Today in Labor History March 23, 1980: Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador gave a speech appealing to the men of the Salvadoran armed forces to stop killing Salvadoran civilians. The next day, they assassinated him, too.
Today in Labor History March 12, 1967: Suharto took power from Sukarno in Indonesia. He ruled Indonesia as an authoritarian, kleptocratic dictator for 31 years, and is widely considered one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators of the 20th century. During that time, he amassed a fortune worth $38 billion. Suharto rose to power under Sukarno during the 1965-1966 genocide. During that ostensibly anti-Communist purge, Suharto’s troops murdered 1-3 million communists, labor activists, peasants and ethnic minorities. During that genocide, he received support military and economic from both the U.S. and the U.K. In 1974, the Suharto regime, with approval of U.S. president Gerald Ford, invaded East Timor, killing over 200,000 Timorese. Another 75,000-200,000 died from starvation and disease. The current Indonesian government is considering awarding him the posthumous honor of National Hero.
A secretive committee of senior officials in Ethiopia’s largest and most populous region, Oromiya, has ordered extra-judicial killings and illegal detentions to crush an insurgency there, a Reuters investigation has found. Reuters interviewed more than 30 federal and local officials, judges, lawyers and victims of abuses by...
"An estimated 90,000 Kenyans were slaughtered in the Kikuyu uprising while just over a thousand were hanged on a portable gibbet. Some 160,000 were detained in internment camps where torture was routine.
"One of Britain’s victims was US President Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who was arrested in 1949, and tortured by having pins inserted under his fingernails."
Kitson brought to Belfast his experiences in Kenya, fighting the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army (exotically dubbed the “Mau Mau” by the British) in the early 1950s where he honed a practice of using “turned” or “converted” rebels into “counter-gangs”.
Today in Labor History January 16, 1992: The government of El Salvador and the FMLN rebels signed a peace accord, formally ending their 12-year-old civil war. 75,000 people died in that war, mostly civilians, and mostly at the hands of the military and government-supported death squads. 25% of the population became refugees. The U.S. taxpayers heavily subsided the Salvadoran government and its death squads and also trained many of them at the School of the Americas (AKA School of the Assassins), in Fort Benning, Georgia. The FMLN was named after Farabundo Marti, a Salvadoran revolutionary from the 1930s, who led a communist uprising that created the short-lived Salvadoran soviet, the first soviet in the western hemisphere. The Martinez dictatorship then slaughtered over 40,000, mostly indigenous people, in a genocide known as La Matanza. Martinez was one of the first world leaders to recognize Hitler.
Today in Labor History January 10, 1981: The FMLN launched its first major offensive against the Salvadoran military. As a result, they gained control of the departments of Morazan and Chalatenango. They held onto these regions of El Salvador for most of the civil war. In 1989, it became clear after their “final” offensive, that the government could not defeat them. At this point, the U.S., which had previously supported the government’s genocidal war against the Salvadoran people, began to support negotiations. Over 75,000 people died in the war from 1979-1992, plus another 8,000 disappeared. The United Nations estimated that 85% of all civilian killings during the civil war were committed by government forces and government-supported death squads. The government and death squads also routinely committed kidnapping, torture, and murder of suspected FMLN sympathizers.
Today in Labor History October 8, 1965: The Indonesian military, led by future dictator Suharto, began torturing and massacring thousands of "suspected" Communists, leading ultimately to the overthrow of leftist President Sukarno. Other targets of the murders were members of the Gerwani women’s movement, trade unionists, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese, atheists, teachers, students, and alleged leftists in general. The U.S. embassy provided the death squads with the names of suspected “communists.” Intelligence agencies from the U.S., U.K., and Australia provided anti-communist propaganda, as well as military and logistical aid. Overall, the genocide (1965-1966) led to 500,000 to 1.2 million civilian deaths and 1.5 million imprisoned. A top-secret CIA report from 1968 called the massacres "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s." Nevertheless, Western media either downplayed the events, or celebrated them. Suharto remained in power until 1998, continuing to imprison, torture and slaughter workers and civilians. He also presided over the East Timor Genocide of up to 300,000 people in the 1970’s.
How a secretive Ethiopian security committee ordered killings, arrests: Reuters (www.reuters.com)
A secretive committee of senior officials in Ethiopia’s largest and most populous region, Oromiya, has ordered extra-judicial killings and illegal detentions to crush an insurgency there, a Reuters investigation has found. Reuters interviewed more than 30 federal and local officials, judges, lawyers and victims of abuses by...