Indonesian genocides
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Genocide
"Suharto was given a green light by the United States to do what we did [in East Timor]. We sent the Indonesian generals everything they needed to fight a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns ... "----CIA desk officer in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1975
[Book excerpts] Secret Third World Wars by John Stockwell
[1998] Pol Pot's Death In The Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman
East Timor (1975)The Santa Cruz Massacre November 12, 1991
[2006] East Timor: the coup the world missed by John Pilger[2006] A Worse Slaughter by John Pilger
[DVD] 'Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy' A Documentary Film By John Pilger
[DVD] Fool Me Twice - Official Release (2002 Bali bombings/East Timor Documentary)
[2001] The Case Against Henry Kissinger. The making of a war criminal by Christopher Hitchens
Overthrow of Sukarno (1965)
"Simply put, this is a classic case of genocide that was engineered by the CIA and cited as a model to be copied elsewhere"----Secret Third World Wars by John Stockwell
[2006] The 1965 CIA massacre in
Indonesia By Mario E. Santos
[1976] Indonesia 1958: Nixon,
the CIA, and the Secret War By L. Fletcher Prouty
External
East Timor Action Network
See: Smallpox Vaccination in the Phillipines 1905-1920 Argentina's 'dirty war' Cambodian Palestinian
Quotes 1965 coup
The media downplay stories of momentous magnitude. In 1965 the Indonesian
military — advised, equipped, trained, and financed by the U.S. military and the
CIA — overthrew President Achmed Sukarno and eradicated the Indonesian Communist
Party and its allies, killing half a million people (some estimates are as high
as a million) in what was the greatest act of political mass murder since the
Nazi Holocaust. The generals also destroyed hundreds of clinics, libraries,
schools, and community centers that had been established by the Communists. Here
was a sensational story if ever there was one, but it took three months before
it received passing mention in Time magazine and yet another month before it was
reported in the New York Times (April 5, 1966), accompanied by an editorial that
actually praised the Indonesian military for “rightly playing its part with
utmost caution.”
[2001] Monopoly Media Manipulation by
Dr. Michael Parenti
Quite clearly, an Indonesian invasion that began a
few hours after Kissinger had left the tarmac at Jakarta airport must have been
planned and readied several days before he arrived. Such plans would have been
known by any embassy military attaché and certainly by any visiting secretary of
state. We have, in fact, the word of C. Philip Liechty, a former CIA operations
officer in Indonesia, that:
"Suharto was given the green light to do what he did.
There was discussion in the embassy and in traffic with the State Department
about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress
became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to
Indonesia at that time. . .. Without continued heavy U.S. logistical
military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off."
The desire to appear to have been
uninvolved may-if we are charitable arise in part from the fact that even
Indonesia's foreign minister, Adam Malik, conceded in public a death toll of
between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians in the first eighteen months of
Indonesia's war of subjugation: in other words, on Kissinger's watch, and
inflicted with weapons that he bent American laws to furnish to the killers. Now
that a form of democracy has returned to Indonesia, which in its first
post-dictatorial act renounced the annexation of East Timor and-after a bloody
last pogrom by its auxiliaries -withdrew from the territory, we may be able to
learn more exactly the extent of the quasi-genocide.
.........On November 9, 1979, lack Anderson's
syndicated column published an interview with ex-President Ford on East Timor
along with a number of classified U.S. intelligence documents relating to the
1975 aggression. One of the latter papers describes how Indonesia's generals
were pressing Suharto "to authorize direct military intervention," while another
informs Ford and Kissinger that Suharto would raise the East Timor issue at
their December 1975 meeting and would "try and elicit a sympathetic attitude."
The relatively guileless Ford was happy to tell Anderson that the American
national interest "had to be on the side of Indonesia." He may or may not have
been aware that he was thereby giving the lie to everything ever said by
Kissinger on the subject. [2001] The Case Against Henry Kissinger. The making
of a war criminal by Christopher Hitchens
There are some who might call the 1965 uprising a success. At least the rebels were not driven into the sea. However, for the United States it was a fantastically costly endeavor. The rebellion ended in the most massive and ruthless bloodbath since World War II. While the headlines in the United States dealt with the slaughter in Vietnam, the press of the rest of the world heaped blame on the United States for the barbaric massacre in Indonesia. The victorious new government of General Suharto proceeded to assassinate nearly one million people. Indonesia 1958: Nixon, the CIA, and the Secret War By L. Fletcher Prouty
U.S. imperialism, working through its puppets Nasution and Suharto and other instrumentalities of the CIA, instigated a terrible bloodbath in Indonesia that ultimately claimed from 1.5 million to as many as 3 million lives. [2006] The 1965 CIA massacre in Indonesia By Mario E. Santos
The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell
... in 1965 the CIA organized an operation to discredit the Communist party in
Indonesia. Their strategy was to make the party appear to be secretly planning a
violent takeover of Indonesian society. The truth was that the Indonesian
Communist Party was doing quite well to obtain representation in the Indonesian
government through the democratic process. That was what made it so threatening
to the United States. They simply could not have an example of legitimate and
successful participation by the Communists in the democratic process.
The techniques of the Indonesian destabilization were classic: CIA agents
planted caches of arms that would then be "found" by Indonesian police under the
watchful eye of the alerted media. Along with the arms would be all kinds of
forged documents proving that the Communists were fomenting a violent uprising.
Propaganda agents planted stories in the media, inflaming the mistrust of the
Communists. Others gave speeches. The situation heated up until some generals in
the Indonesian army were killed, and the boil of tension burst. The Indonesian
army went after the Communists and the people they felt traditionally supported
the Communists. The result was a bloodbath that the New York Times described in
terms half a million to a million and a half dead. The Australian secret
service, closer to Indonesia, put the figure at closer to two million-the rivers
were clogged with the bodies of the dead.
In the summer of 1990, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that it had
indeed delivered lists of names, of people who were subsequently killed, to the
Indonesian government.
The CIA's own internal reporting estimated that 800,000 people had been
killed. The organization published a cover story through the Library of Congress
that the Communist Party had supported a classic insurrection, which the army
had put down. However, internal CIA reports cited the operation as a classic
success in which they had targeted the world's thirdlargest Communist Party and
aided the Indonesian army by providing thousands of names of suspected
individuals and completely eliminated from the face of the earth not only the
party, but the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who tended to support the Communists.
Simply put, this is a classic case of genocide that was engineered by the CIA
and cited as a model to be copied elsewhere....Secret Third World Wars
Quotes East Timor
On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly - but with the complicity of the
Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia - invaded the small
nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the
invasion were murdered. In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and
his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this
film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese - 1/3 of
the population - had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The C.I.A. has
described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century.
Nixon had called Indonesia the "greatest prize in southeast Asia" because of its
oil reserves and other natural resources. Even though Indonesia had no historic
or legal claim to East Timor, it was convenient for diplomats to declare that
East Timor, just gaining its independence from Portugal, would not be a viable
state.
However the lie was given to this argument when Australia and Indonesia signed
the Timor Gap Oil Treaty and carved up the huge oil and gas reserves in the
seabed off East Timor.
None of the politicians from that period - President Ford, Henry Kissinger,
Daniel Moynihan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gough Whitlam - has clean hands.
The Indonesian military used US and British planes to bombard the island, while
the defense ministers proclaimed ignorance.
As Pilger gets an Austrlian diplomat to admit, East Timor was considered
"expendable." But no one watching the massacre in the Dili cemetery can excuse the
geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide. [DVD] 'Death of a Nation:
The Timor Conspiracy' A Documentary Film By John Pilger
When the Indonesians landed in Dili in December 1975, they began a campaign
of genocide which has been compared in its savagery to Pol Pot's takeover of
Cambodia.
Hundreds of people were gunned down
in the streets, in schools, homes, hospitals. Live grenades were thrown into
houses and women and children were raped in front of their families.
As in Cambodia, the first to die
were the educated - public officials, teachers, students and nurses.
One eyewitness reported the words of an Indonesian officer. When asked to
justify the slaughter, he said: "When you clean the fields, don't you kill all
the snakes, both large and small?"
In 1981, in an attempt to flush
out Fretilin guerrilla fighters, the Indonesian army subjected the East Timorese
population to a forced march across the island.
Thousands of civilians including the elderly, women and children were beaten,
raped and murdered. This atrocity was dubbed the 'Fence of Legs.'
In the summer of 1983, Indonesian forces in East Timor overan the small town of
Curaras and massacred between 300 and 400 civilians, wiping the town off the
face of the earth.
Meticulous church records account
for almost 300 of the victims.
After reports of East Timorese
women being forcibly given the birth control drug Depoprovera in an attempt to
'depopulate' East Timor of its native population, John
Pilger sent a British doctor to investigate.
He found that up to 500 women were
herded into one clinic to be given the drug without any explanation.
Shortly after, General Suharto was awarded a UN prize for his 'support' of
family planning along with a cheque for 12,000 dollars.----
John Pilger