INDONESIA

RANDY SHIELDS—The mass murder starts on October 7 on Sumatra with a fanatical anticommunist commander named Ishak Djuarsa who trained at Fort Leavenworth. The police and military arrest leftists and their sympathizers en masse. Trusting peasants and factory workers turn themselves in for what they think is routine questioning and are never heard from again. For mass murder to spread so quickly it’s necessary for ethnic and religious fault lines to be exploited and “ordinary” citizens to directly participate in the killings, often under the threat of being killed themselves.

Most of the killings were summary executions done with knives, swords, machetes, sickles and spears. The flow of small rivers and streams was disrupted by too many dead bodies. Rape, torture, gendered violence, castration and dismembering alive swept across the 17,000 island archipelago from Banda Aceh to Papua. The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of “troublesome” employees.

DUNCAN GRAHAM—There are around three million ethnic Chinese in the country according to Indonesian government statistics, though some academics claim the real number is three to four times greater. Whatever, tiny figures in a population of 270 million. Yet the Orang Tionghoa wield huge business influence, drawing resentment which sometimes turns violent.

VINCENT BEVINS—In January 1966, Senator Bobby Kennedy said, “We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?” He wildly underestimated the number of the dead, but at least he said something. No other prominent US politician condemned the massacre. By this time, RFK was in the habit of speaking out forcefully in ways that others wouldn’t. It’s unclear whether he knew that the Johnson administration was actively assisting with the massacre at that point. Maybe RFK had a kind of conversion about the nature of black ops after his brother’s death. Maybe it was politics. But whatever it was, Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation.

STUART SCHRADER—In the case of Indonesia, General Soekanto, the first director of the country’s national police, was among the most favored U.S. intelligence assets in the 1950s. Unlike other national police executives who emphasized improved crime control an objective when seeking U.S. aid, Soekanto acknowledged that Indonesia’s program was singularly focused on “reducing Commies.” It began with assistance to the Mobile Brigade or Mobrig, a 20,000-man specialized unit of the national police (125,000 total), considered the most reliable instrument to carry out the U.S. political agenda.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Holland and several other Western nations, directly sponsored the coup, while directing both the pro-Western treasonous factions in the military, as well as the religious leaders who stood, from the start, at the forefront of the genocide.