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c h a p t e r 2 2 .............................................................................................

POLITICAL

GENOCIDES IN

POSTCOLONIAL

ASIA .............................................................................................

robert cribb

ETHNIC AND POLITICAL GROUP IDENTITY ................................................................................................................

Mass political killing presents a special analytical problem in genocide studies. The

slaughter of human beings because of the political beliefs and attitudes they held,

or were presumed to hold, cost millions of lives during the twentieth century. In

terms of the number of victims, the most extensive such killings—in the Soviet

Union, Indonesia, China, and Cambodia—match events unambiguously regarded

as genocide. Yet mass political killing is not prima facie covered by the 1948 UN

Convention that makes genocide a crime in international law. In identifying

genocide as acts intended to destroy a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious’

group, the definition seems almost pointed in its exclusion of political killing.

Nor does mass political killing match the broader perception that genocide is

primarily a phenomenon of interethnic relations. Raphael Lemkin, who coined

the term, succinctly characterized genocide in 1945 as ‘deliberately wiping out

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 0 . O U P O x f o r d .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/5/2021 1:57 AM via INDIANA STATE UNIV AN: 381031 ; Donald Bloxham, A. Dirk Moses.; The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies Account: s8336656.main.ehost

whole peoples’.1 His broader work, too, emphasized the character of genocide as an

act of cultural and social destruction, which compounded the crime of mass

murder. Generations of genocide scholars since Lemkin have invested great energy

into refining this characterization, but this refinement has worked mainly to

identify more complex processes of ethnic extermination. There remains a persis-

tent reluctance in the field of genocide studies to allow mass political murder to

qualify as genocide. Schabas put this position forcefully: ‘Confusing mass killing

of the members of the perpetrators’ own group with genocide is inconsistent with

the purposes of the Convention, which was to protect national minorities from

crimes based on ethnic hatred.’2 Even though the Holocaust against the Jews was

accompanied by a savage persecution of German socialists and other political

enemies of the Nazis, there is a powerful inclination to see the ethnic dimension

of the persecution as raising the Holocaust to a different level of turpitude

from that of the political murders. This inclination crystallized in the 1988 coining

of a new word, ‘politicide’, by Harff and Gurr to designate mass killings in which the

victims were targeted for their political affiliation, rather than their ethnicity.3 The

term, now two decades old, has had a mixed academic career. Although it has

been used by those who, like Harff and Gurr, are reluctant to regard political

killings as genocide, its form suggests that it applies to any kind of political killing,

including perhaps assassinations. Other scholars, Schabas amongst them, prefer to

use the term ‘crimes against humanity’ when discussing mass killing with political

motives.

Every definition is suspended in a web of explicit and implicit understandings of

the world. The definition of genocide that separates it from mass political killings is

located within a deep-seated perception in Western intellectual life that ethnic

identity is primordial, or at least historical, whereas political identity is a matter of

choice. Only a minority of scholars today see national identity as arising from the

deep cultural identity of a distinct people, but the mainstream of scholarly writing

on nationalism nonetheless emphasizes that the national identity of each individ-

ual is a product of powerful, even inescapable, forces of socialization. One is not

Indonesian, or Iranian, or Italian, or Icelander by choice, but rather by virtue of the

circumstances in which one grows up. By contrast, political identity is understood

to be malleable. One is left or right or centrist as a consequence of reflection on the

problems of the world. Even if the circumstances in which one grows up are

influential, they are not decisive—a conservative upbringing can and often does

produce a radical; a political career can shift from right to left and back again.

1 Raphael Lemkin, ‘Genocide: a Modern Crime’, Free World 9:4 (1945), 39.

2 William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000), 119.

3 Barbara Harff and T. R. Gurr, ‘Toward Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides:

Identification and Measurement of Cases since 1945’, International Studies Quarterly 37:3 (1988),

359–71.

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This distinction between primordial ethnic identity and acquired political iden-

tity leads to a significant difference in moral judgement. Aside from our condem-

nation of any atrocity or injustice, we feel especial indignation when people are

punished for what they are, rather than what they have done. This indignation

appears when we suspect, for instance, that members of minority communities

receive harsher treatment in the legal system than do members of the majority.

Indignation is most acute, however, in that quintessential genocidal image of the

massacre of women and children, the aged and infirm, for no other reason than the

ethnic group that they belong to. In the case of political killings, by contrast,

indignation is often tempered by the rationalization that the victims had chosen

to engage in politics and that their doom, even if unjust, was a consequence of their

own fatal decisions. This moral contrast between the innocent and the defiant—the

moral distinction between those who are made victims for what they are and those

who are made victims for what they have done, or failed to do—in fact reaches into

the heart of genocide studies itself. Although the UN Convention definition

identifies four straightforward categories of victim (‘national, ethnical, racial, or

religious’), genocide scholars have often not been inclined to explore religious

victimization as a distinct form of genocide unless it is linked with ethnicity, as in

the persecution of Jews.

The broader human consequences of ethnic destruction and political killing also

appear to be different. Ethnic identity is often perceived as part of the cultural

heritage of humankind, an irreplaceable human resource which, if lost, can no more

be recovered than can an animal or plant species that has been driven to extinction.

Genocide, Lemkin stressed, is a crime against humanity not just because the mode

of killing repudiates basic human values but also because the destruction of human

cultural diversity is a crime against all of us, not just the immediate victims. By

contrast, again, the dominant image of the victims of political and religious

persecution is that they go to their deaths confident that their beliefs will live on

after them and that their deaths may even hasten progress towards eventual victory.

Tertullian’s epigram, ‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,’ has been

echoed in countless variants across the centuries. A host of political rationalizations

exists moreover for the destruction of political enemies. Wading through a sea of

blood pouring from slain political enemies in order to achieve a glittering future for

humankind may be a repellent image, but in the modern world it has been far less

repellent than the genocidal slaughter of children.

In the decades since the term genocide was coined and its official definition was

set, however, important reasons have emerged for regarding the distinctions between

ethnic and political mass killing as rather less significant than they appeared to be

in the 1940s. First, trends in scholarship have challenged the presumption that

ethnic identity is simply primordial or historically determined. In 1983, Eric

Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger coined the term ‘invention of tradition’, which

drew attention to the fact that many of those elements that constitute the most

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visible and most appealing features of cultural identity were in fact created con-

sciously or half-consciously and rather recently as cultural symbols, rather than

being deeply embedded in a cultural-historical past.4 This insight implies a mallea-

bility of culture that sits uneasily with primordialist and historical assumptions of

the deep roots of ethnic identity. It implies that cultural identity can be acquired in

similar way to political identity. The cultural studies turn in scholarship has

reinforced this insight. Cultural studies scholars have deconstructed the notion

of cultural authenticity, showing that the privileging of some essentialized cultural

form, on the basis of its antiquity and or some other marker of validity, is itself a

cultural construction.5 Cultural studies scholars have also celebrated cultural

innovation, especially hybridity.6 This new understanding of culture as something

constantly in flux, constantly reinvented, constantly created, has eroded the notion

that cultural heritage is a fragile treasure to be preserved by interventionist protec-

tive measures. None of these insights devalued culture in moral terms; on the

contrary, cultural studies celebrated cultural diversity and heterogeneity in a way

that the older canonical approach did not. But they cast profound doubt over the

presumption that any culture could define a ‘whole group’ in the way specified by

the UN Convention. By asserting that culture, as a living, changing phenomenon,

could not be preserved without destroying it, cultural studies eroded the broad

philosophical underpinning of ethnic identity as a special category in social affairs.

With this erosion, the argument for restricting the term genocide to ethnically

directed killing was also diminished.

Second, other analytical trends in social science began to highlight similarities

between political and ethnic identity. Some of these similarities are especially

marked in the so-called pillarization (verzuiling, pilarization) of Dutch and Belgian

society. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the period following

the emergence of mass politics—Dutch and Belgian societies were vertically seg-

mented into pillars (zuilen) according to religion and political ideology. Dutch

society was marked by four pillars, Protestant, Catholic, socialist, and liberal, each

of them with its own political parties, trade unions, newspapers, schools, univer-

sities, hospitals, sporting and cultural associations, and building societies. Even

large private firms were often strongly associated with a single zuil and would hire

staff only from that segment of the population. The zuilen were defined by belief,

including political belief, and they constituted whole social worlds within which

people were born, raised, trained, matched, employed, entertained, cared for, and

eventually buried. Political differences gave rise to cultural differences, including

4 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1983).

5 Chris Barker and Paul Willis, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 2nd edn (London: Sage,

2003), 392.

6 Ibid. 23–4.

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differences in language use, which gave them a quasi-ethnic character.7 In Belgium,

in fact, ethnicity was part of the pillarization structure, with zuilen defined also by

the ethnic distinction between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking

Walloons. The Dutch–Belgian case in other words shows that ideological identity

can be expressed in public life in ways very close to the public expression of

ethnicity.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moreover, we also saw from time

to time a close association between national and political identities. This associa-

tion is encapsulated in the term ‘un-American’, used at the highest levels of the

United States in the 1950s in an attempt to align national identity with a conserva-

tive ideological approach to the world. A similar strong overlap between ideology

and nationality has been apparent at times in the identification of Nazism with

Germany, Communism with the Soviet Union and China, liberal internationalism

with Sweden, and Islam with Iran.

Of course, none of the considerations outlined above means that national and

ethnic identities are the same as ideological identities. Nonetheless, they blur the

boundary between these forms of identity in a way that removes the obvious

distinction between ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a

national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ and acts committed with similar intent

to destroy a political group. The ethnic genocides that dominate the discussion in

this volume had a variety of overlapping motives. In some cases, the aim was

dispossession—the displacement of original occupants from land so that others

could use it, or the removal of a category of people from powerful positions in

society so that others could take those positions. In some cases, the aim was to

prevent secession or alliance with an external power. In other cases, the genocide

was driven by a doctrinaire belief that members of the targeted group contaminated

the national polity, polluting society in a moral sense and blocking policies that

would have been in the interests of those to whom the nation properly belonged.

The four great mass political killings that took place in the twentieth century

shared this complex of motives, but in all cases that third motive was the most

salient. These mass killings were attempts to rid the body politic of a vast group of

people whose very existence seemed inimical to the nation as the perpetrators

conceived it. The mass killings arose from fundamental conflicts over the national

character of the Soviet Union, Indonesia, China, and Cambodia. The protagonists

in each case agreed on the physical framework provided by national borders, but

they were engaged in a struggle to reshape the fundamentals of national character

within those borders. The destruction of political enemies in these cases was not

just a grab for factional power or economic interest but the extermination of an

alternative nation within the state. In this respect, the victims indeed constituted a

7 Arend Lijphart, Verzuiling, Pacificatie en Kentering in de Nederlandse Politiek (Amsterdam:

J. H. de Bussy, 1968).

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‘national’ group in the terms of the UN Convention. The mass political killings,

moreover, did not simply target political protagonists but rather victimized whole

families. Unlike the punishment of the families of political enemies in earlier times,

when it was intended to enhance the savagery of punishment and to diminish the

possibility that vengeful survivors might form a renewed threat to the regime, this

destruction was rationalized at the time by claims that the individual victims were

themselves culpable. Sometimes on the general basis of class, sometimes on the

more specific basis of family connections, the perpetrators of these killings turned

their enemies into quasi-ethnic groups and committed genocide upon them.

The political genocide in the Soviet Union is analysed in this volume by Nicolas

Werth, and therefore will be discussed here only in passing. Of the other three, the

Indonesian killings targeted communists whereas the Chinese and Cambodian

killings were carried out by communists. All three took place in the course of little

more than a decade (1965–1979) at the height of the cold war. Intense global

political antagonisms were thus acted out on three national stages, as was also

the case in the genocides of secessionist movements discussed in this volume by

Geoffrey Robinson. Although we know that the main protagonists in the cold war

were capable of immense direct brutality against their enemies—the United States

in Indochina, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—and although we know that the

United States had some complicity in the Indonesian killings, the roots of all three

political genocides lay primarily in the national histories of the countries

concerned and in the vastly different futures which communism and its alternatives

appeared to map out for modernizing societies.

INDONESIA ................................................................................................................

Between October 1965 and March 1966, the Indonesian army and its political

allies carried out the murder of approximately half a million members and associ-

ates of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI). The

killings were part of a seizure of power by anti-communist sections of the army led

by General Suharto, who went on to become Indonesia’s longest-serving president,

removing from office his predecessor President Sukarno, who had declared the

country’s independence from the Dutch in 1945. Suharto’s long regime was marked

by the brutal repression of other opponents, including secessionists in Aceh, East

Timor, and Papua, and by deep-seated corruption, but it also delivered impressive

economic growth and a dramatic reduction in poverty.

The killing of the communists was presented as a response to an ambiguous

coup launched in Jakarta early on the morning of 1 October 1965 by a group calling

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itself the 30th September Movement. Much controversy has existed over this coup.

Mid-ranking army officers were involved in the kidnapping and killing of six senior

anti-communist generals (a seventh narrowly escaped). The plotters claimed to

have acted to forestall a coup that they claimed had been planned by the anti-

communist generals for 5 October. After their bold initial strike, however, the

plotters appeared confused and were easily suppressed by Suharto as head of the

army’s Strategic Reserve (KOSTRAD). The controversy over the coup relates to the

question of who may have been involved aside from the immediate organizers.

Responsibility for devising the coup has been attributed variously (and in various

combinations) to the PKI, to Sukarno, to the air force (which was generally

sympathetic to the Left), and to Chinese intelligence operatives. It has also been

identified as a ‘black’ operation carried out by variously Suharto, the CIA, and MI6,

designed to provide a pretext for the suppression of the Left in Indonesia. Recent

research has indicated that the coup was most likely a joint endeavour by the army

officers directly involved and a small group around the communist party chairman,

D. N. Aidit, and that it was intended both to forestall an anti-communist coup and

to push Indonesia decisively to the Left.8

The PKI was at that time the third largest communist party in the world, the

largest in the non-communist world. It had risen from the ashes of an unsuccessful

rebellion in 1948 during Indonesia’s War of Independence to run fourth in the 1955

general elections. It had publicly eschewed armed revolution and was pursuing the

strategy, later identified with Euro-communism, of aiming to win power by

electoral means.9 It was a strong advocate for social justice and was considered

unusual amongst Indonesian political parties for its efficiency and freedom from

corruption. The party, however, had enemies, including those who remembered

the brutality of its 1948 uprising, religious groups apprehensive about the party’s

atheism, landowners fearful of the party’s base amongst landless peasants, and

establishment members of the bureaucratic, political, and military elites who

recognized in the party a hungry new elite that would displace them if it had the

chance. Fear that the PKI would win enough seats in the planned 1959 elections to

guarantee it a place in government was an important element in anti-communist

support for President Sukarno when he dismantled the democratic system between

1957 and 1959, replacing it with what he called ‘Guided Democracy’, a semi-

authoritarian system under his own direction.10

Although anti-communists initially saw Guided Democracy as a freezing of

existing political strengths, the PKI appeared to thrive. It continued to win support

8 John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in

Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

9 Robert Cribb, ‘The Indonesian Marxist Tradition’, in Colin Mackerras and Nick Knight (eds),

Marxism in Asia (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 251–72.

10 Herbert Feith, ‘Dynamics of Guided Democracy’, in Ruth McVey (ed.), Indonesia (New Haven:

Human Relations Area Files, 1963), 309–409.

political genocides in postcolonial asia 451

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in the countryside, the bureaucracy, and even sections of the armed forces. It also

developed a community of affiliated organizations, covering peasants, women,

trade unions, artists, and so on with an even larger membership.11 President

Sukarno, moreover, increasingly saw the PKI as a political counterweight to the

power of the army. He wove the PKI into a new national ideology, NASAKOM

(nationalism, religion, communism), giving it a formal place at the centre of the

Indonesian national identity, and his public rhetoric increasingly adopted the

terminology of the party.12 The party gave vehement support to Sukarno’s cam-

paign against the creation of the new state of Malaysia out of British colonies in

maritime Southeast Asia, and urged that the armed forces pursue an armed

struggle against the new state, a struggle that would take them far away from the

centre of power in Java. The party began to argue (though unsuccessfully) for the

arming of workers and peasants, and began to launch direct actions in the

countryside to implement a 1960 law on redistribution of land.13 As President

Sukarno aged and showed signs of illness, it appeared increasingly possible that the

party might slip effortlessly into political power, despite the fact that it held no

senior cabinet posts and despite its lack of access to weapons. These circumstances

created a perception in Indonesia that the country was approaching a decisive

moment in its history, in which either the PKI would come to power or the army

would move decisively to eliminate the party as a political force.

Research on the killings that followed the 1965 coup is still meagre, but at least

three patterns of killing are evident.14 In some regions, army units, especially the

para-commando RPKAD, moved systematically from village to village, using lists

obtained from ransacked PKI offices or from local informers to identify party

members and leftist activists, who were then summarily shot. This was the pattern

in places where the PKI had been a prominent and not necessarily antagonistic part

of the local landscape, so that it had relatively few enemies and its support base

included many people who were attracted by its general social activism and

reputation for incorruptibility. In other regions, the killings were carried out

11 Donald Hindley, The Communist Party of Indonesia 1951–1963 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1964).

12 Donald E. Weatherbee, Ideology in Indonesia: Sukarno’s Indonesian Revolution (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1966).

13 Rex Mortimer, The Indonesian Communist Party and Land Reform, 1959–1965 (Clayton, Vic.:

Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1972).

14 Robert Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings of 1965: Studies from Java and Bali (Clayton, Vic.:

Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990); Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of

Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); John Roosa, Ayu Ratih,

and Hilmar Farid (eds), Tahun Yang Tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami Pengalaman Korban 65: Esai-

Esai Sejarah Lisan (Jakarta: Lembaga Studi dan Advokasi Masyarakat, 2004); Hermawan Sulistyo,

‘The Forgotten Years: The Missing History of Indonesia’s Mass Slaughters Jombang-Kediri 1965–1966’,

PhD thesis, Arizona State University, 1997; R. A. F. Paul Webb, ‘The Sickle and the Cross: Christian and

Communist in Bali, Flores, Sumba and Timor, 1965–1967,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17:1

(1986), 94–112.

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primarily by local militias drawn from amongst the PKI’s enemies. These killers

had often been engaged in earlier conflicts with the party over issues such as land

reform and they responded to clear signals from the army that violent action

against communists would not be punished. In still other regions, the army actively

sought to engage other sections of society in the killing. Party members were

ordered to report to the authorities. When they did so, or if they were caught on

the run, they were detained in makeshift jails, before being handed over in batches

to execution teams assembled from local communities. The enthusiasm of these

teams seems to have varied widely. Some participants were recruited unwittingly

and suddenly found themselves in a forest clearing, expected to cut the throats of a

handful of hooded, anonymous victims. Others took part to establish their own

anti-communist credentials. Others had been moved by lurid propaganda stories

about communist excesses put about to stoke popular hostility to the party. The

rightwing generals who died in the October coup were said to have been sexually

mutilated by communist women before they were killed; communists all over the

country were accused of preparing pits for the bodies of the anti-communist

victims they allegedly planned to slaughter on party orders.

There is no evidence of systematic records being kept of the killings. Most were

carried out clandestinely, often at night. Graves were unmarked and recorded only

in the memories of perpetrators and occasional bystanders. Memoirs by witnesses

to the killings are exceedingly sparse and an unknown number of victims, includ-

ing a few relatively senior party members, survived by fleeing and changing their

identities. Nonetheless, circumstantial evidence suggests that around half a million

people were killed, one-sixth of the party’s claimed membership.15 Members of the

women’s organization Gerwani, affiliated with the PKI and accused of involvement

in torture of the generals, were especially targeted, but a large majority of the

victims were men. Although it has often been suggested that Indonesians used the

opportunity presented by the purge to settle private scores, there is very little

evidence of the killing of people who were not believed to be communist. Nor is

there evidence that Indonesia’s Chinese minority was targeted for killing, though

there was some lesser violence in the form of burning of shops and expulsion from

small towns.

In the aftermath of the killing, more than a million people passed at least briefly

through military detention camps.16 Some prisoners spent ten years in detention

on the remote island of Buru in eastern Indonesia. Only a few dozen senior figures

from the party and the left wing of the army were brought to trial; the rest were

15 Robert Cribb, ‘How Many Deaths? Problems in the Statistics of Massacre in Indonesia

(1965–1966) and East Timor (1975–1980)’, in Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhöfer (eds), Violence

in Indonesia (Hamburg: Abera, 2001), 82–98.

16 Greg Fealy, The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic Versus Foreign Policy,

1975–1979 (Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1995).

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detained on the basis of military fiat. Even after they were released, their identity

cards were marked with the letters ET (for eks-tahanan, ex-prisoner) and they were

forbidden to vote or to work in a wide range of supposedly sensitive jobs, including

education and the oil industry. The alleged sins of the party members, moreover,

were visited upon their families for decades thereafter. Thirty years after the 1965

coup, Indonesians wishing to work in sensitive areas or even, in some circum-

stances, to complete their education, were required to show that they were ‘en-

vironmentally clean’, meaning that they had no close family connections with

anyone who had been ‘involved’, according to the government’s flexible sense of

the term, with the PKI.17

Since soon after the emergence of the idea of Indonesia in the early twentieth

century, communism had presented a distinctive set of ideas about the fundamen-

tal character of the nation. The extermination of the party in 1965–6 thus repre-

sented not just the exclusion of a political ideology from national legitimacy but

also the genocidal destruction of the people who bore a certain idea of the nature of

the Indonesian nation.

CHINA ................................................................................................................

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, defeating the anti-

communist Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek. Once in power, the Party

embarked on a thoroughgoing restructuring of Chinese society, collectivizing

agriculture, placing businesses under Party supervision, and promoting rapid

industrial development. Within the Party itself, however, there was a wide range

of opinion about the extent of change that was needed and about the pace that

should be maintained. The Party Chairman, Mao Zedong, favoured more radical

and more rapid change, and on his initiative the Party pursued what proved to be a

disastrous programme of rapid industrialization in 1958–61, known as the Great

Leap Forward. Under the programme, peasant labour was redirected into indus-

trial production. Along with unfavourable weather, these policies led to a collapse

in harvests and a famine in which millions died of starvation. The death toll is

officially stated to have been 14 million, but some observers have suggested

substantially higher numbers.18 In contrast with the famine genocide in Ukraine

17 Ariel Heryanto, State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging (London:

Routledge, 2006).

18 Peng Xizhe, ‘Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces’,

Population and Development Review 13:4 (1987), 639–70; Judith Banister, ‘Population Policy and

Trends in China, 1978–83’, China Quarterly 100 (1984), 717–41.

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in 1932–3, there is no reason to believe that the Great Leap Forward Famine was

deliberately engineered to destroy or weaken any social group. Rather, it was the

consequence of the blind confidence of Party leaders in the capacity of human will

to achieve official goals and the unwillingness of officials to report anything except

abundant fulfilment of those goals.

From the start, the CCP was fearful of forces in Chinese society that might block

or hamper its policies and which might even seek to remove it from power.

Although the Party had come to power with a formidable reputation for patriotism

and efficiency, it was well aware that vast numbers of Chinese were unconvinced of

the need for its radical programmes. Remnants of the Nationalist government,

moreover, remained in power on the island of Taiwan, and publicly affirmed their

intention to reconquer the mainland. From October 1950, too, Communist Chinese

troops were in direct conflict with US forces in the Korean War. The CCP

responded to this sense of threat with a series of savage purges intended to remove

various kinds of ‘dangerous’ element from Chinese society. The targets of these

purges in the 1950s and early 1960s included those defined as class enemies (land-

lords and business owners), people politically associated with the previous regime,

alleged spies for outside powers, dissident intellectuals, followers of organized

religion, and party members suspected of the abuse of power. The fate of those

purged varied from public executions to beating, to jailing or exile in the country-

side, to public humiliation, confiscation of possessions, and loss of career pro-

spects. Estimates of the number of executions in this period range from 400,000 to

2 million,19 but very little empirical work has been done to test these estimates.

These purges were marked by the Party’s recruitment of a new generation of young

revolutionaries who had not participated directly in the earlier struggle against the

Nationalists but who now became engaged in internal revolution.

The fears of Party chairman Mao Zedong that the revolution might be reversed

grew more acute after the death of Stalin and the rise of more moderate leaders in

the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union had been the CCP’s most important

ally and had provided its basic development model, Mao was particularly alert to

the risk that moderate forces would arise, as they had in the Soviet Union, within

the Communist Party itself. Whereas the purges of the 1950s had mainly targeted

categories of people who were demonstrably not of the Party, in the 1960s

Mao began to search for a way of purifying the Party itself, along with society as

a whole. The mass killing of communists in Indonesia in 1965–6 added to Mao’s

19 Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: a History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press,

1986), 81; Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1978), 29. Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘China: A Long March into Night’, in Stéphane

Courtois (ed.), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge MA: Harvard

University Press, 1999), 79.

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apprehension. Here was a communist party that had allowed itself to be defeated

by resurgent rightists. He was determined that no such fate would befall the CCP.

To counter these supposed threats, Mao formally launched the so-called Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution in May 1966.20 The action was characterized as

‘cultural’ because it demanded a fundamental change in attitudes, rather than what

was portrayed as lip-service to the ideals of the revolution. In August 1966, the

Party’s Central Committee summed up the issues as follows:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture,

customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and

endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: It must meet

head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas,

culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of

society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority

who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois

academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes

and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that

do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and

development of the socialist system.21

A small group of ultra-radical party leaders, later derogatorily known as the ‘Gang

of Four’, systematically purged the upper echelons of the Party of those considered

to be potentially revisionist.

Because the heart of the problem, in Mao’s view, lay within the Party itself, the

principal agents of the Cultural Revolution were young, radicalized Chinese, male

and female, who were described collectively as Red Guards. Their movement

emphasized intense loyalty to Mao and his teachings, summarized in the celebrated

Little Red Book, and an implacable hostility to individuals, institutions, and forms

of behaviour that were not unambiguously embedded in the Maoist view of the

world. The Red Guards surged through Chinese society to root out all traces of

what were called the ‘Four Olds’—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old

thinking. Included in these vices were any sign of affection for or interest in China’s

traditional culture, the culture of any of the country’s ethnic minorities, or Western

thought and culture. Anyone who possessed suspect books or works of art, who

listened to Western or traditional music, who had Western education or connec-

tions with Western businesses, or who seemed hesitant to embrace the full exuber-

ance of the Maoist revolution was a likely target. Victims were routinely removed

from their jobs and their unacceptable possessions were burnt or smashed. They

20 On the Cultural Revolution in Chinese politics, see Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis,

1966–9’, in Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, 2nd edn

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148–247; and Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael

Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

21 Central Committee of the CCP, ‘Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural

Revolution’, 8 August 1966.

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themselves would be dragged into the street, self-incriminating placards placed

around their necks or dunce’s caps placed on their heads. They were forced to

confess publicly to their shortcomings while crowds jeered at them. The beating of

victims was widespread and as the campaign grew in intensity, increasing numbers

were beaten to death or were permanently crippled. A remarkable number of Party

leaders committed suicide.

This early phase of the Cultural Revolution attracted much attention because of

the character of the Red Guards. Energy and enthusiasm with which the Red

Guards celebrated violence and sought to smash every vestige of the old order

seemed to be the world’s most extreme manifestation of a general revolt of the

young that later found expression in the anti-establishment movements of 1968 in

the West. The Cultural Revolution was also remarkable for the destruction it

caused to China’s physical heritage, the distrust it created between family members,

the disruption it caused to the lives and careers of members of the middle levels of

Chinese society, and the chaos it brought within the Party. Mao as chairman of the

Party appeared to be orchestrating the destruction of the central political institu-

tion that he had helped to create.

By early 1967, not only had the education system been laid waste and the system

of local government largely dismantled by the Red Guards, but workers’ communes

had begun to seize control of factories and businesses. In many parts of the country

rival factions—Red Guard, worker, military—competed for practical control in

what was close to civil war. Under these conditions, Mao began to engineer a

reversal of the extreme devolution of power, calling for the establishment of

‘revolutionary committees’ that included both Party cadres with demonstrated

‘revolutionary’ qualities and, crucially, representatives of the People’s Liberation

Army. The creation of these committees intensified the conflict in China’s pro-

vinces, as rival factions tested each other’s power and struggled for inclusion in the

emerging elites.22 At the same time, the Gang of Four widened the purge of the

Party under the slogan ‘Campaign to Purify Class Ranks’. In the purge, a secret

committee investigated the backgrounds of all party cadres and removed anyone

with previous links to Westerners or the Nationalists or whose family background

included bourgeois elements. As part of the attempt to purge counter-revolution-

ary attitudes, millions of students, bureaucrats, and intellectuals were sent to the

countryside to learn peasant values through intense indoctrination and the disci-

pline of hard physical labour and difficult conditions.23 About 12 million ‘educated

22 Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford

University Press, 1995).

23 In a provocative essay, Jin Qiu discusses the preference of former Red Guards for remembering their

own suffering in this period while ignoring the suffering they inflicted on others; see ‘Victim or

Victimizer: The Reconstruction of the Cultural Revolution through Personal Stories’, in Kenneth

Christie and Robert Cribb (eds), Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and

Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy (London: Routledge, 2002), 13–23. A particularly

powerful memoir of this period is Rae Yang, Spider Eaters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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youth’ were caught up in this process. Although the transfer to the countryside was

couched as a measure against counter-revolutionaries, in fact a large number of

Red Guards were removed in this way from the cities and from all opportunities to

continue agitating. Something close to normal rule began to be restored only

in 1971.

Early accounts of the Cultural Revolution emphasized the violence of the Red

Guards and implied that the revolutionary committees had been Mao’s way of

putting back into the bottle the genie of youth radicalism that he had released in

1966 once it had served the purpose of removing his enemies within the Party.24

Recent research, however, has shown that this period of revolutionary committees

was a time of intense political killings, in addition to the broader phenomenon of

civil war between rival armed groups. The evidence lies in official government

publications that record massacres for the years 1966–71.25 The deaths are recorded

in county almanacs, sometimes simply referring to ‘many killings’ or reporting that

they took place ‘frequently’, sometimes giving specific numbers, as in the following

report from Quanzhou County in Guangxi:

October 3, [1967]. In Sanjiang Brigade, Dongshan Commune, the militia commander

Huang Tianhui led [the brigade militia] to geng-sha [push into a cliff to kill] 76 individuals

of the brigade—former landlords, rich peasants and their children—in the snake-shaped

Huanguaneng canyon. . . . From July to October, [other] 850 individuals [in the county]— the four-type elements (Landlords, Rich Peasants, Counterrevolutionaries, and Bad

Elements) and their children—were executed with firearms.26

The killing of children was particularly marked in the Cultural Revolution

massacres, probably because they were believed to share their parents’ inappro-

priate class background.27 The pattern of killings was different from county to

county and province to province, with the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region

apparently suffering most heavily.28 Walder and Su, who have investigated these

records most closely, conclude that between 750,000 and 1.5 million people were

24 Juliana Pennington Heaslet, ‘The Red Guards: Instruments of Destruction in the Cultural

Revolution’, Asian Survey 12:12 (1972), 1032–47; Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, 243–44

(Harding cites an official death toll of 34,800 and a ‘not . . . unreasonable’ estimate of half a million). 25 For a discussion of the circumstances in which these reports were compiled, see Andrew

G. Walder and Yang Su, ‘The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human

Impact’, China Quarterly 173 (2003), 79.

26 Quoted in Yang Su, State Sponsorship or State Failure? Mass Killings in Rural China, 1967–68,

Paper 03–06 (Irvine, CA: Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, 2003), 5.

27 See Yang Su, ‘Mass Killings in the Cultural Revolution: a Study of Three Provinces’, in Joseph

Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew George Walder (eds), The Chinese Cultural Revolution as

History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 107–8.

28 See Uradyn Bulag’s chapter in this volume, and Wu Di, ‘The Aftermath of the Cultural

Revolution in Inner Mongolia’, in Kenneth Christie and Robert Cribb (eds), Historical Injustice and

Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002), 24–37.

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killed in rural areas during these years, with a similar number being maimed by

beatings.29

Much is still uncertain about the circumstances of most of the killings and of the

identities of the victims. As in Indonesia, however, the mass political killings of the

Cultural Revolution were marked by a sense that the future of the country was at

stake, meaning that extreme measures were justified to suppress the enemies of the

newly consolidating order. In both cases, the characterization of these enemies was

both casual and precise: in China, the victims were defined as ‘class enemies’, in

Indonesia as ‘communists’, both categories representing a kind of person, rather

than a culpable act. Whereas the perpetrators of the Indonesian killings have been

almost entirely silent on their actions, detailed records exist of the revolutionary

committee meetings at which executions were planned and the names of the

victims were decided. Although the committees recruited militias to assist on the

task of extermination, the actions took place under clear official mandate.30 And

although the Chinese government has since rehabilitated most of the surviving

victims of the Cultural Revolution (unlike Indonesia’s government, which continues

a range of discriminatory practices against those linked with the Communist Party),

there has been no attempt to rehabilitate or to memorialize the dead. Those who

took part in the killings were often promoted within the Party in subsequent years.31

The Chinese killings, like those in Indonesia, were aimed at the elimination of a

whole group of people believed to embody a different idea of Chinese nationhood.

Whereas the victims in Indonesia were defined principally by their formal affilia-

tion with the Communist Party or one of its affiliates, the victims in China were

defined more broadly by class, so that the slaughter often encompassed whole

families.

CAMBODIA ................................................................................................................

The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), better known as the Khmer Rouge

(Red Khmers, or Cambodians), came to power in Cambodia in the final phase of

the Second Indochina War (1954–75). Little was known about the party in the rest

of the world and most observers were surprised, sometimes disbelieving, when

news emerged that the party had launched a massive re-engineering of society to

29 Walder and Yang Su, ‘The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside’, 74–99.

30 Yang Su, ‘Mass Killings in the Cultural Revolution’, 108.

31 Ibid.

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create a pristine communist state and had killed its political and class enemies on a

massive scale. The regime was removed in 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion, following

Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnam that aimed to recover former Cambodian

territory in the Mekong Delta. The Khmer Rouge resumed guerrilla resistance in

the countryside and, with the support of China and the United States (which

regarded Vietnam as an ally of the Soviet Union), retained Cambodia’s United

Nations seat until 1982. From 1982 until 1991, it remained the strongest element

within the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea which, though inter-

nationally recognized, controlled only a small part of the country.

In early historical times, what is now Cambodia had been the centre of a series

of powerful kingdoms, whose splendour is still reflected in the vast monuments of

Angkor. In later centuries, however, the Khmer had been unable to prevent the

inroads of neighbouring Siamese and Vietnamese states. By the end of the

seventeenth century, Cambodia had lost to Vietnam control of its sea access

through the Mekong Delta, and it ceased to be a major power. During the

nineteenth century, France incorporated Cambodia, along with neighbouring

Vietnam and Laos, into French Indochina but Cambodia experienced few of the

direct consequences of colonialism that were visited on Vietnam. The Cambodian

monarchy remained in place under the French protectorate, bolstered by French

power and in turn conferring legitimacy on French domination. The modern

sector of the economy and the bureaucracy was dominated by French, Vietnam-

ese, and other outsiders.

Cambodia became independent in 1953 as a constitutional monarchy in the

context of the closing phases of the First Indochina War, whose most important

outcome was the partition of Vietnam between rival northern (communist) and

southern (anti-communist) states in 1954. This partition set the framework for

the Second Indochina War, in which the United States and its southern allies

fought the north, which had backing from the communist bloc. Although the

Cambodian leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, asserted Cambodia’s neutrality

and was one of the pioneers of the Non-Aligned Movement, the country was

increasingly drawn into the conflict by the fact that Vietnamese communist

forces used it as a sanctuary and by the heavy-handed US response, which

included massive bombing of communist-dominated regions. In 1970, Sihanouk

was overthrown in a pro-Western military coup by Gen. Lon Nol, who created

the Khmer Republic.

The bombing and the consequent hardship in the countryside caused, for

instance, by the death of an estimated seventy-five per cent of the draught animals

needed to cultivate the fields appear to have generated increasing support for the

CPK. Although the party had depended on Vietnamese military support and

protection in its early days, it increasingly pursued its own line and defended the

separate priorities of the Cambodian revolution against the ‘Indochina’ impera-

tives of the Vietnamese. Khmer Rouge forces captured the capital, Phnom Penh, on

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17 April 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon to Vietnamese communist forces,

and the CPK renamed the country ‘Democratic Kampuchea’.32

CPK doctrine demanded the rapid creation of a fully communist society. The

party believed that communism could be established within a single country and

that industrialization and urbanization, conventionally seen as essential in the

Marxist historical sequence, could and should be bypassed. ‘We will be the first

nation to create a completely communist society without wasting time on inter-

mediate steps,’ one of their leaders is reported to have said.33 Party ideologues

argued that a just, prosperous, and entirely self-reliant society could be created by

‘unleashing the productive power of the masses’ in a programme of vast irrigation

works designed to allow rice to be grown all year round. This programme required

that the energies of the Khmer people be redirected from commerce (money

and banking was abolished and replaced with barter), from religion (religious

observance was punished and places of worship were destroyed),34 and from

the corruption and distractions of urban life and foreign values in general. Accord-

ingly, nearly all inhabitants of the cities were shifted to rural areas, where they were

set to work on infrastructure projects. Private property was abolished and work was

collectivized to varying degrees from region to region. In some places, collectiviza-

tion included communal dining. The party had previously implemented many

aspects of this programme in ‘liberated’ areas in the countryside before the fall

of Phnom Penh.

Whereas many communist parties allowed a respected but subordinate role to

‘progressive’ elements from enemy classes, the CPK expressed a doctrinaire hostili-

ty to these classes from the start. In theory, the party permitted people who had

held official positions or possessed some wealth under the old order to accept re-

education and to immerse themselves in the peasant values of the new order. In

practice, however, the party was vigilant for any sign amongst these old elements of

failure to conform to the new order. The strongest social division in Cambodia

under the Khmer Rouge was thus between the ‘old people’—those who had been

under effective communist government in the ‘liberated’ areas before 1975—and

the ‘new people’ (perhaps numbering two million or more), most of them dis-

placed from the cities. It was made clear to these people that their survival

depended on utter compliance with Khmer Rouge norms. Many survivors reported

that they were told words to the effect, ‘To spare you brings no benefit; to destroy

32 Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975

(London: Verso, 1985).

33 Karl D. Jackson, ‘The Ideology of Total Revolution’, in idem (ed.), Cambodia, 1975–1978:

Rendezvous with Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 63.

34 Some 40,000–60,000 Buddhist monks were defrocked and forced into labour brigades;

Christians and Muslims, including the indigenous Muslim Cham minority, were targeted as

followers of foreign beliefs. Temples, mosques, and churches were destroyed, along with sacred

objects such as Buddha images and copies of the Bible and the Qur’an.

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you brings no loss.’35 New people were subject to intense re-education, and they

were set to hard physical labour under difficult, often unhealthy conditions,

generally with meagre food rations. Families were often split up and sent to

different parts of the country. They were closely monitored by Khmer Rouge

cadres and trivial infringements of rules or signs of persisting bourgeois or foreign

values, such as expressions of nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times, could be

punished by summary execution. It was reported that people were executed for

wearing glasses (a sign of pre-revolutionary wealth and intellectualism) or for

having soft hands that betrayed a lack of experience in hard work. Survivors

reported that Khmer Rouge children were particularly vigilant in identifying and

punishing signs of un-revolutionary attitudes amongst the new people.36 Members

of Cambodia’s ethnic minorities—indigenous Muslim Chams and immigrant

Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as CPK cadres in the east of the country who

had been in contact with Vietnamese communists—were especially suspect be-

cause of their presumed foreign sympathies and suffered an even higher death rate

than the general population.37

In the period 1975–9, some 17,000 people passed through the Tuol Sleng (S-21)

interrogation centre in Phnom Penh. Victims of the regime’s growing paranoia,

these people included both alleged foreign spies and growing numbers of party

cadres who were interrogated and tortured. They were forced both to confess to

complex conspiracies against the regime and to reveal the names of their supposed

co-conspirators who were then called in for interrogation in a widening circle of

victimization, which also included small children.38

There are significant difficulties in estimating both the total number of victims

of the Khmer Rouge and the precise causes of death. Researchers have used

demographic data, sample surveys amongst survivors, and forensic evidence

from grave sites, as well as comparative evidence concerning the practicalities of

mass killings from other contexts. Although much uncertainty remains, there are

strong indications that the death toll was a little over two million out of a 1975

35 See, for instance, Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under

the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 4.

36 François Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero (London: Allen Lane, 1978); Michael Vickery,

Cambodia 1975–1982 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984); Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over:

The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution and Its People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); Jackson

(ed.), Cambodia, 1975–1978; David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and

Revolution since 1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did

They Kill: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)

discusses the motivation for the killings using insights from psychology. There is now a substantial

literature of survivor accounts of the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia. Two powerful memoirs are

Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (Pymble, NSW:

HarperCollins, 2000), and Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000).

37 Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 251–309.

38 David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2000).

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population of around 8 million. Of these victims, it seems plausible that forty to

fifty per cent were executed, with the remainder dying of disease and starvation

under conditions created deliberately or carelessly by the Khmer Rouge authori-

ties.39 The deaths were unevenly distributed across the population of Cambodia.

Vietnamese, Cham, and other ethnic minorities suffered the most; new people

suffered much more than old people.

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................

The Indonesian killings of 1965–6 cost half a million lives. The killings during the

Cultural Revolution in China claimed a million. Although these are massive death

tolls, both episodes involved only a relatively small proportion of the total

populations of those two countries. The political killings in the Soviet Union

took place on a much larger scale, but they proceeded as a multitude of separate

episodes, some involving ethnically defined victims, some in which hardship

played a greater role in the death toll than did execution. As a result, the Soviet

killings are difficult to comprehend as a single event. The Cambodian killings, by

contrast, claimed twenty-five per cent of a population of eight million in little

more than three years. Even though the perpetrators shared the ethnicity of most

of their victims, it seemed immediately unreasonable to many genocide scholars

to treat the Cambodian killings as anything other than genocide. A UN rappor-

teur is said to have coined the term ‘auto-genocide’ as an uncomfortable ac-

knowledgement of the fact that the events in Cambodia seemed to match the

enormity of ethnic genocide, yet did not fit the conventional interpretation of the

UN definition.40 Since the 1980s, however, the term auto-genocide has largely

disappeared and the experience of Cambodia continues to sit uncomfortably on

the sharp frontier of genocide studies, bringing other mass political killings such

as Indonesia and China in its wake.

Whether these cases can properly be considered as genocide depends above all

on the changing scholarly understanding of the nation, as it influences the meaning

of the term ‘national’ in the UN Convention. The political killings in Indonesia,

China, and Cambodia here and there crossed ethnic boundaries—the Khmer

Rouge’s treatment of the Cham was genocidal under any definition of the term—

but at their core they were political conflicts within a single ethnic group. They

39 Bruce Sharp, ‘Counting Hell: the Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia’, [online].

Available at http:// www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm

40 Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (London: Polity Press, 2007), 76.

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http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm

were not, however, mere expressions of a culture of political violence in which

disputes were routinely resolved with the gun, the knife, or the crowbar. Rather

they were the outcome of fundamental struggles over national character. In each

case, the perpetrators were not simply eliminating a political enemy. They saw

themselves as shaping the character of their nation by removing a category of

people who could never be a legitimate part of it. This category was defined by

membership of the communist party in Indonesia and by imputed class member-

ship in China and Cambodia, but the rationale for purging was similar in all three

cases. The nation as it was envisaged by those in charge could not survive the

presence of masses of people with different national conceptions. The mode of

purging, too, involved the persecution of whole communities of people, not just

leaders or cadres.

The fact, however, that these three political genocides took place within little

more than a decade also demands explanation. They occurred in the context of

the cold war, a time of acute polarization between secular ideologies that is

probably unprecedented in world history. The fate, not just of individual nations

but also of the world as a whole, seemed to be at stake. This polarization almost

certainly strengthened the inclination of both sides in these conflicts to demonize

their enemies. It also gave an international dimension to all three political geno-

cides: the perpetrators believed themselves to be eliminating enemies who were all

the more dangerous for the powerful allies that they were believed to have on the

other side of the cold war divide. In the case of Indonesia, the awareness of

the Indonesian military that they had the backing of the United States played a

role in the confidence with which they acted.41 In the early twenty-first century,

the ideological polarization that marked the twentieth century appears distinctly

muted, replaced by a religious polarization that few in the middle of the twentieth

century would have considered possible. Political genocides may turn out to

be a phenomenon of a rather specific phase in human history, but it would be

distressing if the twenty-first century turns out to be one in which the religious

dimension of genocide needs urgent attention.