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Survivors Detail Suharto-era Massacres
Survivors Describe Mass Killings Under Indonesian Dictator
Suharto
By Anthony Deutsch
29/01/08 "AP
News" -- -- Hiding
out in the dense, humid jungle, Markus Talam watched Indonesian
soldiers herd manacled prisoners from trucks, line them up and
mow them down with round after round of automatic weapons fire.
It was 1968, and the killings were part of a final offensive by
forces under Gen. Suharto to wipe out the communist party and
secure his position as leader of Indonesia, now the world's most
populous Muslim nation.
"They gunned them down and dumped their bodies in a mass grave
dug by other prisoners. I remember the sound of the guns
clearly: tat-tat, tat-tat, tat-tat ... over and over again,"
said Talam, 68, who was later jailed for 10 years after being
named a leftist sympathizer.
Suharto, who died on Sunday at a Jakarta hospital, seized
control of the military in 1965 and ruled the country for 32
years, suppressing dissent with force and supported by an
American government at the height of the Cold War.
Estimates for the number killed during his bloody rise to power
— from 1965 to 1968 — range from a government figure of 78,000
to 1 million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted
Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia's history. It
was the worst mass slaughter in Southeast Asia's modern history
after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia.
A frenzy of anti-communist violence stained rivers with blood
and littered the countryside with the bodies of teachers,
farmers and others.
"They used to dump the bodies here," recalled Surien, a
70-year-old woman who lived near a bay used as an execution
ground. "People called it the beach of stinking corpses because
of the smell."
The CIA provided lists of thousands of leftists, including trade
union members, intellectuals and schoolteachers, many of whom
were executed or sent to remote prisons.
Another 183,000 died due to killings, disappearances, hunger and
illness during Indonesia's 1975-1999 occupation of East Timor,
according to an East Timorese commission sanctioned by the U.N.
Similar abuses left more than 100,000 dead in West Papua,
according a local human rights group. Another 15,000 died during
a 29-year separatist rebellion in Aceh province.
In recent interviews around the city of Blitar, a former
communist stronghold, survivors of the atrocities recounted a
life on the run, living in caves, being beaten and beheadings of
other captives.a
"I am disappointed. I saw great cruelties and am lucky I am not
dead," said Talam, whose simple two-room home overlooks a valley
dotted with overgrown mass graves.
Dragging on a clove-cigarette with trembling hands, he described
how he was detained by police but escaped. He stumbled across
dead bodies in shallow graves and slept in dank caves with
hundreds of others, eating what the jungle had to offer for 50
days, until being picked up.
Talam, a former member of a left-wing union for park rangers,
said he was tortured and beaten repeatedly during interrogations
while detained on remote Buru island, where about 12,000
political prisoners were held, 1,100 miles east of the capital,
Jakarta. "Why has no one been put on trial?" he asked.
In fact, the dark era remains largely unknown to many
Indonesians. Those believed responsible still wield influence in
politics and the courts. Details of the communist purge are
banned from school books, and the military has blocked efforts
by relatives to unearth mass graves.
Near Blitar, a prominent monument and museum honors the crushing
of the communist threat, and the Communist Party is still banned
in Indonesia today.
There is no official record of the shootings Talam said he
witnessed by the Indonesian army near Blitar, which lies 310
miles east of Jakarta.
Though Suharto was swept from power in a 1998 pro-democracy
uprising in this nation of 235 million people, no one has ever
been tried for the bloodletting, in part because some of
Suharto's former generals remain in powerful posts today.
"One of the enduring legacies of Suharto's regime has been the
culture of impunity," said Brad Adams, the head of Human Rights
Watch Asia.
Moreover, public interest in reviving a turbulent past is muted
in the largely poor country, where people are more concerned
with day-to-day survival, said Putmuinah, an 80-year-old former
communist city council member in Blitar.
"The ones who should be held accountable for those crimes are
Suharto, his government and his regime," she said. "Suharto
ordered the elimination of communists and left-wing
sympathizers."
Putmuinah hid in a cave south of Blitar before being picked up
and detained for 10 years. "They robbed me of the opportunity to
raise my seven children," she said.
"They beheaded many of us because we were members of the union
for women," she added. "I was spared torture because I knew the
commander who arrested me."
Suharto's regime capitalized on existing tensions between
Muslims and atheist communists, inciting the nation's powerful
Islamic groups to join the purge.
Hasyim Asyhari, 67, a former member of a conservative Sunni
Islamic youth group in the Blitar region, said the group
received army orders to identify, hunt down and kill communists.
He said he is proud of saving the nation from communist
domination and helping "turn communist sympathizers into good
Muslims."
"We used farm tools, daggers and clubs" to kill prisoners,
Asyhari said in an interview. "I followed the orders of the
government."
Associated Press reporter Irwan Firdaus in Jakarta contributed
to this report.
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