Indonesian Mass Killings 1965-1966: The Anti-Communist Purge

The Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 were a wave of violence in which the army and allied civilian groups killed an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. The killings followed a failed coup attempt known as the 30 September Movement and led to the destruction of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and the rise of General Suharto. They are among the largest mass killings of the twentieth century, yet remain little known outside Indonesia.

Background

After the Indonesian National Revolution won independence from the Netherlands, President Sukarno balanced three main forces under his system of “Guided Democracy”: the army, Islamic organisations and the PKI. By 1965 the PKI was the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China, claiming around three million members and many millions more in affiliated organisations of peasants, workers, women and youth.

Tensions were high. The PKI’s campaign for land reform in Java and Bali brought it into conflict with landowners, many of them linked to Muslim or nationalist groups. The army leadership distrusted the party’s growing influence, and the economy was in crisis, with inflation running at several hundred per cent. Sukarno’s confrontation with Malaysia and his hostility to the West added to the atmosphere of crisis during the Cold War.

The 30 September Movement

On the night of 30 September to 1 October 1965, troops under Lieutenant Colonel Untung, a battalion commander in the presidential guard, kidnapped and killed six senior generals, including army commander Ahmad Yani, and a lieutenant, Pierre Tendean. The defence minister, General Abdul Haris Nasution, escaped, but his young daughter was fatally wounded. The bodies were thrown into a well at Lubang Buaya, on the edge of Jakarta, near an air force base.

The movement announced that it had acted to forestall a coup by a “Council of Generals”. It collapsed within about a day. Major General Suharto, commander of the army’s strategic reserve (Kostrad), who had not been targeted, took control of Jakarta and of the army. Historians still debate who planned the movement; there is evidence that PKI chairman D. N. Aidit and a secret party bureau were involved, but the army’s claim that the whole party had organised it was not supported.

The killings

The army quickly blamed the PKI. Military-controlled newspapers spread false stories that the generals had been tortured and mutilated by communist women, inflaming public anger. From mid-October 1965, the army’s paratroop regiment, the RPKAD, under Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, moved into Central Java, and killings spread to East Java, Bali, North Sumatra and other regions.

The army often organised, armed and protected civilian militias, including members of Muslim, Christian, Hindu and nationalist youth groups. Victims included party members, members of affiliated unions and peasant organisations, teachers, artists and people denounced for personal or local reasons. In some areas ethnic Chinese Indonesians were also targeted. Most killings took place between October 1965 and March 1966, with Bali seeing a particularly intense wave in December 1965.

In addition to the dead, hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps as many as one million, were detained without trial. Some remained imprisoned for more than a decade, many on the island of Buru, where the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer was held until 1979.

Regional patterns

The violence varied greatly from place to place. In Central Java, where the PKI was strong, army units moved from village to village and often relied on local informers to identify suspects. In East Java, members of Ansor, the youth wing of the Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, played a major role, framing the struggle against communists as a religious duty. In Bali, killings by army units and nationalist militias in late 1965 and early 1966 are estimated to have claimed tens of thousands of lives, perhaps around 80,000.

In North Sumatra, killings were concentrated on plantation workers and union members. In many places victims were taken from prisons or detention centres at night and killed at rivers, ravines or remote sites, so that the bodies were never recovered. Accounts by survivors and perpetrators describe how local disputes over land, debts or rivalry were sometimes settled under cover of the anti-communist campaign.

Myths and facts

A persistent official claim was that the killings were a spontaneous outburst of popular anger against communists. Research since the 1990s, including army documents and regional studies, shows that the army planned, organised and directed the violence, even where civilians did much of the killing.

Another misconception is that the PKI was preparing an armed uprising. The party had no significant armed force, and its members offered little resistance; very few soldiers or militia members were killed during the campaign.

Suharto’s rise and the New Order

Sukarno tried to limit the violence and keep his position, but his authority drained away. On 11 March 1966 he signed an order, known as Supersemar, giving Suharto authority to restore order, and the next day the PKI was formally banned. Suharto became acting president in March 1967 and president in March 1968.

His regime, called the New Order, ruled Indonesia until 1998. It brought economic growth and close ties with the West, but it was authoritarian and relied on the memory of 1965 to justify its rule. It also carried out the invasion of East Timor in 1975.

International involvement

The United States, Britain and Australia welcomed the destruction of the PKI. Declassified documents, including US embassy cables released in 2017, show that Western governments were well informed about the killings. US diplomats passed lists of PKI officials to the army, and the US and Britain provided covert support and propaganda assistance to the anti-communist campaign.

By the numbers

Legacy

For decades the New Order told a single official story, in which the PKI was a treacherous enemy and the army the saviour of the nation. A propaganda film about the events was shown on television every year until 1998, and former prisoners and their families faced discrimination. Communism remains banned in Indonesia.

After Suharto’s fall, survivors, historians and journalists began to challenge the official account. Documentary films by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), brought the killings to international audiences. In 2012 Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission concluded that gross human rights violations had taken place, and in January 2023 President Joko Widodo expressed regret for the events of 1965–1966 among other past violations.

Timeline

• 1965, 30 September – 1 October: The 30 September Movement kills six generals and a lieutenant in Jakarta.
• 1965, 1 October: Suharto takes control of the army and crushes the movement.
• 1965, mid-October: RPKAD paratroopers arrive in Central Java; killings begin to spread.
• 1965, December: Mass killings in Bali.
• 1966, 11 March: Sukarno signs the Supersemar order, transferring authority to Suharto.
• 1966, 12 March: The PKI is formally banned.
• 1967, 12 March: Suharto becomes acting president.
• 1968, 27 March: Suharto is appointed president.
• 1998, 21 May: Suharto resigns.

Why it matters

The killings of 1965–1966 reshaped Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, removing its largest political movement and installing a military-backed regime that lasted more than three decades. They were also a major turning point of the Cold War in Asia, occurring ten years after Indonesia had hosted the Bandung Conference as a leader of the non-aligned world.