The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (84 page)

Both Saigon and Phnom Penh fell in April 1975. A massive settling of scores followed, but that’s another story altogether (see “Postwar Vietnam” and “Democratic Kampuchea”).

Death Toll

The army of South Vietnam recorded 223,748 deaths among its personnel before the final offensives interrupted its bookkeeping. The United States registered 58,177 dead. For the longest time, no one had any idea how many Communists or civilians had died, but everyone knew it was a lot. In April 1995, on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, Hanoi announced its official estimates, which indicated that the war was twice as destructive as anyone had previously dared to guess. Hanoi declared that 1.1 million Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers and 2 million Vietnamese civilians had died during two decades of conflict, 1954–75.
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The 2008 world health survey largely confirmed this, estimating 3.8 million violent deaths in Vietnam during this period.
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It has been estimated that 600,000 people died in the associated Cambodian Civil War (1970–75) from all causes, among all parties.
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An estimated 62,000 died in Laos.
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THE COLD WAR

East-West Confrontation

During the forty years of their bipolar global conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union had an obsession about gaining spaces on the game board. Each side tried to control as many countries as possible regardless of their strategic or economic value. In fact, when you look down the list of major hot wars during the Cold War, you’ll see the most worthless collection of countries you can possibly imagine. Except for Indonesia, none stand out as major suppliers of oil, metals, food, or cash crops, and except for Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Greece, none adjoin any important shipping lanes. The fact that millions of people died for control of these places may be the best proof that both sides in the Cold War were sincerely motivated by ideology. If the Soviet Union and United States had been concerned with only economic self-interest, they would have let these countries go without a fight. As it was, they lost lives and money and gained almost nothing tangible in return.

On the other hand, wars that were unprofitable to the country as a whole could still produce a profit for certain powerful factions. The Cold War created a feedback loop in which the threat of powerful ideological enemies required large, standing armies, which then required a massive investment in the military, which created a powerful class of people whose wealth and livelihood depended on continued military spending, which could be justified only by a constant threat of war. Also, the ready availability of this military-industrial complex made it temptingly easy for the leaders of the great powers to resort to arms whenever an international dispute flared up.

Here’s a quick list of the deadliest proxy wars of the bipolar era, beginning with the bloodiest:

1.
Vietnam (1959–75): 3,500,000 dead in Vietnam. Direct American involvement on behalf of the government against Communist rebels.

2.
Korea (1950–53): 3,000,000 dead. Direct Western involvement on behalf of South Korea, and direct Chinese involvement on behalf of North Korea.

3.
Afghanistan (1979–92): 1,500,000 dead. Direct Soviet involvement on behalf of the government against mujahideen rebels.

4.
Mozambique (1975–92): 800,000 dead. Western-oriented rebels versus a Communist government.

5.
Cambodia (1970–75): 600,000 dead. Direct American involvement on behalf of the government against Communist rebels.

6.
Angola (1975–94): 500,000 dead. Direct Cuban involvement on behalf of the government against Western-oriented rebels.

7.
Indonesia (1965–66): 400,000 dead. A Western-oriented government massacred the leftist opposition.

8.
Guatemala (1960–96): 200,000 dead. Leftist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.
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9.
Greece (1943–49): 160,000 dead. Communist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.
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10.
El Salvador (1979–92): 75,000 dead. Leftist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.

11.
Laos (to 1973): 62,000 dead. American assistance on behalf of the government against Communist rebels.
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12.
South Korea (1948–49): 60,000 dead. Leftist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.

13.
Philippines (from 1972): 43,000 dead. Communist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.
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14.
Argentina (1976–83): 30,000 dead. Western-oriented government oppressing the leftist opposition.
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15.
Nicaragua (1972–79): 30,000 dead. Communist rebels versus a Western-oriented government.
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16.
Nicaragua (1982–90): 30,000 dead. Western-oriented rebels versus a Communist government.
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This totals some 11 million people who died in various conflicts where the Americans supplied one side and the Soviets supplied the other. Although it is far beyond the scope of this book to meticulously untangle each of these conflicts and assign blame to either the Communists or the West, if you hear someone assert that the nuclear standoff between the superpowers created an unprecedented era of international peace, they are probably forgetting these 11 million lives.

INDONESIAN PURGE

Death toll:
400,000
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Rank:
81

Type:
ideological purge

Broad dividing line:
army vs. leftists

Time frame:
1965–66

Location and major state participant:
Indonesia

Who usually gets the most blame:
Suharto, CIA

The easily answerable questions that everyone asks:
Is Sukarno the same person as Suharto? Don’t they have first names?
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The Year of Living Dangerously

On September 1, 1965, a small faction of junior officers kidnapped six of Indonesia’s top generals. Details are murky, but it seems to have been the first stage in a coup d’etat. When the scheme went bad, the insurgents panicked and killed their prisoners, stuffing their bodies down a well. The sole survivor was General Abdul Nasution, who had jumped over the back wall in his yard into the yard of the Iraqi ambassador next door after an attack on his home killed his six-year-old daughter and his aide.

After escaping the abduction attempt, General Nasution reported to the senior surviving officer, General Suharto, who had somehow not appeared on the list of assassination targets. General Suharto blamed the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party—at the time, the world’s third largest Communist party and Maoist in orientation—for the attempted coup. Others find it mighty suspicious that the plotters had completely forgotten to put Suharto on their list of targets. Not only did he survive without a scratch, the attacks definitely worked out to his advantage.

The president of Indonesia at the time was Sukarno, the old freedom fighter who had taken Indonesia out of the Dutch empire after World War II. In the 1950s, Sukarno had helped found the nonaligned movement, which tried to organize a “third world” that remained outside the Soviet and American blocs. He had begun as a properly democratic president with elections and a free press, but as the years passed he spun a tight cocoon of power around himself until he emerged like a butterfly as president-for-life in 1963. To keep the opposition safely in check, members of the Indonesian parliament were appointed rather than elected under a policy Sukarno called Guided Democracy.

Indonesia stayed calm for a few weeks after the attempted coup of September 1965, but soon the military began to round up and kill anyone suspected of Communist sympathies. It drew up lists that included leftists of all kinds—Communists of course, but also trade unionists, students, and journalists—and summarily executed thousands of them. Some were killed in raids that wiped out entire families or destroyed uncooperative villages as well. Other suspects were hauled into local jails to be roughly interrogated and ignored for several weeks, until the day came when they were taken to a conveniently desolate spot and shot. According to several former U.S. officials, American intelligence personnel supplied the Indonesian military with the names of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people they wanted removed.
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The soldiers and their vigilante assistants also targeted ethnic Chinese, members of a merchant community that had been part of Southeast Asian culture for generations, on the rumor that they were all agents of Mao.

Most of the raids took place at night as masked men whisked prisoners into oblivion. One eyewitness describes hiding in the bushes one night watching masked vigilantes drive up to the riverbank with truckloads of prisoners, many of whom he recognized as neighbors and teachers. They were dragged out and beheaded with machetes. Their heads were stuffed into bags and kept, while the bodies were pushed into the water to float away.
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Almost a half-million people were hunted down and killed during the purge; 600,000 were imprisoned without trial, often for years. Thousands were exiled to penal colonies across the archipelago, where many were worked to death.

President Sukarno was powerless to control his military, and he officially gave up trying in March 1966, when he relinquished control of the country to General Suharto, who then served as acting president for about a year until he promoted himself to real president. Suharto eased Indonesia away from nonaligned status and turned his foreign policy increasingly toward the American bloc.
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