https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/18/how-jakarta-became-the-codeword-for-us-backed-mass-killing/
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Millions more people were indirect victims of the massacres, but no one came around to inquire how many loved ones they had lost.
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Millions more people were indirect victims of the massacres, but no one came around to inquire how many loved ones they had lost.
Their silence was the point of the violence. The Armed Forces did not oversee the extermination of every single communist, alleged communist, and potential communist sympathizer in the country. That would have been nearly impossible, because around a quarter of the country was affiliated somehow with the PKI. Once the killings took hold, it became incredibly hard to find anyone who would admit to any association with the PKI.
Around 15 percent of the prisoners taken were women. They were subjected to especially cruel, gendered violence, which sprung directly from the propaganda spread by Suharto with Western help. Except for a tiny number of people possibly involved in the planning of the disastrous September 30th Movement, almost everyone killed and imprisoned was entirely innocent of any crime. Magdalena, an apolitical teenage member of a communist-affiliated union, was innocent.
The rank-and-file card-carrying members of the unarmed Communist Party, who made up a large proportion of the victims, were also entirely innocent. They didn’t do anything wrong at all, yet they were condemned to annihilation, and almost everyone around them was sentenced to a lifetime of guilt, trauma, and being told they had sinned unforgivably because of their association with the earnest hopes of left-wing politics.