The World Was Silent? Global Communities of Resistance to the 1965 Repression in the Cold War Era

Abstract

Between 1965 and 1968 the Indonesian army together with civilian vigilantes perpetrated a brutal attack on members of the Indonesian Communist Party and members of affiliated or closely aligned organisations including those for youth, farmers, artists and women. Approximately 500,000 people were murdered and up to a million imprisoned without trial. Schaefer and Wardaya (2013) recently concluded based on a survey of international government and press responses to the 1965 violence that ‘the world’ was largely complacent, if not jubilant, about the rise of the Suharto led military regime and thus silent about the violence against the Indonesian left. This is certainly true of almost all forei..