Was Obamas Mum a Leftie

In a comment I made earlier I remarked how I thought it very strange that Obamas step father would bring a leftist leaning wife to Indonesia, in the aftermath of this appalling incident.

I ask myself many times " how much of a leftist was Obamas mother ? ", and why would Obamas step father bring her to Indonesia when it could mean either his death warrant or a very long prison sentence.

So here is how Indonesia was just before Obamas arrival

The gestapu and Nahdatul Ulama Run Amok
Time magazine, which usually judges the virtue of governments by the number of communist scalps dangling from their belts, nevertheless objectively reported on December 17, 1965, that:
Communists, red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by the thousands. Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of Communists after interrogation in remote jails.

Armed with wide-bladed knives called "parangs," Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families and burying the bodies in shallow graves. The murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java, that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages.

The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies. River transportation has at places been seriously impeded.

Spotty accounts appeared now and again in the months that followed. Again, their tone was fatalistic. There was no indignation or sense of urgency. Instead, the mounting dead were portrayed almost as victims of destiny, the doomed figures of a Greek tragedy.
The Guardian of Britain on April 7, 1966, carried this account from Djakarta by Nicholas Turner:
Estimates of the total number of Indonesians killed in political massacres after the attempted coup of September 30 are being revised as fuller information comes in from outer regions. One Western ambassador considers 300,000 to be a conservative estimate, and other compilations run far higher.

A traveller who knows the island of Bali well, and speaks the language . . . describes mass executions and the annihilation of village after village in some areas. A consular official in Surabaja accepts a figure of 200,000 for Bali, which has a population of two million.

Estimates of the dead in Sumatra also range around 200,000, and a similar figure for Java is generally regarded as on the low side. When the death tolls for other islands such as Borneo and Sulawesi are added, the total may well be upwards of 600,000. Just how many of these are Communists is another question.

It appears certain that the great majority of the dead were innocent victims of political hysteria....

In some areas, Communist suspects were shot or poisoned, but usually the Moslem youth beheaded its victims with the parang. . . . The heads were often impaled on fences and gateposts . . . .

Rivers in many parts of the country were clogged with corpses for weeks. A European resident of Surabaja describes finding bodies washed up by the river on to his back garden.

More people died in these few months than in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of 1965, more Indonesians had been killed than the number of Vietnamese fallen after 15 years of war.

Were these merely the victims of some local vengeance, as the papers tried to imply?
"Run Amok" is of Malay(moslem)origin. How easy it is for the newspapers to explain away a million deaths in Indonesia, where, as every good Indonesian leader knows, "life is cheap."

All the lies that allow the comfortable of the status quo in Jakarta to believe they were morally right to rob Indonesia for the next half century are invoked by the editors of the global press and newspapers to explain away the massacres.

"The insight of run amok not" into the Indonesian character notwithstanding. The real explanation of the massacres lies not in bloodlust or hysteria, or in people wildly "running amok." As in all cases of genocide throughout the world, there was organization, planning, efficiency and an armed force responsible for the executions.

In one of the few isolated instances of press coverage given the slaughter in Indonesia, the New York Times May 8, 1966, Sunday Magazine ran an article by Seth S. King, its Southeast Asia correspondent.

King quotes a schoolteacher in a village near Jogjakarta (Islamic strong-hold)
My students went right out with the army. They pointed out P.K.I. members. The army shot them on the spot along with their whole family: women, children. It was horrible....

Indonesia is made up of 3,000 separate islands, strung out for 3,000 miles along the equator. Yet the massacres were coordinated, and as the earlier quote from the Manchester Guardian showed, almost evenly spread across all the greater islands of the archipelago.

No mass hysteria could leap hundreds of miles, across the intervening seas, to strike on island after island.

Only a strong central power could have directed the executions

• 1963
  May 1 Anti-Chinese rioting
  June 7-11 Anti-Chinese riots in Bandung.
  December PKI begins enforcing land reform laws, confiscating land from rural landowners, resulting in rural violence, involving Islamic organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama.
  
• 1964
  April Violence related to land reform spreads in Central Java.
  May 30 Volunteer fighters recruited on Java for "Konfrontasi" leave for border areas of Kalimantan.
  July 21 Rioting between Malays and Chinese in Singapore kills 21.
  September 2 Rioting breaks out again in Singapore.
  
• 1965
  June 17 Gen. Ahmad Yani gives a speech at Manado stating that "arming the people" according to the PKI's concept is "unnecessary".
  August 9 A court in Surabaya issues a death sentence to a Chinese shopkeeper accused of hoarding.
  Violence between PNI and NU supporters on one side and PKI supporters on the other heats up in Central and East Java.
  September 28 Anti-Communist student leaders ask Gen. Nasution for paramilitary training comparable to what PKI supporters would receive.
  September 30 In the evening, Lt.-Col. Untung, head of the Cakrabirawa Regiment (Presidential Guards), other Diponegoro and Brawijaya Division soldiers, and PKI supporters gather at Halim Air Base, with Gen. Omar Dhani and Aidit present. The forces are under the tactical command of Brigadier-General Supardjo, who had recently been commanding guerilla forces in the Konfrontasi against Malaysia. They leave and attempt to take seven top army generals. Nasution escapes by leaping over the wall of his house, his young daughter is shot and Lt. Tendean, his aide, is taken away. Gen. Ahmad Yani is killed at his house, as are two others. Three other generals are taken alive with Lt. Tendean and the bodies of the dead to Halim, where the remaining live captives are murdered and thrown in the well called Lubang Buaya.
  Rebel soldiers take Merdeka Square in Jakarta by the Presidential Palace, the radio and TV stations.
  October 1 Suharto arrives at Kostrad Headquarters overlooking Merdeka Square, takes emergency control of loyal troops after consulting with available generals.
  October 1 At 7:00 A.M., the radio announces that "Movement 30 September" (Gerakan 30 September, or G30S) is pro-Sukarno, anti-corruption, anti-United States and anti-CIA.
  Gen. Omar Dhani issues a statement supporting the rebels.
  Mutinies in five of seven Diponegoro Division battalions support the rebels, as do Naval officers in Surabaya.
  Suharto announces on radio that six generals are dead, he is in control of the army, and he will suppress the coup attempt and protect Sukarno.
  Senior leaders of Nahdlatul Ulama go into hiding.
  Ansor, the Islamic youth organization associated with Nahdlatul Ulama, releases a statement that it and NU have nothing to do with the coup attempt (despite claims by the rebels that four NU leaders are part of G30S).
  October 3 Ansor releases a statement urging its members to help the Army restore order.
  October 4 Nahdlatul Ulama issues a statement calling for the PKI to be banned, possibly under pressure from Ansor activists. Senior NU leaders do not sign it until the day after or later.
  October 8 Mass demonstration in Jakarta (possibly of more than 100,000) demands the dissolution of the PKI. PKI headquarters in Jakarta are burned.
  October 13 Ansor holds anti-Communist rallies across Java.
  October 18 Nearly a hundred Communists killed in battle with Ansor youths. Beginning of general massacre of PKI supporters in Central and East Java.
  November 22 Muhammadiyah second largest moslem group) declares jihad against PKI. Sukarno pleads with Muslims to give dead proper burial. Anti-Communist movement spreads throughout Java.
  
• 1966
  January Roundups continue of PKI supporters, degenerate into random, unplanned violence in many areas
  July Members of Nahdlatul Ulama and other parties in the Assembly attempt to have the "Jakarta Charter SHARIA LAW" of 1945 recognized officially.
  
• 1967
  February 20 Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia convenes in Jakarta to promote and plan for Islamic evangelism (da'wa), and to counter a perceived growth in "kristenisasi" (Christianization). Former Masyumi leaders, including Natsir and Mohammed Roem, attend.
  April Christian churches are attacked in Aceh. Several days of anti-Chinese demonstrations break out in Jakarta.Most Chinese-language newspapers closed by government.
  July Nahdlatul Ulama holds congress in Bandung. The congress demands quick elections, and an end to the ban on civil servants holding membership in political parties(which prevented civil servants from being members of NU).
  August Suharto places all armed forces under his control.
  October Anti-Christian riots in Makassar; Suharto speaks out against religious violence.
  Aside from those who died in the 1965-66 violence following the G30S incident, there were many hundreds of thousands who were arrested. These people were called "Tahanan Politik" for "political resisters", often shortened to TAPOL. They were classed in three categories. Category A were people considered dangerous PKI leaders or associates who were put on trial. Category B were a larger group of people who were held on suspicion but without trial; many were sent to internal exile on Buru. Category C were people who were only detained briefly, maybe as many as 500,000. No matter what category, all these people were required to have a mark on their personal ID card indicating that they were TAPOL for many years afterward.

CAPTAIN INDONESIA(former president)
On a morning television show on March 14, President Wahid asked for forgiveness for the 1965-67 massacre of suspected members of the banned Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), and for the role of his own organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, in the killings. He also called for repeal of a 1966 decree, TAP MPRS No.XXV, that instituted a pattern of discrimination against families of suspected PKI followers down to the third generation. The President's call, however, was greeted with noisy street protests from some Muslim groups and, in August, the MPR set aside the proposal, leaving the 1966 decree in effect.