On the CIA's role
On the CIA's role
I thank Mr. Richardson for providing a list of names as
sources for his article on the CIA's crimes in Indonesia. I have
spent considerable time on the Internet, the only immediate
resource available to me, to research what these names might have
to say about the criminal activity of the CIA in Indonesia. In
addition to Peter Dale Scott's article The United States and the
overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967 at
http://www.pir.org/scott.html, as mentioned by Mr. Rudi Wilson,
readers of The Jakarta Post might want to look up Noam Chomsky's
discussion of this same topic in chapter five of his book, Year
501, available at http://www.lbbs.org/chomsky/year/year.html.
Journalist Allan Nairn has a homepage at
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com that includes his articles Out
of East Timor and U.S. complicity in Timor. Professor Stephen
Shalom's homepage is
http://www.wilpaterson.edu/cohss/polisci/faculty/shalom.html and
includes an article he coauthored with Cynthia Peters titled
Timor: Reparations and responsibility. Another important article
is one written by Kathy Kadane of the States News Service in 1990
regarding the 1965 massacre, Ex-agents say CIA compiled death
lists for Indonesians, available at
http://www.pir.org/kadane.html.
Mr. Richardson's comments on the 1965 attempted coup are more
than just a precis of the Scott article, because Mr. Richardson's
conviction is hardened into blanket judgment.
Mr. Richardson's article, written as an opinion piece, is
precisely that, opinionated. Mr. Scott's more balanced approach
includes in both its introduction and conclusion an important and
necessary caveat, which I quote: "The whole story of that ill-
understood period would transcend even the fullest possible
written analysis. Much of what happened can never be documented;
and of the documentation that survives, much is both
controversial and unverifiable.
"The slaughter of Sukarno's left-wing allies was a product of
widespread paranoia as well as of conspiratorial policy, and it
represents a tragedy beyond the intentions of any single group or
coalition. It would be foolish to suggest that in 1965 the only
violence came from the U.S. government, the Indonesian military,
and their mutual contacts in British and Japanese intelligence."
That said, Mr. Scott goes on to give the CIA a very strong rap
on the knuckles for its involvement in one of the 20th century's
worst massacres. The CIA and State Department spokesmen may
flatly deny all they want, but I have little doubt from what Mr.
Scott says in his meticulously researched article that the CIA
was actively involved in contributing to the climate in which the
massacre occurred. What is even worse, it is apparent from Ms.
Kadane's article that the CIA was handing over their lists of
known Communist Party members to the Soeharto regime despite
unconfirmed reports the U.S. Embassy possessed that the
Soehartoists were planning mass murder.
However, the numerous facts that can be pinned down are not as
numerous and extensive as one would wish for if one wants to make
the sweeping, condemnatory judgement of the CIA that the massacre
occurred as a direct result of the CIA's planning and
involvement, as some of Mr. Scott's sources and Mr. Richardson
imply.
Another way to look at this is to ask, if the tape of history
were to be rewound and replayed with the CIA extracted from the
picture, would that massacre still have occurred? I think the
answer is "yes". The massacre, after all, was carried out by a
large number of Indonesians, prompted by some very powerful
national groups with guns in their hands who had much more
immediate and compelling interests at stake than the CIA's. The
CIA, while a contributor, was neither the cause nor the catalyst.
As an Indonesian Embassy spokesman says in Ms. Kadane's article,
"In terms of fighting the communists, as far as I'm concerned,
the Indonesian people fought by themselves to eradicate the
Communists."
RICHARD LEWIS
Denpasar, Bali