Buried histories: the anticommunist massacres of 1965–1966 in indonesia john roosa 2024 scribd downl
Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia John
Roosa
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John Zonaras' Epitome of Histories Theofili Kampianaki
Books in the series Critical Human Rights emphasize research that opens new ways to think about and understand human rights. The series values in par ticular empirically grounded and intellectually open research that eschews simplified accounts of human rights events and processes.
Across the Indonesian archipelago during the long months of 1965–66, supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were hunted down, arrested, detained, tortured, and killed. For decades, the killings were shrouded in silence. In Buried Histories , John Roosa combines oral history and finegrained archival research to elucidate how the killings were systematic and planned from the top of the military dictatorship. Careful attention to the subjectivity of both perpetrators and victims illuminates both the series of social and political transformations that led to mass violence in Indonesia during the Cold War and the difficulty of redressing it decades later.
Buried Histories
The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia
John Roosa
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roosa, John, author.
Title: Buried histories: the anticommunist massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia / John Roosa.
Other titles: Critical human rights.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2020] | Series: Critical human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041277 | ISBN 9780299327309 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Political atrocities—Indonesia. | Targeted killing—Indonesia. | Death squads— Indonesia. | Anti-communist movements—Indonesia. | Indonesia—History—Coup d’état, 1965.
Classification: LCC DS644.32 .R655 2020 | DDC 959.803/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041277
For Ayu f or blessing many wounded springtimes
Illustrations
Maps
Provinces and regional army commands of Indonesia in 1965 2
Surakarta and its environs in 1965
Bali in 1965
Sumatra in 1965
Figures
Still image from The Look of Silence (2014) showing the grave of Ramli 13
“Separation,” a painting by Misbach Tamrin, 2007 19
Sukarno and Aidit at Senayan Stadium, Jakarta, May 23, 1965
Sukarno, ca. 1946
D. N. Aidit, June 1963 44
Suharto being sworn in as army commander, October 16, 1965 58
The mob attack on Res Publica University, Jakarta, October 12, 1965 66
Front page of the army’s newspaper, Berita Yudha, November 19, 1965 72
The graves of eleven PKI leaders at Ngalihan, Central Java, ca. 1960
The door to the former Infico Film Studio, Jakarta, 2011 86
Drawing by Gumelar of a torture session in Jakarta 95
Diagram of the September 30th Movement drawn by military prosecutors 110
Ceremony at the Bacem Bridge, 2005 117
Pak Bronto, Surakarta, 2012 129
An army truck, Surakarta, late October 1965 136
The ruins of stores owned by Sino-Indonesians after a riot, Surakarta, late October 1965 140
The lontar written by I Gusti Nyoman Gede, December 1965 148
A group of the PNI’s Tameng militia, Bali, ca. late 1965 161
Statues in honor of I Gusti Nyoman Gede and his Legong group, Bedulu, Bali 178
The cremation grounds of Kapal village, 2012 180
I Gde Puger and Ida Ayu Rai Parmini, Denpasar, Bali, ca. 1960 190
The office of the Legal Department of Kodam IX, Denpasar, Bali, 2012 205
Drawing of the Railway Workers’ Union Hall near Manggarai Station, Jakarta 210
The PKI’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration, held in the Railway Workers’ Union Hall, May 1955 212
An aerial view of the oil refineries in Palembang, Sumatra, ca. 1930 218
Art installation by Semsar Siahaan, Jakarta, 1994 242
A session of the national symposium, Jakarta, April 18, 2016 255
Sukar standing next to a plaque marking the mass grave near the village of Plumbon, Semarang, Central Java 266
Acknowledgments
Much of the research on which this book is based was a collaborative effort with my colleagues at the Indonesian Institute of Social History (Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia, ISSI) in Jakarta who have been committed to unburying the history of the events of 1965–66: Razif, Muhammad Fauzi, Grace Leksana, Yayan Wiludiharto, Taat Ujianto, Anom Astika, Rini Pratsnawati, Alit Ambara, and Hilmar Farid. I have been fortunate to work closely over many years with two master oral interviewers at the Institute: Rinto Tri Hasworo and Erlijna. I am grateful to the many people who have supported the Institute’s work over the years, especially Irwan Firdaus, Yudi Priyanti, and Agung Putri.
I am particularly proud of ISSI’s work in 2010 in fighting the government’s banning of the Indonesian translation of my earlier book Pretext for Mass Murder. ISSI petitioned the Constitutional Court to have the 1963 law on book banning declared unconstitutional, and my colleagues drew upon their rich knowledge of history to present a comprehensive and convincing case before the court. The court’s decision, in October 2010, to strike down the law was a landmark victory for the right of freedom of expression in Indonesia.
My desire to study the events of 1965–66 began in the mid-1990s when I visited Jakarta for the first time and entered into a social circle of former political prisoners who had been involved in the cultural organization Lekra before 1965: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Oey Hay Djoen, and Joebaar Ajoeb. I also spent a lot of time conversing with Joesoef Isak, who had been a journalist before 1965. Upon his release from prison in 1979, he helped set up the publishing house Hasta Mitra with Pramoedya and Hasjim Rachman to publish the many manuscripts that Pramoedya had written while being held in the Buru Island labor camp. I frequently met another former Lekra member and
Buru Island alumnus, Hersri Setiawan, once he moved back to Jakarta from his exile in the Netherlands. These five men were my teachers and my friends, from whom I learned much about writing history and surviving the worst experiences that this world can offer.
Political imprisonment was not just of historical interest to me while in Jakarta at that time. In 1996, my brother-in-law, Anom Astika, was arrested with other leaders of the People’s Democratic Party and charged with political crimes. They were young people, all in their twenties. When visiting him in Cipinang Prison in Jakarta in 1997–98, I was able to meet political prisoners from earlier cases. During the weekly visiting hours, all the political prisoners and their relatives freely mingled in one pavilion. There, I conversed with three men who had spent more than thirty years in prison for their involvement in the September 30th Movement: Abdul Latief, Bungkus, and Asep Suryaman. In the wake of the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship, in May 1998, all of the political prisoners in Cipinang Prison were released. I kept in close touch with Asep, visiting him in his home in Tasikmalaya and meeting him in Jakarta whenever he came to the city.
I learned much from socializing with other former political prisoners in Jakarta, including Putu Oka Sukanta, Martin Aleida, Tedjobayu Sudjojono, Hardoyo, Amarzan Loebis, and Gumelar Demokrasno, and in Bali, I Wayan Santa, Prayitno, Ngurah Jenawi, and I Wayan Natar. All of these former political prisoners were survivors of the massacres of 1965–66—the fortunate ones who happened not to be taken out and executed—and survivors of the malnutrition and disease that claimed the lives of so many other prisoners.
A constant source of inspiration was Ade Rostina Sitompul, whose humanitarian work began in 1965 when her older brother, Djoni Sitompul, an editor of the daily newspaper Warta Bhakti, became a political prisoner. She worked tirelessly to arrange deliveries of food, medicine, and clothes to him and his fellow inmates—supplies that meant the difference between life and death. She continued that work for political prisoners from East Timor and Papua all the way up to the late 1990s.
I want to thank Jaya Laksana, Ciptapura, Roro Sawita, and the late Agus Januraka, who helped the research in Bali. I have learned from historians and human rights activists in Indonesia: Asvi Warman Adam, Yunantyo Adi, Rukardi Achmadi, Bonnie Triyana, Kamala Chandrakirana, Karlina Supelli, Stanley Adi Prasetyo, Baskara Wardaya, Wasis Sasmito, and Al Muiz Liddinillah. I thank Bunga Siagian for corresponding with me about her father.
At the University of British Columbia, I would like to thank the Department of History heads who have facilitated my research and teaching over
the years: David Breen, the late Danny Vickers, Anne Gorsuch, Tina Loo, and Eagle Glassheim. I would also like to thank all my colleagues in the department; the department administrator, Jocelyn Smith; the librarian, Keith Bunnell; and colleagues in other departments: Jim Glassman, Thomas Hunter, Kai Ostwald, and Abidin Kusno (now at York University). Erin Baines and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá have led an inspiring international project on Transformative Memory at UBC. I am indebted to my students who have assisted the research: Teilhard Paradela, Edgar Liao, Genevieve Cruz, Daniel Carkner, and Jason Salim. Nila Ayu Utami and Abigail White played crucial roles in the final stages of preparing the manuscript. Thanks to the students of my 2018 graduate writing seminar who commented on one of the chapters. I am grateful to Eric Leinberger of the UBC Cartography Lab for creating the maps.
Gwen Walker and Tyrell Haberkorn have been sagacious and patient editors.
A small part of the research was funded by a SSHRC grant in 2007 for a project titled “Memories of Mass Violence.” Chapter 3 incorporates some passages from my article “The Truths of Torture: Victims’ Memories and State Histories in Indonesia,” Indonesia no. 85 (April 2008).
I thank fellow academics scattered around the world: Michael Bodden, close by at the University of Victoria; Ben White, Ratna Saptari, Gerry van Klinken, U˘gur Ümit Üngör, and Henk Schulte Nordholt in the Netherlands; Joshua Oppenheimer in Britain; Akhihisa Matsuno, Aiko Kurasawa, and Brad Horton in Japan; Joseph Nevins, Jeffrey Winters, Geoffrey Robinson, Robert Lemelson, Mary McCoy, Brad Simpson, Siddharth Chandra, Rudolf Mrázek, Charley Sullivan, Bernd Schaefer, Mary Zurbuchen, and Margaret Scott in the United States; Douglas Kammen and Taomo Zhou in Singapore; Dag Yngvesson in Malaysia; Robert Cribb, Siauw Tiong Djin, Katherine McGregor, Jess Melvin, Adrian Vickers, Mark Aarons, and Vannessa Hearman in Australia. I am immensely indebted, as always, to Alfred McCoy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I have been saddened by the passing of three Indonesianists in recent years who I had hoped would read this book: Benedict Anderson, Mary Steedly, and Jeff Hadler.
It is still difficult to accept the death of my father-in-law, I Gusti Ngurah Oka, a professor of the Indonesian language, in 2006 as a result of the poor medical care in a hospital in Malang. He was a healthy and fun-loving man who should have lived for many more years. I am grateful for the countless acts of kindness by Ibu Non Oka, a pillar of strength during tumultuous times.
I would not have been able to write about death if I had not been living with someone who is so full of life. Ayu Ratih is a shining exemplar of biophilia, attending daily to the well-being of all manner of plants and animals, including the strange creatures found within the species Homo sapiens. She has been with me every step of the way. Both of us would like a world for our son, Tossan, that is nothing like the past and the present described in this book.
Abbreviations
AB Angkatan Bersenjata
ANRI Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia)
Baperki Badan Permusjawaratan Kewarganegaraan Indonesia (Consultative Body of Indonesian Citizenship)
BKS Badan Kerja Sama (Bodies of Cooperation)
BPS Bad an Pendukung Sukarnoism (Body for Promoting Sukarnoism)
BTI Barisan Tani Indonesia (Indonesian Peasants Front)
BY Berita Yudha
CDB Comite Daerah Besar (Provincial Committee)
CGMI Consentrasi Gerakan Mahasiswa Indonesia (Indonesian Student Movement Center)
CPM Corps Polisi Militer (Military Police)
Dekon Deklarasi Ekonomi (Economic Declaration)
FFC Fact Finding Commission
FSAB Forum Silaturahmi Anak Bangsa (Friendship Forum of the Nation’s Children)
Gerwani Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Movement)
GMNI Gerakan Mahasiswa Nasional Indonesia (National Student Movement of Indonesia)
HSI Himpunan Sarjana Indonesia (Association of Indonesian Scholars)
IPKI Ikatan Pendukung Kemerdekaan Indonesia (League of Supporters of Indonesian Independence)
IPPI Ikatan Pemuda Pelajar Indonesia (Indonesian Association of Youths and Students)
IPT International People’s Tribunal (The Hague)
KAMI Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Indonesia (Indonesian Student Action Front)
KAP-Gestapu Kesatuan Aksi Pengganyangan Gestapu (Action Front for the Crushing of the September 30th Movement)
KAPPI Kesatuan Aksi Pemuda Pelajar Indonesia (Indonesian Youth and Student Action Front)
KOKAP Badan Koordinasi Kesatuan Aksi Pengganjangan Kontrev Ge stapu (Coordinating Body for Unifying the Actions to Crush the Counterrevolutionary September 30th Movement)
KOTI Komando Operasi Tertinggi (Supreme Operations Command)
Lekra Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakjat (Institute for People’s Culture)
Lemhanas Lembaga Pertahanan Nasional (National Resilience Institute)
MKTBP Metode Kombinasi Tiga Bentuk Perjuangan (Method for Combining the Three Forms of Struggle)
NU Nahdlatul Ulama (Revival of the Ulama)
Partindo Partai Indonesia (Indonesian Party)
PDI-P Indonesian Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle)
Perbum Persatuan Buruh Minyak (Oil Workers Union)
Pesindo Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia (Socialist Youth of Indonesia)
PGRI Persatuan Guru Republik Indonesia (Teachers Union of the Republic of Indonesia)
PKI Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia)
PNI Partai Nasionalis Indonesia (Indonesian National Party)
PRRI Pemerintahan Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia)
PSI Partai Sosialis Indonesia (Socialist Party of Indonesia)
PWI Persatuan Wartawan Indonesia (Indonesian Journalists’ Association)
RPKAD Resimen Para Komando Angkatan Darat (Army Paracommando Regiment)
RRI Radio Republik Indonesia (Radio of the Republic of Indonesia)
Sarbupri Sarekat Buruh Perkebunan Republik Indonesia (Plantation Workers Union of the Republic of Indonesia)
SBKA Serikat Buruh Kereta Api (Railway Workers Union)
SBKB Serikat Buruh Kendaaran Bermotor (Motorized Transport Workers Union)
Abbreviations
SBKP Serikat Buruh Kapal dan Pelabuhan (Ship Workers and Dockworkers Union)
SBPP Serikat Buruh Pekerja Pelabuhan (Dock Workers Union)
SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
SI Suara Indonesia
SOBSI Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia (Central Organization of Indonesian Workers)
TT Tentara dan Territorium (Troop and Area Command)
UI University of Indonesia
VSTP Vereeniging van Spoor en Tramweg-Personeel (Union of Rail and Tramway Personnel)
WPC World Peace Council
YPKP Yayasan Penelitian Korban Pembunuhan 1965–66 (Research Foundation for the Victims of the 1965–66 Killings)
Buried
Histories
Provinces and regional army commands of Indonesia in 1965
Introduction
In early March 1966, Ibnu Santoro, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was removed from an army detention camp in the city of Yogyakarta, trucked with twenty other captives to a desolate forest off a backcountry road, and shot point-blank in the back of the head. He was buried in a mass grave with the other captives—all accused of being supporters of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Communist Party of Indonesia). A guard on the truck returned to Yogyakarta secretly carrying a piece of paper that contained a list of the names of the twenty-one victims and a rough, hand-drawn map that showed where they had been buried. The location was on a hillside in the regency of Wonosobo, some forty miles away in Central Java. If not for this compassionate guard, acting on his own accord, this massacre would have remained undocumented, like countless other massacres in Indonesia. Ibnu Santoro’s relatives never knew what had happened to him until the guard’s document became public in 1999. Santoro’s wife had spent years searching the prisons of Java for him, encountering nothing but blank stares and walls of silence from the world of officialdom.
By virtue of the guard’s piece of paper, the mass grave was located and exhumed thirty-four years later. The Suharto dictatorship that had come to power through the mass killings of 1965–66 collapsed in 1998. With the political elite in chaos, the victims of that dictatorship had a new freedom to organize. One group of former political prisoners formed an organization to document the mass killings and decided in 2000 that the Wonosobo mass grave in which Ibnu Santoro lay would be the first one to be exhumed. Not only did they have the guard’s document as evidence, but they had the testimony of a man who had been a prisoner in the town of Wonosobo at that time (because of a criminal case). He and several other prisoners had been forced by army personnel to dig the mass grave and bury the victims. He
remembered the exact location. Local government officials and community leaders, after lengthy negotiations, allowed the exhumation. Forensic specialists brought in from Jakarta uncovered twenty-six skeletons. Only six of them could be identified. One of them was Ibnu Santoro’s.1
Ibnu Santoro was teaching economics in 1965 at Gadjah Mada University, which was one of the largest and most prestigious universities in the country at that time. He, like many of his fellow instructors, supported the PKI-affiliated organizations on campus, such as the one for university students, though his support could not have been extensive. He had spent most of the preceding six years in the United States. The limited support he offered seems to have been at least partly motivated by self-preservation. The PKI was leading campaigns against everything American at the time—Hollywood films, the Peace Corps, the libraries of the US Information Agency—and he would have been a prime target as a Ford Foundation–funded graduate of an American university. Such nuances were lost after October 1, 1965, when the university systematically dismissed professors and expelled students who had been in some way connected with these PKI organizations. Many among the thousands of students and instructors dismissed from the university were detained by the army.2 One of the army’s main detention sites in Yogyakarta was the US Information Agency’s library, called the Thomas Jefferson Library, which had been closed down because of protests in August 1964.3 Some among those detained were, like Ibnu Santoro, taken out at night and summarily executed. They disappeared. One of the ways his family was able to identify his skeleton at the exhumation in 2000 was by the bits of Levi-Strauss blue jeans found next to it. He had been wearing the jeans that he had brought back from Madison.
I first learned of the name Ibnu Santoro from the reporting on the exhumation in 2000, but I learned that he was from the same university at which I had earned my doctorate only when I watched the documentary film Shadow Play (2002), which contained an interview with Ibnu Santoro’s younger brother and showed scenes of the ceremony for his reburial.4 I had by that time interviewed many former political prisoners and their relatives, but none had a connection to my alma mater. I wondered how he had come to study in Madison and who he met there and what he thought about the place. My own interest in Indonesia had begun in Madison, where I had the opportunity to befriend Indonesian students and take courses on Southeast Asian history in the 1990s.
By chance, many years later, I learned more about Ibnu Santoro’s time in Madison. Arthur Ray, a colleague of mine at the University of British Columbia, mentioned to me that he had been a graduate student in Madison in the early 1960s and had become friends with a group of Indonesian students who
frequently visited the house of L. Reed Tripp, a professor of economics. I asked him if he remembered someone named Ibnu Santoro. He did, and he put me in touch with the late professor’s son, Jon Tripp, who knew him better. Ibnu Santoro had been a student of Tripp’s and had become very close to the family. Professor Tripp had worked in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 1957–59 as the director of a Ford Foundation project to develop the economics department at Gadjah Mada University.5 He had become an aficionado of Javanese gamelan music and had an entire set of the instruments shipped to Madison.6 Jon Tripp wrote in an email:
Ibnu began as a graduate student under Dad’s guidance when we returned from Indonesia in 1959. In those days there were perhaps 15 or 20 Indonesian students at the University of Wisconsin, and our home became a meeting place for these students, typically on Sunday afternoon, extending into the evening. We would cook Indonesian food and the students would sing folk songs from home. On occasion, we would play the gamelan instruments. The university held an international student exposition once a year and we would participate with the Indonesian students, setting up a trade-show type of booth with Indonesian statues, fabrics, puppets, and photographs.
Charismatic and gregarious, Ibnu Santoro made a lasting impression on the Tripps, more so than any of the other Indonesian students gathering at their home. This young man from Central Java had no trouble fitting into Midwestern society.
Ibnu was a cut above the rest, having a very engaging personality and a great sense of humor. He spoke American English right down to slang words. He and Dad would sit at the dining room table and debate for hours about politics, government, economics, democracy and communism. I was a pretty good chess player back in those days and I remember Ibnu as the only one of Dad’s students who I could never beat at chess. He went with us on the family vacation up to the National Forest, camping in northern Wisconsin. He was very much a member of our extended family. Our Mom virtually adopted him.
He was killed only about one year after finishing his graduate studies in Madison and returning to Yogyakarta to teach economics. The Tripp family heard some years later that Ibnu Santoro had been killed, but they were not informed of the precise circumstances. I told Jon Tripp of the Shadow Play film. After watching it, he wrote back that he had been profoundly moved upon seeing the younger brother speaking on screen because he looked so
much like Ibnu Santoro. He found it “devastating” to learn how Ibnu Santoro died: “The sense of waste is overwhelming.”7
The killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia in 1965–66, as the army under Major General Suharto was taking power from President Sukarno, remains a mysterious event. All historians acknowledge that the mass killing occurred, that Suharto’s army and various groups of civilians killed people connected with the PKI, but have difficulty documenting any single death. Thousands of massacres must have taken place, but only one has been thoroughly investigated—the Wonosobo massacre—and many unanswered questions remain even about that one: Who decided that those twenty-six men should be executed? Who decided that Ibnu Santoro should be executed? If only twenty-one individuals were in the truck, where did the additional five victims come from? Which army troops carried out the executions? Why did they truck them to that particular faraway location?
The mass killing has been understood in the abstract, as one big event, divorced from the many small, individual events that constituted it. Books on the history of Indonesia describe the event with a level of generality and imprecision that seems incongruous with the significance of it. There is no extensive literature of fine-grained monographs and research articles that can supply a solid evidentiary basis for analyses of the nationwide patterns in the killing. No truth commission has been formed to conduct an investigation and hold public hearings. Indonesian government documents, especially those of the army, have not been declassified. The event has been nebulous, like some distant galaxy about which our knowledge extends little beyond the fact that it exists.
Without detailed knowledge, scholars have been confused over the most basic questions: Who were the perpetrators—the army, civilian militias, or ordinary villagers? Which group was most responsible for the killing? What were their motives? What were their methods? How were the killings organized? Who were the victims—communists or ordinary people killed for nonpolitical reasons? Did the victims resist? If they did not resist, why did they not resist? Precisely where and when were the killings? When did they start and when did they stop in different areas? Why was there killing in one village, district, or province and not in another? Calculating the number of deaths has been pure guesswork, which is why the number I mentioned above— “hundreds of thousands”—is intentionally imprecise.
Historians have been trapped in a hermeneutic circle: without a clear understanding of the event as a whole, they have been unable to grasp the significance of information from a particular locality, and with little information
from particular localities they have been unable to construct a model of the event as a whole. Was the execution of truckloads of detainees in remote areas, as in the Wonosobo massacre, the typical form of killing in Indonesia? Was it even typical for Central Java? Given that no one has firm answers to these questions, it has been an interpretive free-for-all, with many people venturing a model of the whole based on a limited range of evidence. Some scholars have drawn grand conclusions from a single anecdote. It has been difficult to even determine what information from documents and oral interviews should be counted as evidence and what should be discounted as myth.
Consider the problems in interpreting what one would expect to be the most important primary source on the killings: the official Fact Finding Commission (FFC) report issued on January 10, 1966. President Sukarno formed the commission with the mandate to “gather the facts and data” about the “number of victims, the causes, and other matters, that would be useful in the resolution and handling of the serious conditions.” The commission’s nine members included five ministers in his cabinet, a representative of the army, and representatives from three noncommunist political parties. The head was Sukarno’s interior minister, Soemarno, who was a major general in the army. The nine members broke up into small groups and fanned out across the country, visiting four provinces over a ten-day period (from December 27 to January 6) where the killings were believed to have been extensive (North Sumatra, Central Java, East Java, and Bali).8
The FFC report contained three parts: the prologue to the event ( proloog ), the event itself ( peristiwa), and the epilogue (epiloog ). It was a tripartite structure that neatly corresponds to the definition of a narrative as a story with a sense of coherency across a beginning, middle, and end. Instead of reporting on the facts that they had found, the commissioners constructed a grand narrative that they could have written from their offices in Jakarta. Their narrative blamed the victims for having provoked the massacres. The prologue was a long period before October 1, 1965, during which the PKI’s militancy had antagonized all noncommunists. Many years of aggressive behavior on the part of the PKI had made the party widely hated. The central event in the middle of the FFC narrative was the September 30th Movement, for which the PKI was allegedly responsible. During this short-lived revolt, which began on October 1, 1965, six army generals in Jakarta (and six other people besides) were murdered by the Movement and a new government led by a Revolutionary Council was proclaimed over the radio. The FFC presented the violence against the PKI after October 1, 1965, as a logical, natural response to the Movement and the preceding years of aggressiveness: “the masses” (massa) rampaged in revenge. The violence was the epilogue to the story; it was “an
explosive eruption of emotion.” The army, with its limited resources, was unable to stop the fury of “the masses.” If one were to follow the commission’s report, one would believe that the killings of 1965–66 represented a case of spontaneous violence and popular vengeance.
But one suspects something is amiss with this narrative. One sentence contradicts it by mentioning the involvement of state officials in disappearances: “there were executions of September 30th Movement individuals by government agencies that were not officially announced to their family members.” If the killings were committed by the massa running amok, how did state officials become responsible for executing people? The FFC commissioners provided no details but did offer a blanket justification for these secret, extrajudicial executions: “such executions can be considered normal in security operations done in the context of suppressing a rebellion.” Still, the commissioners were worried about this kind of killing. Not making an “official announcement” made the executions appear as “wild” (liar) actions. State officials were operating no differently from the wild massa. 9
One discovers, upon investigating the FFC’s behind-the-scenes procedures, that the army high command controlled the workings of the commission and determined the composition of the final report. The grand narrative about wild and violent civilians was the one that the army wished to present to the public. The US ambassador, who was in close touch with the army high command, noted after the commission had been formed that the army would arrange for it to die a “natural death.”10 The generals would not openly defy Sukarno’s order to investigate the killings; instead, they would quietly strangle it, preventing the commissioners from learning the specifics of the massacres and disappearances. The commissioners, when visiting the regions, stayed for a short time and were allowed to speak only to army and police officials. The one commissioner who was loyal to Sukarno avoided his army minders while visiting Bali by sneaking out of his hotel through the kitchen, with the help of the cooks, to make his own inquiries. 11 The generals on the commission ensured that the final report reflected the army’s propaganda line. Sukarno realized that the report was baseless and did not release it for publication. His only statement to the press about it concerned its finding on the number of deaths. The report’s arbitrarily determined estimate was 78,500. Sukarno, either carelessly misreading the number or intentionally inflating it, announced that the number was 87,000.12
This particular primary source turns out to be evidence not of the killings but of the army’s disavowal of its own role in the killings. The fact that the army did not want to acknowledge that it had any responsibility for the killings provides us with one clue as to why there has been so little evidence of them.
Army officers have discouraged and suppressed public discussion of the killings, and when they have been forced to discuss them, as with the Fact Finding Commission report, they have kept matters vague. Their default explanation has been that anonymous, unidentified “masses” did the killing and that there was no point in bringing up painful memories. General Suharto’s army dictatorship stayed in power for thirty-two years and enforced a general silence on the killings.
On the rare occasions when the Suharto regime mentioned the killings, it did not delve into the specifics. The regime neither denied that the killings occurred nor composed its own history of the killings. It simply avoided discussing them. There was no official version of history when it came to the killings. The regime routinely celebrated the “crushing” and “destruction” of the PKI but did not mention that anyone was killed in the process. The violence was glossed over amid the praise for the elimination of the PKI from the body politic, as if that had been achieved without bloodshed. The Suharto regime’s first book justifying the repression of the PKI was written by two state officials, Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh. The book, published in English in 1968, admitted in passing that killings had occurred and then followed the FFC report in presenting them as the result of spontaneous violence. Local conflicts “exploded into communal clashes resulting in bloodbaths.”13 Details as to where and when these bloodbaths took place and the identities of the perpetrators and victims went unmentioned. Clashes happened. People died.
One finds the same evasiveness in the six-volume canonical history text issued by Suharto’s Education Ministry, Indonesian National History, which covered the history of the archipelago from ancient times to the present. One of the editors of this mammoth project was Nugroho Notosusanto, the coauthor of the regime’s 1968 book on the September 30th Movement. He was a professor of history at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta and held the titular rank of brigadier general. Indonesian National History served as the authoritative source for all writers composing textbooks to be used in the schools. Notosusanto decided that one sentence was sufficient to describe the killings: “Only in East Java and Bali arose the chaos of abductions and killings, which were successfully brought to order again.”14 This oddly phrased sentence suggests that communists and anticommunists killed one another, for a brief time, in just two provinces, and then the army stepped in to bring peace. Notosusanto ignored the FFC report, which had acknowledged that Central Java and North Sumatra were also provinces where the death toll was high. The history textbooks used in the schools did not include even this vague and inaccurate description of the mass killing. Still today, school children do not
learn about the killings from their history textbooks. The only lessons about the events of 1965 that they learn are that the PKI masterminded the September 30th Movement and that it was an evil organization.
It is revealing that those responsible for the massacres have tended not to reveal themselves. When pressed, the army has made a policy of claiming that the civilians committed the killings, while the civilians have tended to claim that they were merely following orders from the army. The British American journalist John Hughes, while uncritically reproducing the army’s disavowals of responsibility, noticed when talking to Javanese militiamen in 1966 that they did not forthrightly proclaim themselves as the ones responsible: they were reluctant “to admit that they themselves took part in any killings.”15 Few have stepped forward to clearly claim authorship of these massacres. When young radical activists in the mid-1990s accused the army of having organized the mass killing of 1965–66, the army responded, out of habit, by putting the blame on civilians. The Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which had worked with the army to carry out the massacres, especially in East Java, did not like being assigned sole blame and published a book in 1996 to prove that the NU and its militia, Banser, had strictly followed the army’s lead. 16 The army and the civilian militias have routinely shifted blame onto each other, while keeping the story about the killings hopelessly vague.
On the odd occasion when perpetrators have spoken about the killings, they have usually justified their actions as a matter of self-defense. They have claimed that the PKI had started a revolt and was preparing to massacre all its enemies. It was a time of “kill or be killed” (membunuh atau dibunuh).17 The NU book of 1996 justified the killings in this way, as self-defense against a violent uprising. It was a war ( perang ), and the victims were combatants. But the book’s brief descriptions of the killings are about massacres of prisoners. For instance, the book mentions that Banser, following the orders of an army officer in one district in East Java, rounded up six thousand individuals and then held them in a field like a herd of sheep. Every night thirty or forty of the prisoners were driven into a nearby forest and executed. Nearly all of the PKI supporters “had already resigned themselves to being butchered [disembelih] by Banser,” and those few who tried to run away were tracked down and killed.18 In other districts, the local army commanders routinely sent batches of detainees to the NU militia with written orders for the detainees to be executed.19 It is an odd sort of war that involves the killing only of unarmed, defenseless prisoners. In wishing to prove that the NU always operated under the command of the army, the authors revealed the state’s dirty secrets.
In excusing or justifying the massacres, the perpetrators have had trouble keeping their story straight. The claim of self-defense is inconsistent with
other claims by other anticommunists. The Notosusanto and Saleh book of 1968, for instance, did not justify the killings in the name of self-defense; they presented the killings as an expression of popular vengeance against the PKI for having killed six generals, attempting a coup, and antagonizing many other people over the preceding years. The mass murder, in their view, was an immediate, uncontrollable reaction to past events, not a reaction to an ongoing armed insurrection. The FFC presented the popular vengeance story but then also portrayed the PKI as having been engaged in a “rebellion.”
If it were actually a time of war, then one would expect much greater openness on the part of the anticommunists to describe their war stories, in the manner of the Indonesian nationalists who were proud of their armed resistance to the Dutch in the late 1940s. Notosusanto himself had been a part of that resistance and wrote much about it.20 Since it is difficult to construe executions of tied-up prisoners as noble and courageous deeds, those acts have usually been left untold and unheralded. The bloodshed involved in the victory over the PKI does not have a thousand fathers; it is, like a defeat, an orphan.
Some viewers of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing (2012) have mistakenly concluded that perpetrators have made a practice of flaunting their bloody deeds. The flamboyant protagonist, Anwar Congo, a midlevel mafia boss in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, seems to have no qualms in admitting what he did. In front of the camera, he and fellow gangsters reenact executions and brag about their ruthlessness. The army dropped off batches of tied-up prisoners at the headquarters of the youth organization Pemuda Pancasila, and the organization’s members, Anwar among them, strangled the prisoners to death on a terrace in the back of the building. They carried out the corpses in sacks, loaded them into a truck, drove down the street, and then threw them off a bridge into the Deli River. “It was beautiful, like parachutes floating down,” comments Anwar while at the bridge reenacting the method for disposing of the corpses. Anwar and his friends also speak in front of the cameras of a local TV talk show in Medan.21 Slavoj Žižek assumes from these scenes in the film that brazenness is the norm in Indonesia: “After their victory, their terrible acts were not relegated to the status of the ‘dirty secret’; on the contrary, Anwar and his friends boast openly about the details of their massacres.” Indonesia is a society, Žižek imagines, that revels in sadism: “what kind of society publicly celebrates a monstrous orgy of torture and killing decades after it took place, not by justifying it as an extraordinary, necessary crime for the public good but as an ordinary, acceptable pleasurable activity?”22 The answer to this rhetorical question is certainly not Indonesian society.
