Remember Wikileaks, the controversial non-profit organisation that publishes classified information from anonymous sources? It’s been a while since most of us have heard from them, but they’re still sitting on a mountain of secret information that they’re slowly releasing to the public.
In a press release dated May 28, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange announced the release of over half a million US State Department cables from 1978, detailing US interactions and observations on just about every country in the world.
Of particularly interest to us, the new release includes 3,289 new documents on Indonesia.
Since the documents are from 36 years in the past, it is unlikely that they will contain any political bombshells relevant to today. However, they do give a fascinating and frank glimpse into history during that time period, specifically the preoccupations of the US government in Indonesia.
As Assange notes in his press release, many of the leaked documents on Indonesia focus on “the increasing student demonstrations protesting against various aspects of Suharto’s rule, including the lack of presidential term limits. A number of student activists were imprisoned, and Suharto established the “Normalization of Campus Life.”
The “Normalization of Campus Life” was essentially a term used by the government to describe breaking the will of student protestors in order to prevent further demonstrations and the formation of organizations with anti-government sentiment.
One document contained in the leak, titled “Rectors tasked with normalization of campus life” describes how rectors from Indonesia’s 40 largest universities were summoned to Jakarta on April 14-15, 1978, for closed-door consultations with government ministers as well as military and intelligence leaders to discuss “normalization” plans:
The last time Wikileaks made headlines in Indonesia was in July of last year, when it leaked documents about a multinational corruption case taking place in Australian in which former presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Megawati Sukarnoputri were mentioned (a leak so sensitive that the Australian government put a gag order on the Australian media not to report the details of it).
