`Indonesiagate': Obama's Historic U.S. Embassy Family Connection--Part 1

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Member Barack Obama may not be very interested in pushing for a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the exact role that the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia played during the 1960s in Indonesian internal politics. One reason might be because Obama’s now-deceased mother, Ann Dunham, was employed by the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia following the U.S. Embassy-backed 1965 right-wing military coup in Indonesia.

If you ever saw the 1982 movie The Year Of Living Dangerously, you probably realize that more Indonesian civilians were apparently killed as a result of the U.S. Embassy-backed right-wing coup in Indonesia during the Democratic Johnson Administration than were killed as a result of the U.S. Embassy-backed 1973 right-wing coup in Chile during the Republican Nixon Administration. As the 2006 book by John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, recalled:

“In one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of individuals were massacred by the army-affiliated militias, largely in Central Java, East Java, and Bali, from late 1965 to mid-1966…

“Suharto’s army usually opted for mysterious disappearances rather than exemplary public executions. The army and its militias tended to commit large-scale massacres in secret: they took captives out of prison at night, trucked them to remote locations, executed them, and then buried the corpses in unmarked graves or threw them into rivers…

“The post-Suharto parliament has maintained the laws forbidding public discourse about Marxism-Leninism and the participation of ex-political prisoners (and their children and grandchildren) in political parties…

“…The U.S. government had been preparing the Indonesian army for a showdown with the PKI [The Communist Party of Indonesia] and a takeover of state power. From 1958 to 1965 the United States trained, funded, advised, and supplied the army precisely so that it could turn into a state within a state…

“In the NSC [National Security Council]’s assessment the PKI `would probably have emerged as the largest party in Indonesia,’ if Sukarno had not canceled the election scheduled for 1959…

“In accordance with the policy of building up the army as the bulwark against the PKI, the U.S. government trained army officers in the United States, donated and sold weapons, and provided financial aid…

“In August 1958 the United States began a military assistance program that supplied equipment to the military, especially the army, and trained officers in the United States. From 1958 to 1965 the United States annually spent between $10 million and $20 million on military assistance. The program for training Indonesian army officers in schools such as those at Fort Bragg and Fort Leavenworth was extensive. From 1950 to 1965 about twenty-eight hundred Indonesian Army officers were brought to the United States for training—most of them after 1958. That number represented about one-fifth to one quarter of all army officers. Through this training the United States was able to develop extensive contacts within the Indonesian army…”

Next: “Indonesiagate”: Obama’s Historic U.S. Embassy Family Connection—Part 2