Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Today in the "Religion of Peace™"

On October 1st, 1965, in Indonesia Suharto took over control of the country from Sukarno, after 6 top military leaders were assassinated the previous day.  Under Suharto, Muslim groups began killing non-Muslims throughout 1965 and 1966, with over 500,000 people murdered.  According to a CIA report, "In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century."

During WWII, Indonesia (then Dutch West-Indies) under Sukarno fought on the side of the Japanese Axis forces.  At the end of the war, Indonesia declared its independence, with Sukarno serving as the first president.  Sukarno was Sunni Muslim, but encouraged a secular form of government;  he also developed leanings toward communism, to the dismay of the U.S. and U.K.  By the 1960's, Indonesia's parliament was split between the secular Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and Islamic fundamentalist parties.

Suharto was an army general serving under Sukarno.  Like Suharto and most Indonesians, he was also a Sunni Muslim.  On the night of September 30th, 1965, a group of top generals in the Indonesian army kidnapped and killed 6 other top generals in a coup attempt.  The motivation and composition of the coup members remains murky.

One theory is that there was a planned CIA coup to overthrow Sukarno to prevent the communists (the PKI)  from gaining power;  the coup members pre-emptively killed the generals who were planning to overthrow Sukarno.  The coup members were all close associates of Sukarno, and he willingly went with them to their stronghold in the hours after the murders took place.

Another theory is that Suharto was part of the coup attempt, but switched sides to Sukarno for personal political reasons.

The official version is that the coup members were communists.

Regardless, in the hours after the coup attempt, Suharto took control of the military, and the rebel forces mainly fled or surrendered.  After a brief battle, the coup was over.  The coup was blamed on the PKI.  Suharto accused all generals who were loyal to Sukarno of being communists, and they were quickly purged from power.  Suharto now had defacto control of the country.  The PKI was banned, and its members were rounded up and executed without trial.

Muslim militia groups, with the blessing of Suharto's government, fanned out across the country and begin the massacre of anyone accused of being "communist" (ie. anyone resisting the imposition of sharia law in Indonesia).  As in Uganda in the 1970's, the property of (non-Muslim) ethnic-Chinese citizens was confiscated and appropriated by the Muslim militias, and the former-owners were killed. On the Christian islands of Nusa Tenggara, Christian clergy were murdered by the Muslim militias.  Hindu-majority Bali was also heavily targeted.

In accordance with the teachings of the holy, holy Qur'an, the method of killing was usually cutting the throat of the victims with swords, often including beheading.  The victims' bodies were dumped in rivers, which at some points became clogged with cadavers.  At least 500,000 people were killed, with some estimates as high as 3 million.

Two Muslim groups were prominently involved.  Muhammadiyah (followers of Mohammad) is a Sunni group that is tied to the National Mandate Party.  Nahdlatul Ulama is a Sunni group that is directly involved in politics.  Both groups declared that the killings were "holy war," and openly justified the killings in religious terms.

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon all supported the overthrow of Sukarno and the killing of the PKI, due to Cold War fear of communism.  Presidents Nixon and Ford's support of Suharto and the Islamic militias that committed unimaginable mass murder (including the last vestige of Christianity in East Timor in the 1970's and 1980's) stands as a particularly egregious blunder in U.S. foreign policy.

Little attention is paid today, either within Indonesia or outside, to the hundreds of thousands of murders that took place in Indonesia, and even less attention is given to the religious motivation driving it.  Like Darfur or Armenia, when Muslims are committing the mass murders, the world sheepishly looks the other way.