Suharto’s US-Backed Coup in Indonesia Supplied a Template for Worldwide Mass Murder
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/suharto-indonesia-us-coup-communism-history-mass-murder-postcolonial-sta
This lesson was not lost on the Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi. They saw what the Americans were capable of, and it clearly impacted the way they ran the war after 1966. In Cambodia, both the Left and the Right paid attention. As early as 1967, enemies of the fledgling Khmer Rouge movement were saying “we don’t lack Suhartos in Cambodia,” meaning “we can move against the Khmer Rouge.” A decade later, there was a Khmer Rouge document that mentioned the Indonesian mass violence against the PKI as a justification for why the Khmer Rouge had to take such a hard line. Both left and right were radicalized in Southeast Asia by this example.
In Chile, the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende was code-named “Operation Jakarta,” echoing Suharto’s violence. Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up the same kind of people in Chile: party members, union leaders, and activists. Even the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara was killed as a political opponent. In his book The Jakarta Method , Vincent Bevins has detailed the multiple links between the Indonesian example and cases in Latin America.
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Truth be told, it would have been difficult for the CIA to do very much on the ground in Indonesia in the years leading up to 1965. With martial law and Sukarno’s increasingly hostile attitude toward the United States, it would have been very difficult for them to gather much intelligence.
That said, the United States cultivated an important group of Indonesian officers and recruited them for training at Fort Benning, which would go on to be the home of the School of the Americas. They created a cadre of pro-American officers. Many of those officers stepped up in 1965–66 and were instrumental in the mass murder.
It’s very likely that United States, British, and Australian intelligence were pushing the army to move, and it’s clear from recent research that there was coordination ahead of time, possibly with the likes of Suharto. It’s tough to prove this, because obviously the Indonesian government and military doesn’t want these documents released. But at the very least, it looks as if Western intelligence was calling for some kind of scenario like the Reichstag fire in Germany in 1933 — a crisis that could be blamed on the PKI.
But Indonesians did this killing for their own reasons, with some help and encouragement from the West, and with guaranteed impunity. The Western capitalist democracies made it clear that they would not hold the Indonesian military accountable for these crimes. Indeed, the United States actually celebrated Suharto’s move against the PKI and organized labor.