Indonesian genocides
[back] 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)
[2008]
Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places by John Pilger

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

"Ford and Kissinger Gave Green Light to Indonesia's Invasion of East Timor in 1975 ...that has left perhaps 200,000 dead" , National Security Archive, 12  December 2001.

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