Letter
Mass political murder is not genocide
Duncan Graham writes, “In the 1965 coup, an estimated 500,000 were slaughtered in a military-organised genocide against real or imagined communists…”. Absolutely not.
His wrong-headed assertion is based on Jess Melvin’s “The army and Indonesian genocide”, which deliberately misinterprets the Convention and seeks to expand the legal definition of genocide to include mass political murder.
The Convention is clear: genocide is the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, religious or cultural group, not the mass murder of political groups, ie, the PKI.
Do you really imagine that the same Western governments, that had laid waste to German cities, burned Tokyo to the ground and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were going to write the Convention to include their own mass murder? Nope. Political mass murder was deliberately excluded from consideration.
What Suharto and his generals, including his son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, did, in East Timor, was genocide. A third to half of the Timorese populations was annihilated. By comparison, 1965 was strictly political, targeting communists, socialists, human rights activists, lawyers, judges, trade unionists, etc.
— Rick Pass from Home Hill