Washington, D.C., October 17, 2017 - The U.S. government had detailed knowledge that the
Indonesian Army was conducting a campaign of mass murder against the country’s
Communist Party (PKI) starting in 1965, according to newly declassified
documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George
Washington University. The new materials further show that diplomats in
the Jakarta Embassy kept a record of which PKI leaders were being executed, and
that U.S. officials actively supported Indonesian Army efforts to destroy the
country’s left-leaning labor movement.
The 39 documents made available today come from a
collection of nearly 30,000 pages of files constituting much of the daily
record of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1964-1968. The
collection, much of it formerly classified, was processed by the National
Declassification Center in response to growing public interest in the remaining
U.S. documents concerning the mass killings of 1965-1966. American and
Indonesian human rights and freedom of information activists, filmmakers, as
well as a group of U.S. Senators led by Tom Udall (D-NM), had called for the
materials to be made public.
The documents concern one of the most important and
turbulent chapters in Indonesian history and U.S.-Indonesian relations, which
witnessed the gradual collapse of ties between Jakarta and Washington, a
low-level war with Britain over the formation of Malaysia, rising tension
between the Indonesian Army and the Indonesian Communist Party, the growing
radicalization of Indonesian President Sukarno, and the expansion of U.S.
covert operations aimed at provoking a clash between the Army and PKI. These
tensions erupted in the aftermath of an attempted purge of the Army by the
September 30th Movement – a group of military officers with the collaboration
of a handful of PKI leaders. After crushing the Movement, which had
kidnapped and killed six high-ranking Army generals, the Indonesian Army and
its paramilitary allies launched a campaign of annihilation against the PKI and
its affiliated organizations, killing up to 500,000 alleged PKI supporters
between October 1965 and March 1966, imprisoning up to a million more, and
eventually ousting Sukarno and replacing him with General Suharto, who ruled
Indonesia for the next 32 years before he himself was overthrown in May 1998.
In an unprecedented collaboration, the National Security
Archive worked with the National Declassification Center (NDC) to make the
entirety of this collection available to the public by scanning and digitizing
the collection, which will be incorporated into the National Archives and
Records Administration’s (NARA) digital finding aids. When completed, scholars,
journalists, and researchers will be able to search the documents by date,
keyword, or name, providing unparalleled access, in particular for the
Indonesian public, to a unique collection of records concerning one of the most
important periods of Indonesian history.
Of the 30,000 pages processed by the NDC, several hundred
documents remain classified and are undergoing further review before their
scheduled release in early 2018. While some of the documents in this collection
were declassified and deposited at NARA or the Lyndon Johnson Presidential
Library in the late 1990s, many thousands of pages are being made available for
the first time in more than 50 years.
The
Documents
The documents in the files of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta
range widely, from the daily operations of the Embassy to observations on
Indonesian politics, economics, foreign policy, military affairs, the growing
conflict between the United States and Sukarno, the conflict between the Army
and PKI, the September 30th Movement and the mass killings that followed, and
the consolidation of the Suharto regime. While most of the documents in this
briefing book concern the events of September 30, 1965, and their aftermath, we
have included a handful of others to give a sense of the range and historical
significance of the larger collection for an understanding of the broader
consolidation of the Suharto regime.
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