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This blogger sums it up -
The Soetoros and the Indonesian Massacres 1965-1999 PatriotDEMs
Obama's mother Stanley Anne Dunham had a very short relationship with Obama’s father in the early 1960s and then went to College, first in Washington and then in Hawai. In 1967 she got engaged to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian army officer (like herself, a student of Russian in the University of Hawaii) and in 1968 they went to live in Indonesia. There she worked for the US Embassy in Jakarta and for the Ford Foundation in rural parts of East and West Timor. Obama lived there with her from the age of 8-11 and visited her there (and in Pakistan) summers thereafter. He was formally adopted by Lolo Soetoro and has a half sister. The marriage ended by 1970 but she stayed on in Indonesia.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.
Stanley Anne Dunahm Soetoro (Obama's mother) is portrayed in the media as a free spirit radical with a love for community development. Her work for the Ford Foundation and World Bank is mentioned.
Indonesia in 1968 was going through the later stages of an anti-communist bloodbath. There was a two stage coup (starting 1965) against the joint government of Sukarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) : the US Intelligence services trained moslem students and a massacre of officers was staged to incite a bloodbath against the communists. In the initial stage at least 500,000 communist families, men, women and children were butchered by hand and in the following years hundreds of thousands imprisoned and a million or more estimated dead.
Sukarno's progressive regime that had kept Indonesia's oil and other natural hands out of the control on the multi national corporations was ended and an auction similar to the one last week in Iraq took place. A military regime of extraordinary brutality was installed. Slave labour was common in rural areas.
The horrific events and American role is described here:
The CIA in Indonesia, 1965-1967
How the CIA handed over lists of names of PKI cadres to their killers
CIA in Indonesia, 1965
Stanley Anne Dunham-Soetoro’s worked at first for the US embassy in Jakarta and then for the Ford Foundation/USAID. Her work is described glowingly, without mention of massacres, here
Spotlight on Alumni: EWC Alumna Ann Dunham— Mother to President Obama and Champion of Women’s Rights and Economic Justice
This article gives a lot of nitty gritty information about the Asian CIA set up, based for some time in Manila, but also covering Indonesia.Dunham’s research and consulting work took her around the world. She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up village credit programs, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta championing women’s issues, and later in 1986 she served in Pakistan as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank focusing on women's welfare. In 1988, she joined Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Indonesia’s oldest bank, and helped develop the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor, which enabled people from rural areas to engage in cottage industries and emerge from poverty. As a pioneer in the field of microfinance, her anthropological research helped shape the policies set by the Bank. At present the Bank’s microfinance program is the world leader in terms of savers, with an average of 31 million members, according to MIX (Microfinance Information eXchange Inc.)
Equipo Nizkor - Covert Operations and the CIA's Hidden History in the Philippines
Training of students like Lolo Soetoro was a plank of the US / CIA strategy for bringing Indonesia under control. The Ford Foundation is named as the main Non-governmental funding agency involved.American sociologist James Petras describes how progressive non-government organizations can be neutralized, if not coopted, thru US government, big business-backed funding agencies or CIA fronts and conduits masquerading as foundations. The purpose, according to Petras, is "to mystify and deflect discontent away from direct attacks on the corporate/banking power structure and profits toward local micro-projects ...that avoids class analysis of imperialism and capitalist exploitation."
Neo-liberalism today, according to Petras, encourages NGOs to "emphasize projects, not movements; they 'mobilize' people to produce at the margins, not to struggle to control the means of production and wealth; they focus on the technical financial aspects of projects not on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people."
While using the language of the Left such as "people empowerment," "gender equality," "sustainable development" etc., these NGOs funded by USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Asia Foundation, etc. have become linked to a framework of collaboration with donors and even with government agencies with whom they have partnerships that subordinate activity to nonconfrontational politics, rather than militant mass mobilization. (Petras, 1999)
It must be emphasized that the US places high premium on the ideological legitimation of its continuing neo-colonial domination over the Philipines and, as such, depends heavily on US-financed and US-sponsored institutions, especially on the ideological front. Thus, grants are generously poured in by such agencies like USAID, NED, Asia Foundation and the big business-sponsored Ford Foundation.
Building an Elite for Indonesia
Obama described his mother in Dreams of My Father (one of very few references to her)
"The poverty, the corruption, the constant scramble for security . . . remained all around me and bred a relentless skepticism. My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess. . . . In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hard-ship . . . she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."
Chicago Reader | Obama-rama: What Makes Obama Run? Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack <b style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Obama</b> doesn't need another career. But he's entering politics to get back to his true passion--c
Obama has never mentioned the political situation in Indonesia or the devastating impacts it had on the people his mother worked with. He does describe his mother as a strong, profound influence on his political life.
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Originally Posted by Asi-Irish
