Once again, I began research on the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66, and found this wonderful article by Dr. Katherine McGregor. I went back the next day and it had been removed from the Internet. Luckily I had printed it. Because I printed it and didn't save it to my computer, I'm having to type it manually, and not copy and paste, so there will be typos. If you're left leaning and wish to critique, please keep your comments to facts and not typos. I have carpal tunnel syndrome and that's why this is not in one piece, but several parts. It is extremely long, and it pains me to type for long periods. But this information needs to get out. President Obama was in Indonesia during the tail end of this massacre and it had to have had an effect on him. There is no way murdered and mutilated bodies being hung in the streets would not effect a child, especially when they were murdered for being the same political party that your parents professed to be, and murdered by the religion that your dad was. How conflicting is that? The government enlisted Muslim youths to kill communists. And better yet, Indonesia still doesn't allow anyone who was involved in that movement, or their children or grandchildren, to hold certain offices if they are of that country. Could that be why the Obama's gave up their lawyer licenses? Hmm. Something to look into?
NOTE: I just looked up this link and found it back on the Internet! http://www.massviolence.org/The-Indonesian-Killings-of-1965-1966
Should we be asking why President Suharto, the President who "crushed" the communist rebellion, died in 2008, the same year the President Obama took office? When President Obama was in Indonesia at the same time that he committed these atrocities to communists, who happened to be the political affiliation of his parents, and "used" Muslims, who were the religion of his Father? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. I wonder what he died of?
Contested Memories of the Killings
The collapse of the Suharto [http://www.massviolence.org/Suharto] regime in May 1998 ushered in a period of openness and a new curiosity about the events of the 1960s emerged. After restrictions on the media were lifted, discussions began about the official version of the coup attempt and then eventually the 1965-66 killings and imprisonments.
Former political prisoners seized this opportunity to publicise their experiences. Some began to publish memoirs of their prison experiences emphasising their suffering. A common trend in these stories is to begin narrating one's experiences from the moment of arrest in a way that obscures the author's involvement in politics and indeed the militancy of some PKI affiliated organizations (Watson, 2006 and McGregor and Hearman, 2007). The intention is to generate sympathy for this group of people and demand their rehabilitation in addition to seeking justice by more formal means. Some former political prisoners have also made, or provided testimony, in documentary style films about the violence of 1965-66 to help raise public awareness about what happened.
Survivors also joined together to form a number of victims' organizations. One of the most active victim's organizations in the first years after Suharto [http://www.massviolence.org/Suharto] was the YPKP (the Foundation for Research into Victims of the 1965-66 Killings) founded by the famous novelist and former prisoner Pramoedya Anota Toer [http://www.massviolence.org/Ananta-Toer-Pramoedya] and former Gerwani leader Sulami [http://www.massviolence.org/Joyoprawiro-Sulami]. YPKP's initial activities included collecting testimonies, investigating and exhuming mass graves and producing publications with the aim and challenging the orthodox history of the killings and bringing perpetrators to account. In the early years of its operations the activities of the YPKP and the split off group LPKP(Institute for Research on Victims of the Killings) prompted sporadic protests, and their branches repeatedly received threats from organizations such as the Front Pembela Islam (Islam Defenders Front).
In addition to these efforts a number of NGOs and independent research groups such as ELSAM, Kontras, the National Commission on Women's Rights and Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia (ISSI - Institute for Indonesian Social History) began to research the mass violence of 1965-66. ISSI has collected oral histories of over two hundred people affectee by the violence of 1965 and published a collection of these stories (Roosa, Ratih and Farid, 2004). ISSI has also been involved in efforts to promote greater awareness about the violence of this period among younger Indonesians.
At an official level, responses to efforts to address this past have been mixed. The first president after Suharto [http://www.massviolence.org/Shuarto], Bacharuddin Habibie[http://www.massviolence.org/Jusuf-Habible-Bachruddin], released all remaining political prisoners, cancelled the tradition of screening the propaganda film about the coup on the 30 September and promised revisions to school history textbooks that had previously encouraged hatred towards all alleged communists. In 2000, President Abdurrahman Wahid[http://www.massviolence.org/Wahid-1940-Abdurrahman], who was the former leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, suggested lifting the long standing ban on communism and proposed a judicial investigation into the killing. In response there were mass rallies of protest from Islamic groups.
The reaction to this proposal was a precursor to a looming back lash against all efforts to address this past. In 2001, members of the group Forum Ukuwah Islamiya Kaloran (Kaloran Islamic Raternity Forum) violently obstructed a YPKP coordinated reburial of remains of victims from 1965. The remains had been recovered from a mass grave in Wonosobo. Prior to the 2004 elections the government lifted the ban on former political prisoners standing for elections. In August 2005 a number of anti-communist groups also protested outside the Central Jakarta State Court against a class action brought by ex-political prisoners from LPKP. The action, against the current President and his predecessors including Suharto[http://www.massviolence.org/Suharto], sought to repeal the 1966 decrees banning the Communist Party, historical correction, compensation and rehabilitation of the names of victims.
By 2004, approved textbooks included alternative versions of the attempted coup. the propaganda about communist barbarity was discarded, but no mention was made of the post-coup killings or the mass imprisonments that followed. Even these tame revisions, however, prompted protest. In 2005 the Attorney General called the authors of these textbooks to explain why they had not described 1965 as a communist coup attempt. In 2004 the push for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) encompassing the 1965-66 killings also gained momentum, but in 2006 the idea was abandoned.
Opposition to both the revised textbooks and the TRC was particularly strong from the NU elder Yusuf Hasyim [http://www.massviolence.org/Hasyim-Yusuf] who formed part of an anti-communist coalition. In 2001 and 2003 he organized exhibitions devoted to the theme of PKI treachery and barbarity. Another polemical anti-communist is Taufig Ismail[http://www.massviolence.org/Ismail-Taufig], whose poetry was popular in the anti-communist student movement of 1966 of which he was a part, has repeatedly published accounts alerting Indonesians to communist crimes in history and the aleged fate they were 'saved from' in 1965 (Ismail, 2004)
There were different views, however, among Indonesian Muslims concerning this past. One Islamic organization Syarikat, which is composed of NU youth, is working hard towards community level reconciliation between ex-political prisoners and members of Hahdiatul Ulama on the basis of a belief that members of the NU participated in the killings only because they were manipulated by the military.
F - General and Legal Interpretation of the Facts
The most prolific writer on Indonesian killings is the Australian based historian, Robert Cribb. Cribb edited the first scholarly book on the killings in 1990, in which he attempts to survey patterns in the violence of 1965-66. Since this publication he has published several articles on the killings (Cribb, 1997, 2001a, 2001b, 2002).
From the 1980s, some scholars began to regard the Indonesian killings as genocide because of the scale of the killing, but this interpretation was rejected by other scholars on the grounds that the United Nations definition of genocide does not mention the targeting of political groups. Cribb (2001) has since argued that ethnic and political identities can overlap so strongly that excluding mass political killing from the definition of genocide is no longer tenable. Another term sometimes used to describe politically motivated killings is politicide.
Some observers have suggested cultural explanations for the killings. The journalist Frank Palmos (1966), for instance, drew on the fact that amuck (amuk in Indonesian spelling) is an Indonesian word to suggest that Indonesians had run amuck or participated in a wild frenzy and killed other Indonesians in a form of psychopathology. Yet there is no evidence of such a frenzy and serious sociological studies of amuck as a phenomenon show that it is a response to defeat and humiliation, never carried out by those who have the upper hand in a conflict. Other observers have suggested (e.g. Hughes, 1967) that Javanese and Balinese cultures place unusually high value on social harmony and that social forces take revenge on anyone seen as disrupting that harmony. This explanation, however, is based on an orientalist view of traditional Javanese and Balinese cultures which ignores the elements of conflict and violence that have consistently been present.
Scholars differ in the emphasis they place on certain factors in contributing to the killings. Cribb (2001) argues that the killings were directed by the military and fueled by economic and political tensions. He stresses military agency as one of the most significant factors driving the killings, yet he qualifies this stating that the military often co-opted civilian vigilantes to do the killing. Most serious studies of the killings acknowledge that the military played a central role in the killings.
Cribb (1990) has argued that only Islam provided an ideiological justification for the killings. Fealy (1998) further notes that in Islam the concept of bughat - revolt against a legitimate government - provides a rationale for taking action against those who have revolted against a legitimate government. Caution is however required in assuming a causal link between religious devotion, theological justifications and participation in the killings. Robinson's (1995) work on Bali offers a useful way of interrogating the assumed casual link between religious identity and the killings. Importantly, he notes that although religion was often used as justification for the killing, the military actively shaped and encouraged a popular discourse of anti-communism based on exacting religious ideas and cultural analogies' (1995:279). He claims that those who directed their members to participate in the violence were driven primarily by political, rather than religious, considerations. In the case of Islam, McGregor (2009) argues that ideas of Islam were similarly exploited to further political agendas.
There are several detailed studies of regions affected by the violence and these studies also point to different contributing factors. The results from the 1955 elections, the last and only democratic elections prior to the coup attempt (see maps below), [note: maps were not printed] indicate where the PKI had the greatest following.
East Java was a stronghold for both the Nahdlatul Ulama and the PKI. Violence in this area was particularly intense and the NU youth organization Ansor was at the forefront of the killings. Fealy (1998) has provided one of the most detailed accounts of the involvement of Ansor in this violence. Young (1990) offered the first attempt to weigh up the influence of local and national factors in explaining the killings based on his research in Kediri, East Java. He argued that it could not be assumed that patterns in the frequently cited case of East Java were universally applicable. He points to the specific impact of land reform and a unique social history in this region.
In his study of the killings in Jombang and Kediri, two areas where there are many Islamic boarding schools and hence devout Muslims, Sulistyo (1997) points to long standing social conflict, clashes in political views and the key role played by Muslim youths in the killings, giving some specific examples of the impact of peer pressure on participation in the violence. He suggests the military played a relatively passive role in this region.
In his research on East Java and Bali, Sudjatmiko (1992) emphasizes the policies and practices of the PKI and affiliated organizations as central to the revenge enacted upon them. He represents the PKI as deserving of their fate.
Robert Hefner (1990), who researched the killings in the upland area of Pasuruan, East Java, notes that Ansor did not wait for the military to act in this area. Here, there were complex social relations and Ansor targeted not just the PKI, but also the PNI, which were supportive of Hindu-Buddhist religious practices and antogonistic to Islamic groups.
There is little research on Central Java. there were extensive killing in the areas of Solo-Klaten, Pati and Banyumas. Here RPKAD, under Sarwo Edhie[http://www.massviolence.org/Edhie-Sarwo], played a dominant role (Cribb 1990).
Violence was less widespread in West Java. One explanation put forward by Cribb (1990) for this is that the army had only recently suppressed the Darul Islam (House of Islam) revolts and was thus reluctant to rearm and use people involved in this rebellion to counter the communists.
In Bali, where approximately 80,000 people died, Robinson (1996) notes that tensions resulted from the PKI's encouragement of changes to rigid social relations connected to the caste system and because it challenged the authority to Hindu religious leaders. The BTI was also very active in implementing land reform resulting in disquiet amongst those who lost land. Robinson stresses the central role played by the military in Bali in encouraging militia linked to the PNI to take revenge against the PKI. He also notes that there was a delay in killing in this region due to the closeness of the governor to the PKI and a period of waiting to see how things played out in Jakarta.
Most explanations use historical and political perspectives to explain the violence of 1965, but in recent years anthropologists have added new insights into the dynamics of the killings and the lasting effects of the killings. Based on their field research in Bali, Dwyer and Santikarma (2007) have, for example, examined how the violence of 1965-66 has continued to impact on local level social relations and the resultant reluctance of some survivors to openly remember the past and engage in forms of internationally sanctioned reconciliation or peace making processes.
In Wes Kalimantan, ethnic Chinese involved in the Malaysia campaign were targeted by the indigenous Dayak people, with encouragement from the army. The killings began here at a later stage (Coppel, 1983).
The killings were also intense in North Sumatra. There is not much published research on this area, yet we know there were many plantation and industrial workers in North Sumatra who had joined the PKI and affiliated organizations in response to efforts by the party to improve their lot (Stoler, 1995). In North and South Sumatra party membership was also strong amongst migrant lagorers from Java, another group the PKI had become advocates for. In Aceh there were only a small number of PKI and the killings occurred quickly. According to Kahin (1999) the British Consul estimated there were 200,000 deaths throughout Sumatra.
Webb (1986) notes that in West Timor the Protestant Church supported land reform and its members were subsequently targeted. In Lombok, Muslim Sasaks were involved in the killing of Balinese and Chinese. Despite its anti-communist stance, in Flores, the Catholic Church forbade the killing of communists. On the killings in West Timor, Farram (2002) also emphasizes that the PKI had successfully attracted members of the Christian Church, supporters of animist belief and challenged traditional authority, leading to a broad cross section of people being killed.
Several authors such as Roosa (2006), Farid (2006), Hadiz (2007) and Simpson (2008) place greater emphasis on the alliance between the US government and the Indonesian army as a crucial determinant to the actions of the Indonesian military. They emphasize the joint agenda of building a capitalist economy founded on Western aid and continued access to Indonesian natural resources and markets. Roosa (2006) argues that as a consequence of all their grievances against the PKI, the military, with Western backing, were looking for a pretext to crush the PKI. The actions of the 30 September Movement provided this pretext. These authors argue that by killing members of the PKI, trade unions and farmers who pushed for the nationalization of assets, labor, and land reforms, the army also paved the way for implementing this new economic system. these interpretations, however, also focus on elite motives and do not explain why the killings reached the scale they did.
In the context of the Cold War and especially the Vietnam War, which had been underway for three years by 1965, the US government was deeply afraid of the possiblity of a communist victory in Indonesia. In this context the army leadership courted Western powers and the US supported, pro-Western sections of the army in coming to power by any means possible. Western governments were also largely pleased when the army began moving against the PKI in October 1965. Time Magazine reported the rise of Suharto[http://www.massviolence.org/Suharto] as 'The West's Best News for Years'. There was limited sympathy for the victims of the violence because they were communists and also because of racist assumptions about the lower value of life placed on Indonesian people.
Legal Issues
In the ten years since the end of the Suharto[http://www.massviolence.org/Suharto] regime there have been some state level initiatives to address the human rights abuses of 1965-66. The National Commission on Human Rights was given a mandate to investigate the detention and treatment of prisoners sent to Buro Island sent to Buru Island. this was, however, a very narrow investigation and commissioners were given a very short time to complete their research. In addition there was no follow up to their findings.
In 2004 the parliament passed a law enabling the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and President (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono[http://www.massviolence.org/Bambang-Yudhoyono-Susilo] began to consider a list of potential commissioners. However, the commission was abandoned in 2006 after the Constitutional Court declared the TRC law to be unconstitutional. The Court was responding to objections human rights groups had raised against proposed amnesty provisions that would have given impunity to those who confessed crimes. There was also pressure exerted by sections of the NU in co-operation with the military.
In 2008 the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights began investigating the 1965-66 killings by collecting evidence and testimonies from individuals and organizations throughout Indonesia, in order to compile a report about the killings and recommend judicial action by the Indonesian government. however, the Commission continues to receive regular threats. Whenever NGOs or surviving victims have attempted to open this past to public scrutiny or stake claims for justice, protests, instances of direct intimidation, and violence have followed.
In the case of the 1965-66 killings, there are no powerful or significant lobby groups either inside or outside Indonesia pushing for justice on this case. In addition, there is on consensus that the New Order's origins were a shameful period in Indonesian history. For this reason there has been no significant progress in efforts to address this past by legal means.
G. Bibliography
I'm skipping the bibliography, as it is quite extensive. If anyone wants it, you can post a comment, and I'll add it later. This has been painful on my wrists and back to sit and type all this.
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