Peter Boyle speaks to Indonesian socialist Ignatius Mahendra Kusumawardhana about the disturbing return to the former Suharto dictatorship era’s notorious “dual function” policy for the military.
Sukarno
The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66
By Geoffrey B Robinson
Princeton University Press, 2018
429 pages
From October 1965 to mid-1966, one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century took place in Indonesia. Anywhere between 500,000 and more than 1 million people associated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were estimated to have been killed and more than 1 million others jailed, some for more than 3 decades, in an anti-leftist purge led by the Indonesian military.