Ly a Nottingham reader RIGHT-/ING KILL 100,000 INDONESIAN COMMUNISTS

"Mere people have been killed in the Indonesian revolt in the past three months than have died in the Vietnam war in the past five years..." This is the conclusion ;:rained from a careful sifting of reports, according to the Sunday Times reporter Nicholas Carroll. Writing in the Jenuary end issue of that paper, he goes on to say: "Figures ziven of the number killed vary between 20,000 and 200000, but fairly conservative estimates by Western diplomats put the figure at around 100,000. European engineers, business men and other foreign travellers returning from up-country speak of rivers filled with floating decapitated corpses, One traveller said he had seen children in a village playing football with the severed heads of Communist supporters. The murders have mostly been the work of Muslims who suffered grievously at the hands of the Communists before the abortive coup d'etat last October, " aeeett is reliably reported that on the island of Bali alone between 3,000 and 4,000 were killed in the past ten days end Army helicopters had to be flown in to restore order....There is still no final confirmation that D.N. Aidit, the Communist leader, was exccuted at the end cf November, but most diplomatic missions believe the story is probably true, The eovernnental position is still confused. Although President Sockarno is still nominally at the head of affairs, with a Cabinet of some 100 Ministers going daily to their offices, there is little question that the real master of the country is General Nasution, the Defence Minister, who escaped assassination on the night of September 30 by climbing over his: garden wall..»..There is no sipn at present that the Arny intends to take over formally, though in practice its writ runs nominally everywhere outside of Jakartae In Sumatra there is in effect a military state with a statee..."