The Soetoros and the Indonesian Massacres 1965-1999

No wonder Barack Obama didn’t write a book called Dreams from My Mother.

The president has said that he wished he had written a biography of  his mother, the late Ann Dunham Soetoro, rather than his father, Barack Obama, Sr.  And he might have done it well since he lived with her for lengthy periods. But perhaps that tome would have been called Nightmares from My Mother, or Bad Dreams from My Mother and Stepfather.  The more I read about the Dunham family the more fictionalized and fabricated they seem; Obama’s mother, in particular, since she is so often trotted out posthumously for photo ops.  Her story, as presented by Obama, is simple:  she was a free spirit who transcended type casting, spent her life doing for others and preserving native Indonesian crafts.  Lolo Soetoro was hardly worth mentioning.O.K., but this is the way it really was:

Indonesia 1965-1968. There was an ongoing massacre of PKI party communists and suspected communists in Jakarta and across Java by the Indonesian Army and anti-communist Muslim student jihadists. There is no doubt that the U.S. had strategic and economic interests in the Indonesia controlled by Sukarno, and those interests had a bloody reprise.

Time magazine described it this way: “Communists, Red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by the thousands…Army units executed thousands after interrogation in remote jails. Armed with wide-blade knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families, burying the bodies in shallow graves. The murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages….Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies, river transportation has at places been seriously impeded.”
Pretty horrific by any standards, even genocidal ones.
Yet, Ann Dunham Soetoro, according to all of the MSM hype and Obama’s whitewash of an autobiography, was teaching English as an American Embassy employee while her husband, Lolo, an Army Colonel under the monster Suharto was busy working as an oil company geologist cum government liaison. The Dark Side of Paradise, by Geoffrey Robinson, makes clear the implication of complicity in the monstrous events by both the Army and the U.S. Embassy.  I can’t link to p. 284 so I’ll quote: “the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta noted in a cable to the department of State…the U.S. government is generally admiring of what the army is doing”. Approval (for the killings) came from the U.S. Embassy.  Excerpt

Approval for the release of the names came from the
top U.S. Embassy officials, including former
Ambassador Marshall Green, deputy chief of mission
Jack Lydman and political section chief Edward
Masters, the three acknowledged in interviews.

Obama’s autobiography says little or nothing about the dread which must have been prevalent among the peasant populous during this period despite the fact that more than a million were imprisoned and used by the big corporations (timber, mining, oil) as slave laborers.  In his autobiography, Obama says virtually nothing about his step-father Colonel Lolo Soetoro, save that he was easygoing, friendly.

According to one fluff article available on the internet Obama returned to Indonesia for Christmas and summer holidays with his mother for many years.  During those years, Obama would have been mature enough to take note of the intense political oppression imposed by Suharto and the dread connected with reprisals directed at any party brave enough to criticize the regime.  The U.S. supported the dictator and Ann Soetoro went from her English teaching job with the embassy to employment with USAID and the (allegedly) CIA connected Ford Foundation in 1965 or this in 1966.

More questions than answers attach to Ann Soetoro during her lengthy stay in Indonesia.  The more one investigates the paucity of information about her activities the more one wonders about the lack of detail.  The blizzard of banal impressions about Ann Soetoro’s personality has buried or replaced the record of her life.  These are some of the nagging questions:

I have not been able to locate Ann Soetoro’s curriculum vitae.  Did she produce any scholarly work other than her long awaited dissertation?

Did Ann Soetoro work in Ghana and Thailand?  If so, during what years and for whom did she work?

What “scholarships” enabled young Obama to attend the prestigious and elite Punau school in Hawaii while his mother was “too poor” to afford it?  Ann Soetoro was also allegedly the recipient of a “scholarship” to continue her M.A. anthropology studies at the Univ. of Hawaii.

Why did she earn an undergraduate degree in math and then switch to anthropology?

Micro-financing of peasant women in East or West Timor seems like a front for something else (CIA?) since the massacres within that province wiped out nearly a third of the population and in many areas the gendercide of males was as high as 80%.  Much of the population of East Timor was relocated to West Timor.  (See my earlier posts on this subject).

To whom was Ann Soetoro teaching English while under U.S. Embassy auspices during the horrifying massacres and imprisonments during 1967-1968 and the decades long slave labor and torture regime?

Why would the Ford Foundation finance anthropological studies into native fabrics and iron working during this time? Or was this Ann Soetoro’s cover for another kind of research in the countryside?

And Obama says nothing about his mother’s residence in Indonesia during the brutal Suharto invasion and occupation of East Timor beginning in 1975.

My developing theory is that the important shaping of Obama’s character is connected to Indonesia, as much as or more than either Hawaii or Chicago.  If his step-father  was a top honcho in the brutal Suharto regime and Lolo had plenty of American military friends from the embassy, how might that have affected the boy?  If his mother’s work was of such great importance that she stayed on in Indonesia while her son returned home, are we to believe cataloging native crafts was this important work?

If Obama returned often to Indonesia to see his mother as he grew older wouldn’t he have been aware of the horrific events in Indonesia during his stays there and mentioned them as critical events in his otherwise superficial life story?

How are we to believe his stories of reacting strongly to racial and color slights when he lived in a land of genocide without being scarred or apparently even particularly moved by that fact?

And ,finally, what should one make of Obama’s appointment of Admiral Dennis Blair as the new Director of National Intelligence while it it is widely alleged that Blair helped win approval for a resumption of military cooperation with Indonesia  in  1999 despite yet another massacre carried out by Indonesian troops at Dili, East Timor?