So, the butcher Suharto is dead. Few will mourn the monster.
Today’s Independent on Sunday carries a lengthy obituary of the man and cannot avoid discussing the horror he wrought after his takeover in 1965:
Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.
It’s a brutal legacy from which the Independent omits the more pertinent truth: the close involvement of the British Labour Government, under Harold Wilson and the US Democratic Administration under Lyndon Johnson. As the Foreign Office said in a statement to its embassy in Jakarta in October 1965:
It seems pretty clear that the Generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-Western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the Communists. In the short run, and while the present confusion continues, we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the Generals.
Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, had put this matter a little more succinctly only a few days earlier, when he remarked to the F.O. that “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. It was considerably more than “a little shooting” for which the British offered their tacit support – as they well knew. In December 1965, a British official reported to the Ambassador that he was “readier to accept” American statistics that over 100,000 had been butchered, after receiving “horrifying” details of the purges. Such details recorded by the F. O. included,
[Some victims being] given a knife and invited to kill themselves. Most refuse and are told to turn around and are shot in the back.
A woman of 78... was taken away one night by a village execution squad... Half a dozen heads were neatly arranged on the parapet of a small bridge.
As the British consul in Medan summarized events,
Posing as saviours of the nation from a Communist terror, [the army] unleashed a ruthless terror of their own, the scars of which will take many years to heal.
Another memo referred to the purges as “an operation carried out on a very large scale and often with appalling savagery.”
What I must stress is that this was all done with clear UK (and US) knowledge and encouragement. All the quotations above are taken from official UK Government memoranda, published by the Public Records Office and related in Chapter 19 of Mark Curtis’ excellent “Web of Deceit”. We learn further from these documents that the British Government was keen not to “distract” the Indonesian army from its slaughter and that it assured Suharto that they had no intention of interfering. The UK also launched black propaganda operations from its MI6 base in Singapore, designed to lead people to believe that China was arming the PKI opposition and so "blacken [them] in the eyes of the army and the people of Indonesia". Indeed, Britain knew that it could stop, or at the very least seriously impede, the slaughter because it was engaged in a military confrontation with Indonesia in nearby Borneo -but they stressed to Suharto that, were he to divert troops from that stand-off to take part in the butchery, the UK would not take “military advantage”. British callousness to the brutal mass murder of “bewildered peasants” was truly awesome, with one official noting of one group of 10,005 arrestees that, “I hope they do not throw the 10,005 into the sea..., otherwise it will cause quite a shipping hazard.”
This is just a small sample of the record -directly concerning UK complicity in the most gruesome atrocities, all carried out under the pretence (and it was a pretence: the real 'threat' was left-wing nationalism endangering Western business interests) of combating Communism. For instance, I have not touched on our support for Suharto’s genocidal invasion of East Timor. Yet even this brief survey of complicity is lost beneath gallons of Independent whitewash. "Disgraced and villified" reads the headline but that's Suharto, not us. Suharto is dead. So is history.
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