Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965-79: Cold War, state, and region

The mass murders and genocides in Indonesia in 1965-66 and Cambodia in 1975-79 are examined here at three levels: great power participation, state-level perpetration, and a regional chronology of the onset of mass violence across each country. The two cases, involving anti-communist and communist perpetrators respectively, occurred in discrete phases of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the U.S. approach to each perpetrator proved similar, based first on Washington’s initial anti-China position and then on its more pro-China stance. Indonesia experienced from the outset a top-down phenomenon of political mass murder. In Cambodia, such killings also occurred from the start, but were accompanied by mass deaths from forced labour, starvation, disease, and increasingly, genocides, especially of the ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslim minorities. In both Indonesia and Cambodia, the mass murders did not occur everywhere at once but spread from one region to another as central power accumulated and was sequentially deployed.