Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966, by Dr. Katherine McGregor, (Part Two)

Once again, this is from an article that I found on line, and then was suddenly gone, so I am rewriting it. Since I didn't save it to my computer, but printed it, and am having to type it in manually, and have carpal tunnel, there may be typos. For the left leaning critics out there, this is not my article. Hang in there to the end and she gives a whole page of foot notes, unlike the books on the slamming of our founding fathers. WARNING CONTAINS SOME GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS.

C. Victims

As noted above, the PKI claimed a membership of 3.5 million people by 1965. In addition it had another 23.5 million members in affiliated organizations. These affiliated organizations included a wide range of interests including the Barisan Tani Indonesia (BTI - Indonesian Farmer's Union), The Indonesian Workers Union (SOBSI), Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat Indonesia (LEKRA - The Indonesian People's Culture Institute), Gerwani (The Indonesian Women's Movement) and the youth organization Pemuda Rakyat (The People's Youth). Members of these organizations shared a broad political agenda with the PKI. In some cases, however, they joined for a very specific reasons rather than an overarching commitment to communist ideology. Some illiterate farmers, for example, were attracted to BTI because of the potential to gain their own land holdings or the promise of fairer wages. The army condemned members of these affiliated organizations alongside the PKI for their alleged involvement in the 30th of September Movement.

Members of the PLI, BTI, Pemuda Rakyat, Gerwani, SOBSI and LEKRA were all targeted in the initial arrests and imprisonments. they were identified by means of organizational lists compiled by the army, or in the case of local communities, by means of general knowledge of peoples' alliances.

The PKI remained a legal party until 1966 because of President Sukarno{http://www.massviolence.org/Sukarno] refused to ban the party. Despite this, repression of PKI members and members of affiliated organizations began in the weeks after October 1.

Members of the Cakrawirawa guard and members of the two battalions that supported the 30 September Movement, the Diponegoro and Brawijaya divisions from Central java, were also targeted. the air force, which was the force most sympathetic to the PKI, was also subject to purges. In addition there was a split within the Indonesian National Party and some of those on the left, who were most supportive of President Sukarno[http://www.massviolence.org/sukarno], were also purged from both the military and the government.

The ethnic Chinese were not especially targeted in the violence of 1965-66. Historically the ethnic Chinese have frequently been persecuted in Indonesia and as a result of this and other discriminatory policies they were concentrated in the cities in the 1960s. Because the killings were most intense in rural areas they were not especially targeted, although many suffered property loss or damage (Cribb, 2001a and Coppel, 1983).

Members of the PKI and its affiliated organizations sometimes reported directly to authorities and were detained, others were arrested at their homes and taken away by members of the military or religious vigilantes for interrogation, often involving torture. They were commonly detained first in temporary prisons and later taken to the forests to be killed with knives, bayonets, firearms or were beaten to death. Their bodies were disposed of in mass graves. In other cases the corpses were dumped in the sea, caves, major rivers, left on main streets or mutilated and strung up for public display as a further form of terror.

Estimates of the number of people who died range from 100,000 to 2 million people. There is a wide range of estimates because there was little record keeping at the time and no serious attempt afterwards to reconstruct what happened. President Sukarno[http://www.massviolence.org/Sukarno] ordered a Fact Finding team to investigate the killings in December 1965, but it completed its work before the killings finished. A KOPKAMTIB (Komando Operasi Pemulihan Keamanan dan Ketertiban - Operations Command to Restore Order and Security) survey in 1966, still not available to researchers, is said to have estimated that a million people had been killed. There are serious doubts about the reliability of this report because there were motivations for both over and under reporting the killings. Because the corpses were disposed of in numerous ways and due to the climate of Indonesia, which promotes rapid decay, remains were not frequently discovered in ensuing years. In addition, there was no political will or interest in uncovering mass graves until the late 1990s and the end of the Suharto[http://www.massviolence.org/Suharto regime. Acknowledging the many difficulties of arriving at an accurate estimate, Robert Cribb (2001b) suggests a figure of 500,000 as most accurate.

In addition to those killed, 600,000-750,000 people were also imprisoned for periods of between one and thirty years (Fealy, 1995). The military categorised prisoners into three groups. Group A consisted of the highest ranks of the PKI, those for whom there was allegedly evidence of planning and leading the 30 September Movement. these prisoners were held for long periods until a military trial could be scheduled. Of those tried no-one was acquitted and many received the death penalty.

Group B consisted of people who were the rank and file of the PKI, whom the military deemed indirectly involved. Category B prisoners were sent to penal colonies in remote areas like Buru Island in the Laluku region where they were set the task of opening up agricultural lands while remaining isolated from the rest of society. To survive, they were forced to establish self-supporting communities with their own sources of food. During the period of imprisonment some prisoners also carried out forced labour (sic) to build roads and infrastructure.

Third came category C prisoners, including those who supported the PKI's 26 mass organizations. Most category C detainees were detained closer to home where their families could provide supplies and were released by 1972. Once they were released they faced sever restrictions on their employment, compulsory registration and monitoring by local officials and loss of voting rights.

Prisoners were often subject to torture when they were first detained and sometimes long after this. During these torture sessions their captors sought to extract confessions from prisoners as to their involvement in the 30 September Movement and as members of the communist Party, the were also asked to name other people in the party or its affiliated organizations and reveal their locations. Gaol (sic) rations were minimal andmany men and women died of hunger and related illnesses.

Due to the propaganda surrounding Gerwani and their alleged debauchery in the events of 30 September, Gerwani women and other women affiliated with the PKI were subject to intense stigmatization and sexual abuse including rape inside the prisons (Wieringa, 2002). Women were detained in either a mixed or women's only prisons such as Bukit Duri in Jakarta and the more isolated Plantungan prison in Kendal, Central Java.

In some cases, when women had young children or were pregnant their children went to gaol (sic) with them. In other cases, women had to ask for help from their wider family to adopt their children. sometimes children were also left orphaned by the killings or forcibly removed from the families of alleged communists. Families left behind also suffered due to the intense stigmatization of communists.

The houses and property of those killed or detained were sometimes burnt down or seized by the military. Some became temporary detention centres (sic).

From the 1980s onwards, after the release of most political prisoners, the New Order government applied a form of screening called the 'clean environment policy' towards appointments to certain professions such as teachers, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, and in the military. According to this policy former political prisoners and the children and grandchildren of those allegedly connected to the 30 September Movement were barred from working in these professions.

D - Witnesses

Most Indonesians, particularly in Bali and East Java would have witnessed incidents of killings or other violence during the 1965-66 period. however, until the fall of the Suharto[http:www.massviolence.org/Suharto] regime in 1998, there were only a handful of published accounts by survivors about what they had witnessed in 1965-66.

Since 1998 several former political prisoners have published their memoirs, focusing on their experiences inside gaol (sic). These works include accounts of torture, beatings and murder inside the gaols (sic) as well as accounts of prisoners being taken away never to return (see for example Sulami, 1999).

Several researchers have also collected oral testimonies from survivors of the violence, which include recollections of witnessing killings.

There are a number of published accounts by witnesses and perpetrators available in English. The first major edited book on the killings by Cribb (1990) includes a translated report from the army history division on crushing the PKI in Central Java, an anonymous report on the killings in East Java, two reports on the killings in 1969 in Purwodadi and three short reports on the violence in Bali.

Pipit Rochijat, a graduate in electrical engineering, provided an account of the killings in Kediri, East Java in a piece titled 'Am I PKI or non-PKI?' (Rochijat, 1985). At the time of the killings Rochijat was a student. He witnessed the killings, in which his friends participated. He recalls that troops from nationalist and religious youth groups, including recruits from Islamic boarding schools, would surround a village suspected of being communist such as Pare in East Java. The next day he would see corpses, sometimes mutilated, floating down the Brantas river often tied to or impaled with bamboo sticks so they would float and be visible to others. He also recalls the road west of Kediri being decorated with PKI heads and make genitals being hung outside brothels. He recalls watching people die and beg for mercy, the image of heads being decapitated, the screams of a Gerwani woman as her vagina was pierced with a bamboo pole. As a member of a PNI youth group he also was targeted for arrest in a later wave of army-directed arrests.

In 1989 an unidentified member of a leftist youth organization, possibly Pemuda Rakyat, who escaped death recorded his memories of witnessing some killings from hiding. His work was published in English under the title By the Banks of the Brantas. In this piece, republished in Cribb (1997), he recounts his experiences of avoiding capture and viewing the slaughter and decapitation of several men and women.

Yusuf Hasyim[http:www.massviolence.org/Hasyim-Yusuf] also published a short account of Ansor's role in opposing the communists before and after the 30 September Movement in a larger volume on the New Order period (Hasyim, 2005).

In 2008, shortly after the death of former president Shuarto[http:www.massviolence.org/suharto], journalist Anthony Deutsch published some interviews with people who recalled the violence of 1965. In one interview in Blitar, East Java, Markus Talam, a former member of a left-wing union for park rangers who was gaoled (sic) for ten years on suspicion of being a communist sympathiser, recalls seeing soldiers herding prisoners from trucks, lining them up and shooting them with automatic weapons (Deutsch, 2008a).

In another rare interview, for perpetrators in Bangil, East Java, expressed no remorse for the killings. Sulchan, who is now a preacher and was a former member of Banser suggested the order to kill communists came through Islamic clerics within the Nadhlatul Ulama. Sulchan admitted to leading the killings in his local area and recounted how his men killed a school teacher with a sledghammer, how they decapitated one man and hung his head in the town square. On another night they took 20-30 prisoners to an execution site, dumping the bodies in a ditch (Deutsch, 2008b).

Both military official histories of particular regiments and histories of Ansor and/or the NU include accounts of the killings throughout Indonesia (see for example Semdam VIII, Brawidjaja, 1969 and Anam, 1990). In addition to these first hand accounts there are several fictionalised accounts of the killings (see for example Aveling, 1975).

E - Memories

Official history during the New Order period

For the duration of the Suharto [http:www.massviolence.org/Suharto] New Order regime, the 1965-66 killings were described obscurely in school history textbooks under the generic term of crushing the PKI, which could have been interpreted as the suppression of those directly involved in the 30 September Movement. the military regime used its version of the coup attempt to deflect attention from the killings. Within forty days after the coup attempt the military produced the first white book on the events, emphasising PKI culpability and their alleged depravity during the kidnapping and killing of the seven army martyrs (Pusat Sedjarah Angkatan Bersenjjata, 1965). It then set about memorialising the site, Lugang Buaya in Jararta, at which the bodies of the martyrs were found. Over time, an elaborate monument and museum complex was built.

From the mid-1980s a propaganda film including a reenactment of the kidnapping and killing of the army men was screened repeatedly on all television stations. In addition, the regime began to commemorate October 1 each year as Sacred Pancasila Day (McGregor, 2002). The name of this day suggested that the day of the coup attempt was suppressed the national philosophy, Pancasila, had been saved. The overarching narrative was thus that the Indonesian people had been saved on October 1 from a communist betrayal, that for this reason the day should be commemorated and the military victims mourned as martyrs to this cause.

For thirty two years, on October 1, Indonesian newspapers continued under tight press controls to faithfully replicate the official version of the coup attempt and made little or no mention of the killings that followed. In military histories and histories compiled by religious organizations involved in the violence, the killings were generally referred to by the military term penumpasan, meaning crushing. Both these groups recorded their participation in the killings with pride, as part of their service to the nation. In communities in which the violence had taken place many people were afraid to speak out or write about the violence because of an enduring campaign of anti-communism and possible consequences of being labelled a communist even thirty years after the coup attempt.

One reason that the government kept anti-communism alive was that the Suharto[http:www.massviolence.org/Suharto] regime feared communism as a political force. The New Order regime placed severe restrictions on the employment, movement and political activities of former political prisoners thereby restricting the capacity of these people to seek redress for past violence. In this climate it was difficult to express public sympathy for victims of this violence.