The Voice of Murder

The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of the massacre (and so influential do many of the men who took part in it remain), that outspoken eyewitnesses are extremely rare, despite the enormous numbers of people involved and widespread knowledge of where each town’s unmarked mass graves can be found.

Some of the worst killings were carried out on a volunteer basis by village men who were members of Islamic and nationalist youth groups, often on extremely flimsy evidence of communist sympathies. Yet due testimony from actual members of these groups who performed the round-ups and committed the killings in the countryside, is virtually nonexistent in the historical record. So it is remarkable and important that some of those men have finally spoken out in old age to the Associated Press. All the men interviewed by the AP however are unrepentant and convinced that they saved their country from an impending communist takeover.

Read the entire piece if you can, but here’s a brief excerpt of some of the revealed stories:

Sulchan, now a 64-year-old preacher, says the “order to eliminate all communists” came through Islamic clerics with Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. Sulchan led the first killing in his neighborhood — that of a schoolteacher, Hamid, said to have had communist ties.

We “hit him in the head with a sledgehammer and he died instantly,” says Sulchan, a tall, lanky man who wears a wraparound Javanese sarong, his crooked teeth stained by years of smoking sweet clove cigarettes. He points calmly up the street to the spot of the murder, a piece of cracked pavement and an abandoned kiosk overgrown with weeds.

On another day, his men decapitated a man named Darmo because they feared he would return to life and take revenge. His head was hung from a banyan tree in the town square and his body dumped on the other side of the river, says Sulchan, sitting on the tiled floor of his mosque.

On one night, Sulchan’s platoon helped unload 20 to 30 prisoners at the execution site and beat to death a man who tried to escape. The rest were forced to the ground and killed. A man pleaded with his executor to tell his child to study the Quran, Islam’s holy book. The executor agreed, then murdered him too.

[...]

“I am convinced the actions were justified because communists were the enemy of my religion,” says Sulchan. “I thought: This is what people get for not submitting to religion. I felt righteous.”
(Associated Press)

Given active US support for the Suharto coup which precipitated this, and some direct evidence of CIA involvement in the identification of targets for killing, some American apologists for the massacre like to argue that the communist PKI was no mere lamb led to the slaughter. They argue that had the PKI ever gained total power over an ailing and paranoid Sukarno, or via its own coup, the communists would have killed even more people. Additionally they argue that the Sukarno regime itself had already degenerated into a despotic and brutal antidemocratic autocracy, which was on course to be far worse than Suharto’s dictatorship, which subsequently embraced many liberalizing reforms, eventually giving way to a thriving market economy and functional democratic government.

All of that is true, but there cannot be any credible apology for the accounts described above because of it. Resistance to the designs of communism cannot and should not be defended only by appeal to a limitation in the degree of preemptive murder and repression. And in reading the accounts of the purge supplied by the AP, it should be readily apparent that the actors and actions involved are virtually indistinguishable from the worst crimes committed under Asian communism in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere, except by their claimed political cause and the quantity of the murdered. That is no defense at all.

This is something that is all the more tragic, because opposition to communism in favor of democracy and freedom is not a difficult argument to speak, even in Indonesia. But any speech compromised by the voice of murder isn’t worth listening to.