|
|
|
|
 |
| |
TIME
Daily May 15-17, 1998
The rioters who trashed Jakarta all of this week were mostly not yet born
when power last changed hands in Indonesia. And perhaps it is their
generational distance from the bloodletting that accompanied then-general
Suharto's October 1965 coup that allows them to summon the courage to so
vocally demand his ouster.
One million people -- primarily communists and Indonesians of Chinese
origin -- are estimated to have been slaughtered in the months following
Suharto's overthrow of President Sukarno. Described by the CIA as "one of
the ghastliest and most concentrated bloodlettings of current times," it
was Indonesia's equivalent of Cambodia's "Killing Fields." Yet, there has
been remarkably little historical appraisal of how the slaughter
transpired, let alone calls for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Reasons for that silence include Indonesians' fear of the authoritarian
Suharto, the complicity of many of them in the butchery, and the
break-a-few-eggs ethos of the Cold War. Unlike the Khmer Rouge, Suharto's
army did not monopolize the killing duties -- it also whipped up a frenzy
of anti-communist, anti-Chinese sentiment and then distributed arms and
lists of suspected communists to civilian Indonesians, urging them to wipe
out the country's 3.5 million-strong Communist Party (PKI). Suharto's
willing executioners, then, may number in the tens if not hundreds of
thousands.
|
