Victims of Indonesia’s 1965 communist killings tell UK to tell truth about its role in genocide and anti-Chinese propaganda
- Declassified documents reveal a UK propaganda unit helped fuel anti-communist massacre that followed failed 1965 coup and led to the rise of dictator Suharto
- Unit urged Indonesians to ‘cut out the communist cancer’ and speculated Sukarno and China were planning to let off an atomic bomb
While Britain’s involvement has long been suspected, the documents – first unearthed by The Guardian – offer a new insight into its methods and motivations in encouraging the purges, which led to the downfall of left-leaning President Sukarno and legitimised the subsequent installation of the dictator Suharto.
The killings left a deep scar on the Indonesian psyche that remains to this day and which is manifest in lingering widespread fears over the influence of communism and anti-Chinese sentiment, despite no evidence that China had any involvement in the turmoil of the period.
The declassified documents highlight how the Foreign Office’s Cold War propaganda arm, the Information Research Department, took advantage of the aftermath of a failed coup by a left-wing group of army officers on September 30, 1965.
Indonesia’s leftist officers killed six of the army’s most senior generals, believing that they had been plotting to dethrone Sukarno and weaken the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which supported Sukarno.