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Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia (New Perspectives in Se Asian Studies) | 
 enlarge | Author: John Roosa
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 371117
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 344
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0299220346
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.8036
EAN: 9780299220341
ASIN: 0299220346
Publication Date: August 3, 2006
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Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship.
Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Useful but biased and not extensive December 21, 2007
3 out of 12 found this review helpful
Between 1965 and 1967 more than 1 million mostly Chinese Indonesians were murdered under the pretext that they were COmmunists. THe real reason for their killing was that they were a minority, they were Chinese and they were not Muslim, which made them a target of the Indonesian nationalist Muslim government under Suharto.
This book however ignores the murders, the genocide, the pogroms, and instead focuses on the plot that was the pretext or excuse for unleashing the genocide. This is tantamount to writing an entire book on the Holocaust and examining only the killing of Reinhard Heydrich instead of examining the subsequent mass murder.
This book is mostly one long anti-American bashing polemic that blames the United States for all the murder and terror inflicted by the Indonesian government on the Chinese minority. The book insinuates that John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower were 'waiting' for the attempted Communist coup and used the killing of a few military officers to unleash the coup and the mass murder. But the U.S had no role in the mass murder that followed. The U.S was fed a lie by Suharto, namely that the Communists were trying to sieze power, and thus Suharto was able to carry out his ethnic-cleansing.
Seth J. Frantzman
 An Excellent Look at a Sadly Overlooked Coup March 28, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
"Pretext for Mass Murder" is an impressive overview of the complicated events behind the 1965-1966 coup in which pro-U.S. General Suharto seized power and began a three decade reign of terror. Roosa worked with a group of Indonesian scholars on interviews and other historical research which produced core material for this book. Though in the end Roosa concludes that a few members of the Indonesian communist party (PKI), by launching an ill-conceived anti-military action, did provide the provocation which rightist military forces and the U.S. had been waiting for in 1965, the foolhardy actions of those individual PKI members do not in any way absolve Suharto and his western backers for what consequently happened (an epic campaign of bloodletting which eviscerated the PKI and killed up to a million Indonesians).
In Roosa's words: "In the months before October, the United States and the army wanted an incident like the movement to occur[...] Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers - Allen at the head of the CIA and John Foster at the head of the State Department - viewed all nationalist Third World leaders who wished to remain neutral in the cold war as Communist stooges. In full confidence of their right to handpick the leaders of foreign countries, Eisenhower and the Dulleses repeatedly used CIA covert operations to overthrow such leaders: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Souvanna Phouma in Laos in 1960. The Dulles brothers viewed Sukarno as yet another irritating character who needed to be removed from the world stage."
The book effectively synthesizes a wealth of information and is extremely well written, and thankfully devoid of the clunky jargon which sinks so many otherwise useful academic volumes.
Great essay, not a great book March 16, 2007
This book is not your typical one, as the subject matter, (the September 30th Movement), does not lend itself to a proper narrative. The whole event is surrounded in mystery, with many holes in the story yet to be filled, so the book is rather open ended and tries to interperate numerous accounts. If you are interested in the subject matter, it is the best source available. If you just have a mild interest in Indonesian history, it will probably be too dry a read. I'd give it 5 stars for being the best source of information on this topic, but can only give it 4 stars for reading enjoyability.
Important book on modern Indonesian history... October 17, 2006
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Mr. Roosa has written a very good account of The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia bringing new information to light. These events are central to modern Indonesian history and to an understanding of US policy in Southeast Asia in the past and present. Roosa does a superb job of synthesizing much of the speculation surrounding these events. I remember walking in the kraton in Yogakarta and talking to an elderly docent who was giving me a tour of the sultan's palace. He whispered to me, "Soeharto is one of the great mass murderers of all time." Indeed.
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