‘Red scare’ rises ahead of polls

Padang: Bookseller Yanto Tjahaja was tending to his shop when soldiers burst through the door and confiscated a dozen titles over claims they violated one of Indonesia’s most sensitive taboos: communism.

Upwards of half a million leftists were massacred across the South-East Asian nation in the mid-1960s, a bloody spectacle that ushered in the long rule of dictator Suharto, whose fervent anti-communist stance remains decades on.