On the one hand, I am grateful to see the Washington Post print an article, even a short one with a narrow focus, on one of the great almost unknown crimes of the mid-twentieth century, the massacres in Indonesia in 1965. (I don't think that description is a rhetorical flourish -- as the article says, we are talking about some 500,000 politically inspired deaths in a very short period.) The article was well-written and of compelling human interest.

However, I found it profoundly disturbing that the article did not mention any U.S. role in the 1965 events. No-one (including, I would bet, the reporter, Ms. Nakashima) could seriously contend that the 1965 massacres were unrelated to Cold War politics, or that the US had no role in the events. It is undeniable that the results of the massacres were strikingly congruent with US policy of the time, and included the destruction of the largest Community Party outside the socialist bloc, the end of the Sukarno regime which had stood for the neutralist third way approach signalled at the Bandung conference, and the beginning of almost forty years of the Suharto regime of anti-communism and accomodation to US military and corporate interests.

I realize that Ms. Nakashima was focussing on one village and one very compelling story. However, the article did include some broader contextual information. Therefore, the omission of any possible US role gives the misleading impression that these crimes were purely indigenous in origin. Either Ms. Nakashima or some editor should have added a brief note about the US role, or at least an alleged US role. (And if Ms. Nakashima originally included this point, and it was edited out, my apologies to her and my redoubled criticism of the Post.)

After all, the article was published in the capital of the United States of America, and at a time of controversy over how the US deals with oil-rich Islamic nations. It might be of some little use in explaining why some people in Indonesia hate the U.S., and why much of the visible opposition there is based on religious extremism rather than on a secular left critique.

As it stands, the article, probably the only one you have printed in many years on the topic and quite likely the only one for some time to come, is profoundly misleading, describing only one impetus for these monstrous massacres -- "bad feelings built between the Communist Party, which supported land reform in rural areas, and small landlords." While those words are literally true, they cannot stand alone as a description of the genesis of those massacres. It's impossible to believe that "small landlords" alone created the political space that allowed Suharto and his cronies to undertake such a bold and bloody coup in one of the world's most populous nations. At the very least, these generals, like those of Chile, Guatemala, Vietnam, and Haiti, at least checked in with the U.S. Embassy or the local CIA operative to see how their plans would be received, and had some general idea about how resource-extracting corporations might feel about the matter.

As a rational observer of current trends, I naturally consider this omission in this article one more sign of the inability of corporate media to tell the truth about US corporate interests and crimes committed in the name of "national security." You could prove me a little bit wrong by making sure that the next article on this topic is not similarly sanitized.

Larry Yates, November 2005