Between October 1965 and March 1966, the Indonesian Army and its civilian and religious militia allies killed between 500,000 and 1 million people. The targets were members and suspected sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) — at the time, the third-largest communist party in the world after the Soviet and Chinese parties, with approximately 3 million card-carrying members. The killings began in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt on the night of September 30 to October 1, 1965, in which six senior Army generals were murdered. The Army, under General Suharto, blamed the PKI. Within ten days, anti-communist purges had begun across Java; within six months they had spread to Bali, Sumatra, and other islands. The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta — under Ambassador Marshall Green — supplied the Indonesian Army with lists of suspected PKI members. The U.S. State Department declassified approximately 30,000 pages of embassy cables and CIA briefings in October 2017, confirming the operational support pattern that historians had documented from other sources since the 1990s. President Sukarno was forced from power; Suharto formally became President in March 1968. Suharto's 'New Order' regime ruled Indonesia until 1998. The 1965-66 killings were never formally investigated by the Indonesian state. The 2012 documentary *The Act of Killing* (Joshua Oppenheimer) and its 2014 companion *The Look of Silence* brought the killings into international consciousness through interviews with the surviving perpetrators.
State & Intelligence Operations
1965-1966
