Mass Violence in the Indonesian Transition from Sukarno to Suharto

Katharine McGregor is senior lecturer in South-East Asian History at the University of Melbourne.

In July 2012, the Indonesian National Commission for Human Rights, following a four-year investigation, released an executive summary of a report on the 1965–8 mass violence in Indonesia that killed an estimated five hundred thousand people. The commission declared that it had found evidence of serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, slavery, eviction or forced eviction, deprivation of freedom, torture, rape and abuse.

 

In its press release, the commission also indicated that it had identified people and organisations responsible for the violence against members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), including Kopkamtib (Operations Command to Restore Order and Security), a military body headed by Major-General Suharto. In the wake of the violence, Suharto had slowly removed President Sukarno from office and become the second president of Indonesia. Although Indonesia has democratised dramatically since the fall of Suharto in 1998, the fact that the government allowed this investigation was remarkable given the enduring grip of anti-communism and continuities between the Suharto and post-Suharto governments. The government endorsed the investigation largely because of a new commitment laid out in Indonesian laws to address human rights abuses.

 

Attitudes within Indonesia to this period of mass violence are, however, far from uniform and reflect conflicting interpretations about why the violence took place and how it should be understood today. One of the key points of dispute is where the story of this violence should begin and to what extent the PKI provoked anti-communists prior to 1965. In this brief overview I will outline the political context preceding the mass violence, including the position of the Indonesian army and other anti-communist groups and the rising significance of the PKI. I will consider why the violence began, who directed and participated in it, and whether one of the most brutal campaigns of the twentieth century may justly be categorised as genocide. Lastly, I will return to the issue of how this violence is understood today in Indonesia and why interpretations of this past remain fiercely contested almost half a century later.

The Political Context

The trigger for the violence came on 30 September 2024 when a group calling itself the September 30 Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in the top leadership of the Indonesian army. The movement seized control of the national radio station in the capital, Jakarta, and broadcast an announcement on 1 October declaring that its action was a pre-emptive move against the “Council of Generals”, whose members had allegedly been preparing a coup attempt against President Sukarno. Interpretations of who was behind the September 30 Movement have been contested, with a range of theories attributing responsibility to sections of the army, the PKI, Major-General Suharto, the CIA and even President Sukarno. In the most recent authoritative account, John Roosa argues that the key leaders of the September 30 Movement included three military men—one from the presidential guard, one from the Jakarta army garrison, one from the air force—and two civilians from a clandestine organisation known as the Special Bureau, which was run by PKI chairman, D. N. Aidit.¹ The movement, which carried out another action in Central Java, was poorly organised and failed in its objective to secure the reins of the Indonesian National Revolution, whereby the country had thrown off Dutch colonial rule. Under the command of Major-General Suharto, the army crushed the movement within a day and, despite the involvement of military men, quickly declared that the PKI alone was responsible.

 

The army rapidly seized control of all newspapers, closing down publications supportive of the PKI and thus dominating sources of information about the September 30 Movement and who was responsible for its actions. In a campaign of psychological warfare, newspapers spread fallacious stories that PKI members had mutilated and tortured the bodies of the generals prior to their deaths. This propaganda focused on the alleged sexual depravity of women from the PKI-aligned Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerwani) who had supposedly danced naked around the well at Lubang Buaya (Crocodile Hole) into which the corpses of the army leaders were thrown. As Saskia Wieringa has demonstrated, this highly gendered mythology, which deployed images of Gerwani to stigmatise the entire PKI on the basis of its alleged lack of morality and humanity, had terrible consequences in terms of sexual violence against women and the collapse of progressive gender ideology.²

 

The anti-communist leadership of the army was determined to blame the September 30 Movement on the PKI in order to justify an attack on the party. By 1965, the PKI was the army’s main political rival and animosity between these two groups had grown over time because of continual clashes and competing agendas. It was during the independence struggle against the Dutch that the army and the PKI first clashed. The party had been formed in 1920 in response to colonial exploitation and was vigorously suppressed after premature rebellions in 1926. The independence struggle—from the declaration of independence in August 1945 until the Netherlands’ recognition of Indonesia’s independence at the end of 1949—gave the PKI new oxygen. On 18 September 1948, troops disgruntled with plans of the Indonesian Republican-led government in Jakarta to rationalise leftist divisions in the army led an uprising in the East Javanese town of Madiun. The PKI seems to have backed the uprising only after it had begun. The army leadership responded by executing communist leaders and thousands of followers without trial. The army was bitterly resentful that it had to fight fellow Indonesians at the same time as it was waging the independence struggle against the Dutch, and it thereafter distrusted the communists.

 

After the 1948 repression, the PKI tried to rebuild its support but faced continuous opposition from the army. The party was also opposed by anti-communist Muslims, who were aggrieved by the killing by leftist troops of Muslim religious leaders and teachers following the Madiun uprising. A new more dynamic communist leadership decided to continue to support the idea of struggle through a peaceful, united national front within the parliamentary system as a means of shielding the party from renewed violence. The party performed very well in Indonesia’s first democratic elections of 1955, achieving 16.4 per cent of the national vote. By February 1956, it had one million members, even though shifting political alliances among the other parties continued to deny the communists any role in government.

 

The army leadership believed it had the right to a political role following its part in the independence struggle. It had never accepted subordination to civilian authority, giving rise during the 1950s to a series of attempted coups and increasing autonomy among regional commanders. In March 1957, the army moved with President Sukarno to declare martial law, thereby suspending parliament in favour of a working cabinet appointed by Sukarno. This not only gave the army absolute power but also allowed it to check communist expansion. The period of parliamentary democracy ended in 1959 when Sukarno announced on Independence Day that Indonesia had been deviating from the correct path of revolution for the last decade and that he was subsequently returning the revolution “to its own true rails”.³ Sukarno then introduced a new system of “Guided Democracy”, declaring Indonesia would embark on a two-stage revolution, consisting of a national anti-imperialist phase and then a social anti-capitalist phase during which full socialism would be implemented.⁴

 

Guided Democracy naturally placed much greater power in the hands of President Sukarno. At first the army and the president were the axis of this political system. Having supported Guided Democracy primarily to check the growth of the PKI, the army now consolidated its political role by setting up a territorial system in which military officers took the lead in regional governments. To regain political leverage, President Sukarno courted a new ally by making communism one of three pillars of his ideology of Nationalism, Religion and Communism. Although political parties as such wielded less influence in this period, Sukarno began to appoint members of the PKI to bureaucratic and political posts, such as those of mayor or provincial governor.⁵ The parties also competed for mass membership, engaging in frequent shows of force in mass rallies and street politics.

 

Although anti-imperialism was the cornerstone of political rhetoric during the era of Guided Democracy, there was hesitation over the next phase of the revolution, the anti-capitalist phase. Lance Castles notes that most bureaucrats enthusiastically implemented socialist programmes that benefited them, such as the nationalisation of foreign assets, which presented them with business opportunities. But they stalled in implementing other aspects of the socialist agenda such as land reform and the formation of co-operatives, which sought to level the classes.⁶ The army leadership, for example, was quite content to benefit from the nationalisation of Dutch assets in 1957 following on Indonesian frustration at Dutch delays in “returning” Western New Guinea to Indonesia. Its increasing forays into business ventures earned army officers the derogatory label of “capitalist bureaucrats”.

 

The primary strategy of the PKI continued to be democratic engagement by siding with the president and enhancing communist influence, while weakening the power of the army.⁷ The party tried to recruit from within the military, with some success in the air force and certain divisions of the army. From 1963 onwards, frustrated with the continual blocking of reforms, the PKI became increasingly aggressive in attacking anti-communist forces, and encouraged followers to begin implementing the land reforms the government had approved in the 1959 Crop-Sharing Law and the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law. With the support of the PKI, the affiliated peasant front (BTI, Barisan Tani Indonesia) began to implement land reform in several provinces of Indonesia, including Bali, North Sumatra and East Java. In each case, these attempted land-seizures resulted in violent conflicts with local aristocrats and their protectors.

 

In East Java, this included attacks on Muslim landowners associated with the boarding schools of the largest Islamic organisation in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama. The PKI and affiliated organisations accused Muslim leaders of being “village devils” for their dominance of landholdings. In response to the attempted land-seizures, Nahdlatul Ulama leaders formed an armed wing of their youth organisation, Ansor, known as Banser (Barisan Serba Guna, Multi-purpose Brigade) and began to use violence to oppose these unilateral actions.

 

In Bali, land reform had begun in 1961 but initially moved very slowly, favouring supporters of the PNI (Partai Nasional Indonesia) who dominated the bureaucracy. From 1963, however, the PKI made inroads into local government in Bali, escalating the pace of land reform. The result was heightened tensions and some violent clashes between members of the affiliated peasant unions of the PKI and PNI.⁸

 

In North Sumatra, another major support-base for the PKI because of the attractiveness of the party’s policies to plantation workers, the PKI encouraged peasants to implement land reform. Its unilateral actions here in particular threatened the interests of the army, which had taken over the management of many nationalised estates in the province from 1957.

 

In 1964, PKI chairman D. N. Aidit claimed that Indonesia was still in the national–democratic phase of the revolution, but that the time had now arrived to purge society fully of feudalistic elements. He criticised Indonesians, stating that although people were generally united on the platform of anti-imperialism there was considerable resistance from some groups towards the elimination of capitalism and feudalism, which were other forms of oppression. Sukarno shared the frustration of the Communist Party and began to refer to “internal enemies” and “divisions between friends and foes”.⁹ In 1965, Sukarno, alluding to the larger Cold War, suggested that “world conflict between the old established forces and the new emerging forces” was reflected in “a bitter struggle” within Indonesia.¹⁰

 

By the early 1960s, the PKI, with three million members, was the third-largest communist party in the world, earning it respect in the international communist community. The party and its mass organisations, such as Gerwani, the BTI and the PKI-affiliated labour unions, appealed to Indonesians because of their outreach work among the poor in increasingly dire economic conditions, their commitment to literacy programmes and to improving labour conditions, and their goals of greater opportunities and equality across the classes. Rex Mortimer notes, however, that there seemed to be no clear resolution of how the PKI would achieve the goal of a people’s democracy, given that the party rejected armed struggle and continued to subordinate itself in the political system in order to protect itself from further persecution.¹¹ To oppose the new nation of Malaysia, the PKI had lobbied for the creation in Indonesia of an armed fifth force in which its members would participate, but the army had firmly resisted this proposal, leaving the PKI unarmed when the onslaught against it began.

Patterns in the Violence

The outbreak of violence against PKI supporters and members of mass organisations aligned or affiliated with the party began in October 1965 following the killing of the generals and the attempted seizure of power by the September 30 Movement. Under the leadership of Major-General Suharto, the army immediately mobilised youths who belonged to anti-communist mass organisations such as the Catholic Party and Nahdlatul Ulama, encouraging them to join a group named KAP Gestapu (Action Front to Crush the September 30 Movement) and to demand that President Sukarno move against the PKI. On 8 October, a coalition of these youths attacked the PKI headquarters in Jakarta with impunity. The army continued to organise and encourage student street protests against the PKI, Sukarno and left-leaning ministers as a means of increasing pressure on Sukarno. Because he had relied on the PKI as a balancing force alongside the army and because he did not believe in the necessity of a violent reprisal, President Sukarno referred to the September 30 Movement as “a ripple in the ocean of the revolution”.¹² He remained president until 1968, but in reality his powers were increasingly curtailed, with the army under Suharto acting independently of him in a creeping coup.

 

On 10 October, Suharto established a new military body, Kopkamtib, to fulfil Sukarno’s order to restore order and security. Kopkamtib oversaw the process of tracking down and arresting PKI supporters, the administration of prisoners, and broader security functions such as issuing permissions to publish. From October onwards, violence against PKI supporters escalated across the Indonesian archipelago. Violence in the form of either killings or mass detention took place in every major island of Indonesia, including Java, Sumatra, Bali, Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Papua (Western New Guinea) as well as in minor islands such as Maluku, Flores, Lombok and Timor. In different provinces, the patterns in the violence varied depending largely on the political loyalties and persuasions of regional military commanders and the extent to which they had already established links with other anti-communist forces. The composition of each of these alliances differed from location to location depending on local politics. The involvement of sections of the military in the September 30 Movement reflected the reality of diverse political views within the institution. Across the regions of Indonesia, depending on both their support for President Sukarno and for the PKI, territorial army commands and the battalions below them played different roles in the repression. In some provinces such as Aceh, the first site of violence, the fiercely anti-communist military commander travelled around the province co-ordinating the violence by calling for assistance from the people to crush the PKI and instigating arrests and killings.¹³

 

In East and Central Java, however, regional commanders were more hesitant about attacking the PKI. Many soldiers from the Central Javanese command of Diponegoro had in fact backed the September 30 Movement. For this reason, Suharto could not rely on this provincial command to begin the attack on the PKI, so instead he sent in the elite army crack troops, the Paracommando Unit (RPKAD), both to commence the killing and to train locals to take part in the violence. In East Java, the political context was complicated by the almost equal support in this province for the PKI and Nahdlatul Ulama. Because Sukarno was from East Java, the military there was particularly loyal to him. In this province, national leaders of the Nahdlatul Ulama, who mostly came from East Java, played an important role in endorsing their members to attack followers of the PKI and its mass organisations, with varying degrees of army support.

 

In Bali, the province with the largest death toll per capita, the military worked together with Nahdlatul Ulama in the west and with militias attached to the PNI in other parts of the island to attack PKI followers. Thus, across each province of Indonesia, anti-communist coalitions comprised different groups, including members of religious, nationalist and army-affiliated organisations working in concert with the army.

 

The violence initially entailed attacks on the headquarters of the PKI and its affiliates and on the homes of PKI supporters, but it soon escalated to arrests and executions. A common pattern in the violence was for the army or anti-communist youths to arrest and detain people in military detention centres, district command centres, local police headquarters and makeshift prisons, and then to release quotas of detainees to local anti-communist youths for nightly executions. Although there were cases of public display of corpses, the executioners usually took prisoners to secluded locations such as fields, riverbanks and ravines so that the bodies could be easily disposed of following execution. The victims were generally killed by a blow to the head or by having their throats cut with machetes or swords. Robert Cribb estimates that approximately five hundred thousand people were killed.¹⁴ The height of the campaign was from late 1965 to early 1966, but killings and arrests continued until 1968. In this latter phase, the army crushed remnants of the PKI in West Kalimantan, West Java, Central Java and East Java. It was only in this later phase of the repression that the army and its allies encountered any significant armed resistance, although the death toll on the side of anti-communists was far less than on that of the communists given the latter’s poor supply of arms.

 

Mass detention was an integral part of the attack, with approximately 600,000–750,000 people imprisoned for periods of between one and thirty years.¹⁵ Upon arrest, they were interrogated about their involvement in the September 30 Movement, despite the fact that only a handful of people could have known about the movement. The army considered any link to the PKI, such being a member of a party-affiliated teachers’ union, as grounds for imprisonment.

 

The military classified prisoners according to their alleged connections to the September 30 Movement and their status in the PKI. The highest-risk prisoners, Category A, were detained in discreet detention centres awaiting trial. Of the handful of people subjected to military show trials, none were acquitted and most received sentences of fifteen years’ imprisonment or the death penalty.

 

Category B prisoners—active members of the PKI or leaders of associated mass organisations who could not be easily linked to the September 30 Movement—were relocated to penal colonies. Considered too dangerous to release, they were segregated from society in remote prison camps and made to grow and harvest their own food.

 

Category C prisoners, who were generally rank-and-file members of the PKI or affiliated organisations, were generally separated from other prisoners. Some began to be released from 1966, while others were held until the mid-1970s.

 

Those imprisoned were frequently subjected to torture, overcrowding and insufficient rations. Some people escaped arrest by living on the run, hiding in big cities or seeking refuge among relatives or sympathisers who were willing to take them in.¹⁶ Meanwhile, the homes and property of those killed, imprisoned or in hiding were taken over by army personnel.

 

The regime’s perception that these prisoners were ongoing risks to society and the pattern of long-term detention reveal the larger project in which the emerging military-dominated regime was engaged: a remaking of Indonesian society. The new regime called itself the “New Order”, deliberately highlighting a radical break from the past, from the old order as represented by Sukarno. From the time of the September 30 Movement, the anti-communist leadership of the army moved to reverse the course of the revolution President Sukarno had set in train. At first, this entailed eliminating the most radical thinkers in society, smashing the PKI and affiliated organisations, imprisoning those perceived as continuing threats and then purging the military and Indonesian institutions—especially schools and universities—of those with suspect political backgrounds. The army initially framed its role as that of securing the Indonesian National Revolution, proclaiming the military leaders killed on 30 September 2024 as “Heroes of the Revolution”. As time passed, however, it began to portray its role in crushing the September 30 Movement as a case of national salvation from the communist threat.

 

Anti-communism became a cornerstone of the new regime and was replicated in commemoration of 1 October, in the monument built to honour the Heroes of the Revolution at Crocodile Hole in Jakarta, in school textbooks and in an epic docu-drama re-enacting the kidnapping and killings of the generals. The implications of this persistent propaganda were dire for former political prisoners and for the families of those killed for their alleged connections to the PKI. They became Indonesia’s own version of the untouchables. Moreover, the government subjected former political prisoners and their families to constant surveillance and restrictions on employment and movement. Children, spouses and other relatives sometimes sought to escape the resulting poverty and social stigmatisation by disowning family members branded by the regime as “PKI”.

 

During the Sukarno period, people had been compelled to affiliate themselves with a political force. The Suharto regime used the allegedly persisting threat of communism as a justification for the total depoliticisation of society. No elections were held until 1971, and in these elections only three parties could compete, including the government’s electoral vehicle, Golkar, which until the end of the regime never lost an election. In 1966, the army ratified a new, dual role for itself: besides overseeing Indonesia’s defence, it would also officially play a part in socio-political affairs. More and more army men moved into government posts. The army held a large block of votes in parliament.

Genocide?

The patterns in the 1965–8 violence in Indonesia parallel many other cases of mass violence and genocide. As in the Nazi, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, the violence was preceded by a process of dehumanisation of those targeted. To do this, the army exaggerated the barbarism surrounding the deaths of the generals on 30 September 2024 and played on existing hostilities and fears that the PKI had been planning a much larger attack on its opponents, spreading rumours that numerous wells had been dug in preparation for the corpses of the victims of the PKI’s planned mass slaughter. Benjamin Valentino argues that genocide is most likely to occur in the context of war.¹⁷ The 1965–8 turmoil in Indonesia was not a civil war because the PKI remained largely unarmed, but there had been clashes and escalating tension prior to 1965 and army propaganda created a climate in which anti-communists believed they were under attack. A similarity, however, with the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides is that the army and civilian organisations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and the right wing of the PNI recruited heavily among young men to find willing executioners.

 

The term “genocide” is used in scholarship to refer to state-organised and premeditated efforts to destroy in part or whole a particular group in society. As we have seen, the Indonesian Army was increasingly frustrated by the growing strength of the PKI and had been looking for an opportunity to attack the party. Although Sukarno was still president and did not endorse the violence, the army was able to act as a quasi-state to attack its targets in every province of Indonesia because of the reach of its territorial command system, because it had already been working closely with some anti-communist coalitions prior to 1965 against the PKI, and because it was able to coerce people by means of threat and intimidation. But is “genocide” the best categorisation of what happened in Indonesia?

 

It is accepted today that the definition of genocide covers the annihilation of political and social groups and not just that of ethnic or religious groups. This would allow us to categorise the attack on the PKI and aligned organisations as a genocide. However, the term “genocide” forces attention primarily onto the victims and onto an attempt to define neatly who they were. In fact, the attack went further than the PKI to include supporters of Sukarno more broadly in the military and on the left wing of the PNI. The purpose of the violence was consistent with the definition of genocide to destroy these groups in part, in order to dominate them. Yet the term obscures a larger purpose that drove the violence: the reorientation of society away from Sukarno’s radical politics, from his fierce critiques of imperialism and his moves to implement socialism, which had direct ramifications for members of anti-communist coalitions, including leaders and the rank and file. Executioners and their patrons were thus motivated by the desire to secure their own economic and political interests by destroying a major political rival. The overarching goal was a reversal of the implementation of socialism and an end to class-levelling. Thus, the most apt descriptor for the 1965–8 events in Indonesia is “counter-revolution”.¹⁸

 

The term “counter-revolution” also alludes to broader interests that stood to gain from the suppression of the Indonesian left. Because of its oil reserves and other natural resources, as well as its control of the sea-lanes through South-East Asia, Indonesia was of vital strategic importance during the Cold War and the site of intense competition for influence between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. By 1965, Indonesia sided with China. Dutch assets had already been nationalised in Indonesia in 1957 and with the escalation of Indonesia’s campaign against Malaysia attacks had also begun on British property. The United States was fearful for its economic interests in Indonesia and for Western access to the sea- and air-lanes of the region. A communist victory in Indonesia would have given both China and North Vietnam a significant boost. At the beginning of 1965, when Sukarno withdrew Indonesia from the United Nations, US diplomats began to make overtures to the anti-communist forces to gauge their support for a move against the president and the PKI. According to Bradley Simpson, Washington encouraged the Indonesian army to attack the PKI and supplied some arms and equipment to aid the cause.¹⁹ The outcome of the destruction of the PKI and the removal of Sukarno was to reposition Indonesia decisively as being in the Western bloc and to secure Western economic and military interests across the rest of island South-East Asia.

Current Views

Throughout the period of Suharto’s rule (1965–98), the 1965–8 violence was officially remembered as a joint effort of the people and the army to crush the treacherous PKI. Families and communities that fell victim to the terrifying witch-hunt and the arrests and disappearances of loved ones had little choice but to carry on with what was left of their lives and to keep their heads down. Schoolchildren learnt only to hate the PKI and nothing of the horror or scale of violence that the generations before them had either suffered or inflicted. It was not until the final years of the regime, which ended in May 1998, that survivors of the violence were emboldened by escalating protests against Suharto to begin to organise. From 1998 onwards, victims’ organisations began to demand that the state deal with the crimes that had accompanied the inauguration of Suharto’s rule.

 

In the first years of democratic reform, there were promising signs that the government might begin to use legal measures to address the historical grievances of those who had suffered. In 1999, President Jusuf Habibie released all remaining political prisoners. In 2000, under President Abdurrahman Wahid, the Indonesian government passed Law No. 26, which allowed for the formation of ad hoc human rights courts to deal retrospectively with gross violations of human rights, including genocide and crimes against humanity. In 2004, under President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the government passed Law No. 27, which provided a mandate for the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission. But the government stalled in forming such a commission, and in 2006 the Constitutional Court cancelled the law, declaring it unconstitutional.

 

Survivors and non-governmental organisations committed to human rights challenged the New Order’s version of history. They published alternative accounts of the 1965–8 massacres, made films with survivor testimony, held exhibitions about the mass imprisonments and sought to reduce the stigma imposed on survivors. In 2000, the survivor organisation YPKP successfully exhumed one mass grave in Central Java. In parallel with these efforts, however, anti-communists representing elders in Nahdlatul Ulama and the army continued to replicate the narrative that the killings were justified, insisting that the 1965–8 violence was a civil war and that it had it been a case of “kill or be killed”. They repeatedly denied survivors the status of victim and successfully lobbied parliament to reverse its decision on the reform of history textbooks, reflecting the continued influence of the military, despite its supposed return to barracks in 1999, and the fact that Nahdlatul Ulama returned to politics after 1998.

 

Late in 2011 and throughout 2012, the issue of how to deal with Indonesia’s violent past unexpectedly gained momentum. One explanation is that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired general, will end his final term in 2014 and is concerned about his legacy given a poor record of defending human rights. In 2012, Albert Hasibuan, the minister for politics, law and security, began to speak publicly about the possibility of a presidential apology for all past human rights abuses, together with a compensation fund. On 23 July, the release by the National Commission of Human Rights of the executive summary of its findings on 1965 prompted public debate about the anticipated apology. Politicians from the PDI-P (Democratic Party of Struggle), the party headed by President Sukarno’s daughter Megawati, called on the president to issue an apology, begin the rehabilitation of former political prisoners, and commence a process of reconciliation and “mutual forgiveness”.²⁰ Yet Deputy House Speaker and head of the Golkar party, Priyo Budi Santoso, said “it was best if cases of gross human rights abuses in the past were not prioritised because they could cause similar events to occur again”.²¹ The comment sparked outrage among human rights groups. Unrepentant, a spokesperson for a gathering between Nahdlatul Ulama supporters and the military, Alfian Tanjung, said they rejected the commission’s efforts because the army and members of Islamic organisations should also be considered victims of human rights violations by the PKI. Following the controversy, President Yudhoyono did not make the anticipated apology in his Independence Day speech on 17 August.

 

The 2012 anniversary of the September 30 Movement prompted a new wave of commentary. An official from the Council of Ulama, Indonesia’s top Islamic clerical body, stated that “the PKI’s cruelty could be forgiven, but not forgotten”.²² No mention was made of the violence against the PKI. Meanwhile, the popular Indonesian magazine Tempo published a special edition on the executioners of 1965. The special edition was in part inspired by a controversial new film called The Act of Killing. Produced by an American, Joshua Oppenheimer, the film centres on re-enactments of the killings by a largely proud executioner, Anwar Congo, in the Sumatran city of Medan.²³ Tempo’s special edition featured interviews with those who took part in the violence from the islands of Java, Bali and Flores, and reported on the long-term prison camps, referred to as “concentration camps”, in South Sulawesi, Buru island and Central Java. The editor’s introduction, entitled “Requiem for a Massacre”, opens thus: “Reconciliation cannot begin with denial, but with an admission: this is what we need to hear from the people responsible for the 1965 mass killings, and those who supported them.”²⁴ The publication, which sold out quickly, attempted to counter denials of the scale of the violence and of the need to reinvestigate the tragedy. Despite including accounts from Nahdlatul Ulama members testifying to their part in the violence, leaders of the Islamic organisation threatened to sue Tempo for unfair coverage, claiming that the special issue was a case of trial by press.

 

On 10 November, Heroes’ Day, an important military celebration, the attorney-general announced that there was insufficient evidence in the National Commission for Human Rights’ report on 1965 for a formal legal investigation and returned the report to the commission for revision. However, on 5 December, Tempo was awarded a Yap Thiam Hien Award, granted to individuals or organisations that have made a significant contribution in the effort to uphold human rights in Indonesia. It was announced that the award was given in part for Tempo’s coverage of the victims of the 1965 violence. Despite the reluctance of President Yudhoyono and sections of the bureaucracy to provide historical justice for survivors of the 1965–8 violence, sections of Indonesian civil society, including survivors, activists, journalists and a handful of politicians, are now importantly challenging Indonesian anti-communists and pursuing alternative mechanisms for justice and truth-telling.

Endnotes

1. John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 41.

 

2. Saskia E. Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

 

3. Sukarno, “Returning to the Rails of the Revolution (1959)”, in Indonesian Political Thinking, 1945–1965, ed. Herbert Feith and Lance Castles (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 109.

 

4. See Peter Christian Hauswedell, “Sukarno: Radical or Conservative? Indonesian Politics 1964–65”, Indonesia 15 (April 1973), pp. 116–17.

 

5. See Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959–1965 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 131.

 

6. Lance Castles, “Socialism and Private Business: The Latest Phase”, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 1, no. 1 (June 1965), pp. 13–14.

 

7. See Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, pp. 139–40.

 

8. See Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 264–71.

 

9. From Sukarno’s 1964 Independence Day speech, “The Year of Living Dangerously”, quoted in Hauswedell, “Sukarno: Radical or Conservative?”, p. 131.

 

10. Sukarno, “Nation Building and Character Building”, in Indonesian Policy Series: New Forces Build a New World, 10th Anniversary 1st Asian African Conference 1965 (Jakarta: Department of Foreign Affairs, 1965), p. 28.

 

11. Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, p. 59.

 

12. Sukarno speech, 16 October 1965, as quoted in Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia, rev. ed. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 162.

 

13. See Jessica Melvin, “A Silent Massacre: The Indonesian Communist Party and the 1965 Mass Killings in Aceh” (honours thesis, Melbourne University, 2009), pp. 35–45.

 

14. Robert Cribb, “Problems in the Historiography of the Killings in Indonesia”, in The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali, ed. Robert Cribb (Clayton, Victoria: Centre of South-East Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990), pp. 7–14.

 

15. See Greg Fealy, “The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic versus Foreign Policy, 1975–1979” (Clayton: Working Paper, Monash University, 1995), pp. 5–7.

 

16. See Vannessa Hearman, “Dismantling the Fortress: East Java and the Transition to Suharto’s New Order Regime (1965–68)” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 2012), pp. 139–56.

 

17. Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

 

18. See Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor, “Introduction to the Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia: 1965–68”, in The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–1968, ed. Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (Singapore: SEAP Series Singapore University Press, University of Hawaii Press and KITLV, 2012), pp. 10–13.

 

19. Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 193.

 

20. See Sandro Gatra, “Resolve the 1965–1966 Event by Political Means” (in Indonesian; all translations by Katherine McGregor), Kompas (Jakarta), 24 July, 2012.

 

21. Heru Suprapto, “The Victims of 1965 Condemn Priyono’s Statement” (in Indonesian), Kompas (Jakarta), 25 July 2012.

 

22. “MUI: The Cruelty of the PKI Cannot Be Forgotten” (in Indonesian), Metro TV News, 1 October 2012.

 

23. Catherine Shoard, “The Act of Killing—Review”, Guardian Weekly, 14 September 2012.

 

24. “Requiem for a Massacre”, Tempo (Jakarta), 1–7 October 2012, p. 11.