Indonesia and its trials and tribulations.

[mentalbunny]

I've just started reading The New masters of the world, or whatever it's called, by Pilger and the first essay is about Indonesia and how the governments of the West backed up General whats-his-name (sorry, can't remember). Does anyone know anything about this kind of stuff? It would be good to read something else on this after I've finished Pilger.

[Cassius Clay]

General Suharato I think his name is. Anyway out of all the Communist Partys the Indonesian one suffered the most, aswell as anybody who symapthised with them. Both the Royal Navy and U$ Navy supported him in East Timor and while he was having tea with Queen Elizabeth over 500,000 Communists were being butchered.

Try to provide some links soon.

[elijahcraig]

Estimates range from 500,000-1,000,000, + the invasion of East Timor, more than 200,000 slaughtered. God, these fucking imperialist pigs make me sick to my stomach!

[IHP]

It was supported by Australia as well. Are you talking about the 1975 invasion? That was Suharto.

Unfortunately someone that I really respect, Gough Whitlam, was the PM of Australia at the time (you might remeber that Liberty Lover and I argued about Whitlam for about ten pages a while ago...) , which has become something of a blotch on his career.

What do you want to know about it? The United States gave lists of suspected communists to ABRI (the Indonesian armed forces) and as elijahcraig said over half a million people were killed. They publicly supported the invasion of East Timor with another 200, 000 innocents killed. Dubbed 'extra-judicial' killings. The US trained and armed the ABRI of many years.

All this can be found here:
http://leav-www.army.mil/fmso/lic/sfindex2.htm

OK well it doesn't seem to work any more. This is where I got lots of information about the US in Indonesia.

What else is there? I know a fair bit about this so..yeah feel free to ask away.

--IHP

[Ian]

The slaughter of the PKI is said to be worse than the efforts of the Khmer Rouge, with an estimated 4 million suspected communists being killed (that would have been a huge chunk of the membership, although it was the biggest party outside of China and Russia it was only estimated to be 4 million members, that means that either the entirety of the Party was killed or many innocent people were killed.

Break up a concrete slab on any Indonesian island and there is a likelihood you will find a few skeletons, this sad fact was tacitally acknowledged by Australian Federal Police helping Indonesian investigators establish the number of dead from the Bali bombings when they (of course reputedly, but I know an AFP who tells me this is true) found extra bodies while searching around for bodies and clues and the like.