60 years after the Indonesian mass killings: Is the Cold War back?
Key takeaways
- Six decades after helping the Indonesian army crush one of the biggest communist parties in the world, the US is once again meddling in countries it considers a thorn in its flesh.
- https://p.dw.com/p/5B0NQThousands of suspected communists were detained, tortured and killed between 1965 and 1966 in Indonesia Image: UPI/TT/IMAGOAdvertisement Jakarta, October 1965.
- Today, some historians see the memo as evidence of a broader Cold War strategy.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Six decades after helping the Indonesian army crush one of the biggest communist parties in the world, the US is once again meddling in countries it considers a thorn in its flesh. Is history repeating itself?
https://p.dw.com/p/5B0NQThousands of suspected communists were detained, tortured and killed between 1965 and 1966 in Indonesia Image: UPI/TT/IMAGOAdvertisement Jakarta, October 1965. After a failed coup attempt, the Indonesian army and its allies killed, tortured and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Indonesians they suspected to be communists, many of them of Chinese descent.
But almost a year before that, in December 1964, the British Foreign Office had already written in an internal memo: "A premature PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia] coup may be the most helpful solution for the West – provided the coup failed.”