In Indonesia , the hardline anti-communist General Suharto wrested control of the state from his predecessor Sukarno in an attempt to establish a " New Order " . From 1965 to 1966 , with the aid of the United States and other Western governments , the military led the mass killing of more than 500,000 members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party and other leftist organizations , and detained hundreds of thousands more in prison camps around the country under extremely inhumane conditions . A top-secret CIA report stated that the massacres " rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century , along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s , the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War , and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s . " These killings served U.S. strategic interests and constitute a major turning point in the Cold War as the balance of power shifted in Southeast Asia
led the mass killing
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66
Cold War