The Rise of the Suharto Regime and the Unimaginable Mass
Murder of Around 1,000,000 Indonesians
The Quagmire of Independence
The Indonesian people began
making huge leaps and bounds toward independence in one of the most tumultuous
centuries in recorded history—the 20th century. In that bloody span
of 100 years, there were two World Wars, a Cold War of ideologies, and numerous
contained wars, where the United States, the Soviet Union and China battled it
out within smaller, allied states, such as Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. It
was a time when every nation believed their own philosophy to be superior, and
all countries were pressured to pick sides—Allies or Axis, NATO or Warsaw,
capitalist or communist. Unfortunately for Indonesia, this was the world stage
that their country was thrown into when they declared their independence.
(President Sukarno in Washington D.C. in 1956, photographed by Warren
K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report [Public Domain in U.S.], via Creative
Commons)
