On Sunday the 4th of March the East Java regional conference of the Indonesian National Liberation Party of Unity, or PAPERNAS, was viciously attacked by the right wing and anti-communist FAKI militia (Front Anti Komunis Indonesia). About a hundred FAKI thugs, wielding knives, fought their way into the conference venue, where PAPERNAS activists fought to defend themselves and their conference. PAPERNAS activists sent out urgent appeals for solidarity from inside the venue. Among them where Dita Sari, a famous trade union organiser and the PAPERNAS candidate for presidential elections in 2009. Read more...

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Indonesia was estimated in the 1950s to be the fifth richest country in the world in natural resources, and had long been the target of a drive by US imperialism to dominate its natural wealth and to win its rulers to become part of Washington’s worldwide anticommunist alliance. This was the era of a series of military coups to produce “regime change” in semi colonial countries such as Mossadegh was removed in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Read more...

The end of May saw the Indonesian military launch an all out offensive on Aceh. In a land, sea and air assault 40,000 troops and military police stormed into villages throughout the province. It was Indonesia’s largest military operation since the invasion of East Timor in 1975. The aim is to wipe out the estimated 5,000 guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) who are fighting for independence. Read more...

Since the Bali bombing, which mainly killed young Australian holidaymakers, Australia has been drawn even more directly into the “war against terror". But the media refuse look at the role of the west in installing the Suharto regime in Indonesia which was responsible for terror on a much greater scale than the Bali bombing. Read more...

President Abdurrahman Wahid's position was shaken after the Indonesian Parliament voted 393 to four to censure him for his involvement in two corruption scandals. Read more...

A week of horrific ethnic clashes occurred in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan at the end of Read more...

The decision of the Indonesian parliament at the end of May to censure President Abdurrahman Wahid for a third time opens the way for his removal. Read more...

The ousting of Suharto marks the beginning, not the end, of the Indonesian revolution. For nearly a third of a century he exercised an iron grip on this vast country of 210 million people.

The coalescence of a student-led movement for democracy with a revolt of the urban masses against the economic crisis and the IMF austerity measures, brought about his downfall.

However, Suharto's replacement by his vice-president Jusuf Habibie is an attempt to save the bureaucratic military regime not to replace it with a democratic one.

It is an attempt to head off revolution. Read more...