Australian
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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows separate footage of Frank Palmos, Don North and Roland Challis, Australian, US and British foreign correspondents respectively, who were based in Indonesia in the 1960s. They relate the difficulties they faced in filing or having published their reports about political killings in Indonesia during this period. This footage is intercut with graphic scenes from Indonesia, black-and-white photographs of two of the reporters in the 1960s, footage of a newspaper being produced as well as images of people being held captive. A narration links the interviews.

Educational value points

• The clip refers to a period of time that was crucial in the rise to power of the second president of Indonesia, Haji Mohammad Suharto. As a lieutenant-general in the army, Suharto (1921–) blamed the communists for an aborted coup in September 1965. The massacre of communists that followed, as well as political manoeuvring against the ailing president Sukarno, resulted in Suharto taking on the role of acting president in 1966 before being voted in as president in 1968. Accusations of corruption forced him to resign in 1998.

• The events of 1965 referred to in this clip are still the subject of debate. There is dispute about who was responsible for the killing of six senior army generals on 30 September 1965. The killings were used as the excuse for the purge of Indonesian communists. There is no agreement on the precise number of those who were killed, nor is there agreement on whether the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was complicit in the killings. What is clear is that at least 500,000 civilians were killed over a period of five months and that the resulting suppression of the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party) assured Suharto’s rise to power.

• Those associated with the PKI were targeted by the so-called 'death squads’ referred to in the clip. Founded in 1920, the PKI supported the cause of national liberation from Dutch rule, which finally led to Indonesia becoming an independent republic in 1945. By the middle of the 1960s, the Party had more than 3.5 million members and declared its support for the policies of president Sukarno and his idea of a Jakarta–Peking alliance. The PKI was accused by many of supporting the attempted coup in September 1965 as part of a communist plot to rule Indonesia.

• The complicity of the West in the mass killings of those associated with the PKI is alluded to in the clip. The junior officers, led by one of Sukarno’s bodyguards, Colonel Untong, claimed the killing of six senior army generals was necessary to prevent an imminent, CIA-backed coup against the Sukarno government. Tension between the West and president Sukarno had been increasing prior to the coup. Former CIA officials and US diplomats have claimed that the US embassy in Indonesia supplied the Indonesian army with a list of PKI leaders, who were subsequently executed by the army.

• The Cold War in South-East Asia provides the context for the events referred to in the clip. The Cold War was an ideological conflict that began after the Second World War. The communist Soviet Union and the non-communist USA along with its allies fought each other indirectly rather than risking a nuclear war. They used rhetoric against each other and sought alliances, supported conflicts and created instability in other parts of the world to undermine the power of the other. The USA helped Asian nations to fight communism. In the first half of the 1960s president Sukarno was leaning towards the left and had formed an alliance with the PKI against the army.

• The clip provides an example of the way in which language can be censored in the press. When there appears to be some political motivation for the use of a euphemism to replace a troublesome, offensive or disturbing word or phrase, such a euphemism is called 'doublespeak’. Frequently, doublespeak is used by governments, corporations or the military to soften or hide their actions or to represent those actions in a particular way. For example 'collateral damage’ refers to civilian deaths from bombing. Thus, certain words may be suppressed if they do not conform to the message that powerful interests wish to convey.

Journalists, Frank Palmos, Don North and Roland Challis comment on the complicity of newspapers and foreign governments to down play the slaughter.

Frank Palmos I saw many broken bodies and many pieces, torsos, legs, arms floating in the canals and ah, this went on day after day, night after night. Hundreds of them.

We see footage of a canal and then a man typing on a typewriter.

Narrator Although there were several journalists inside Indonesia filing reports, the true story of a one-sided slaughter did not immediately reach the Western public.

Frank I reported many interviews of catastrophic occurrences but a lot of them didn’t see the light of day in newspapers.

We see a newspaper run on a machine.

Don North I wrote a daily file for Time magazine and I also sent reports to the BBC and to NBC News. Most of my material was going through other journalists who were staff people in Singapore and they would edit my stories, discard my stories because they didn’t believe then. It’s incredible that they could second-guess and ah, kill my stories that I was gathering on the spot.

Narrator In the mid-1960s at the height of the Cold War in South-East Asia, stories that might engender sympathy for communists were not welcome. In this context, most newspapers and broadcasters reported the Army’s death squads as engaged in a civil war.

Roland Challis There really was no sense that there was a centrally organised slaughter of alleged communists. It was being presented from all directions as a sort of a running battle going on between, you know, organised communism and organised army. It was a cleaning up operation. It was not a slaughter. The word ‘slaughter’ didn’t pass anyone’s lips at that time. The scale of it was not understood.