For three decades, with long interludes to preserve my sanity, I have studied U.S. involvement (along with other countries like Britain and Japan) in the great Indonesian massacre of 1965. Only in the last few years have I come to focus on what I now think was the defining paradigm for what happened: a psywar operation.
What opened my eyes was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the slaughter. This made it clear that the corpses flooding the rivers of East Java were not just dumped their to dispose of them; they had been rigged to float, and thus terrorize those living downstream:
"Stomachs torn open. The smell was unbelievable. To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes. And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew."6
This exploitative detail, the display of mutilated corpses, has been recurringly cited for its horror as a symptom of "unplanned brutality,"7 or "mass hysteria."8
In fact it falls well within the parameters of planned U.S. atrocities. It is in particular a signature of U.S.-trained atrocity managers in Chile, El Salvador, and today in Colombia.9
The display of corpses by arranging to float them down river was a feature of U.S. counterinsurgency in the Philippines in the 1900s, and again in the 1950s.10
Corpses were also displayed by the Indonesians in East Timor after 1975, as part of a genocidal campaign supported and supplied by the United States. I will have more to say about the display of corpses, not because this atrocious detail is intrinsically worse than others, but because it is a forensic clue of techniques that have been transmitted through instruction.
Though less spectacular today, the East Timor campaign continues. So does the atrocity management in West Papua, a territory ceded by the Dutch (under U.S. pressure) to Indonesia, as a U.S.-dominated multinational (now called Freeport McMoRan) began to carry out plans to develop one of the world's largest known deposits of copper and gold. Closer to home, army and U.S.-backed massacres continue in Colombia, and increasingly in Mexico. With these examples in mind, I have chosen a title, "Using Atrocities" (rather than "Managed Atrocities"), to stress that the process we are talking about continues.
At least in theory, these processes are amenable to human control and amendment. We saw in the 1980s how the U.S.-backed atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua were terminated after Congressional action, especially after the long-denied massacre at El Mozote in 1981 (by a U.S.-trained battalion) was finally acknowledged. The delayed exposure of atrocities in East Timor has led to recent U.S. pressures on Indonesia, in the form of withholding military aid; and there are signs that Indonesia may soon respond in some way to the increasing pressures on it from the rest of the world.
The holding of an impartial referendum on self-determination in East Timor would represent a great victory for the people of that small and sorry nation. But the termination of managed atrocity in that country could have global consequences as well: as a statement that managed atrocity in this world is not inevitable, not acceptable, and indeed eliminable.
THE U.S. RESPONSIBILITY FOR TERROR IN EAST TIMOR
Of all the western nations, the one whose people knows least about the current regime of Indonesian terror in East Timor is probably the United States. This is no accident. Despite deceptive public protestations about human rights, the United States is also the major power with the greatest responsibility for those conditions of on-going psychological warfare, which is to say terror.
Those who have made this case in the past, like Noam Chomsky, have focused on three aspects of U.S. responsibility: political encouragement, military support, and propaganda preparation. This paper will point to a fourth: U.S. responsibility for teaching the Indonesian Army the psychological warfare (psywar) techniques of terror, which were then practiced in the great massacre of 1965, and again in East Timor a decade later. I shall argue that, whereas massacre is unfortunately only too common a human experience, massacre as a psywar technique of terror has a narrower history. Although we shall see precedents from the Mongols and Tatars, and later Japan during World War II, the chief country of transmission would appear to be the United States.
Deliberate atrocity is not easy to read or write about. Even at the post-war Tribunal on Japanese war-crimes, the record shows recurring moments when the presiding judge did not wish to hear details, and one time when even the prosecutor declined to continue. What will always remain obscure is the line between the spontaneous mayhem of soldiers who have run amok, and the mayhem that has been intended to terrorize a civilian population. Unfortunately the record from Indonesia in 1965 and East Timor since 1975 is unambiguous that terror was deliberately practiced as part of psywar campaigns, for which the U.S., to a greater or lesser degree, shared ultimate responsibility.
As a way of introducing this topic, I will look first at the broader context of U.S. responsibility, and particularly the involvement of the U.S. (along with other countries) in the psychological propaganda campaign which prepared world opinion to accept the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor.
A political green light for the Indonesian invasion of December 7, 1975 was given by President Ford and Henry Kissinger in Jakarta a few hours before, when all the Americans demanded was that the attack be delayed until after their departure.12 The U.S. abstained in the subsequent U.N. vote condemning the invasion, and the Indonesians rightly interpreted this abstention also as tacit acceptance. As U.N. Ambassador Moynihan later wrote of his service under Jimmy Carter (the "human rights" president), "The Department of State desired that the U.N. prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."13
Meanwhile the United States continued to supply U.S. arms and materiel to Indonesia, which were used to crush the Timorese people. As both countries were well aware, the use of U.S. arms to attack a third country violated the military assistance agreement under which the arms had been provided. Yet, as Noam Chomsky told the UN General Assembly in 1979,
Contrary to false testimony by government witnesses at congressional hearings, new offers of arms were immediately accepted after the invasion. Then, and since, the flow of arms has been uninterrupted, including attack helicopters and other equipment required to wipe hundreds of villages off the face of the earth, destroy crops, and herd the remnants of the population into internment centers.14
The arms supplied by the U.S. and other countries, such as Rockwell's Bronco OV-10F airplane, were not for general defense purposes. They were specifically chosen to meet the needs of the East Timor counterinsurgency campaign, in which saturation bombing by the Bronco jets came to play a key role.15
This is perhaps the most obvious sign of U.S. involvement in the on-going atrocities of East Timor. The planes were used both to bomb villages directly, and also to defoliate the earth as part of a campaign of forced resettlement. As a letter from 1977 narrates, "Many elements of the population were killed under inhuman conditions of bombardment and starvation....The waters of the river were filled with blood and bodies."16
A third aspect of US involvement raised by Chomsky and others is its propaganda role in preparing for Indonesian takeover of East Timor.17 I would like to begin by distinguishing between mere advocacy of East Timor into Indonesia, and manipulative psychological preparation for it.
According to the Australian observer James Dunn, the first published example of the former may have been in a December 1966 article in the journal Asian Survey, published by the University of California at Berkeley. The author, Donald Weatherbee, concluded that "when Indonesian ideology and interests converge in a Timor `liberation' policy, the Portuguese will be faced with realities of power in the Archipelago;" and he added that "In a sense Portuguese Timor is a trust territory, the Portuguese holding it in trust for Indonesia."18
Dunn, who was a diplomat at the time, attaches some importance to this article, reporting that its "cursory dismissal of East Timor's right to self-determination...was common among the few Australian and American officials responsible for handling Indonesian affairs, and during informal contacts it was inevitably conveyed to Indonesian officials."19 Later he describes its view that Timor's future lay with Indonesia as one "that had developed in political, diplomatic, and academic circles since the early 1960s," adding that "The Suharto regime would not have missed the work of Professor Donald Weatherbee."20
There is not much in the public record to corroborate Dunn's sense of the article's importance. I can find only one citation of it before the 1975 invasion, and this was in a French academic journal. But Asian Survey was edited by two men, Professors Robert Scalapino and Leo E. Rose, who were also involved in the formation of U.S. Asian policy. When in 1980 the Indonesian Government finally invited a delegation of friendly American academics to approve of their handiwork in East Timor, the invitees, chosen by the U.S. State Department, included both Prof. Weatherbee and Prof. Rose. (To this day Prof. Rose argues that the Timorese he met were happy to be assimilated, and that Fretilin leaders were no more than a group of mesticos from the cities. This last claim, according to Dunn, is another propaganda canard; all but two of Fretilin's Central Committee were full-blooded Timorese.)21 and Asian Survey's assessment in 1976 of the Indonesian invasion, though vastly more sensitive than Weatherbee to Timorese conditions and suffering, again concluded that the Indonesian takeover was probably "inevitable."22
If Weatherbee's article has any importance, it is by default. I can find no other American articles about Timorese politics before 1974-75, and virtually none about Timor at all. Apart from a few anthropological essays and reviews, the only periodical reference to Timor I could locate was a travel article in the February 1968 issue of Motor Boating.
It is against this background of silence that we must judge the sudden propaganda sequence of stories in the New York Times. (mostly based on dispatches from the British news agency Reuters), between August 11, 1975 and the following July.23 This was a clear example of political complicity and duplicity in preparing public opinion to accept Indonesian intervention as a solution to violence, rather than what it had already been, a source of it.24
The reality in East Timor was much clearer than the anarchic chaos these stories portrayed. The infant East Timorese political parties had encountered difficulties in agreeing on a common approach to independence; and the Indonesians, aware of the situation, had encouraged one of the parties (the Uniao Democratica Timorense, or UDT), to proclaim a unilateral coup d'etat in August. But the UDT had swiftly collapsed under a counterattack from the more radical and popularly-based Fretilin, so that by the end of August, after a swift but bloody civil war lasting only a fortnight, the UDT forces had withdrawn from the capital and begun their retreat into West Timor.25 UDT- Fretilin fighting lasted another month near the West Timor border, as Fretilin inexorably mopped up the last pockets of UDT resistance, now increasingly supported by invading Indonesian commandos. By September 26 the CIA, which had access to monitoring of the Indonesian communications, reported that the UDT had failed to offer a serious resistance to Fretilin, and that the Indonesians themselves had suffered casualties.26
Though fighting resumed in October, it was now between Fretilin and (as the CIA reported on October 10) invading "Indonesian troops," supported by an amphibious task force.27 The civil war was now over, except in the pages of foreign journals like the New York Times. (As we shall see, a Times special correspondent could write, as late as November 26, about Indonesia's "hands-off policy with respect to the civil war that is engulfing Portuguese Timor.")28 In June 1976 the Times' David Andelman reported that the Indonesian takeover of East Timor was now complete, and approved by a People's Assembly in Dili.29
Others have noted how, through two and a half subsequent years of a genocidal Indonesian campaign (leading to the death of perhaps one third of the population), the Times ran only two brief stories, about the problem of East Timorese refugees in Lisbon.30 But just as slanted was the extensive Times reporting in the months leading up to and including the December 1975 invasion. A series of stories repeated Indonesian propaganda lies about the Fretilin government in Dili, as "Communists" receiving arms from Communist bloc countries, who in seizing power "had cut the throats of babies," and who were violating the Indonesian territory of West Timor.31 Former Australian diplomat James Dunn, who was in Dili at the time, has since denounced these claims as either "macabre fantasy" or else fabrications from the Indonesian intelligence agency Bakin.32
Chomsky and Herman have further shown how an article by Gerald Stone in the London Times (summarizing atrocity reports) was acutely censored when reprinted in the New York Times. In particular authorial warnings such as the following were deleted: "I am convinced that many of the stories fed to the public in the past two weeks were not simply exaggerations; they were the product of a purposeful campaign to plant lies."33
Meanwhile on November 26, an extraordinary dispatch from the Times' own correspondent David Andelman spoke of Indonesia's "hands-off policy with respect to the civil war that is engulfing Portuguese Timor," and noted that "The Indonesian forces...have been showing remarkable restraint."34 This was seven weeks after the Indonesians, as the CIA had reported internally on October 10, had launched an overt military attack from West Timor, in order (according to Dunn) "to keep up the fiction that the civil war was continuing to rage."35 Again, writing after the East Timorese town Atabae had been bombarded for twelve days by Indonesian gunships, Andelman wrote that U.S.-supplied Indonesian destroyers "cruise the waters around Timor to prevent infiltration of arms by sea to the left-wing rebels."36
In short the Times coverage of East Timor exactly fit the goals of Indonesian propaganda, as summarized by James Dunn:
The flow of disinformation from Jakarta...was carried by Australian, US, British and some other foreign media and news agencies, which served to divert world attention to Indonesia's false dilemma -- what should it do to help the strife-torn people of Timor? Many observers were thus asking the obvious question: how much longer could Indonesia stand by and not intervene with this terrible war going on right on its own borders, and posing a potential threat to its security?37
It is hard to imagine how the tiny half-island of East Timor could have posed a threat to one of the world's largest nations. Yet the Times' articles certainly strengthened this illusion.
The Times' subsequent news blackout in the wake of the full invasion suggests that this heavy slanting of the news was not from ignorance. What is most striking about the stream of pre-invasion scare stories is the absence of a single dateline from Washington, the Times' usual source. This was in keeping with Washington's desire to distance itself as far as possible from the East Timorese situation, the State Department having even directed its Embassy in Jakarta to cut back on its reporting of the subject.38
This distancing fit the so-called Nixon doctrine of devolving security responsibilities on to regional powers like Indonesia. Back in August the U.S. Ambassador in Jakarta had already told an Indonesian official that the U.S. had no objection to integration of East Timor, and that although difficulties could arise if the Indonesians resorted to force, these difficulties had to do with a possible Congressional reaction which could threaten the military assistance program.39
It is clear that, even if the U.S. press was complicit in this psychological preparation of the path to Indonesian invasion, so were the media of Australia, Britain, and other western powers. I hope however to show that this preparation was part of an inclusive psywar campaign, including terror, for whose application the U.S. among these powers bears primary responsibility.
U.S. RESPONSIBILITY FOR TEACHING PSYWAR TERROR TECHNIQUES
As the invasion and bombardments fade into history, I would like to focus on a fourth aspect of responsibility which is both chilling and on-going, and for which the U.S. in particular may have been the principal source. This is responsibility for teaching the psywar (psychological warfare) techniques that have been used, persistently even though unsuccessfully, to break the will of the Maubere people in East Timor. These psywar techniques include not only killings and rapes (which require no instruction), but more sophisticated tactics such as forced relocations of populations, and training civilian youths as paramilitary goon squads to localize terror and propagate it further. Among these standard techniques, which are widely practiced and disseminated through the world, is one which appears to carry a particular U.S. signature: the public display of decapitated and mutilated bodies, bodies not of criminals or guerrillas but of average civilians.
In general the public display of bodies and heads, of civilians chosen almost at random, appears to have a narrow history, characteristic above all of this century. This practice is part of a complex of psywar terror (or so-called "counterterror") techniques was developed by U.S. advisors in the Philippine counterinsurgency campaign of the 1950s, and soon afterwards expanded upon in Vietnam. The techniques were subsequently written down, by Philippine psywar practitioners like Edward G. Lansdale, Charles Bohannon, and Napoleon Valeriano, and incorporated into U.S. Army psywar training manuals.45
Although the most senior of these men was Lansdale, the man most associated with mass killing was Valeriano, a Filipino whose units were known as "skull squadrons" for their practice of beheading suspected Huks.46 The journals of Lansdale, a non-soldier and p.r.-man, reveal that he found the killings carried out by his friend Valeriano "rather sickening."47
Judging from subsequent behavior, it would appear that these techniques were taught to the Indonesian army prior to the great anti-PKI bloodbath of 1965, just as we know they were taught to the armies of other countries where decapitations and the like also became common. These countries include Vietnam, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala, all of which were visited by U.S. counterinsurgency advisors in the early 1960s.48
This teaching occurred in two venues. Key Indonesian officers were sent to the United States for training, such as General Suwarto, who after 1958 built the Army Staff and Command School in Bandung (SESKOAD) into a training-ground for the takeover of political power.49 Another example is Suharto's son-in-law Maj.-Gen. Prabowo Subianto, a key figure in the East Timor occupation who is said to have graduated first in his U.S. Special Forces officer class.50 At the same time U.S. advisors in Indonesia had trained the Army since the 1950s, especially in counterinsurgency. As we shall see, U.S. aid in 1962-65 was channeled through a Military Training Advisory Group whose purpose was seen as helping to resist Communist takeover.51 By the time of the 1965 coup, over 4000 Indonesian officers had been trained in the United States; and almost half of the officer corps had received some kind of training from the Americans.52
My case that some of them were taught psywar terror tactics lacks proper documentation, and is based chiefly on the congruities between the psywar behavior in Indonesia with that of U.S. trainees elsewhere. Thus, inevitably, my argument is in large part a historical one. The consequences of what we shall discuss are however very contemporary.
One of the more conspicuous features of the Indonesian army repression in East Timor today is the widespread use of torture. The precise techniques of torture used, in which detainees are "tied, beaten, kicked, hung, hooded, and sometimes slashed," are exactly those used by counterintelligence interrogators of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s.53 To argue U.S. responsibility for training in these techniques does not exclude the possibility that third-party nations, such as Taiwan or Israel, have been involved in their transmission. But it is the United States, more than any other country, that has disseminated these techniques widely through the world. And particularly, as I shall now argue, in Indonesia.
Indonesian troops themselves have declared to their victims that their terror campaign in East Timor is modeled on the great anti-PKI massacres of 1965.54 I and others have argued that the United States played an important role in encouraging, planning, financing, and supplying trainers and military equipment for this operation.55 My own previous arguments focused primarily on political and military developments in this period. I was not then aware of the extent to which the whole operation was conceived of as a psychological warfare (psywar) operation along American lines.
In the light of what I now know about psychological warfare, I see the 1965 Indonesian "coup attempt," and subsequent massacre, as part of a single co-ordinated psychological warfare operation, arguably the largest that the world has ever seen. It would seem to respond to what U.S. Ambassador Howard P. Jones was calling for in 1961, as part of his seven-point program to prevent Indonesia's slide toward communism. One of his proposals was that the U.S. prepare for a "possible major psychological war campaign coordinating covert and overt resources, when proper climate can be developed."56
What Jones had in mind may possibly be illuminated by his subsequent actions and statements, which were in line with what eventually developed. Jones tried in 1964 to persuade former Army Chief of Staff Nasution to have the army take matters in its own hands against the PKI (Indonesian Communist party).57
In March 1965, fearing accommodation between the army and PKI, Jones told senior officials: "From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia."58
This had been Washington's goal from as early as 1960, when the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council wrote to President-elect Kennedy that the U.S. should .
give priority treatment to programs which offer opportunities to isolate the PKI, to drive it into positions of open confrontation with the Indonesian Government, thereby creating the grounds for repressive measures, politically justifiable in terms of the Indonesian national interest.59
The campaign of 1965 was defined as psychological warfare by at least one of its key protagonists. This was Col. Sarwo Edhie, a CIA asset and commander of the RPKAD Red Berets who oversaw the killings in central Java, eastern Java, and Bali.60
We learn from an official Indonesian account of the campaign to crush the Indonesian Communists ("the G30S/PKI"), that Sarwo Edhie's meeting to plan this campaign in Surakarta on October 26, 1965, was organized along the following principle (with the underlined words not in Bahasa Indonesia but in English):
The G30S/PKI should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psywar, distribution of pamphlets and the spreading of information to achieve the goal of slowing down [G30S/PKI activities].61
What followed this meeting is well-known from other sources: not leaflet distribution, but the training of youths as death squads for civilian killings.62
Until recently, I was unaware that, from its first English use in 1941, the term "psychological warfare" had been linked to terror, and explicitly linked "mass communication with selective application of violence (murder, sabotage, assassination, insurrection, counterinsurrection, etc.)."63 Christopher Simpson quotes from a U.S. Army document to show that among the weapons of psychological warfare are "miscellaneous operations such as assassination."64
Lansdale's "tactical psywar" campaign against Philippine guerrillas in the early 1950s added some sophistication to an earlier campaign of what the CIA called "gradual extermination." In these psy-ops (psychological operations), "terror played an important part."65 Though relatively restrained in comparison to the terror operations of the 1960s in Indonesia and Vietnam, Lansdale's write-up of his successful campaign was (according to Michael McClintock) to legitimate for future U.S. Army Manuals (such as Army Pamphlet 525-7-1 of April 1976) what McClintock calls "exemplary criminal violence -- the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies."66
Accounts of the 1965 massacres in Indonesia have tended to focus on the unprecedented scale and brutality of the murders, rather than on the psywar exploitation of the corpses. In fact the display of mutilated bodies and body-parts, widespread throughout the campaign, is one of the sure signs that the mayhem was not spontaneous and unpredictable (as U.S. apologists like John Hughes have argued), but centrally planned and directed.67
Kenneth Young's useful analysis of local influences and differences in the slaughter of 1965 also misses this unifying theme of psywar exploitation.68 Young makes the distinction that the PKI were chiefly slaughtered by Ansor gangs guided by santri Muslims in Java, and by the PNI in Hindu Bali.69 Relying on a dubious claim attributed to Sarwo Edhie (the chief organizer of the Java killings), Young argues, more tendentiously, that in Bali "the RPKAD was ordered in, not to supervise the purge of the PKI, but to restore order."70 (Robinson has since retorted that the bulk of the killings occurred after the RPKAD troops arrived, "and in all probability took place under their supervision....Virtually all of the evidence indicates that military forces, both local and Java-based...orchestrated and incited the violence in Bali, as they did in Java.") Young's conclusion, that the slaughters exhibited "very variable results from region to region," is uncontestable, and important. This does not however address the recurring features of psywar exploitation.71
THE ORGANIZED DISPLAY OF MUTILATED BODIES
A notable example of this in 1965 was the display of decapitated heads on roads. This occurred in both Java and Bali, where the common denominator was that the civilian killers had been trained by Sarwo Edhie's RPKAD. In East Java, according to Time, "Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages."72 In the Kediri district of East Java (contrasted by Young with Bali), the road leading up to Mount Klotok "was decorated with PKI heads."73 In the same region Muslim Ansor youth gang cut off the head of a village teacher, "stuck it on a bamboo stake (bambu runcing) and placed it on a guard post at an intersection in the village of Gumul."74 Further east, in Banyuwangi, heads "were cut off and placed on bamboo stakes along the roadside or hung from trees."75 Robinson quotes an elderly Balinese woman as saying, "Of course I remember 1965. There were heads lying around in the street out there. Sometimes the heads of people you knew."76
Both in Java and in Bali, it was also the practice to leave headless bodies in the middle of roads.77 Both in Java and in Bali, the killers practiced not only decapitation but dismemberment; and body parts, including male genitals, were also displayed in public places.78
These same practices had previously been practiced by CT (Counterterror) teams in Vietnam, also recruited by the military from civilians. They would leave a Viet Cong head on a pole as they left a village, or a mutilated body, or ears nailed to houses ("The idea was that fear was a good weapon").79 The CIA advisor who introduced this counterterror to South Vietnam, Ralph Johnson, "formulated his theory in the Philippines in the mid-1950's and as a police advisor in Indonesia in 1957 and 1958, prior to the failed Sukarno [sic] coup."80 I might add parenthetically that in 1997 one can see bodies and decapitated heads in the streets of rural Colombia, another country where U.S. psywar training has been prominent.81 And for a decade some of the most celebrated horror photographs from East Timor have been of Indonesian troops posing with decapitated heads.82
In 1985 the world received a technical but compelling new indication that the mayhem committed by Ansor gangs in the Kediri district was not spontaneous, but organized, deliberate, and calculated to achieve maximum psychological impact. This was in Pipit Rochijat's celebrated memoir, "Am I PKI on Non-PKI," translated with an Afterword by Ben Anderson. As the author recalled,
A mass of Ansor Youth would be brought in from the various pondok and pesantrén in the Kediri region. On average, about 3,000 people would be involved....Each day, as Kartawidjaja's Son No. 2 went to, or returned from, State Senior High School No. 1, he always saw corpses of Communists floating in the River Brantas.... And usually the corpses were no longer recognizable as human. Headless. Stomachs torn open. The smell was unbelievable. To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes. And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew.83 (Similarly on the Solo river, people "watched rafts of corpses floating down, gaily bedecked with Communist flags.")84
This deliberate impalement on stakes, to ensure that the psychological message reached the maximum number of villages, does not fit Cribb's description of it as "unplanned brutality," "compounded by inexpert techniques and a desire to make the bodies unrecognizable."84 Rather it seems to exemplify the practice of corpse-mutilation and display in the Philippine experience, as codified in the 1962 handbook, Counterguerrilla Operations ("Few weapons have quite the same effect on guerrilla morale.").85 Even the use of the river was not original. One of the handbook's two authors, Napoleon Valeriano, had headed a special squadron, whose tactic, according to another observer,
was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy....almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of Valeriano's Nenita Unit.86
In 1970, when CIA-trained assassins carried out mass executions of Vietnamese civilians in Cambodia, "they cut off their heads and threw them in the river."87 During the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, beheadings, and the subsequent display of heads, were recorded by both eyewitnesses and photographs.88 In Aceh the dumping of unidentified corpses along roads, rivers and plantations has continued into the 1990s, as part of the Indonesian Army's counterinsurgency campaign.89
continues...
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