A Jakarta childhood ends: Tari Lang bears witness to Indonesia’s 1965 bloodbath

There are historical crimes much of the world has agreed to half-remember. Indonesia’s anti-communist massacres of 1965–66, when the Indonesian military and its civilian collaborators murdered somewhere between 500,000 and a million people—trade unionists, peasant organizers, ethnic Chinese, schoolteachers, and anyone denounced as a sympathizer of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI)—belong on that shameful list. Washington cheered the slaughter on. The CIA and the State Department, we now know from declassified cables, supplied the new Suharto regime with lists of names.