Memory, Truth-seeking, and the 1965 Mass Killings in Indonesia
Out of the shadows, into the light of public debate: this is a call that applies as much to Indonesia as it does to Timor-Leste. The chapters above speak of campaigns for truth and reconciliation that spill over Timorese borders into the country’s former colonial ruler, Indonesia. Although there was an innovative bilateral truth Commission on Truth and Friendship (CTF) between the two countries, it has done little to change the general climate in Indonesia of denial or indifference towards the legacy of mass atrocities in Timor-Leste.
Indonesia grapples with its own troubled past, too. It is far from the only country that has experienced a dictatorship implicated in sustained human rights violations. But Indonesia’s New Order regime was both especially long-lived (it lasted thirty-two years) and especially bloody in its path to power. In 1965, left-wing army officers kidnapped some of the country’s top generals. The surviving army command struck back quickly and took control of the state apparatus of power. Blaming the large Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI), the army launched a wave of mass killings that engulfed most of the country. The death toll is impossible to estimate: the army placed the number at 78,500, while other estimates run as high as 2 million. Another million left-leaning Indonesians faced detention and in some cases long prison terms. The army’s net was cast far beyond the PKI’s members to encompass numerous popular movements; the anti-communist violence also aimed to stamp out potential challengers to army power and to depoliticize what was then a highly mobilized Indonesian society.
The army blamed the PKI for trying to stage a coup. Virulent images of PKI savagery flared up as mass killings went on, and they were ritually repeated in government accounts and in a film shown annually to Indonesian students. And yet, the response to the mass killings that followed the attempted coup and counter-coup was a state command to the people: forget. A five-volume official history of Indonesia gave the killings one sentence. Otherwise the killings were not discussed, and debate on their meaning and consequences was forbidden. National memory was to be erased, the trauma of national suffering denied.
When the “1965 events” did merit discussion, the New Order insisted on the absolute truth of its own narrative. It blamed the now-banned PKI, even while using its memory as a means of controlling dissent, by labelling dissenters from the government agenda as communists. Anti-communism was a key basis of legitimacy for the New Order, which recalled 1965 only to bolster its self-proclaimed role as the nation’s saviour in the face of communist subversion. The death of six generals formed the central memory of these events. The many deaths of civilians that followed were eliminated from the record.
In 1998, the New Order finally collapsed amidst an economic crisis and popular pro-democracy protests. President Suharto was out after three decades in power. His vice president succeeded him and lost the subsequent general election. Indonesia has had four democratically elected presidents since then: liberal Muslim teacher Adburrahman Wahid; Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the founding president and a former opponent of Suharto; general-turned-reformer Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; and Joko Widodo, a popular non-ideological figure who rode his record of competent administration as mayor of Solo and then Jakarta into the presidency. Jokowi, as he is known, is the first president not linked to the old elite, and his accession to the presidency seemed to augur a more open reflection on the past. Yet, like its predecessors, the Jokowi presidency has done little to change the government’s reluctance to discuss the 1965 events. The New Order’s official narrative has loosened, but it has not given up its grip as the dominant view in government circles.
Chapter 10 provides an exploration of clashing historical narratives. It pictures the official narrative as a wall that blocks light and words, a hegemonic view of the past that denies other views. At the same time, it describes efforts of non-government voices half a century later to break through that wall. Victims’ groups, friends and families of those who died or suffered in the 1960s and after, historians and other academics, non-governmental organizations dedicated to supporting victims and telling their stories—all are challengers to the official narrative. Two historical narratives—unequal but nevertheless in contention—emerge from this picture, with the non-government narrative seeking to break silences, speak through the wall, and start, perhaps, to make it crumble.
In this account the role of civil society is clear. There have been calls for a truth commission, amongst other calls for truth-seeking and truth-telling about the past. A new law authorizing a truth commission even passed in 2004, but the government soon dropped the plan over objections from civil-society organizations. The voices calling for truth emerge here in an adversarial relationship to the apparatus of state power, which still prefers to forget the violent past. We can consider the period since the New Order’s fall in 1998, with the emergence of civil-society voices challenging the silence, as a pre–truth commission period: these are calls from outside government for truth-seeking. Whether they will succeed or not remains to be seen.
The government’s reluctance to debate the past has its border-crossing counterpart in the reluctance of other governments to reveal their own role in the 1965 coups and killings. Suharto and the other army commanders acted for their own reasons, but they did not act in isolation. They blamed Communist China, a country whose role in the 1965 events remains unclear. They were encouraged to act—and to kill—by US officials keen to see communism snuffed out in Indonesia as they waged a full-scale war in Vietnam. Other Western governments also lined up to encourage the army to overthrow President Sukarno and eradicate the PKI. It is impossible to fully understand what happened in 1965 without also looking at the global setting and the actions of major governments outside Indonesia.
This international dimension is discussed in chapter 11, which concentrates on the United States and China and considers what an eventual truth commission might look like. An effective commission would have to go beyond Indonesia’s borders. There is a precedent in the joint Indonesian-Timorese CTF. There is precedent for opening archives in the United States to truth commissions in Central America. Just as the events of 1965 were in part international, so, too, must a truth commission be, with archives opened in several countries.
Continued silence, these chapters argue, extends the violence committed in 1965 and prevents Indonesian society from reconciling with its violent past. Forgetting has not brought healing: remembering might. Chapter 12’s presentation of poignant writing by one of the victims of 1965 personalizes these issues through one man’s experience, a story not previously published. It ends abruptly, in rupture. The 1965 coup also presents itself as rupture, followed by imposed forgetting. It is to a closer look at that rupture that we now turn.