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Firefighters working at the site of the bombing in Kuta, Bali, October 12, 2002
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Vivid descriptions of burning bodies and television images of the makeshift morgue and smoldering ruins of a Balinese nightclub have horrified a Western audience. Journalists have flocked to report on the "demise of the island paradise," a haven for Western tourists from as close as Australia and as far as the UK. Yet those familiar with Indonesian history will notice a significant absence in Western reporting, no reference to a terrorist act that killed over four hundred times as many Balinese, less than half a century ago.
Everywhere has a history, and a former Western colony is likely to have a particularly bloody one. Could the bombing, causing the deaths of some 200 foreign tourists and Indonesians, have really been the first mass atrocity on Balinese soil, as my English language news programs would have me believe?
It took me around two minutes to find the answer. Pulling John Pilger’s The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2002) off my bookshelf I read the following quotation from a February 1966 report from the British ambassador in Jakarta: “The killings in Bali had been particularly monstrous. In certain areas, it was felt that not enough people [emphasis in the original] had been killed.”
In the 1960s, the West considered “Communism” not “Islamism” the devil incarnate. In the name of the war against the red enemy, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered across the southern hemisphere, from Asia to South America. While the West sometimes got its hands dirty, such as in Vietnam, generally it was seen as easier just to train and supervise a local proxy militia to do the killing for you. Indonesia is a prime example.
Forty years ago, under the leadership of Megawati’s father, Sukarno, Indonesia was part of a group of post-colonial states, like Nasser’s Egypt, that sought to create a non-aligned movement independent of both the West and the East. In a cold war climate, anyone who was not with the West was automatically branded as with the enemy; the Soviets, irrespective of how much support was actually received from the USSR. And thus the West, notably the US, the British and the Australians, saw it as their role to become involved in the overthrow of the government in Indonesia, the former Dutch colony.
And so the West became involved in undermining the Sukarno regime, through a simple method, using Suharto’s militia to kill the “communists.” Detailed investigation by many journalists and academics, such as the American Kathy Kadane and Pilger have shown how active a role the Western powers played in Suharto’s killing spree. The New York Times, July 6, 1966, reported the following from visiting Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt: “With 500 000 to a million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.” (Does “reorientation” sound disturbingly like “regime change” to you?) Pilger states that nearly 80,000 were killed in this “reorientation” in Bali alone, “tourists who have since taken advantage of cheap package holidays to the island might reflect that beneath the car parks of several of the major tourist hotels are buried countless bodies.” A doubly haunting sentence when read after the recent attack.
The mountain of evidence indicating CIA involvement with the killings in Indonesia makes it impossible for critics to dismiss it as conspiracy theory. Last year the BBC and other mainstream media reported on the withdrawal of a state department textbook at the last minute, as it detailed too closely American involvement in the 1960s Indonesian “regime change.” Sections of the text however were published on George Washington University’s National Security Archive , and backed up evidence presented by investigators such as American journalist Kathy Kadane whose interviews with senior US personnel demonstrate that the US had passed “death lists” to the Suharto regime.
In 1990, Kadane published the findings of interviews that she conducted; “For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in 1965 they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of Communist operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to the U.S. officials,” she wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990.
As an Australian, Pilger has shown particular interest in exposing Australian colonialism, a country that is often seen as benign or irrelevant. This Western assumption of Australian government political innocence was reflected in the tone of media analysis of the grieving Australian nation, in the wake of this recent killing of Australian citizens. Campaigning journalists have tried to alert a Western audience to the direct role played in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians, (not just in Bali). Yet in all the media coverage I watched, I heard no mention of the slaughter in Bali and across Indonesia less than 40 years ago.
Paying heed to the mistakes of the past has never been so important for the West, yet the majority of us are further away than we ever have been from engaging with the bloody legacy of colonialism. Why can’t we start addressing the right questions to ourselves as Westerners now, instead of sitting back, blaming the usual suspects, and waiting for the next group of random tourists, office workers or bus passengers to be hideously blown to pieces? We must take action in memory of the dead in Indonesia now, but in memory of them all, not just the latest two hundred victims.
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