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Indonesia: US documents released on 1965-66 massacres
Human Rights Watch Statement - October 18, 2017
The release on October 17, 2017, by the United States nongovernmental public transparency organization National Security Archive of 39 US Embassy in Jakarta documents show that US diplomatic personnel were fully aware of the scale and savagery of the 1965-66 killings. The documents reveal that US diplomats and their State Department counterparts in Washington, DC, were documenting tens of thousands of killings by the military, paramilitary groups, and Muslim militias of suspected members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and ethnic Chinese, as well as trade unionists, teachers, activists, and artists.
"These newly released documents make clear that US officials had detailed knowledge of the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965-66," said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director. "The US government now needs to release the remaining documents, not only for the historical record of one of the 20th century's worst atrocities, but as a long overdue step toward bringing redress to the victims."
The US government now needs to release the remaining documents, not only for the historical record of one of the 20th century's worst atrocities, but as a long overdue step toward bringing redress to the victims.
The 39 documents are part of a cache of almost 30,000 pages of declassified embassy paperwork spanning from 1965 to 1968, processed by the National Declassification Center, a division of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). They include State Department letters, telegrams, situation reports, and confidential communications between US consulates in Indonesia and the US Embassy in Jakarta. They do not include US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents, which remain classified.
In Indonesia, there has been a recent surge in efforts by paramilitary groups and militant Islamists to stoke "anti-communist" paranoia in response to calls for accountability for the mass killings. Elements of those groups led a violent "anti-communist" demonstration in Jakarta in September while the Indonesian military launched a propaganda offensive aimed at reinforcing the official narrative that the killings were a justified response to an attempted communist coup.
Starting in October 1965, Indonesian army officials, led by then-Major General Suharto, oversaw a campaign of mass killings targeting Communist Party members and giving free rein to a mix of soldiers and local militias to kill anyone they considered a communist. Over the next few months into 1966, at least 500,000 people were killed (the total may be as high as 1 million).
In the 52 years since the killings, the Indonesian government has justified the massacres as a necessary defense against the PKI. Its account holds that the communists attempted a coup, murdering six army generals on September 30, 1965, as part of their attempt to turn Indonesia into a communist state. In October 2012, then-Coordinating Minister of Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Djoko Suyanto responded to findings of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) that the events of 1965-66 constituted a "gross human rights violation" by insisting that those killings were justified. Public discussion about the killings, a taboo topic in Indonesia for decades, has increased in recent years, a process substantially aided since 2012 by the release of the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.
On December 10, 2014, US Senator Tom Udall introduced a "Sense of the Senate Resolution" condemning the 1965-66 atrocities in Indonesia and calling on US authorities to declassify related documents in US files. The proposed Senate resolution highlighted the continued impunity enjoyed by those who carried out the crimes, and called on Indonesian political leaders to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to address alleged crimes against humanity and other human rights violations. It called upon all relevant US government agencies to "locate, identify, inventory, recommend for declassification, and make available to the public all classified records and documents concerning the mass killings of 1965-1966, including but not limited to records and documents pertaining to covert operations in Indonesia from January 1, 1964-March 30, 1966," and to expedite the public release of such files. The release of the 30,000-odd US Embassy documents was just the first step in that process.
"The US government can help the Indonesian government shine a light on the 1965-66 massacres," Kine said. "Meaningful accountability for those heinous crimes – including the role of the US government – requires full-disclosure and declassification of all relevant official information."
Excerpts from the 39 Declassified US Embassy in Jakarta Documents:
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