Robert Cribb :
'The Genocide in Indonesia 1965-1966'

Between October 1965 and March 1966, Indonesian military units and civilian vigilantes killed approximately half a million members and associates of the Indonesian Communist Party. The killings took place in an atmosphere of extreme political tension and economic disarray under President Sukarno's Guided Democracy. In an atmosphere of extreme political uncertainty, the communists were blamed for the killing of senior generals in an ambiguous coup in Jakarta and were suspected of planning a massacre of their enemies. The killings were rooted, however, in deeper antagonisms, especially over land, over the place of religion in Indonesian society and over the political authority of the military. Still more deeply, the issue was whether Indonesia was to follow a communist, a Muslim or a western-style development trajectory. Although political killings are not normally regarded as genocide, the intent in 1965-66 - to destroy a way of thinking about Indonesia's identity - comes close in many respects to ethnic killings.