Indonesians recount role in massacre

By ANTHONY DEUTSCH

SURABAYA, Indonesia (AP) — The men bound the thumbs of dozens of suspected communists behind their backs with banana leaves and drove them to a torch-lit jungle clearing. As villagers jeered, the prisoners were killed, one by one.

“There was no resistance,” remembers Sulchan, then the 21-year-old deputy commander of an Islamic youth militia. “All of them had their throats cut with a long sword.”

Sulchan was a killer in one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, where up to half a million people were massacred in 1965-66 in a purge of communists backed by the United States government. The bloodbath swept into power the dictator Suharto, who ruled for three decades. Today, Indonesian history books make no mention of any deaths, and government and military officials depict what happened as a necessary national uprising against a communist threat.

for complete story, click here