The Indonesia that Barack Obama lived in
as a child bore fresh scars from the darkest period in country's modern
history. Shortly before Obama's arrival in 1967, hundreds of thousands of
people had been killed in a bloody anti-communist purge.
Now Indonesian human rights officials want Obama's
help in addressing unanswered questions about the bloodshed 50 years ago. They
are requesting the declassification of secret US files that could shed light on
how the killings were planned and the extent that the United States
collaborated with Indonesia's military.
Despite nearly two decades of civilian rule, the
prevailing account in Indonesia of those events remains the one planted by the
military regime that swept to power after the killings, led by the dictator
Suharto who ruled for 30 years. Indonesian text books portray it as a national
uprising against a communist threat, and gloss over the deaths.
Joko Widodo, the first directly elected Indonesian
president without links to Suharto, ran as a reformer who would look into
episodes of military impunity, but since taking office in 2014, he has not
pressed the issue due to opposition within his own government and the still-powerful
military.
Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission in 2012
reported there was evidence that crimes against humanity were committed during
the 1965-1966 crackdown, but the attorney general took no action.Commissioner
Muhammad Nurkhoiron met this week with State Department officials and has made
a formal request to Obama that says the release of files from the CIA, the
Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies will help in "encouraging
the Indonesian government to redouble its own efforts to establish the
truth" and promote reconciliation."We need the US to immediately
release those documents to help our efforts," Nurkhoiron said in an
interview. He said when Obama leaves office early next year, momentum for US
action could be lost.
Myles Caggins, a National Security Council spokesman,
said it will review the commission's request. He said the administration
supports the declassification of any relevant documents from the period which
do not pose a national security risk. The US has already released many
documents related to the period, but has withheld others.
The killings began in October 1965 shortly after an
apparent abortive coup in which six right-wing generals were murdered. Suharto,
an unknown major general at the time, filled the power vacuum and blamed the
assassinations on Indonesia's Communist Party, which was then the largest
outside the Soviet Union and China, with some 3 million members. No conclusive
proof of communist involvement in the coup has been produced.I
n his 1995 best-selling memoir, "Dreams From My
Father," Obama recounted how his mother, who had moved them to Jakarta
after marrying an Indonesian, learned about the recent killings through
"innuendo, half-whispered asides." In words that still ring true,
Obama wrote: "The death toll was anybody's guess: a few hundred thousand,
maybe; half a million."At that time, the Vietnam War was intensifying, and
Washington's fears of communist takeovers in Southeast Asia were running high.
Previously declassified State Department documents indicate that the US Embassy
in Jakarta passed the names of dozens of Communist Party leaders to the
Indonesian army. Redacted meeting notes from a National Security Council covert
action committee that were declassified last month — the result of a 2004 freedom
of information request from a U.S. historian — show that the US endorsed
"obstructive action" against the Communist Party.
The historian, Brad Simpson from the University of
Connecticut, said the US organized covert operations aiming to provoke a violent
clash so the Indonesian army would crush the communists. Once the killings had
started, the US sent technical assistance and clear signals that it supported
the killings, he said.
But Simpson said releasing more detailed information
would likely make clearer that the primary responsibility for killings lay with
the Indonesian military and state, and not the United States. It could shed
light on the command and control structure of the Indonesian armed forces, who
was actually carrying out the killings in particular places, and the degree of
coordination that was involved between the Indonesian army and its civilian
supporters and affiliates."The more we release, the less tenable will be
the conspiracy theories about the US role," Simpson said.
Thomas Blanton, director of the nongovernment National
Security Archive, said the Obama administration has quite a good track record
on declassifying documents for human rights accountability, as it did last
October for Chile, revealing that former dictator Augusto Pinochet ordered the
1976 assassination of a Chilean diplomat.
But he said the US was unlikely to act without a
strong push from the Indonesian government, particularly as some of the
documents being sought are closely guarded CIA operational files.
That appears unlikely, as the bloodshed of 50 years
ago, which is believed to have caught up many with only tenuous communist
links, remains a deeply sensitive topic in Indonesia.
Authorities have in some cases blocked public viewings
of two recent Oscar-nominated documentaries by the filmmaker Joshua
Oppenheimer, who tracked down former death squad members and found them
unashamed, unrepentant and even willing to re-enact their brutal murders. Matthew
Pennington, Associated Press, Washington
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