Despite being met with widespread disbelief and dismissal, could Donald Trump’s AI-generated vision of ‘Trump Gaza’ be following the earlier example set by Bali? Reflecting on the tourism boom after Indonesia’s deadly coup in 1965, Adam Robertson Charlton says this would not be the first time the US has been complicit in atrocities on foreign soil before using tourism to cover it up.
Even by Donald Trump’s standards, the reel, shared to the president’s Instagram, felt uniquely deranged. An AI-generated Gaza in ruins. Children rummage through the rubble, while other Gazans shuffle between devastated apartment blocks.
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‘What’s Next?’ reads the text, in American red, white and blue. Then, cranes begin to appear, transitioning the scene into a beachfront view, resplendent with hotel skyscrapers. Belly dancers dance, while the music intones “no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here”.
We see a Trump Gaza hotel, shining gold, while the US president sips cocktails with Benjamin Netanyahu beside a pool.
Condemnation was swift, but both detractors and advocates for the president were at pains to highlight the surrealism of the video.
Despite Trump doubling down on his vision for a “riviera of the Middle East”, which he said would create an “unlimited amount of jobs and housing for the people of the area”, the consensus was that, while spectacularly distasteful, such a scheme was fantasy.
Yet if it came to fruition, it would not be the first time that the US has been complicit in an atrocity on foreign soil before using tourism to cover it up.
In 1965, the US and UK helped the Indonesian Army to overthrow the country’s president, Sukarno. In the aftermath of the coup, more than 500,000 members of the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, were murdered by the military and anti-communist militias, in mass killings that some academics have argued constituted a genocide.
In the following years, the island of Bali, where perhaps the worst atrocities took place, was transformed into a luxury holiday destination with money from USAID and the World Bank.
Tourists at one of Bali’s beaches, a large contributor to the success of their tourism industry. Photo by Bernard Hermant via Unsplash.
The complicity of the CIA in the mass killings is well documented, but declassified documents seen while researching this story go further, suggesting a strategy to not only eliminate Indonesia’s Communist Party, but to intentionally transform Bali into a world-renowned tourism destination in the aftermath. A strategy designed and delivered by some of the most senior officials in Washington.
The path to 1965 – and the growing power of the PKI, Indonesia’s Communist Party
By the mid 1960s, the PKI’s three million members made it the largest communist party in the world, outside of China and the Soviet Union.
Although committed to nonviolence and not in power, the party had significant influence in the villages of rural Indonesia, and on the country’s charismatic leader, Sukarno. A towering figure in the global Non-Aligned Movement, Sukarno was influential in plotting a path between the US and Soviet Union, seeking a third way, led by developing nations in the Global South.
But as communist forces appeared to gather momentum in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, the United States and its allies became increasingly suspicious of Sukarno, and the influence that the Communist Party exercised in Indonesia.
To counterbalance the power of the PKI, the US began to woo the only other major player in Indonesian politics besides Sukarno and the communists, the army.
In the years leading up to 1965, thousands of Indonesian Army officers were trained in the United States. Even as relations soured, and the US began cutting aid to Indonesia in 1964, senior officials agreed to quietly continue the training programme, which they felt was “an important link to the Indonesian military”, but which did “not bolster Sukarno”.
According to Vincent Bevin, in his book The Jakarta Method, The CIA and MI6 also stepped up their psychological warfare operations in Indonesia, sowing misinformation about the threat of a communist takeover or a military coup.
‘Every village in Bali has a mass grave’ – Sukarno Vs Suharto
In this febrile atmosphere, a group of apparently loyal army officers rounded up six senior generals with links to the United States. It would seem they planned to arrest them and bring them to Sukarno.
What happened next, and the extent to which the US was involved, will remain unknown unless the CIA declassifies more information. What we do know is that by the time Sukarno arrived, all six generals had been shot or stabbed to death.
In the subsequent chaos, the newly top ranking – and unhelpfully named – General Suharto, seized power, and sidelined Sukarno. the Indonesian president would later be arrested and killed.
In a time before the internet, news of the coup arrived in Washington long before it did in many of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands. Yet in the following months, the army’s takeover unleashed a wave of bloodletting across the country, which would see more than 500,000 people murdered for alleged ties to the communist party.
Many of these people were targeted using kill lists provided by the US Embassy in Jakarta, and many had no ties at all. As for those who were correctly identified, they were executed for being part of an up-until-then entirely legal and nonviolent organisation.
The beautiful island of Bali, with its Hindu and Buddhist majority, was the heartland of the PKI. As such, the killings reached their frenzied crescendo there.
Speaking in 2010, Dr I Ngurah Suryawan, whose PhD sought to determine the extent of the killings, came to the conclusion that “virtually every village in Bali has a mass grave”.
Soldiers, police officers, and Islamist militiamen rounded up men, women and teenagers from across the island.
After being imprisoned, interrogated, and often tortured in scenes similar to those now unfolding in Gaza, they were driven to remote locations and executed en masse.
According to two books, The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevin, and The Dark Side of Paradise by Geoffrey Robinson, Bali’s beaches became mass graves; shallow pits dug in the sand. In many cases, bodies were simply dumped in the surf at night.
On 25 February 1966, the US Embassy in Jakarta sent an airgram to Washington. It estimated that 80,000 people associated with the PKI had been murdered in Bali, “with no end in sight”.
As US Secretary of Defence, we can assume this message landed on the desk of one Robert McNamara – the aforementioned official proposing to cut aid to Indonesia, but maintain ties with the military. While we cannot know for sure whether McNamara saw that airgram, we do know that he thought the entire thing was a resounding success.
Briefing President Johnson in March 1967, McNamara explained that “the Indonesian Army, led by General Suharto, put down a Communist-inspired coup d’etat and then proceeded to eliminate the three million member Indonesian Communist Party as an effective political organization”.
He continued, “I believe that our Military Assistance Program to Indonesia during the past few years contributed significantly to the Army’s anticommunist, pro-U.S. orientation and encouraged it to move against the PKI when the opportunity was presented”.
To hide mass killings in plain sight
In the immediate aftermath of the mass killings, waves of western development began to crash upon the beaches where so many had just been killed.
In 1966, the InterContinental Bali Beach Hotel, a ten-storey, 566-room leisure complex, opened on Sanur Beach. Still the tallest building on the island, it asserted an international new era for Bali.
To quote the World Bank, “while attracting relatively little foreign tourism prior to 1967, in the years between 1967 and 1973 Indonesia experienced rapid growth in the sector. During this six-year period the number of visitors to the country increased by more than 50% annually, reaching an estimated 300,000 visitors by 1973”.
Bali was at the forefront of this. As western capital flowed into the island’s exploding tourism sector, the World Bank established the ‘Bali Tourism Project’, a $16 million programme which oversaw the creation of a vast complex of hotels and resorts at Nusa Dua, on the island’s southern tip.
Financed by organisations like USAID and the World Bank, Indonesia’s New Order Regime buried the mass killings – both figuratively and literally – under hotels, swimming pools, beach bars and bikini-clad westerners with money to spend.
Luxury hotels sprawling above the bones of the disappeared is a recurrent image in the work of Balinese artist and musician, Made Bayak. This, he says, is of course a metaphor; the Bali of mass tourism is built on a Bali of mass graves, but it is also quite literal.
‘Industry, hidden history and legacy of the island of the gods.’ Illustration by Made Bayak.
“It is a reality that occurs in Bali” says Made. “During the construction of foundations, some hotels and resorts found many human bones in the coastal areas. Several years ago, some beaches that experienced abrasion also showed piles of human bones. Many of these incidents were not reported but were finished with certain ceremonies or rituals. It was never discussed again”.
Made is far from the only person with a story about mass graves buried beneath hotels; known yet never reported.
While working in Bali during the 1990s, the Australian academic Denis Byrne was, “startled to hear a…friend of a friend” mention that “two thousand communists lay buried beneath the Oberoi, a five star beach-side hotel which had been built by the government in the early 1970s and then subsequently privatized”.
The mutual friend had been married to the manager, and “some local women had told her that thousands of communists killed in 1965 had been buried in that space between the sea and the fields which had become the site of the hotel”.
‘Bali by the Backroads’, a National Geographic article
In 1969, three years after 5% of the population had been murdered, the journalist Gilbert M Grosvenor and his photographer wife Donna visited Bali for National Geographic. Their account, a series of vignettes with titles like ‘Balinese Life a Continuing Celebration’, captures the terrifying speed at which the island had been sanitised for western pleasure-seekers.
Page of the National Geographic discussing and depicting the Balinese life and culture.
The article paints a picture of Bali familiar to many of us today – a bangled dancer “with eloquence in her fingers” and mystical coming of age ceremonies, all set against a backdrop of rice paddies, weaving their way into the clouds.
While there is one mention of an attempted “communist coup”, it only serves to tee up Grosvenor’s next joke that “today, the greatest threat Bali faces is an invasion of tourists”.
He continues, “Along the glistening sand fronting the Hotel Bali Beach, bikini clad sun worshipers brave the tranquil waters of the reef protected lagoon. The Bali Beach, well managed by Inter-Continental Hotels, has provided spirited conversation since its completion in 1966”.
Something Grosvenor does notice, however, is a certain reticence among the Balinese themselves to frolic in the surf. “We find no pleasure splashing in the sea”, he is told by the locals. He explains that “the Balinese regard the sea as the domain of their demons”.
Fortunately, he writes, “for tourists, demons pose little threat”. In a sense of course, he was right.
A legacy of silence
Today, six million tourists visit Bali every year, and the sector accounts for 80% of the island’s economy.
Freddie Speak, a British national, works for a company which offers package tours to a few of these six million visitors. He moved to Bali in 2019.
Freddie became aware that something had happened in the 1960s when someone on his tour asked him about the killings. Prior to that it had gone undiscussed. Both at work, and among his friends.
“I think people who are coming on the tours have found themselves on our website, and they’re scrolling through, and they just think, ‘oh, Bali looks nice’. And it’s a cheap tour; it’s nice accommodation. So yeah, I’m not sure 95% of them would know about the history of it. No, I don’t think they’re researching it before they come”.
Tourist at the Balinese Split Gate Walkway. Image by Luiz Guimaraes via Unsplash.
Freddie reckons that among the 20 or 30 people that he’s good friends with in Bali, “apart from being vaguely aware that something happened, 90% of them wouldn’t know much about what it was”.
Even among Balinese friends, “it doesn’t really come up in anything, really, there’s never any sort of conversation about it. You never hear people reference it”.
Turning the scene of a massacre into one of the most visited places on the planet is a counterintuitive way to conceal it. While not everyone who visits Bali is interested in its rich history and culture, many are.
But for most, there is a permitted, unburied past in Bali. A history and culture which exists beyond the resorts, not beneath them.
As Gilbert M Grosvenor demonstrated, it was possible within just three years of the killings to feel like you’d saturated yourself in Balinese history and culture, while staying at the InterContinental, and missing the bones beneath your feet.
An American cover-up?
So just how much did US officials know about the cover-up? While we know that they were complicit in the mass killings because people like Robert McNamara bragged about it to the president, the link between Washington and the Bali tourism boom is murky.
To many journalists and activists, the torrent of money which flowed from USAID and the World Bank into Bali and Indonesia following the killings, earmarked for airports, tourism infrastructure, and resort complexes like Nusa Dua, has always suggested a degree of coordination between the US and Suharto’s New Order Regime. Hard evidence, however, has been scant.
But in the process of researching this story, a document, declassified by the World Bank, has come to the surface. It goes very close to proving a continuum in the thinking of one senior American official, from supporting the Indonesian Army, to eliminating the PKI, and then burying the evidence under Bali’s hotel boom. That official is Robert McNamara.
In February 1968, a year after briefing Johnson about Indonesia, McNamara resigned as Defence Secretary, due in large part to the disastrous war in Vietnam. One month later, he was appointed president of the World Bank.
Just a month and a half after that, McNamara addressed a director’s meeting at a subsidiary of the World Bank. The minutes aren’t publicly available, but we know he spoke because it inspired an excited response from one attendee, Singapore’s Finance Minister.
In his letter, addressed to a senior World Bank official who evidently spoke alongside McNamara, the Minister writes,
“I have been very much interested by the statements made by yourself and Mr. McNamara at the meeting of Executive Directors of IBRD on 14th May, 1968. You will be glad to hear that there are very good prospects of getting Singapore and U.S. capital to put up hotels in Bali, and the Indonesian Government has expressed its willingness to offer favourable terms to foreign investment in these hotels”.
While we may never know exactly what McNamara said, we can only assume that fresh from fomenting the atrocities as Defence Secretary, and less than two months into his presidency at the World Bank, McNamara was pushing for hotels to be built in Bali.
Crucially, this document has been archived by the World Bank in a file titled, ‘Indonesia – Bali Tourism Project – Negotiations 01’, meaning this was not just idle talk among bank directors. Rather, it was the groundwork for the $16 million World Bank programme which built the Nusa Dua resort complex.
In June 1968, Robert McNamara made his first foreign visit as president of the World Bank to Indonesia. The Bank website states that, “From the beginning of his tenure as president of the World Bank Group, President McNamara took special interest in Indonesia”.
Robert McNamara (left) during his visit to Indonesia in June 1968.
A little like Gilbert M Grosvenor’s assertion that tourists need not fear Bali’s beaches like the Balinese do, there is some truth in the Bank’s statement. Yet I suspect the families of those buried beneath Bali’s hotels may wish McNamara had shown a little less interest in their country.
The relationship between mass killings and tourism is not unique to Bali. Professor John Roosa, author of Buried Histories, a book about the anti-communist masscres , points out that “Bali could be included in a general survey of tourist places that have been built on sites of mass murder and violent expropriations of land. All the settler colonies have such places, the US, Canada, Australia, et cetera”.
That said, the speed, coordination, and ultimate success of the cover-up in Bali make it uniquely stark and disturbing.
Could Trump’s dream of doing something similar in Gaza become a reality? It feels profoundly unlikely. Yet the widespread tone of dismissal following his video and statement, the implication that such a thing could only happen in an alternate universe, rather than a mere 50 years ago in Indonesia, demonstrates how little 1965 and its aftermath is known.
Let us hope that this failure to remember does not destine us to repeat.
*Featured image by Michaela Římáková via Unsplash.
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