NEW revelations about the role of the British state in provoking the massacre of more than half-a-million people in Indonesia in 1965-66 confirm much that is already known, but are no less shocking for that.

Official documents already made public in the US refer to the activities of Britain’s diplomatic and intelligence services in the joint effort to undermine the democratically elected government of Indonesia’s President Sukarno. 

His crime had been to oppose British colonial policy in the Asia-Pacific region and to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy which included friendly relations with the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union.

Now a number of investigative journalists have dug out more detail from British state papers finally opened at the National Archives after most of those responsible for Britain’s criminal actions have been promoted and died.

The papers provide much more detail about the propaganda operations launched to discredit Sukarno and, in particular, his main source of support: the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), then the largest in the world outside the socialist countries.

Through the British Foreign Office, its shadowy Information and Research Department (IRD) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a radio station was established in Malaya and a newsletter published and supplied to thousands of influential people — including army generals — in Indonesia. Their reports targeted the PKI and its albeit critical support for Sukarno. 

Horror stories were fed to the mass media about PKI brutality and subversion, much of it purporting to come from dissidents forced to flee to freedom from Sukarno’s and communist tyranny.

Most of the reports, like their supposed authors, were fiction produced by IRD staff and other propaganda peddlers.

In September 1965, pro-Sukarno and pro-PKI military officers acted to forestall what they feared would be an anti-Sukarno coup, detaining seven army generals and killing some of them. 

This was the cue for US-backed General Suharto’s forces to begin mass arrests and executions of PKI activists, whereas Sukarno himself wanted to resolve problems by political dialogue.

Britain’s contribution to the crisis was to use all its covert propaganda organs, the BBC World and Indonesia Services and local mass media to criminalise the PKI, demanding in the name of all “patriotic” Indonesians that “this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” 

The PKI was now a “wounded snake” and “now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”

Over the coming months, Suharto organised the slaughter of more than half-a-million PKI members, supporters and other leftists (one CIA estimate put the final total at one million). 

The CIA provided him with money, arms, agents and the names of 5,000 leading communists.

US and British Labour government ministers and diplomats made excuses for the repression, denied any massacre and welcomed Suharto’s seizure of power in July 1966. 

Our mass media reported the one-sided bloodbath as a “civil war” between patriots and democrats on the one side and communist terrorists on the other.  

Britain’s ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, helped spin a widespread web of lies throughout much of this period. He had formerly served with the Special Operations Executive in colonial India and ended his career as Britain’s ambassador in Dublin. 

His chief assistant, Norman Reddaway, later became the ambassador in Poland during the rise of the anti-communist Solidarity movement. 

Their public school and Oxbridge training fitted them well to the old adage that “an ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” 

And the biggest lie of all is that freedom and democracy are intrinsically US, British and Western values.