The Blueprint for Tyranny: How Hiding the Records of Indonesia’s 1965 Anti-Communist Genocide Fuels Modern Oppression

Author: Sarisha Harikrishna

October 22, 2026

General Suharto at the funeral of the six generals who lost their lives in the G30S Movement [Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Historical Background

When one thinks of genocide in the Southeast Asian context, images of the severe atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the Rohingya genocide spring to mind. This selectiveness in choosing which genocide should be broadcast by mainstream international media has been termed a phenomenon by renowned American philosopher Noam Chomsky and economist Edward S. Herman as the ‘worthy versus unworthy victims.’ Long forgotten in the media were the crimes perpetrated from 1965-1966 in Indonesia, which rights groups recognize today as a genocide. However, Western intervention in the genocide has been well-documented in historical records. ‘In terms of the numbers killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.’ This was a direct quotation lifted from a declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report on the underreported 1965-1966 anti-communist massacres. It not only detailed the sheer gravity of the unrest in Indonesia, which ultimately led to the deaths of approximately 500,000 to 1 million civilians, but most importantly, it illustrated how the international community bore witness to the bloodshed and chose not to intervene. Often described as one of the darkest periods of Indonesian history, the massacres, which lasted from October 1965 to March 1966, were an unfathomable act of violence sponsored by the ruling government at that time. The 1960s saw a rise in the fear of communism across the globe due to active geopolitical flashpoints, nuclear tension, and ideological clashes. 

For instance, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, an extremely violent showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, not only marked a close shave to a full-scale nuclear event, but also opened the eyes of American audiences to the fact that having a Soviet-aligned communist state just 90 miles from Florida posed a significant threat to national security. The senseless deaths and suffering inflicted during the Vietnam War, which resulted in the 1968 My Lai massacre, where US soldiers murdered hundreds of mostly vulnerable people like children, women, and the elderly, was one of the more prominent instances where the United States intervened in the domestic sovereignty of Asian countries. In recent years, the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War has been criticized as a profound violation of geopolitical borders abroad, particularly in the weaponization of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as an ideological loophole to justify this interference.  

Additionally, figures such as Hans Morgenthau, George F. Kennan, Senator J. William Fulbright, and former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had viewed the conflict as a global communist conspiracy, instead of a localized nationalist movement. Although the Vietnam War and the communist massacres occurred in different countries, despite the overlapping timelines, the main sentiment among Asian communities is that both events were questionable external US interference in what was essentially a domestic issue. The main catalyst for the massacre was the murder of six army generals by a group of lower-ranking military officials, called the 30 September Movement (known in Indonesian as G30S, Gerakan Tiga Puluh September, or Gestapu). Believing that the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI)) was the mastermind behind the killings, General Suharto placed the blame on them, leading to the commission of heinous crimes to eliminate them once and for all. 

However, the attacks were not limited to members of the PKI. Anyone who was accused of being a PKI sympathizer, despite no prior links being attached to them, was also indiscriminately targeted and murdered. This article aims to uncover the history of the atrocities that occurred on Indonesian soil, assess how modern cover-up attempts only serve to shield perpetrators from justice, and trace how these evasions have shaped current-day Indonesian politics and the chances for accountability for victims. 

Censorship in the 21st Century and the Systematic Erasure of History

Although a vast majority of Indonesian youth are aware of the horrific events that took place during those six months, many are unaware that almost 500,000 to over 1 million leftists had lost their lives. The reasons are twofold: there is a difference between how this history is portrayed in private and public school curricula, and there is widespread stigma around the event due to its links to communism. In public schools, PKI is portrayed as the aggressor that needs to be subdued due to its actions of abducting and killing the six army generals. In private schools, this history is presented in a much more nuanced way, offering different perspectives on the historical event, such as who initiated the coup and the role of foreign actors such as the US. Additionally, proactive teachers who want to give their students a neutral worldview of the horrors of those six months take the initiative to expose the students to global scholarship and present different ideas that challenge the one-sided narrative painted by the government.

It was considered an incredibly brave endeavour for these teachers to provide the full account of both sides during the PKI massacres, since they face a range of systemic abuses such as professional, social, legal, and psychological repercussions as a result. Teachers who choose to provide different perspectives than what is written in the school curriculum risk being terminated or forced to resign if local education boards and even disgruntled parents accuse them of ‘manipulating history.’ If the teacher’s lesson is interpreted as defending the PKI, they could be unjustly criminalized under the country’s active People’s Assembly Decree No. 25 of 1966 (TAP MPRS XXV/1966), ultimately opening them to criminal liability. 

There have been attempts to illustrate the full picture of the massacre.  In 2004, a short-lived attempt was made to revise the school curriculum to remove paragraphs explicitly naming PKI as the perpetrator of the murders of the six army generals. However, after immense political pressure from ultra nationalists, the Attorney General’s Office prohibited the publishing and disseminating of history textbooks that provided a holistic lens to the massacre. The subsequent public burning of these books in 2007 drew condemnation from prominent figures such as Asmara Nababan from the Center for Human Rights and Democratic Studies and Franz Magnis-Suseno, who planned a constitutional challenge against the legality of the ban. The government at the time justified its ban on books by stating that it ‘challenged some accepted truths’ and could possibly lead to public disorder. It is clear at this point that this same line of justification has been reproduced and repackaged by multiple authoritarian regimes to shift the focus from state violence to preventing public unrest. 

Although the Indonesian Constitutional Court later struck down the colonial-era Law No.4/PNPS/1963 in 2010, which empowered the Attorney General to ban books without a trial, massive bureaucratic hurdles in achieving nationwide awareness of these events still remain. In its 2010 ruling, the Court emphasized the importance of ensuring that future prohibitions on publications should be thoroughly vetted by a transparent judicial court procedure where authors have the right to defend their work, bringing Indonesia in line with its obligations under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the country is a party to. In light of the widespread state-sponsored repression of fundamental civil liberties like the freedom of expression, independent civil society and activists took it upon themselves to educate the Indonesian youth on the grave crimes against humanity that occurred from 1965-1966 by creating short documentaries on it.

The most prominent example of this is Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries detailing the killings, which place unrepentant death squad leaders who boast about their spoils of war and their achievements right at the centre of the conversation. His first documentary on the massacres, entitled The Act of Killing (2012), received critical acclaim for the way that it viewed the horrors of those six months through the eyes of these war criminals. On the other hand, his second documentary, released two years later, called The Look of Silence, painted a poignant retelling of the massacres from the perspectives of the victims' families. The documentaries ignited a spark in the souls of young Indonesians, inspiring many of them to start youth groups of their own, hold underground screenings of the documentaries, and host alternative history discussions in a bid to seek reconciliation for the generational trauma caused by the massacres. 

In 2015, the Indonesian state previously forced organizers of the popular Ubud Writers and Readers Festival to cancel all of their sessions aimed at discussing the massacres in a coordinated effort to stifle neutral discussions on the atrocities. In addition to actively suppressing the voices of these victims, the Indonesian government was heavily criticized in November 2025 after President Prabowo Subianto awarded the country’s highest civilian honour, known as Gelar Pahlawan Nasional (National Hero), to General Suharto, who has been criticized for his dictatorship and role in the massacres. President Prabowo’s action was not only seen as a blatant disregard of the massacres that took place, but also as what activists say is a historical revisionism aimed at minimizing the dark chapters of Indonesia’s past to legitimize the current ruling regime. The severity of this issue has also been exacerbated by the fact that an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission has never been established to look into the massacres, illustrating an evident ignorance towards a painful moment in Indonesian history.

Even when the non-binding International People’s Tribunal (IPT 1965), which was held in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled that Indonesia had committed genocide, the ruling government rejected the decision outright, refusing to issue an apology. On the yearly anniversary of the killings, pushback by the government rose significantly. In 2017, General Gatot Nurmantyo issued a directive ordering military personnel to restrict any efforts to hold public screenings of documentaries related to the massacre, asserting that it ‘distorted history.’ The selective erasure and rewriting of the history of the massacres have left the families of victims without legal recourse, further rubbing salt into the wound.

Students participating in an anti-Suharto protest [Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

The Discovery of Mass Graves and Formal Recognition of Genocide

In 2016, news broke that five survivors, who had founded the Research Foundation for 1965 Murder Victims, had found that there were more than 100 mass graves linked to the massacre, painting a more harrowing side to the massacre - there were still hundreds of nameless victims who had not gotten justice. Mass graves in the aftermath of what scholars say is a genocide are an extremely inhumane and haphazard way of burying bodies, since multiple victims are put together into large pits or trenches without proper identification, reducing them to merely statistics on the page of a website or book. In particular, Article 130 of the Geneva Convention IV explicitly outlines that digging mass graves to hide the perpetration of atrocities is a violation of international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) uses forensic data regarding the discovery of mass graves as evidence of mass atrocities, although it is not an automatic indication of genocidal intent.

Although the IPT 1965 has described the event as a genocide, the legal and official consensus remains incredibly complex. Despite former President Joko Widodo’s statement expressing regret for the way that human rights were handled throughout Indonesian history, the lack of formal accountability and the resulting gaps in public understanding makes it an uphill task to categorize it as genocide. It is important for more efforts to uncover and spread the truth of what happened in 1965 to the Indonesian public to be done, without fear of repercussions. 

Conclusion

The tragedy of Indonesia’s massacres does not only lie in the cost of the slaughter itself, but also in the way that state-sponsored cover-ups have fostered this impunity by refusing to acknowledge the gravity of what had occurred during those six months. By choosing to dilute the pain and suffering of the victims' families to make it more palatable for the state’s narrative, it reaffirms their perspective that justice will never be served, in this lifetime or the next. 

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Glossary

• Accountability: The fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it, or the degree to which this happens.

• Atrocity: An extremely cruel, violent, or shocking act. 

• Authoritarian: Demanding that people obey completely and refusing to allow them freedom to act as they wish.

• Civil liberties: The rights of a person to do, think, and say what they want if this does not harm other people. 

• Communism: The belief in a society without different social classes in which the methods of production are owned and controlled by all its members, and everyone works as much as they can and receives what they need, or a social and political system based on this belief. 

• Constitutional: Allowed by or contained in a constitution. 

• Criminal liability: Responsibility for any illegal behaviour that causes harm or damage to someone or something.  

• Crimes against humanity: Specific crimes committed in the context of a large-scale attack targeting civilians, regardless of their nationality. These crimes include murder, torture, sexual violence, enslavement, persecution, enforced disappearance, etc. 

• Coup: A sudden illegal, often violent, taking of government power, especially by part of an army

• Declassified: Officially stated to no longer be secret. 

• Dissemination: The act of spreading news, information, ideas, etc. to a lot of people. 

• Genocidal intent: The specific mental element required under international law to classify an act as genocide. 

• Historical revisionism: The tendency to reinterpret the events or meanings of the past in terms of current facts, views, or preferences. 

• Impunity: Freedom from punishment or from the unpleasant results of something that has been done. 

• Jurisdiction: The authority of a court or official organization to make decisions and judgments. 

• Leftist: A supporter of the political left.

• Reconciliation: A situation in which two people or groups of people become friendly again after they have argued. 

• Repression: The use of force or violence to control a group of people.

• Sympathizer: A person who supports a political organization or believes in a set of ideas.