Below is a condensed version of an article found at Saint Louis Today.com.
As many as 500,000 people were killed. As villagers jeered, the prisoners were killed, one by one.
Sulchan was a killer in one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, in which up to half a million people were massacred in 1965-66 in a purge of communists backed by the United States government.
In a series of interviews, Sulchan and three other killers said the massacres were in fact a carefully planned and executed state operation and described some of its horrors for the first time. But documents released by the National Security Archives in Washington show that the U.S. Embassy passed the names of dozens of Communist Party leaders, and perhaps many more, to the Indonesian army. Documents also show that officials from the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia passed on information to Washington about the killings of 50 to 100 people every night.
"In all the newspapers published since late 1965, it is extraordinarily rare to find a perpetrator's description of the killings," said John Roosa, a professor at the University of British Colombia who wrote the book "Pretext for Mass Murder." 30, 1965, after an apparent abortive coup in which six right-wing generals were murdered and dumped in a well near the capital, Jakarta. He blamed the assassinations on Indonesia's Communist Party and claimed they were targeting Islamic leaders. Its ties with China and Russia worried Washington, at a time when fears of communist takeovers in Southeast Asia were running high.
Sulchan, now 64 and a preacher, said the "order to eliminate all communists" came through Islamic clerics with Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. Sulchan led the first killing in his neighborhood — that of a teacher, Hamid, said to have had communist ties. The rest were forced to the ground and killed. The executor agreed, then murdered him, too. "I thought: 'This is what people get for not submitting to religion.'"
Sulchan's superior, Mansur, commanded the Banser militia for two years and describes a highly efficient operation.
Those who resisted were killed on the spot. Others were taken to detention centers, then trucked to killing fields and shot, stabbed, beheaded and beaten to death, he said.
"We didn't want the country to become a communist state," said Mansur, sitting on a porch bench after returning from Friday afternoon prayers.
Even today, a ban on the Communist Party remains in force in Indonesia, and people marked as ex-political prisoners endure lingering mistrust and discrimination.
The truly sad part is that we still do not realize as a nation how corrupt, brutal, and despicable we are in our dealings with other people in this world. And then when we get a perceived slap in the face by anyone at all we are filled with righteous indignation.
Before we go about the world passing judgment, and invariably killing innocent people in the name of some allegedly noble cause, we should take a good, long, hard look in the mirror.
Might I suggest reading the free ebook Amoral America to get just a glimpse into the shadowy world of our international dealings. Or perhaps you wouldn't like what you saw in the mirror?
You can get the ebook at amoralamerica.info. History is doomed to repeat itself because we all want so badly to forget...
