THE CIA IN INDONESIA | ||
by wakeupmag.co.uk "It was one of the ghastliest and most concentrated bloodlettings of current times." - from the CIA's own study on its Indonesian operation. The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of this century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which murdered them in a bloodbath that claimed more than half a million lives.  Indonesian soldiers parade their anti-riot equipment past a portrait of President Suharto. The dictator was brought to power with the aid of the CIA. His army has been the dominant political force in the country ever since. In the early 1950s, the PKI or Communist Party of Indonesia became the largest political movement in the country, with three million members. The U.S. National Security Council responded with a series of policy documents calling for "appropriate action, in collaboration with other friendly countries, to prevent permanent PKI control of Indonesia." The CIA's primary efforts were directed towards funding and aiding extreme right-wing political parties (described by NSC 171 as "moderates… on the right') with tens of millions of dollars annually, together with arms and personnel. U.S. academics in CIA-subsidised "think-tanks" pressured their contacts in the Indonesian military to "seize power and liquidate the Communist opposition." A CIA memorandum dated June 18th 1962, concerning a meeting between President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Macmillan, stated that the two leaders agreed to attempt to isolate Indonesian President Sukarno in Asia and Africa. Further, "They agreed to liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities." The most prominent of the CIA's operatives in Indonesia was Guy Pauker, who taught at the University of California at Berkeley and served as a consultant at the RAND Corporation, where he maintained frequent contacts with leaders of the Indonesian military. In a RAND Corporation book published by the Princeton University Press, Pauker urged his Indonesian military contacts to "assume full responsibility" for their nation's leadership" and "to fulfil a mission... to strike, sweep their house clean." Pauker's closest friend in the Indonesian army was the U.S.-trained General Suwarto, who played an important part in the creation of the army's counterinsurgency wing. Suwarto built the Indonesian Army Staff and Command School in Bandung (SESKOAD) into a training-ground for the take-over of political power. SESKOAD became a focal point of aid from the Pentagon, the CIA, RAND and the Ford Foundation. As well as military and counterinsurgency training, SESKOAD trained army officers in economics and administration, and thereby taught them to virtually operate as a para-state, independent of the government. U.S. officials confirmed that the training programme was "contingency planning to prevent a PKI take-over." Military aid included a secret contract to deliver 200 Aero Commanders to the Indonesian army. These were light aircraft suitable for use in "civic action" or counter-insurgency operations by the Army Flying Corps, whose senior officers were virtually all trained in the United States. A Senate investigation nine years later was to reveal that U.S. military suppliers with CIA connections (principally Lockheed) negotiated equipment sales with payoffs to middlemen in such a way as to generate payments to neither Nasution nor Yani (the titular leaders of the Indonesian armed forces) but instead to the hitherto little-known leader of a third faction in the army, the right-wing Major-General Suharto. Secret funds administered by the U.S. Air Force on behalf of the CIA were laundered as "commissions" on sales of Lockheed equipment and services, in order to make political payoffs to those military personnel - Suharto's faction - favoured by the CIA. The most significant focus of U.S. training and aid was to the Territorial Organisation's connections with "the civilian administration, religious and cultural organisations, youth groups, veterans, trade unions, peasant organisations, political parties and groups at regional and local levels." These political liaisons with civilian groups provided the structure for the ruthless suppression of the PKI that was to come. Roger Hilsman, whose career spanned the CIA and the State Department, noted that by 1963, as a result of the training programme, "the American and Indonesian military had come to know each other rather well. Bonds of personal respect and even affection existed." The House Committee on Foreign affairs confirmed that at the time of the coup, more than 1,200 Indonesian officers, including senior military figures, had been trained in the United States. In 1965, a group of young military officers, encouraged by the CIA, attempted a coup against President Sukarno and killed six top military officers. The CIA seized this opportunity to replace the increasingly unpopular Sukarno with Major-General Suharto. The Agency established a massive propaganda campaign to blame the deaths of the six generals on the PKI. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the PKI. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals - badly decomposed - were featured in all the newspapers and on television. CIA-planted stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women armed with razor blades. The Agency also planted rumours in the press that mainland China was smuggling arms to the PKI for an imminent revolt. During this time, an elite group of Indonesian military and economic leaders, who had been trained by the CIA at the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, and who would later be christened the "Berkeley Mafia", returned to Indonesia and became the impetus behind a military coup on 1st October 1965. The CIA brought in troops from East, West and Central Java to Jakarta to aid the coup. Systematic killings of the leftists by the Indonesian army swept across the country. Civilians involved in the massacre were either recruited and trained by the army on the spot, or were drawn from groups such as the CIA-sponsored SOKSI trade unions (Central Organisation of Indonesian Socialist Employees) and allied student organisations that had collaborated for years with the Army on political matters. British, Japanese, German and Australian intelligence played a supporting role in the operation. Anti-Communist organisations and individuals, particularly Muslims, were encouraged to join in the slaying of anyone suspected of being a PKI sympathiser. A former CIA deputy station chief and an American diplomat admitted in May 1990 that U.S. officials supplied both arms and the names of thousands of PKI members to the Indonesian army and CIA-funded Muslim student death squads, who hunted the leftists down and murdered them. The first order by military officers to Muslim students in early October was the word sikat, meaning "clean out", "wipe out" or "massacre." U.S. officials were well aware that the people named on the lists "were destined for extra-judicial firing squads." CIA officers "later checked off the names of those who had been killed." Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA operation run from half a million to over one million people. Former CIA Director William Colby compared the Indonesian operation to the CIA's Phoenix Programme in the Vietnam War (whose goal was to "neutralise 3,000 people a month" and which murdered between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese). Colby admitted: "The people getting killed in Indonesia were not soldiers. They were not even the "enemy" in an on-going war. They were members of a popular, grassroots political party. Or they were in the way." State Department consultant and former member of the U.S. Embassy's Indonesian political section Robert Marten commented: "They probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." Howard Federspiel, the Indonesia expert at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, stated: "No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it." According to Australian journalists who were in Indonesia at the time, the massacre was hideous. Victims of firing squads were made up not just of Communists, but their families and ethnic Chinese who were targeted as potential Communists. Northern Sumatra and Eastern Java reeked with the smell of decaying flesh. Boats were immobilised on rivers choked with human corpses. In a public report, the CIA described the indiscriminate killing as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century," then turned around in a covert study and recommended the operation as "a model for future operations." The CIA concocted a false account of what happened, later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia 1965: The Coup That Backfired. U.S. officials, journalists and scholars with CIA connections created the myth that the bloodbath was a "spontaneous, popular revulsion to PKI terrorism." Over one million people were detained for alleged involvement with the PKI during the military coup. At least 100,000 were held without charge for up to 14 years. The trials of those charged with involvement with the PKI were grossly unfair. The virulent anti-Communism which followed the coup meant that few witnesses dared testify on behalf of suspects. Defence lawyers were accused of Communist sympathies, threatened and harassed. The evidence of many witnesses was extracted under torture. In the military courts, many PKI prisoners were denied the right to appeal. Those allowed to do so often waited 10 or 20 years to learn that their appeals had been rejected. Many prisoners detained at that time remain in jail today - some of them on death row. The New Order Government under President Suharto has remained the dominant political force in Indonesia for the past three decades, with the explicit approval of Washington. The country has suffered persistent patterns of human rights violations. Women and young children have been tortured and raped in custody; men in their seventies have been hauled before the firing squad after 20 years in jail on political charges; elderly women have been shot for protesting against eviction from their land. Students, trade unionists, farmers, community leaders, journalists and human rights workers have all suffered. Hundreds of thousands have been arbitrarily killed. Between 1983 and 1985, government death squads summarily executed some 5,000 alleged criminals. President Suharto said in his memoirs that the killings were deliberate government policy, "shock therapy to bring crime under control."
Trade unions and the right to organise and strike are heavily restricted in Indonesia. Over 35,000 were forbidden to vote in the 1992 "elections." Security forces routinely open fire on peaceful demonstrations. In May 1994, 21 students were each sentenced to six month's imprisonment for taking part in a demonstration calling for President Suharto to take responsibility for past human rights violations. One month later, the High Court increased the sentences by between 8 and 14 months, on the grounds that the students had used their trials for "political propaganda." Indonesia's subversion law carries the death penalty and allows people to be detained for a year without being charged. The death penalty is mainly passed on political opponents. Suharto and the military exert total control over the nation's political, social and economic affairs. Since 1968, Suharto has stood unopposed in five successive elections. Only two political parties apart from his are allowed to exist, and neither has any chance of gaining power. Only Suharto's ruling party Golkar, can campaign in rural areas, where 65% of the population lives. Before national elections, all candidates must be vetted by military intelligence and approved by the President. The most relentless violations of human rights have taken place in East Timor, the former Portuguese colony that Indonesia has illegally occupied since 1975, and in Aceh and Irian Jaya, where the government faces armed independence movements. East Timor has great economic and strategic importance, lying close to rich oil and natural gas reserves in the Timor Sea. When the popular Fretiuin Party took control of the country in September 1975, advocating an independent East Timor, the U.S. decided to take action. A secret cable leaked in Australia revealed that the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta was under instructions from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger not to involve itself in the forthcoming Indonesian invasion, and that events should be allowed to "take their course." The same cable revealed Australia's position. The then Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woolcott, advised the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra that the situation in East Timor was going to be messy for some time. He therefore advised that Australia distance itself as far as possible from Indonesia's intervention, while privately reassuring the Indonesians that Australia supported their position. The Prime Minister of Australia in 1974, Gough Whitlam, met the Indonesians for informal talks in Central Java, where he told President Suharto that he thought the best solution would be for East Timor to join Indonesia. On December 7th 1975, just nine days after Fretihin proclaimed the Democratic Republic of East Timor, Indonesia invaded the island, annexed it and instigated a mass slaughter. More than 200,000 East Timorese - one third of the population - were massacred. No one was spared from the systematic "disappearance," torture, rape, political imprisonment, arbitrary arrest, intimidation and harassment, no matter how old, how young or how vulnerable. Washington did nothing to condemn Suharto after the invasion took place. Kissinger even told the Jakarta press: "The U.S. understands Indonesia's position on the Timor question." A peaceful procession to the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in November 1991 resulted in the cold-blooded murder by the security forces of 270 people and the "disappearance" of some 200 others. Without warning, squads of Indonesian soldiers opened fire on the unarmed crowd, shooting indiscriminately. Many were shot in the back as they ran from the gunfire. Those wounded but not killed were stabbed with bayonets by the soldiers. The Indonesian armed forces commander (now Vice President) General Try Sutrisno, attempted to justify the killings on the grounds that the people in the procession had "spread chaos" and "shouted unacceptable things." He said: "In the end, they had to be shot. These ill-bred people have to be shot... and we will shoot them." Eyewitnesses testified that a number of the wounded, who were taken to the military hospital in Dili, were hit with large rocks or crushed by military vehicles as they lay on the ground, and that others were given lethal injections.  Massacre in East Timor: demonstrators and bystanders flee in panic as Indonesian army troops open fire on the unarmed crowd at the Santa Cruz cemetery.  Some of the wounded sheltering in a chapel during the Santa Cruz massacre. Many of the dead and "disappeared" have still not been accounted for. Today, the CIA provides training for Indonesia's brutal military and intelligence services, both at the notorious School of Americas (see Dealing in Death: The CIA and the Drugs Trade) and elsewhere in the United States. Other western governments have also provided military training to Indonesian troops known to be implicated in serious human rights abuses. The international community has shown little concern over the systematic slaughter taking place in the fourth largest population in the world. Sitting astride critical sea-lanes which link the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Indonesia is of considerable strategic and economic importance to the west, which embraced Suharto's regime as a friend and ally against Communism at the height of the Cold War. The response of the U.S. and other western governments to Indonesia's appalling human rights record has been to provide Suharto with abundant economic, military and political support while turning a blind eye to clear evidence of Indonesia's systematic human rights abuses. In a statement made to the United Nations Special Committee in July 1994, Amnesty International broke with tradition by not just condemning the government of Indonesia but laid the blame also on "The member states of the UN, who in our view share responsibility - both directly and indirectly - for the long-standing human rights problem in East Timor." Both British Conservative and New Labour governments have been major suppliers of arms and military goods to Suharto, providing the regime with everything from Alvis light tanks and British Aerospace Hawk ground attack aircraft to army helmets and riot control equipment. Transnational corporations such as Shell, Petroz and BHP Petroleum were among those granted exploration agreements of the Timor Sea in a treaty signed between Australia and Indonesia in February 1991. In mid-1993, the Australian military conducted joint exercises with Indonesia's counter-insurgency unit Kopassus, which has been heavily involved in massacres and torture over many years. (The Kopassus Red Berets, then known as RPKAD, played a key role in the bloodbath that brought Suharto to power; General Prabowo, who trained in the US at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, headed the elite Kopassus Red Beret command which was chiefly responsible for human rights violations in East Timor). In March 1998, the US Congress learned that, despite its express prohibition in 1992, the Pentagon had continued to supply training to Kopassus. The tactics that US Green Berets taught Kopassus included 'Advanced Sniper Techniques', 'Military Operations in Urban Terrain', 'Psychological operations' and 'Close Combat'. "They are asking for more freedom... This is a warning for us to beware of the PKI. The name is different but it is the same movement. We have to stay alert." - PRESIDENT SUHARTO on the pro-democracy movement, December 1993 U.S. Ambassador Green reported of an interview with Nixon in 1967: "The Indonesian experience had been one of particular interest to Nixon because things had gone well in Indonesia. I think he was very interested in that whole experience as pointing to the way we should handle our relationships on a wider basis in Southeast Asia generally, and maybe in the world." Thus, the role of the CIA in Indonesia may be seen as the blueprint for the Agency's actions in overthrowing Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia in 1970 (which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge), the overthrow of President Allende in Chile in 1973 and the U.S. sponsorship of the death squad regimes in Central America. Indonesia also serves as a prime example of Washington's hypocrisy in condemning, for example, Iraq's invasion of Iran (the excuse for all-out war) while turning a blind eye to the naked aggression of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. Five days after the invasion, the United Nations voted to condemn Indonesia's attack as an act of international aggression. The United States abstained; thereafter, the U.S. has consistently manoeuvred behind the scenes to resist UN moves aimed at forcing Indonesia to give up its conquest. Once again, America's economic interests supersede all considerations of human rights. |
