Indonesia's Mass Killings And The Rise Of Suharto
- Date
- 1965–1966
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- Southeast Asia (Indonesia)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
Between October 1965 and March 1966, Indonesia was convulsed by anti-communist mass killings that left an estimated 500,000 to more than a million people dead and brought General Suharto to power.
The bloodshed followed a murky coup attempt on the night of 30 September 1965, when a group calling itself the 30 September Movement killed six senior army generals. Suharto, commander of the strategic reserve, swiftly crushed the plot and blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), then the largest in the non-communist world, unleashing a nationwide purge. Army units and allied civilian and Islamic militias systematically murdered suspected communists, trade unionists, ethnic-Chinese Indonesians, and others across Java, Bali, and Sumatra, often with encouragement and intelligence from Western governments. Suharto sidelined founding president Sukarno and became acting president by 1967, inaugurating his authoritarian "New Order" that ruled until 1998. One of the largest and least acknowledged atrocities of the Cold War, the killings remade Indonesia into a pro-Western, anti-communist state and shifted the strategic balance of Southeast Asia, their memory suppressed for decades.
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Empires active in 1965–1966
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Dutch Empire1581 CE – 1975 CE
Related politics & governance events
- The Fall Of Suharto And Reformasi1998
- Construction of the Berlin Wall13 August 1961
- Iranian RevolutionJanuary–February 1979
- Founding of the People's Republic of China1 October 1949
- Establishment of Apartheid in South Africa1948
- Independence and Partition of British India14–15 August 1947
Further reading
The wider story
A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads
Authoritative yet readable history of the whole region, mainland and maritime.
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