As I write this in late May 1998, the world is watching two Indonesian traditions, locked in a dramatic struggle to determine that country’s future. One, representing one of the world’s most tolerant Muslim cultures, seeks a non-violent return towards the democratic civil society that prevailed in the early 1950s. The other apparently hopes to maintain the Army’s ruthless domination of power, using violence and provocations reminiscent of Indonesia’s violent bloodbath of 1965.
But there are two American traditions caught up in this struggle as well. One is humanitarian, and is represented by the millions of dollars which the US government has poured into Indonesian human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations. The other tradition, less recognized, believes in and teaches the use of repressive violence, in Indonesia and other parts of the Third World.
The conflicting goals of these two American traditions have led to recurring showdowns in Congress. In March 1998 Congress learned that, despite its express prohibition in 1992, the Pentagon had continued to supply training to the Indonesian army unit, Kopassus, that has been most involved in massacres and torture over the last 35 years.
On May 8, 1998, the Pentagon headed off Congressional anger by suspending its controversial aid to the Indonesian Army (ABRI). It is however clear that Washington will not terminate the US-ABRI connection, which it regards as its best hope to influence affairs in Indonesia. The Kopassus Red Berets (then known as RPKAD) played a key role in the 1965 bloodbath that brought Suharto to power. The tactics taught Kopassus recently by US Green Berets – in ‘Advanced Sniper Techniques’, ‘Military Operations in Urban Terrain’, ‘Psychological Operations’, and ‘Close Quarters Combat’ – suggest that the Pentagon has been improving the ability of Kopassus to use violence against Indonesian civilians. There were least 41 such exercises between 1992 and 1997, and 20 more scheduled for 1998.(1)
On repeated occasions in the last four decades, the votes of the Congressional majority to limit military aid have been similarly thwarted. (Only in the case of aid to Vietnam in 1974 was the limit respected, but that was because the Saigon regime fell before the limit was reached.) Congressional bans on aid to the death squads of the contras in the mid-1980s were secretly and illegally subverted by Oliver North in the Reagan White House with Pentagon and CIA support, provoking the Iran-Contra confrontation.
Indonesia’s acute crisis today recalls in its details the political uncertainty at the end of the Sukarno era more than thirty years ago. Political unrest has been aggravated by economic disruption and inflation, so that protests are mounting throughout Indonesia. Tensions have been building between the Suharto regime and the international community, above all the United States. They have been building also between proponents of a non-violent transition to a more democratic civil society, and provocations that would suggest a possible intervention or even coup by some elements of the Indonesian Army.
These same conditions in 1965 led to an army intervention, and a change of leadership accompanied by an army-backed massacre in which perhaps over a million civilians were murdered. That grim memory lends importance to another important similarity between 1965 and 1998, one which the press, to my knowledge, has so far ignored.
Up until March 1998, as in 1965, though for different reasons, most members of the U.S. Congress mistakenly believed that they had terminated U.S. military training for Indonesian troops. In fact, in both periods, U.S. training continued on the sly, and for obvious political motives. On the one hand, the U.S. Administration wished to maintain contact with the officer corps of the Indonesian Army, which it regarded as a more secure ideological ally than the Indonesian Head of State. On the other hand, it wished for the sake of appearances to distance itself publicly from the Army, as the latter prepared to eliminate its opponents by wholesale massacre.
The first political motive was spelled out in a secret memo to President Johnson on July 17, 1964 (preceding the coup and massacre by one year):
Our aid to Indonesia…. we are satisfied…. is not helping Indonesia militarily. It is, however, permitting us to maintain some contact with key elements in Indonesia which are interested in and capable of resisting Communist takeover. We think this is of vital importance to the entire Free World.(2)
A Defense Department official reiterated in 1998 that the training program was to ‘gain influence with successive generations of Indonesia officers.'(3)
Meanwhile the 1965 bloodbath was accompanied by U.S. instructions to its officials to keep their distance.
This covert U.S. aid and training before 1965 was mostly in the innocuous-sounding area of ‘civic action’. I have argued that in fact ‘civic action’ provided a cover, in Indonesia as in Vietnam, for psychological warfare or psywar, and that psywar in turn had become a euphemism (used without translation by the key Red Beret organizers of the slaughter in Java) for using techniques of terror, including massacre. I believe that through these links to the Indonesian Army, U.S. civilian and military advisors bear a share of the responsibility for the 1965 killings.
In 1998 there is a risk that, if Congress does not reassert its will, history will repeat itself. In February Admiral Joseph Prueher, U.S. Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), said in London that there was trouble ahead in Indonesia:
‘There is no economic and political stability. We’re trying to work in an economic, political and military way to be as supportive as we can to try to bring this back in line.'(4)
A number of recent US VIP visitors to Indonesia, such as Defense Secretary William Cohen, have made a point of visiting Army General Prabowo, a U.S.-trained general who graduated head of his class at Fort Benning, Ga.. Prabowo heads the elite Kopassus Red Beret command which has been chiefly responsible for the human rights violations in East Timor. These violations led to the intended Congressional ban on training in 1992, yet Kopassus is one of the chief groups the Pentagon has continued to train. Kopassus is also the successor unit to the RPKAD Red Berets who were chiefly responsible for organizing the slaughter of one million in 1965. Early in 1998, Prabowo was reported by journalists to be helping to instigate anti-Chinese rioting, of the sort which in 1965 preceded a more general massacre.
The Pentagon certainly know the implications of dealing with Prabowo and Kopassus, a unit notorious for terror, murder, rape, and torture. Yet, when Congress banned training under the usual Pentagon program of International Military Education and Training (IMET), the Pentagon quietly kept on training Kopassus under a different program, Joint Combined Education and Training (J-CET). In a similar way, according to the New York Times, ‘The J-Cet program provided training in psychological operations [i.e. psywar] and marksmanship to the Rwandan Patriotic Army, which has been accused of the massacre of civilians in eastern Zaire.(5) A subsequent New York Times editorial specified that the Indonesians were trained under J-CET in ‘riot-suppression’, and noted that ‘it seems likely that the troops will be used to crush legitimate democratic protests.'(6)
The editorial attitude of the Times has shifted considerably since 1966, when its columnist James Reston described the Indonesian massacre and change of government as ‘A Gleam of Light in Asia.’
The outcome of the Pentagon-Congressional tussle over training Indonesian troops now involves far more than the human rights violations in East Timor, or even in Indonesia. In Latin America and other parts of the world, the Pentagon has persisted, despite Congressional concerns, in supplying training and aid to armies that are directly or indirectly involved in psywar massacres.
Two recent examples have been Colombia and Mexico; two more countries where officers accused of involvement in civilian massacres have been trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga. Even the Inspector General of the Pentagon has conceded that execution and torture have been taught there in the past.(7)
The time is right for Congress to reassert its will in the matter of banning training to Indonesian units, like Kopassus, that have been involved in major human rights violations. The US press, and even the US State Department, have now reported amply on human rights violations by Kopassus, and the Times has added editorially that ‘the case for an end to the riot troop training is now especially strong.'(8) It would also send a strong message to those other armies which benefit from U.S. training: that the times are changing, and the forces for democracy in Washington will no longer tolerate massacres, death squads, and torture.
Psywar, East Timor, Congress and those who defend atrocities
In the last decade, after the American people became aware that U.S. programs were sponsoring death squads, terrorists, and torturers in Central America, Congress took steps to curtail these atrocities. Though social conditions there remain abysmal, assassinations in the Central American republics are now sharply down. Meanwhile the situation is worsening in neighboring countries, notably Colombia and Mexico. This is a sign that Congress has yet to deal with some of the root problems, such as Fort Benning’s School of the Americas where both torture and assassination have been taught.
East Timor is another area of U.S.-assisted atrocities where the problem has not yet been successfully addressed. Here the case for U.S. responsibility is more controversial than what has been conceded in Latin America. The scale of atrocity is also larger, leading in the case of East Timor to the death of perhaps one third of the population.
In addition most Americans, at least until recently, have not been aware of the atrocities committed by Indonesian troops in East Timor. I shall quote at this point from an eyewitness account by a Catholic missionary of a search-and-destroy mission in 1981, three years after the worst killings had ended.
‘We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even the littlest ones…not even pregnant women were spared: they were cut open…. They did what they had done to small children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and smashing their heads against rocks…. All this was happening at a time when President Suharto of Indonesia had offered amnesty to all Timorese who surrendered…. The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral character of this army: “We did the same thing in Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked.” That is, terror caused the people to submit.'(9)
This conduct is unfortunately part of a counter-insurgency tradition that can be traced back to the US conquest of the Philippines, and before that to the wars against native Americans. Consider this observer’s account of the 1864 massacre of an unsuspecting Indian encampment at Sand Creek, Colorado.
‘They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men use their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.'(10)
Like other atrocities, the Sand Creek massacre remains a focus of controversy a century and a half later, and has generated two parallel traditions of response, both American. An eastern-dominated Congress investigated and condemned the incident (like most historians since), and voted substantial indemnities to relatives of the survivors.(11) But many whites in the region agreed with Colonel John Chivington, the commander, that the slaughter was the only way to bring peace.(12) Among these were U.S. Army Generals Sheridan and Sherman, whose explicit endorsement of exterminating Indians became a model for a later generation of commanders in the U.S.-Philippine War.(13) To this day there are military historians who defend what happened at Sand Creek as an early example of pacification.(14) This unresolved standoff between two parallel traditions underlies the Pentagon defiance in 1998 of the Congressional ban on training Indonesia’s forces.
Thus it should not surprise us that in recent years similar atrocities have occurred in other countries where the United States has played a role in training and supplying troops. The following summarizes a survivor’s account of a Guatemalan Army raid on a village:
‘The government troops came in, rounded up the population, and put them in the town building. They took all the men out and decapitated them. Then they raped and killed the women. Then they took the children and killed them by bashing their heads with rocks.(15)
In nearby El Salvador, a sweep by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion was followed by the murder, one by one, of 24 women and children. ‘Counter-terror-style, the mutilated corpses were left behind as a warning to leftist guerrillas.'(16)
For such deliberate horrors are intentional, meant to terrorize the rest of the population into submission. The terror occupation of East Timor continues today, though with different emphasis. Today a forcefully relocated civilian population faces arbitrary disappearances, torture, and rape. Listen to the testimony of a young East Timorese woman at the March-April 1998 session of the UN Commission on Human Rights:
‘I left East Timor in August 1997 because my life was in danger and because I was being repeatedly raped by members of the Indonesian military….Often, young girls were taken from inside the church by Indonesian soldiers who would take the girls back to their houses and rape them. This has happened to me so many times I cannot remember…… My whole family was taken to the Indonesian military station…… My parents were beaten and we young girls were all raped. Two of my younger brothers were put inside small tanks of water and their heads dunked in until they were nearly drowned.'(17)
Published photographs taken by Indonesian soldiers corroborate the following account by a 25-year old man:
‘They ordered me to take all my clothes off and then tied me to a chair. They brought in a battery and some wires and blindfolded me. Then they began to torture me. They broke one of my teeth when they hit me with the butt of a gun. They gave me electric shocks in my head, armpits and genitals. They burned me with cigarettes (I have three scars on my arm and chest). They wounded me with a stick close to my eye and cut me with razor blades (I have the scars on my hand and neck).'(18)
Similar stories are acknowledged by the January 1998 State Department Report on Indonesia Human Rights Practices (in marked contrast to the 1978 Report, which covered up the genocidal slaughter then going on):
‘Credible sources confirmed several deaths in detention in East Timor during the year. In June an individual known as “Januario” was detained in Baucau, severely beaten, and died while being transported to Dili…. There were also credible reports that detainees in East Timor were shot to death while allegedly attempting to escape…. Many credible sources agreed that persons detained by the police in East Timor were routinely beaten while in the process of being detained…. Four residents of Lavateri village near Baucau, East Timor detained on April 4 by an intelligence team, were reportedly beaten with rifle butts, with one individual suffering a broken rib and another having a cross carved into the palm of her hand. Six East Timorese detained by the Joint Intelligence Unit (SGI) in Liquica on February 26 were reportedly tortured with electric shocks and immersion in ice water. Five East Timorese civilians detained by security forces near Liquica on April 30 were reportedly beaten with rifle butts and suffered electric shocks.'(19)
U.S. Psywar, Indonesia, and East Timor
There is no question that the U.S. provided military materiel and training for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, as well as a virtual green light. What has been less clearly demonstrated is the degree of U.S. responsibility for the precedent campaign of massacre and atrocity by the Indonesian Army: against its own people in 1965. The key to U.S responsibility in 1965, as today, lay in special training for a key political paracommando battalion, the Red Berets. Now renamed Kopassus, this battalion was at the center of massacre and torture operations in the 1960s as in the 1990s. Its chief then, Sarwo Edhie, has been called a CIA agent or contact. It was he who, while giving orders in Indonesia for the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party, used the American Army word, ‘psywar.’
‘The G30S/PKI should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psywar.(20)
Indeed, after three decades of intermittent study, I have come to see the great Indonesian massacre of 1965 in terms of what I now think was its defining paradigm: a psywar operation. What opened my eyes was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the slaughter. This made it clear that the corpses flooding the rivers of East Java were not just dumped there to dispose of them; they had been rigged to float, and thus terrorize those living downstream:
‘Stomachs torn open. The smell was unbelievable. To make sure they didn’t sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes. And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew.'(21)
This exploitative detail, the display of mutilated corpses, has been recurringly cited for its horror as a symptom of ‘unplanned brutality’,(22) or ‘mass hysteria.'(23) In fact it falls well within the parameters of planned U.S. atrocities. It is in particular a signature of U.S.-trained atrocity managers in Chile, El Salvador, and today in Colombia.(24) The display of corpses by arranging to float them down river was a feature of U.S. counter-insurgency in the Philippines in the 1900s. A news correspondent reported at the time how American soldiers killed
‘men, women, children…from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk”, have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet riddled corpses.’
This testimonial is the more credible because the correspondent approved of these tactics:
‘It is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality.'(25)
This sending of corpses downstream occurred under the command of General J. Franklin Bell. Recently a U.S. military historian, John Morgan Gates, has singled out General Bell for his ‘excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification’; and noted the consensus of ‘both civil and military officials’ in the Philippines that Bell’s campaign in Batangas ‘represented pacification in its most perfected form.'(26) Because of this, Gates claims, General Pershing’s campaign against the Moros in 1908 greatly resembled Bell’s; just as ‘the campaign against the HUK movement in the Philippines following World War II greatly resembled the American campaign of almost fifty years earlier…. The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one.'(27)
Again in the Philippines
In the light of Gates’ comments, we should not be surprised that corpses were again dropped into rivers as part of the U.S.-coordinated Philippine counter-terrorism campaign in the 1950s:
‘The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy….almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano’s Nenita Unit.'(28)
Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counter-insurgency, and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam.(29) Valeriano was also employed to train the Cuban Task Force for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs.
Corpses and human heads were also displayed by the Indonesians in East Timor after 1975, as part of a campaign of terror supported and supplied by the United States.(30) (I have focused on the display of corpses, not because this atrocious detail is intrinsically worse than others, but because it is a clue to techniques that have been transmitted through instruction.)
But the core of the Indonesian pacification program in East Timor is the same as the core of General Bell’s in Batangas: the forced resettlement of the population in villages which could be called concentration camps. (Forced relocation had of course earlier been the core of U.S. pacification efforts against native Americans in the West.) For most Timorese, the focus of their lives became the strategic camps into which they were herded prior to being transported to new ‘resettlement villages’ in sites created away from their original homes. As Mgr. Costa Lopes, Apostolic Administrator of Dili until his dismissal in May 1983, noted:
‘….the problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside….This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food.’
An ICRC delegate, surveying the Hatolia camp where 80 per cent of its 8000 inhabitants were suffering from malnutrition, was reported as concluding that it was ‘as bad as Biafra and potentially as serious as Kampuchea,’ whilst the head of Catholic Relief Services commented that the problem was ‘greater than anything I have seen in fourteen years of relief work in Asia.'(31)
‘Benevolent and humane actions…’
Here is how General Bell’s ‘well-conceived’ reconcentration plan was characterized by Professor Gates (writing in 1973, in the brief interval between the failure of such techniques in Vietnam and their introduction in East Timor).
‘A basic feature of General Bell’s pacification policy was his plan for isolating the guerrillas from those supporting them….he ordered each garrison commander to establish a plainly marked area. Unless they [the Filipinos] moved into them by December 25 their property would become liable to confiscation or destruction. Within the zones of protection, the Americans encouraged the Filipinos to erect new homes ….Schools were also provided, and all of the benevolent and humane actions that had characterized American operations in the Philippines were evident in the zones of reconcentration….In the Philippines…the [U.S. governing] commission recognized the success of the army’s approach to pacification, and it passed a reconcentration act in 1903, modeled on General Bell’s techniques.'(32)
But Professor Gates’ book (clearly written as part of America’s debate over Vietnam) omits aspects of Bell’s ‘perfected’ campaign which at the time caught the eyes of the anti-imperialists in Congress:
‘When an American was “murdered”, they were instructed to “by lot select a P.O.W. — preferably one from the village in which the assassination took place — and execute him.”…The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps….Everything outside of the camps was systematically destroyed….Bell’s main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes….Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes. He compared such tactics to those of General Sherman in Georgia during the War Between the States and theorized that once the better elements were miserable enough they would persuade the others to stop fighting.'(33)
The same mixed campaign of terror, indiscriminate reprisals, and forced relocation marks the on-going repression campaign today in East Timor. It echoes also the American experiments in psychological warfare and counter-insurgency in Vietnam, which culminated in Operation Phoenix.
Closer to home, army- and U.S.-backed massacres continue in Colombia, Peru, and increasingly in Mexico. Today the atrocity business, given more polite titles such as ‘counter-insurgency’ or ‘low-intensity conflict’, has become a staple and a rationale for the U.S. Pentagon bureaucracy. The culture of low-intensity conflict has also spawned its own population of consultants, who defend death squads publicly in the same way that military historians defend Chivington and Gates. Thus in 1986 death squads were called an ‘extremely effective tool’ by Neil Livingstone, who, at the time, was a counter-terrorism consultant to Oliver North and the Reagan Administration.(34) Four years later Michael Radu, a researcher at a formerly CIA-funded think tank, justified the Salvadorean death squads for doing what they ‘had to do’; and faulted the attempts of Congress to condition aid on respect for ‘human rights’ (Radu’s quotation marks), as a ‘total misunderstanding of the situation.'(35) Radu also claimed that it was ‘untenable’ to treat the Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero as a spiritual leader (p. 17), presumably meaning that a death squad was quite right to murder him in 1980.
Turning to a more timely topic, Radu attacked ‘the absurd and artificial notion’ in Latin America of university autonomy (p. 15). This was shortly after the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Brigade had shown its agreement in 1989 by murdering six Jesuit priests at the chief university in El Salvador. Congress responded to the killings by attempting to terminate aid to the Salvadorean Army, but the attempt was vetoed by President Bush in 1991.(36)
There is nothing inevitable about this development. Congress should again recognize that, at least in theory, such atrocities are amenable to human control and amendment. Vietnam was an example of this; as Congress contributed, however belatedly, to the termination of that fatal experiment. Again in the 1980s the U.S.-backed atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua were scaled back after Congressional action, especially after the long-denied massacre at El Mozote in 1981 (by a U.S.-trained battalion) was finally acknowledged.
Now the problem of atrocities in East Timor has been acknowledged by the U.S. State Department and the New York Times, who both worked twenty years ago to cover up Indonesia’s genocidal campaign there. What remains to be seen is whether Congress, which rebuked Colonel Chivington in 1864, and exposed General Bell in 1901, will now ensure that U.S. influence with the Indonesian Army is used to prevent massacre, not encourage it.
Notes
- Statement by Allan Nairn on the suspension of US military training aid to Indonesia, May 9, 1998.
- Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1982, 001786 (DOS Memo for President of July 17, 1964); italics in original.
- New York Times, March 17, 1998, A3.
- International Herald Tribune, 7 February 1998; emphasis added.
- New York Times, March 17, 1998, A3.
- New York Times, March 23, 1998, A18.
- Washington Post, February 22, 1997, A11: ‘The Pentagon’s inspector general yesterday said repeated mistakes were made in the 1980s that caused descriptions of “objectionable” actions such as execution and torture to be included in U.S. Army manuals.’
- New York Times, March 17, 1998, A3.
- In A. Barbedo de Magalh, ed., East Timor: Land of Hope (Oporto: Oporto University, President’s Office, [1990]), p. 52. See also James Dunn, Timor: a People Betrayed (Sydney, Australia; ABC Books, 1996) p. 261: ‘On the Indonesian side, there have been many reports that many soldiers viewed their operation as a further phase in the ongoing campaign to suppress communism that had followed the events of September 1965.’
- John Smith, scout, in U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., ‘The Chivington Massacre’,’ Reports of the Committees (Washington: GPO, 1867). Quoted in Rae Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York: MacMillan, 1974), p. 568; Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), p. 234. Smith’s objectivity was challenged at the time, but today even defenders of the Sand Creek raid concede that most women and children there were killed, and their bodies mutilated. See Lt. Col. William R. Dunn, ‘I Stand by Sand Creek’:A Defense of Colonel John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry (Ft. Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1985).
- See U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., ‘The Chivington Massacre’, Reports of the Committees (Washington: GPO, 1867); House of Representatives, 38th Cong., 2nd Sess., ‘Massacre of Cheyenne Indians’, Report on the Conduct of the War (Washington: GPO, 1865); Department of War, ‘Sand Creek Massacre’, Report of the Secretary of War (Washington: GPO, 1867).
- See Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 228-34.
- Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, pp. 236-40; Stuart Creighton Miller, ‘Benevolent Assimilation’:The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), pp. 94-95, etc.
- See Lt. Col. William R. Dunn, note 9 above.
- Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 329.
- Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 423-24.
- Testimony of Domingas Maria Moniz; UN Commission on Human Rights, 54th Session, 16 March-24 April 1998.
- Testimony of Nelson de Jesus Guterres Amaral; UN Commission on Human Rights, 54th Session, 16 March-24 April 1998.
- U.S. Department of State, Indonesia Report on Human Rights Practices for 1997; Released January 30, 1998
- In Pemberontakan G30S/PKI dan penumpasannya (The Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression) (Jakarta: Dinas Sejarah TNI Angkatan Darat, 1982); translated by Robert Cribb, in Robert Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings, p. 164. Sarwo Edhie had been a CIA contact while serving at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia (Pacific, May/June 1968).
- Pipit Rochijat, ‘Am I PKI or NON-PKI?’ Indonesia, 40 (October 1985), pp. 43-44.
- Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings, p. 15. See below.
- Don Moser, ‘Where the Rivers Ran Crimson’, Life, July 1, 1966, pp. 26-28.
- See Peter Dale Scott, ‘Colombia’, Tikkun, May/June 1997, pp. 27, 30.
- Philadelphia Ledger, November 19, 1900; as quoted in U.S. Cong., Senate, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc 166, 2; Stuart Creighton Miller, ‘Benevolent Assimilation’: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), p. 211; see also Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 188.
- John Morgan Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), pp. 258, 288.
- Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, pp. 288, 291.
- Interview with a pro-U.S. Filipino colonel, as reported in Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines, (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1979), p. 196.
- Charles Bohannan and Napoleon Valeriano, Counterguerrilla Operations: The Philippine Experience (New York: Praeger, 1962).
- See above also e.g. John G. Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor (London: Zed Books, 1991) p. 102.
- Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War, pp. 92, 93, 97.
- Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, pp. viii, 259-60, 288.
- Miller, ‘Benevolent Assimilation’, pp. 207-08.
- Neil C. Livingstone, ‘Death Squad’, Journal of World Affairs, 4, 3 (1986) pp. 241-43, quoted in McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, p. 429. ‘In reality, deaths squads are an extemely effective tool, however odious, in combatting terrorism and revolutionary changes.’ Commenting on the Argentine experience, Livingstone wrote: ‘Too often the death of one family member at the hands of government security forces radicalized every brother, sister and cousin, who then became terrorists in order to avenge the victim. Thus, when a terrorist was identified, every member of his or her family was often killed to prevent blood feud.’ For more on Livingstone, see P.D. Scott, ‘Northwards Without North’, Social Justice (San Francisco), Summer 1989, pp. 1-30.
- Michael Radu and Vladimir Tismaneanu, Latin American Revolutionaries: Groups, Goals, Methods, (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defense Publishers 1990), pp. 69 and 70. The book was published as a Foreign Policy Research Institute book.
- Kenneth E. Sharpe, ‘US holds to old habits in Salvador’, Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 1991.