How UK trained Indonesian students who went on to help massacre500,000 people and onst Sukarno and who are now raking in money from American oil companies... and how UK is helping make Northeast Thailand safe for the Chase Manhattan Bank
(all without really trying)
By DARRELL RICE
A
American corporations have made a killing in Indonesia.   And that's a horrible, sick pun.
¢ The corporations made a financial killing following the downfall of Sukarno in Indonesia and the rise of General Suharto, who has proved to be much more friendly toward them than his predecessor.   Suharto rose to power over the dead bodies of from 200, 000 to 500, 000 Indonesians (allegedly Communist party members) massacred in 1965.
All this came about with the help of U.S. government agencies, private foundations and universities.   The University of Kentucky, although mostly unwittingly, had a part in it.   In addition, UK currently is playing a role in counter-insurgency efforts in Thailand, again, apparently unknowingly.
In recent years governmental agencies and private foundations have increasingly involved personnel and resources of universities in their overseas machinations. Sometimes the universities have been prostituted willingly into doing defense research and related tasks.   This has been especially true of the country's "leading" schools.
But often, individual academicians have been deceived by agencies and foundations posing as froces of benevolent humanitarianism into carrying out projects which actually have equally reprehensible purposes as developing chemical-biological weapons.   The April 2 issue of "The Student Mobilizer" as well as subsequent information compiled shortly afterwards by the Pacific Studies Center reveal just how massive the "military-industrial-academic complex" has become.
These stories reveal how innocent-seeming studies with such esoteric titles as "Ethnology of the Akah" and "A
EDITOR'S NOTE:  Background material for this story has been supplied by the Pacific Studies Center; the April 2, 1970, issue of "The Student Mobilizer, " and a story by David Ransom in the (current) October issue of "Ramparts. "
Social-Anthropological Study of the Yao People of Thai-, land" are put to use by military agencies in their efforts to manipulate the political situations in other countries to serve American and, ultimately, corporate interests. Usually, the social scientists who make these government-or foundation-funded studies have no idea what use is being made of their work.   That's because U.S. counter-insurgency efforts are of two types.
The first is plain old hard-core counter-insurgency. That's where insurgent elements are dealt with directly by suppression.   The second variety is more subtle. In order to contain insurgent movements as much as possible, government agencies and foundations seek to pacify potential participants by meeting the most obvious needs of "sensitive" areas.   Thus, they give the illusion that the existing local government is concerned about the problems of the area and hopefully prevent it from being toppled and replaced by a more hostile regime.   It's a case of more or less alternating the carrot and the stick, hard-core counter-insurgency and soft-core counter-insurgency. Universitites have been enlisted for both kinds. UK's programs are of the "carrot" variety.
Kentucky has had three separate contracts in overseas development.   Two of them were in Indonesia between 1956 and 1966.   Then UK took up in Thailand in 1967 where it had left off in Indonesia and presently is scheduled to be there until 1975.
A hailand is a country of many ethnic minorities ruled by a government that is theoretically democratic but which is in fact a military dictatorship.   The men who run Thailand were described in a Chicago Daily News Service story by Raymond Coffey:  "The military men built close ties with the United States, provided bases from which much of the U.S. bombing in Vietnam was done, squeezed a huge payment out of the Americans in return for sending troops to
blue-tail fly/5