Slaughterhouse in Indonesia
P., S.
Indonesia is passing through a period which could lead to its disintegration as a nation. The standing of its new military government and its leader Bung Karno has dropped to zero. The...
...Actually, we simply do not know what is going on in Indonesia since it passed under military control...
...If what appears to have been a premature Communist coup had succeeded, we have not the slightest doubt that the victorious Communists would have instituted their own bloody purge...
...With American backing, the United Nations ought to institute an investigation of the slaughter...
...Under these tragic circumstances not only does some kind of impartial investigation have to be conducted into Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel, who published fiction and essays in Western periodicals under the pennames of Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, have been sentenced to seven and five years in forced labor camps by the Russian Supreme Court...
...Would it have remained silent if the slaughter had been done by the Communists...
...the International League for Human Rights and the UN International Lawyer's Commission at Geneva ought to get on to this story...
...The Government mint of Jakarta is reported operating on a double shift to run off thousands of rupiah notes daily, nothing more substantial behind them than the paper on which they are printed...
...Shaken, crestfallen but unrepentant, Sukarno continues to "rule" his volcanic islands...
...The standing of its new military government and its leader Bung Karno has dropped to zero...
...Indonesia is passing through a period which could lead to its disintegration as a nation...
...If Sukarno admits 87,000 dead, then the figure of 150,000 first reported is probably closer to the truth...
...The Russian state-party dictatorship thereby announces that, the mass killings, but efforts should immediately be initiated to provide emergency aid to the people of Indonesia— not funds that the unspeakable Sukarno can use to start a war against Malaysia or to create useless luxury hotels and sports stadiums with which to glorify his rule, but food for the hungry and, if at all possible, aid toward a preliminary stabilization of the Indonesian economy...
...And what is especially appalling is that the "evidence" accepted in the court consisted of literary works, fantasies and satires that were treated like political documents...
...Their slaughter of the six Indonesian army generals was a foretaste of what might have happened had they won power...
...Such an investigation would in no way need to condone the Indonesian Communist movement...
...in January, 1966 it was 2,400 rupiahs...
...Why has the American government been silent on this...
...The admitted slaughter of 87,000 Communists (according to Sukarno) by the Indonesian army and Moslem lynch mobs is a deed of appalling evil which demands universal condemnation...
...The price of rice, the staple diet for 105 million Indonesians, was 300 rupiahs as quart in June, 1965...
...They were convicted—it is important to note —not because they allowed their manuscripts to be smuggled abroad, but because they wrote what could, in the words of the court, "be used profitably by enemies of Communism...
...There is hardly a more repellant and odious figure in the world today than this half-clown, half-devil...
...According to the little available information, squads of army officers and men, aided by Moslem gangs, went through the country rounding up all known Communist leaders, and executed them without hearing, trial or accusation...
...What real power he possesses, what his perspectives are, remains largely unknown to the outside world...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
