The New Order was an authoritarian regime that occupied Indonesia from 1967 to 1998, it was one of the most violent and corrupt governments in history, and acted as a US-client state.
Crimes Against Humanity
The New Order was responsible for four major crimes against humanity.
- The Anti-Communist Mass Killings
- The Occupation of West Papua
- The Occupation of East Timor
- The Petrus Killings
The Anti-Communist Mass Killings
In 1965, the '30 September Movement' killed the six top generals in the country, the action was blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) although it was likely done by the army with US support. The army then began a massive killing spree so large it bordered on a civil war across the country for the next year. Between 500,000 and 3,000,000 people had been killed (0.4 to 2.8% of the population) and the CIA secretly compared it to the Holocaust and the Red Terrors in China and Russia.[1]
- Killing methods included shooting, stabbing, beheadings, impaling, disemboweling, cutting off people's limbs and letting them bleed to death, strangling and castration (forced removal or disfiguring of genitals).
- Killing devices included assault rifles, small arms, knives, sickles, machetes, swords, ice picks, bamboo spears, iron rods and other makeshift weapons.
- Both men and women were subjected to sexual violence while in prisons, including rape and electric shocks to the genitals.
- Torture methods included severe beatings with makeshift materials like electric cable and large pieces of wood, breaking fingers and crushing toes and feet under the legs of tables and chairs, pulling out fingernails, electric shocks, and burning with molten rubber or cigarettes. Detainees were sometimes forced to watch or listen to the torture of others, including relatives such as spouses or children.
- Mass looting and burning down of pro-communist villages after killings.
- Many of the killings had a distinctly prejudiced (notably racist) nature against Chinese, Abangans and Atheist minorities in Indonesia.
The Occupation of East Timor
See Main Article: Indonesian Occupation of East Timor
From 1975 to 1999, the New Order engaged in a brutal occupation of East Timor, which had just gained independence from the Portuguese Empire following the anti-colonial war and Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Despite East Timor's efforts to form an independent democratic state, Indonesia invaded with support from Australia, the US and Britain because they didn't ban their popular communist party. The resulting occupation has been described as one of the most brutal in history, East Timor routine and systematic torture, sexual slavery, extrajudicial executions, massacres, and deliberate starvation. These actions killed between 60,000 and 308,000 people, or between 9% and 46% of the population.[2] Some notable and terrifying atrocities that occurred include:
- Burning down Timorese houses and executing Timorese indiscriminately, including children.
- The deliberate destruction of farms and crops in the countryside to force the population into cities where they would often be shot for entering or put into resettlement camps.
- These camps had no electricity, sewerage, water, medical care or reliable food supplies leaving people to die in a trapped space of starvation or disease.
- Extreme abuse of Timorese women, forced marriages, forced contraceptions, sexual slavery, abduction of random women by helicopter for sexual abuse for weeks at a time. This included teenage girls and children.
- Abduction of Timorese men and teenage girls to be used as a giant line of human shields involving tens of thousands of people.
The Petrus Killings
From 1983 to 1985, hundreds of bodies began showing up in public places and thousands of people connected to crime began going missing. The government did not reveal the cause of death for months, until eventually confessing it was done by undercover snipers working for the Indonesian military in order to reduce crime (which was successful as the population was too scared). Between 2,000 and 10,000 people were killed by snipers.[3]