Скачать или смотреть Files declassified showing US knew of Indonesia extermination campaign

(18 Oct 2017) A Human Rights Watch spokesman welcomed on Wednesday the news that thousands of declassified files have been made public, revealing new details of US government knowledge and support of an Indonesian army extermination campaign that killed several hundred thousand civilians during anti-communist hysteria in the mid-1960s.
However, the organisation's deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson told AP that this was merely the tip of the iceberg and "a lot more disclosure needs to be made."
The thousands of files from the US Embassy in Jakarta covering 1963-66 were made public Tuesday after a declassification review that began under the Obama administration.
The Associated Press reviewed key documents in the collection in advance of their release.
The files fill out the picture of a devastating reign of terror by the Indonesian army and Muslim groups that has been sketched by historians and in a US State Department volume that was declassified in 2001 despite a last-minute CIA effort to block its distribution.
In 1965, Indonesia had the world's third-largest communist party after China and the Soviet Union, with several million members, and the country's president, the charismatic Sukarno, was vociferously socialist and anti-American.
US officials despaired of Indonesia's apparently unstoppable drift into the communist fold and were ecstatic when conservative generals imposed martial law in Jakarta, seized state radio and set out to annihilate the country's communist party on the pretext that it had tried to overthrow the government.
Within months, the army would prevail in its power struggle with Sukarno, shifting Indonesia's political orientation to the US and opening its huge market to American companies.
The newly released files underline the US Embassy's and State Department's early, detailed and ongoing knowledge of the killings and eagerness to avoid doing anything that would hinder the Indonesian army.
The documents also show that US officials had credible information that contradicted the Indonesian army's lurid story that the kidnapping and killing of seven generals in an abortive coup by junior officers on Sept. 30, 1965, which paved the way for the bloodbath, was ordered by the Indonesian communist party and Beijing.
The documents specifically mention mass killings ordered by Suharto, a general who within months would seize total power and rule Indonesia for more than three decades, and the pivotal role in carrying out the massacres by groups that today remain Indonesia's biggest mainstream Muslim organizations: Nahdlatul Ulama, its youth wing Ansor and Muhammadiyah.
The release of the documents coincides with an upsurge in anti-communist rhetoric in Indonesia, where communism remains a frequently invoked boogeyman for conservatives despite the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly three decades ago and China's embrace of global capitalism.

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