Indonesian Mass Killings and Suharto's Seizure of Power
On the night of 30 September 1965 a group of officers killed six senior generals in what was presented as an attempted leftist putsch. General Suharto rapidly took control of the army and used the crisis as the pretext to annihilate the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), then one of the largest communist organisations in the world with over 20 million members and dependants. The army and allied Islamic militias carried out mass killings across Java, Bali, and Sumatra in 1965-66, with an estimated 500,000 to one million Indonesians murdered, falling disproportionately on the abangan Javanese peasantry and the ethnic Chinese minority. Sukarno was progressively stripped of authority and Suharto assumed the presidency, founding the New Order regime. Structurally this is a creeping military coup: a small group within the armed forces seized power and permanently reordered the polity by eliminating the organised left.
- Year: 1965 CE
- Category: Political
