#suharto

[nunoms135]

Smilin' & Smokin' [14 Mar 2026]

[probablyasocialecologist]

‘Ruthless Terror’ – When Labour Aided Genocide In Indonesia

Sixty years ago, Harold Wilson’s government secretly conspired with the Indonesian military as it conducted one of the postwar world’s worst

British declassified files show how Harold Wilson’s Labour government, together with the US government under Lyndon Johnson, were complicit in one of the worst slaughters in the postwar world. The killings in Indonesia started when a group of army officers loyal to President Sukarno assassinated several generals on 30 September 1965. They believed the generals were about to stage a coup to overthrow Sukarno.  The instability provided other anti-Sukarno generals, led by General Suharto, with an excuse for the army to move against a powerful and popular political faction with mass support, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). It did so brutally: in a few months hundreds of thousands of PKI members and ordinary people were killed and the PKI destroyed. Suharto emerged as leader and instituted a brutal regime that lasted until 1998. The files show British opposition to the nationalist Sukarno and the PKI, and that it wanted the army to act and encouraged it. “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”, the ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, informed the Foreign Office on 5 October 1965. 

17 October 2025

[politicalsci]

[goldpeninsula]

To Buru Island: A Journey to the Dark Side of Indonesia’s Past

Mars Noersmono’s story is a first-person account of a nation’s shame.

Mars Noersmono has a story he’s determined to tell. It’s deeply disturbing — a tale of horror and courage, despair and resilience.   Although primarily about Indonesia’s bloody and brutal past, it’s also a sober warning against authoritarian governments everywhere that ignore the rule of law and create civilian panic against mythical monsters to justify violence and maintain power. The illegality and human suffering is strong enough, but this is also a first-person account of a nation’s shame. In September 1965, a coup was allegedly staged in Jakarta. Six generals and a lieutenant were murdered, but no uprising followed. General Suharto took control of the military and placed blame for the coup on the Communist Party of Indonesia, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). Three three years later Suharto would supplant President Sukarno and became president himself. The rule of his authoritarian Orde Baru (New Order) administration would last 32 years. Shortly after the alleged coup attempt, in October 1965, the PKI was banned and the slaughter started – not of invading foreigners or armed revolutionaries – but unarmed ordinary citizens who had been peacefully (“though not uncritically,” said Noersmono) supported Sukarno’s anti-colonial rhetoric. An estimated half-million died, their bodies thrown in rivers and mass graves.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

"It is not the military strength of the Communists but their fanaticism and ideology which is the principal element of their strength. To consider this, each country in the area needs an ideology of its own with which to counter the Communists. But a national ideology is not enough by itself. The well being of the people must be improved so that it strengthens and supports the national ideology."

Suharto (1921-2008), Second President of Indonesia (1967-98).

[southeastasianists]

The New Normal: Indonesian Democracy Twenty Years after Suharto

When Suharto resigned as Indonesia’s president in May 1998, the path was unsure. Would democratization be allowed to proceed?  Would violence be used to settle differences as it had previously in Indonesia’s history, to bloody effect? Twenty years later, Indonesia is a noisy democracy which has come back from several trips to the knife’s edge. This essay uses Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s approach to understanding democratic consolidation to evaluate Indonesia’s democracy twenty years after the overthrow of Suharto. 1 The paper shows that Indonesia has moved toward democratic consolidation in many areas—democracy has become the new normal, but serious challenges remain such as undemocratic civil society organizations, a threatened and in parts unprofessional press, reviled political parties, weaknesses in the rule of law, bureaucratic corruption, and economic inequality.

Prerequisite: Stateness

For Linz and Stepan, there is a pre-requisite to democratic consolidation: stateness. Since states experience democracy, without being a state, democracy is a non-starter. So, countries suffering significant separatist challenges struggle to consolidate democracy. As Indonesia democratized in 1998, many wondered whether the country would be able to hold together without an authoritarian strongman to keep the regions in check. Inter-communal violence in Ambon and Poso between Christians and Muslims raised the prospects of wider chaos early in the transition from authoritarian rule. So, too, did the long-running separatist conflict in Aceh. Democratization gave East Timor the opportunity to vote in an UN-supervised referendum on independence. But, as it turned out, despite the horrible violence, these were not harbingers of a wider challenge to Indonesia’s stateness. East Timor departed, but this did not challenge Indonesia existentially due to that territory’s distinct political history (it was invaded only in 1975). Peace deals in Ambon, Poso, and even Aceh calmed conflicts in those areas. Despite serious challenges to its territorial integrity, Indonesia has maintained its stateness.

Civil Society

Civil society is the arena, independent from the state, in which people organize into groups and associations. Indonesia’s civil society, in particular university students, contributed to the fall of President Suharto in 1998 through months of protests.  After the dictator had fallen, the Indonesian public remained engaged, organizing to support the country’s young democracy. New groups appeared; old organizations acquired new space. Indonesians came together to conduct voter education, monitor elections, promote human rights, and fight corruption. These groups supported new democratic norms.

Other groups formed, however, which did not support Indonesia’s evolving democracy, though they did take advantage of the new freedoms to organize. The Islamic Defenders’ Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI) took it upon itself to enforce Islamic strictures, using force and intimidation to target celebrations of Christmas, drinking alcohol, LGBT citizens, and those perceived to be deviant Muslims. Terrorist groups, homegrown and with links to Al Qaeda and then ISIS, have also carried out attacks on targets including hotels, the stock exchange, religious sites, and night markets.

Front Pembela Islam has experienced success with its foray into politics, helping to prevent ethnic Chinese and Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok) from being re-elected in 2017.  FPI and other organizations orchestrated social media campaigns and protests designed to spread the message that non-indigenous non-Muslims should not be permitted to lead Indonesia’s majority Muslims. FPI further demanded Ahok’s prosecution for blasphemy, for which he was eventually sentenced to two years in jail.  While many may disagree with Ahok’s blunt style and neoliberal policies, the FPI’s attack on an Indonesian citizen’s right to hold office simply because of his ethnicity and religion undermined Indonesia’s democracy.

Indonesia’s press has exploded in the reform era, allowing a profusion of new voices to be heard.  However, press freedom is still under challenge in the country.  Indonesia ranked 124th of 180 nations in the Reporters without Borders Press Freedom Index in 2018. 2 Journalists have struggled to report in some areas of the country, especially Papua, West Papua, and Aceh.  Also, reporters experience and fear violence as a result of their reporting, particularly when concerned with conflict areas, religious extremists, and corruption.  Some members of the press are also part of the problem because they charge subjects for positive coverage, fail to fact-check, or display partisanship (many Indonesian politicians own their own media outlets).  “Fake news” is expected to play an important role in upcoming regional and national elections.

Political Society

In addition to civil society, democratic consolidation also occurs in the arena of political society; this is where citizens organize to contest for state power. After Suharto fell, hundreds of new political parties formed. Party and election laws have been refined over time to narrow the number of parties through requiring certain levels of national participation and support. Just 16 parties will be allowed to compete in elections in 2019, along with four parties only in Aceh. The effective number of parties, a measure used to assess parties’ weight in the political system, was 5.1 in 1999 and 8.9 in 2014, 3 so, though the overall number of parties has gone down, the number which matter has actually risen. Levels of support for each party vary from election to election.  Three different parties—Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan, Golkar, and Partai Demokrat—have topped the parliamentary polls in the four elections since Suharto’s fall.  Indonesia’s strong presidency is now directly elected, and only coalitions of a certain level of support may nominate candidates.  Direct presidential elections since 2004 have brought personalistic rather than institutional/party-based candidates to power.

Suharto’s Indonesia was highly centralized, but in the reform era, politics has been decentralized with greater power and authority available to local and regional levels of government. Likewise, these lower levels have been democratized with direct elections for mayors, regents, and governors.  When the opposition under Gerindra’s Prabowo Subianto tried to un-do direct regional elections in 2014, the attempt was reversed due to public pressure.  

Indonesians’ responses to pollsters show strong support for the country’s democratic elections.  In the International Foundation for Election Systems poll following the 2014 elections, 82% of Indonesians responded that they were satisfied or very satisfied with the voting process in the national parliamentary elections. 4 Problems with elections include the high cost of campaigns (for which elected officials need to get paid back and parties need to scrounge funds), candidates paying for votes, and inaccurate voter rolls. Despite these problems, election turnout remains high four elections in to Indonesia’s democratization (75% in 2014), suggesting strong public engagement. 5

While elections have become a regular piece of Indonesia’s democratic environment, parties have an image problem.  Early in the post-Suharto transition, public opinion poll respondents expressed affinity for one or another of the new political parties.  Today, though, “[c]itizen loyalty toward political parties is trending weak,” according to Saiful Mujani Research Center executive director Djayadi Hanan. 6 Reasons for this public disaffection include ambitious say-anything politicians, eat-at-the-trough-of-power coalition building, flamboyant corruption scandals, and the parties’ failures to build enduring institutions.

Rule of Law

Rule of law is another arena in which democratic consolidation occurs.  For democracy to be consolidated, everyone, including officers of the government, must be equal before the law. Rule of law has improved since the Suharto years when law was “just an ornament,” according to University of Indonesia law professor Hikmahanto Juwana. 7 However, significant problems remain.  The Rule of Law Index finds Indonesia 63rd of 113 countries in rule of law. 8The country’s weakest scores are in criminal justice and corruption.  Judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement are all notoriously corrupt.  According to Hikmahanto, reasons for weaknesses in rule of law are poor pay, weak human resources, and lack of prestige in study of the law. 9

State Bureaucracy

In addition to rule of law, a consolidated democracy also requires an effective state. Who will support the new democracy if it cannot effectively execute its duties? Early in the transition, Indonesia’s state appeared to wobble.  The country faced a kristal, total crisis: political changes, economic crash, communal violence, and terrorist onslaught.  However, Indonesia’s state survived.  Politics painstakingly built a new constitutional system. Elections in 2004 delivered a popular president who was believed able to deliver security, a key state function. The economy climbed from the doldrums of the financial crisis (shrinking 13.8% in 1998) to achieve growth rates of 4-6% annually in the 2000s, increasing public confidence.  Peace agreements were brokered in Ambon and Poso to calm the country’s inter-communal tensions.  Indonesia’s Detachment 88 anti-terrorist squad has successfully hunted and captured terrorists minimizing the threat to the new democracy.  The state has survived the kristal and delivered.

The state bureaucracy is, though, highly corrupt.  According to Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index, Indonesia ranks 96th of 180 countries. 10  Politicians typically rail against corruption in campaigns but struggle to combat it (if they try at all) when in office. Poor pay means officials believe they need corruption to get by.  Parties need money to fight elections to stay in power, but their only seeming access to funds is through monetizing their control of the state, i.e., corruption.  Presidents need coalitions of parties to advance their agendas, meaning sometimes they must look away from corruption to protect their broader goals.  Corruption has been democratized as power and funds have passed down the political hierarchy to provinces, districts, and municipalities.  It often feels like Indonesia’s Anti-Corruption Commission, deeply respected by Indonesians, is outmatched by its prey.

Economic Society

Democratic consolidation also happens in the arena of economic society. Democracy requires that all citizens have the economic capacity to influence the political process.  Excessive control of resources by any one entity (the state) or group (oligarchs) could make democratic consolidation problematic.

In Indonesia, high income inequality is the greatest challenge in economic society. The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, has actually increased over the course of the reform era: from .30 in 2000 to .41 in 2013; 11 this is a significant and surprising fact. A democratization movement meant to spread political power has, at least in the short term, concentrated wealth more unequally.  The political system is loaded with millionaires and even billionaires bankrolling parties or putting themselves up as candidates. The high cost of campaigning in Indonesia’s media-saturated, poll-driven environment makes big money a plus for political candidates. But, an elite-run system is problematic for consolidation of Indonesia’s democracy.

Conclusion

Using Linz and Stepan’s lens to understand Indonesia’s democratic consolidation over the last twenty years highlights key aspects of the country’s journey.  Democracy has largely become the “only game in town,” the new normal. 12 Indonesia has survived challenges to its stateness, achieving Linz and Stepan’s pre-requisite for democratic consolidation. Civil society has expanded dramatically; press outlets have proliferated.  In political society, elections have become widely accepted, and participation is extensive.  The state has demonstrated effectiveness, particularly in the key areas of nurturing growth and establishing security.

But, the filter provided by Linz and Stepan’s framework enables us to see areas where consolidation is weak.  Not all civil society organizations take part in the new democratic ethos. Likewise, the press is under threat and parts sometimes unprofessional. The legitimacy of political parties is low, rule of law is weak, and economic inequality has increased since Suharto’s fall. The state bureaucracy remains highly corrupt.  Each of these weaknesses holds in it the possibility of un-doing Indonesia’s democracy if it contributes to delegitimizing the new normal.

Paige Johnson Tan, Ph.D Professor Department of Political Science Radford University, USA

References

Ahmad, Saidiman.  “Elektabilitas PDIP dan Jokowi Terus Menguat.” Saifulmujani.com. January 3, 2018. http://saifulmujani.com/blog/2018/01/03/elektabilitas-pdip-dan-jokowi-terus-menguat (accessed March 6, 2018). Gantan, Josua.  “Rule of Law Seen as Indonesia’s Achilles Heel.” Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014 http://jakartaglobe.id/news/rule-law-seen-indonesias-achilles-heel/ (accessed May 7, 2018). IFES. Executive Summary on Indonesia Post-Election National Survey. June 2014.  http://www.ifes.org/sites/default/files/indonesia_national_public_opinion_poll_june_2014_2014_executive_summary_2.pdf (accessed February 16, 2018). Linz, Juan and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reporters without Borders. Press Freedom Index 2018.  https://rsf.org/en/ranking(accessed May 11, 2018). Thornley, Andrew. “Nine Takeaways from the Legislative Elections.” Elections in Indonesia. 2014.  Asia Foundation. https://asiafoundation.org/resources/pdfs/IndonesiaElections.pdf (accessed February 16, 2018), pp. 6-7. Transparency International. Corruption Perceptions Index. 2017. https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017(accessed May 11, 2018). WJP.  World Justice Project. Rule of Law Index 2017-2018. Undated. http://data.worldjusticeproject.org/#groups/IDN (accessed May 7, 2018). World Bank. “Indonesia’s Rising Divide.” December 7, 2015.  http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/12/08/indonesia-rising-divide(accessed May 7, 2018).

Notes:

Linz and Stepan 1996.

Reporters without Borders 2018.

These are the author’s calculations based on official election results.

IFES 2014, 1.

Thornley 2014, 7.

Ahmad 2018.

Gantan 2014.

WJP 2018.

Gantan 2014.

Transparency International 2017.

World Bank 2015.

Linz and Stepan 1996, 5.

[newstfionline]

In Indonesia, the ‘fake news’ that fueled a Cold War massacre is still potent five decades later

By Vincent Bevins, Washington Post, September 30, 2017

JAKARTA, Indonesia--Early on the morning of Oct. 1, 1965, members of Indonesia’s armed forces kidnapped and killed six high-ranking generals in Jakarta. To this day, it’s not entirely clear who was involved in planning the operation or what the “30th September Movement” hoped to achieve.

But the military’s swift reaction and the mass killings that followed have entered history as one of the Cold War’s darkest chapters. Gen. Suharto, then the head of the army’s strategic reserve command and relying on support from the CIA, accused the powerful Communist Party of orchestrating a coup attempt and took over as the military’s de facto leader. Over the next few months, his forces oversaw the systematic execution of at least 500,000 Indonesians, and historians say they may have killed up to 1 million. The massacre decimated the world’s third-largest Communist Party (behind those of the Soviet Union and China), and untold numbers were tortured and killed simply for allegedly associating with communists.

The military dictatorship that formed afterward, led by Suharto, made wildly inaccurate anti-communist propaganda a cornerstone of its legitimacy and ruled Indonesia with U.S. support until 1998.

More than 50 years after the events of 1965--and as documents continue to emerge pointing to Washington’s support for the killings--the topic is still an inflammatory one in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Recently, conservative and Islamist activists, armed with Suharto’s version of events, have sought to suppress investigations into the events of 1965 and have used the communist boogeyman to attack moderate President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

“There are two tools that cynical operators can use for political gain in Indonesia--religion and communism,” said Baskara T. Wardaya, a professor at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta who studies the role of the Cold War in Indonesian history. “And the myth of an ever-present, dangerous communist threat was created by Suharto in October 1965. It was ingrained into the minds of the people.”

In 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was a legal party of unarmed civilians operating in the open, not a rebel or clandestine organization. Even if the party’s high command did know about or helped form the 30th September Movement, there is no evidence that any rank-and-file members had knowledge of its plans.

But simply for their political beliefs, they were subjected to mass slaughter. Across the country, one by one, Indonesians were shot, stabbed, decapitated or thrown off cliffs into rivers to be washed into the ocean. The carnage was mostly over by the end of 1965, but violence and discrimination continued for decades. Relatives of victims or accused communists were banned from participating in many facets of public life.

A member of the U.S. Embassy staff in Jakarta later admitted that he had handed over a list of communists--compiled by U.S. officials--to Indonesian authorities as the massacre was underway.

“It really was a big help to the army,” Robert J. Martens, a former member of the embassy’s political section, told The Washington Post in 1990. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”

The National Declassification Center recently processed thousands of the Jakarta embassy’s files from this period and is working with Brad Simpson, a historian at the University of Connecticut, and the National Security Archive to digitize them and make them public.

In an email Friday, Simpson said preliminary work indicated that the documents should “confirm in additional detail that US officials were aware of the Army-led mass-killings of alleged PKI supporters and members and actively encouraged them” and could be released later this year. He added of the officials, “They knew the Army was carrying out a campaign of extermination against overwhelmingly unarmed civilians who were unaware of and had no involvement in the September 30th Movement.”

But Indonesia still suffers from “dangerous anti-communist paranoia,” in the words of a recent Human Rights Watch publication. The organization was condemning an attack on the offices of the Legal Aid Institute in Jakarta earlier in September.

The institute had planned to host a small conference about the events of 1965, but conservatives circulated social-media messages falsely alleging that the event was actually a meeting to revive the PKI, which is still illegal. Demonstrations on Sept. 16 forced the cancellation of the planned talk. When supporters of the groups involved returned to the building the next day for a cultural event, they were trapped inside by an “anti-communist” mob until early the next morning.

Participants, including students and young human rights activists, told stories of their panic that night as they heard the group outside shout repeatedly “Kill PKI!” and “Allahu akbar!” Witnesses said many of the demonstrators belonged to the same Islamist groups that led a successful campaign for the imprisonment of a former governor of Jakarta, a Christian of Chinese descent, on charges of committing blasphemy against Islam.

“We were the victims of a hoax,” said Citra Referandum, a lawyer at the Legal Aid Institute, using a Bahasa Indonesia term sometimes translated as “fake news.” She said, “Our event on September 17th was only about supporting democracy in Indonesia.”

The anti-communists remain active. On Friday, a few thousand protesters gathered in Jakarta to warn the country about the alleged dangers of a PKI resurgence in the government. Many analysts think this line of attack may be used against Widodo in next year’s election.

“Many powerful people are invested in maintaining the false narrative put forward by the propaganda and brainwashing under Suharto, because they don’t want to see themselves or their predecessors turned from heroes into villains,” said Andreas Harsono, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Indonesia, after Friday’s protest. “And even though communism is practically nonexistent here, the fears they created can still be used against Jokowi. He’s Javanese [Indonesia’s largest ethnic group] and Muslim, so they can’t attack him for his race or religion. So they try to attack him for being a communist.”

[the-funtime-autocrat]

“Say what you will about authoritarianism, but it has many benefits.

Suharto’s Indonesia, Mohamad’s Malaysia and Nasser’s Egypt were all authoritarian states with majority Muslim populations. One of the best elements was their general purging of Islamists to avoid the same open tendencies currently in Turkey and the Arab Gulf states.

Fundamentalists, their organizations, imans and sects were banned, imprisoned and in some cases, executed. All three pursued secular rule with radicalism in check.

This fact is lost on American foreign policy thinkers without historical outlooks or knowledge. The end result being US support for those seeking the destruction of what they’re trying to defend.”