JAKARTA, Indonesia — Rights groups are urging the U.S. to release files on Indonesia’s anti-communist massacres of 1965-66, as the Southeast Asian country takes a step toward a reckoning with one of the last century’s worst atrocities.
The push by Human Rights Watch and Indonesian group Kontras comes ahead of a conference next week in Indonesia that will be a rare public discussion of the mass murder of 50 years ago.
There is no official figure for the number of people killed, but researchers estimate it as half a million. Within Indonesia, widely accepted accounts of the era gloss over the deaths. The role of the U.S. is cloaked in secrecy. At the time, the U.S. viewed Indonesia as a bulwark in its efforts to thwart the influence of communist Soviet Union and China in Southeast Asia.
“We want to know the working level involvement between the U.S. government and the killers in 1965,” said Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth. “Who knew what and what were the channels of communication? Were there names (of suspected communists) conveyed by the U.S. government to the Indonesian government and what happened to those people.”
