In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement's partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a ...
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In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement's partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno's powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship. Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century's worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement's connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder , John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto's repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation.
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"Pretext for Mass Murder" is an impressive overview of the complicated events behind the 1965-1966 coup in which pro-U.S. General Suharto seized power and began a three decade reign of terror. Roosa worked with a group of Indonesian scholars on interviews and other historical research which produced core material for this book. Though in the end Roosa concludes that a few members of the Indonesian communist party (PKI), by launching an ill-conceived anti-military action, did provide the provocation which rightist military forces and the U.S. had been waiting for in 1965, the foolhardy actions of those individual PKI members do not in any way absolve Suharto and his western backers for what consequently happened (an epic campaign of bloodletting which eviscerated the PKI and killed up to a million Indonesians). In Roosa's words: "In the months before October, the United States and the army wanted an incident like the movement to occur[...] Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers - Allen at the head of the CIA and John Foster at the head of the State Department - viewed all nationalist Third World leaders who wished to remain neutral in the cold war as Communist stooges. In full confidence of their right to handpick the leaders of foreign countries, Eisenhower and the Dulleses repeatedly used CIA covert operations to overthrow such leaders: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Souvanna Phouma in Laos in 1960. The Dulles brothers viewed Sukarno as yet another irritating character who needed to be removed from the world stage." The book effectively synthesizes a wealth of information and is extremely well written, and thankfully devoid of the clunky jargon which sinks so many otherwise useful academic volumes.
