The post appeared to be an example of anti-Muslim sentiment in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where sectarian violence had flared between Buddhist communities and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
The Southeast Asian nation faces charges of genocide at the UN’s top court after the military drove out about 750,000 Rohingya Muslim minority in a supposed crackdown on militants in 2017.
Posts similarly claiming Indonesia’s Muslims massacred millions of Buddhists have been shared more than 1,700 times on Facebook since at least 2022 here, here, here, here and here.
The claims are false, several scholars told AFP.
‘Total lie’
Upwards of half a million people were massacred across Indonesia between October 1965 and March 1966, in a bloody spectacle that ushered in the long rule of dictator Suharto.
The killings led to the collapse of the now-banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), once among the biggest in the world behind China and the Soviet Union.
But it was “impossible” for eight million Buddhists to have died then, said anthropologist Roberto Rizzo who specialises in research about the history of Buddhism in Indonesia (archived link).
“There weren’t so many Buddhists in Indonesia at any time in the country’s modern history,” he told AFP. Buddhists might have been killed but “definitely not in massive numbers”, he added.
Saskia E. Wieringa, chair of the International People’s Tribunal 1965, a people’s court set up by activists that held hearings on the violence, separately said the claims were “a total lie” (archived link).
The victims were targeted mainly “because they were considered to belong to a communist organisation”, she told AFP. “The rapes and murders of women were associated with their presumed political links, not with any religious aspect.”
Andi Achdian, a historian at the National University in Jakarta, separately said: “The victims were the communists or those who were accused of being communists, so religious affiliation was irrelevant” (archived link).
Buddhism has not completely disappeared from Indonesia contrary to the claim in the posts.
According to statistics from the archipelago’s Ministry of Religious Affairs as of August 2022, around two million of its citizens are Buddhists, comprising 0.73% of the population (archived link).
Misused pictures
Moreover, reverse image and keyword searches on Google found the pictures shared in the posts were shared in a false context.
The picture of the Buddha statue was taken in Taiwan after a typhoon, according to the Associated Press (AP) news agency which originally published it in August 2019 (archived link).
“A statue of Buddha’s head is seen submerged in flood water and debris from Typhoon Morakot at a temple in Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009,” reads the caption to the picture.
Typhoon Morakot slammed central and southern Taiwan in mid-August 2009, killing hundreds of people (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the Buddha statue picture in the false post (left) and the photo from AP (right):
The other two pictures appearing to show men who were tied up were previously published on the website of the Dutch National Archives here and here (archived links here and here).
The national archives agency indicated both pictures predated the 1960s killings. Captions said they were part of a series taken during a communist uprising in Madiun in east Java in September 1948 (archived link).
The pictures in the false post (left) were flipped horizontally as shown in the screenshot comparison below with the original photographs from the Dutch National Archives (right):
