Over roughly six months from October 1965, the Indonesian army and civilian militias it backed killed a vast number of people accused of membership of, or sympathy for, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). The purge followed a failed seizure of power by a group called the 30 September Movement, which the army blamed on the communists. The most widely cited estimates put the dead at between 500,000 and one million, and the upheaval carried General Suharto to power for three decades.
Background
In the early 1960s President Sukarno governed by balancing three forces he called Nasakom: nationalism, religion and communism. The PKI had grown steadily through the 1950s and was one of his chief supporters. Its campaign of "unilateral action", in which peasants tried to enforce for themselves land-reform measures passed in 1959 and 1960, set them against landowners and their militias and deepened hostility among religious conservatives. From as early as 1958 Western governments, above all the United States and the United Kingdom, had encouraged anti-communist officers in the army as part of their Cold War strategy in South-East Asia.
The 30 September Movement
On the night of 30 September 1965 the movement seized and killed six of the army's most senior generals, saying it was protecting Sukarno from a plot by a pro-Western "Council of Generals", but its leadership proved confused. Major General Suharto, commander of the army's strategic reserve, retook central Jakarta with almost no resistance and within days held real control of the government. From 5 October, the day of the generals' funeral, an army propaganda campaign pinned the affair on the PKI, spreading lurid and partly false accounts of how the officers had died.
The killings
Arrests and killings began in the capital in October and moved on to Central and East Java, then to Bali and parts of Sumatra, where the party had been strongest. In some areas army units, among them para-commandos under Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, organised, armed and trained local militias; elsewhere vigilantes struck first, though usually with military approval. In Java, Ansor, the youth wing of the Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, played a prominent part, while on Hindu-majority Bali militias linked to the Indonesian National Party led the violence. Most victims were poor farmers, labourers, teachers and others with real or alleged ties to the party; ethnic Chinese were attacked in some places. The party chairman, D. N. Aidit, was captured and shot. Most of the killing had stopped by March 1966, although it lasted longer in parts of East Java.
How many died
No verified count exists. Before the violence ended the army estimated 78,500 deaths, while the PKI spoke of two million. The scholar Benedict Anderson put the figure at 200,000 in 1966 and later at 500,000 to one million. Most historians now accept at least half a million; Robert Cribb regards about 500,000 as the most likely, while the highest estimates reach two or three million. On Bali alone around 80,000 people, roughly one islander in twenty, are thought to have died. Detention lasted for years: Amnesty International reported in 1977 that about a million people had been held, many of them tortured or sexually abused. Scholars have described the killings as a politicide, and some as a genocide.
Suharto's rise and later reckoning
The purge destroyed the PKI and with it Sukarno's political balance. The Supersemar decree of 11 March 1966 handed much of his authority to Suharto; parliament removed Sukarno's remaining powers in March 1967 and elected Suharto president in March 1968, opening the period called the New Order. Documents declassified in 2017 show that the United States government knew of the killings from the outset and supported the army, and its embassy handed over lists naming as many as 5,000 suspected communists. An unofficial International People's Tribunal held in The Hague in 2015 declared Indonesia responsible for crimes against humanity, a finding the government rejected. President Abdurrahman Wahid apologised in 2000, and President Joko Widodo acknowledged in January 2024 that grave human rights violations had occurred.
On our maps
Our 1960 and 1985 maps show Indonesia on the eve of the killings and under Suharto's New Order.
From the atlas
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 in time and on the map
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 lasted from 1965 to 1966. The nearest maps from before and after are 1960 and 1985; compare them side by side.
Living through it, among others on this site: Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), Che Guevara (1928–1967), Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), Desmond Tutu (1931–2021) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969).
Other events of the same years: Satsuma Rebellion (1877–2005), Nahda (1900–2000), Great Migration (1916–1970), Cold War (1945–1991), Decolonisation of Africa (1950–1975), Civil rights movement (1954–1968), Vietnam War (1955–1975), Dirty War (1955–1989), Space Race (1957–1975) and Congo Crisis (1960–1966).
Next to it in time on this site: before, Brazilian coup of 1964 (1964) and Guatemalan Civil War (1965–1996); after, Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) and Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
Quick answers
- When did Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 happen?
- It began in 1965 and ended in 1966.
- Where did Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 take place?
- Indonesia.
- How did the map change?
- Compare the atlas’s maps of 1960 and 1985 side by side.