Between October 1965 and early 1966, somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesians were killed. Some estimates go as high as two or three million. Over a million more were imprisoned, many tortured. The New York Times called it "one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history." Yet for decades the world barely spoke of it, and inside Indonesia the truth could not be told at all.
Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, with about 280 million people, roughly 87 percent of them Muslim, the largest Muslim population anywhere. It is rich in resources and biodiversity. In the 1950s it was also a prize in the Cold War.
Why Sukarno Was a Target
Sukarno led Indonesia to independence from Dutch rule and became its first President. In 1955 he hosted the Bandung Conference, which helped lay the base for the Non-Aligned Movement and a path of neutrality, rather than joining the anti-communist alignments the USA promoted. He nationalized some Dutch companies, and there was talk of taking over more foreign assets, including in oil.
Sukarno was not a communist. But the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which followed a legal and peaceful path, grew steadily under him and became the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. Sukarno tolerated it because it helped him balance right-wing army factions and extremist Muslim groups. Washington and its allies saw a resource-rich, non-aligned nation drifting left, and decided to act.
The First Attempt, 1957-58
The CIA first tried to topple Sukarno through a rebellion by dissident army officers. Joseph Burkholder Smith, who ran the CIA's Indonesia desk at the time, later wrote that the plan was to feed Washington "alarming reports" until it agreed to back the colonels. The operation armed thousands of rebels, air-dropped weapons and used B-26 bombers. In April 1958, a bombing raid on Ambon harbor also hit a nearby church, reportedly causing about 700 casualties. When a CIA-linked pilot was shot down and captured with his papers, American involvement was exposed. The operation collapsed.
The Long Preparation, 1959-65
The failure made Sukarno more suspicious of the West and more reliant on the left, while his own governance grew more authoritarian. The USA, with Britain and Australia, grew more determined to remove him. A 1975 US Senate committee investigating assassination plots reported it had "received some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno."
Meanwhile, a quieter project was under way: preparing Indonesia's future leaders. By 1963, according to Roger Hilsman, a third of the Indonesian general staff and nearly half the officer corps had received some American training. By late 1965, more than 1,200 Indonesian officers had been trained in the USA.
Civilian elites were cultivated too. David Ransom's essay "Ford Country" describes how the Ford Foundation worked with US universities and the Indonesian economist Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, a political opponent of Sukarno, to train a technocratic class. Berkeley, in Ransom's words, trained "most of the key Indonesians who will later seize government power." Ford's own program director said it was training "the guys who could be leading the country when Sukarno got out."
Not everyone was comfortable with this. Berkeley academic Ralph Anspach said he felt he was "supposed to be a part of this American policy of empire" and quit. Another, Len Doyle, said a university should not be involved in what was becoming a rebellion against a government.
October 1965 and the Killings
In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a group of junior officers killed six senior generals, saying they were preventing a CIA-backed coup. The full truth may never be known. The army, under General Suharto, crushed the group within days. Then came a wave of false rumors that the communists were behind it and had mutilated the bodies.
Army units and mobs, some linked to religious groups, political parties and youth organizations, began mass killings, reaching even remote villages. The main targets were PKI members and supporters, but also trade unionists, progressive women's groups, ethnic minorities, transgender people and inclusive Muslim communities such as the Abangan of Java. Later, some killed simply to loot or settle personal scores. Time magazine reported rivers and streams "literally clogged with bodies."
The deaths were not the only toll. As in all such violence, many women and children died indirectly, from hunger, lack of medicine and shelter, and the loss of those who provided for them. Countless survivors lived on with trauma. Hundreds of Indonesians abroad were never able to return home.
Who Bears Responsibility?
The Indonesian army and the mobs it mobilized carried out the killings. But scholars and a people's tribunal have pointed to foreign complicity.
UCLA historian Geoffrey Robinson, author of The Killing Season, writes that western powers "encouraged the army to move forcefully against the Left" and "facilitated widespread violence including mass killings." Bradley Simpson of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project says Washington's officials worried only that the killing might not go far enough to keep Sukarno from returning. In 2015, the International People's Tribunal in The Hague concluded that the USA, the UK and Australia were "complicit to different degrees in crimes against humanity." A year earlier, US Senator Tom Udall had urged the declassification of American records on the period.
The documents are uncomfortable. The British embassy advised its intelligence headquarters that propaganda should stress the PKI's "brutality in murdering generals" while ensuring "British participation should be carefully concealed." A US embassy officer, Robert Martens, who supplied lists of communists to the army, later said: "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad." Sweden sold large quantities of small arms to Indonesia, and West Germany reportedly gave the army support.
A Chilling Sense of Satisfaction
Even more troubling was the mood in western capitals. A US embassy official cabled of "a fantastic switch" in ten short weeks. Time called it "the West's best news for years in Asia." Australia's Prime Minister Harold Holt remarked that with 500,000 to a million communist sympathizers "knocked off," a reorientation could be assumed. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy called it "a striking vindication of US policy." The British Ambassador wrote that "a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change."
The Aftermath
Historian John Roosa writes that Indonesia went "almost overnight" from a fierce voice for neutrality and anti-imperialism to "a quiet, pliant partner of the US world order." Suharto ruled for about three decades, opening the economy to western companies, curbing democracy and banning communist ideas by draconian laws, though communists had been the victims, not the perpetrators, of the violence. Robert F. Kennedy tried to draw attention to this injustice before his own assassination in 1968.
Vincent Bevins, in The Jakarta Method, argues that Indonesia became a model for anti-communist mass violence elsewhere. In Chile, years later, the word "Jakarta" appeared on walls.
Indonesia never fully recovered. Under Suharto, speaking the truth was dangerous, and falsehoods about the victims were officially promoted. Echoes of this persist today.
What Should We Learn?
The first lesson is obvious: covert foreign regime-change operations produce horrific results. They turn neighbors into enemies, and they should be abandoned.
The second lesson is deeper, and concerns us all. Outside forces can only inflame hatred where hostility already exists. Societies must therefore work harder to bridge their differences. People of different ideologies will always disagree about which ideas and programs are good. The democratic spirit lies in living peacefully despite this, finding common ground where possible and learning to coexist where it is not. When rival camps look to outside patrons instead of reducing local hostilities and building friendships, avoidable mass violence becomes more likely. Add foreign covert operations to that mix, and the makings of catastrophe are in place.
I end with a plea for peace, and for all societies to settle their differences through nonviolence and justice.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener of the Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071
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