Many years ago during Suharto’s dictatorship, when the mass killings of 1965-66 were a taboo subject, I interviewed Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of Indonesia’s greatest writers, who was living under house arrest in Jakarta after his release from a decade of brutal existence as a political prisoner on Buru island.

Those interviews with Pak Pram, as he was known, were revelatory to me, a young US journalist who knew next to nothing about the botched coup of 1 October 1965, which the army blamed on the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and then used as a pretext to massacre up to a million suspected communists and imprison another million Indonesians, including Pak Pram.

I took a deep dive into this little known chapter of the Cold War in my attempt to understand Pram’s role as a fellow traveller and leading leftist intellectual before 1 October, and then a locked-up, banned and silenced writer after Suharto and the army seized power.

Back then, facts were hard to come by. It was dangerous to challenge the official narrative that the army saved the nation and that the people rose up in a frenzy to annihilate the PKI. After Suharto was toppled in 1998 and Indonesia entered its cacophonous yet fragile democratic era, a battle over memory and history erupted over the events of 1965.

While the official narrative still prevails and continues to be taught to schoolchildren, that official narrative has been debunked by scholars, journalists, writers and political prisoners who survived the killings. The ongoing excavation of the hidden history of what happened is crucial for Indonesians, but it is also important for citizens of the US, UK and Australia to understand the role their governments played in supporting the mass killings and then helping to hide them.

These three new books add, in very different ways, needed pieces of the complicated mosaic explaining why so many were killed so quickly, what happened to the political prisoners who weren’t killed and why the army and civilian militias who carried out most of the killings have never been held accountable.

The survivors
Vannessa Hearman’s Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia focusses on one province, East Java, and after she explores who was behind the killings in the province, she digs into what happened to the PKI members and other leftists who survived and how they responded to the violence. Hersri Setiawan, like Pramoedya, was banished to Buru, and his Buru Island: A Prison Memoir paints a wrenching portrait of life as a political prisoner, robbed of all rights and human dignity. The third volume, The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide, is a collection of essays that delve into the different categories of crimes against humanity committed by the army and its proxies during the state-sponsored annihilation campaign, and adds the crucial dimension of the complicity of the US and the UK in providing propaganda and material support.

Hearman, a historian who lectures at Charles Darwin University, spent years researching Unmarked Graves. Through her extensive interviews, Hearman describes what happened in East Java as the news spread from Jakarta that in the early hours of 1 October six high-ranking army generals were snatched from their homes and murdered by left-leaning junior officers who called themselves the 30 September Movement.

They claimed they were forestalling a coup by a CIA-backed group of anti-communist generals. Within hours, the junior officers were out-manoeuvred by Major General Suharto, who staged a counter-coup and blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for the murders.

The army took control of all newspapers and radio, and the propaganda ­ – including the fake and endlessly repeated story of how Communist women danced around the kidnapped generals as they castrated them and gouged out their eyes ­ – played a huge part in whipping up support within Muslim militias, mostly organised by the army, for rounding up, detaining and then killing suspected communists.

Within twenty-four hours, the 30 September Movement collapsed. PKI members in East Java, like the rest of the archipelago, were stunned and did not know what to do as the communists were blamed. East Java was a stronghold of the PKI, which by then was the third largest communist party in the world. East Java also has long been a mainstay of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), a mass-based Muslim organisation that opposed the PKI.

Hearman describes how the army turned to NU and its youth militias, known as Ansor, gave them weapons and turned them into willing executioners of those deemed to be linked to the treacherous PKI. She writes that as early as 5 October, NU leaders in the East Java town of Kediri met with army officers and agreed to work together. On 8 October, NU and other Muslim leaders gathered in the town of Jamsaren: “It was agreed that among the organisations present, NU would take a leading role in eradicating the PKI in the coming weeks”.

The first killings in East Java began in Kediri on 13 October. Some NU leaders sanctioned the killings; the head of a NU religious school in the town of Situbondo declared that “the PKI’s blood was halal”. In describing how the killings spread across the province, Hearman’s research echoes the harrowing patterns another Australian scholar, Jess Melvin, uncovered in Aceh and describes in her groundbreaking book, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder.

Army documents
Melvin found a cache of 3,000 army documents that prove that the army deliberately planned the massacres, and she uses them to chronicle how the tactics and scale of the killings evolved in Aceh. Hearman, relying on interviews and archival material, found the army’s methods in Aceh were repeated. Public demonstrations against the PKI were followed by the creation of militias and death squads. In the first phase of the killings, there were public executions and mass round-ups. Then the killings would escalate.

“The first stage was demonstrative and open, while the second was routinised slaughter away from public eyes”, Hearman writes. By early 1966, the killings stopped. Some 200,000 people were murdered in East Java, the highest death toll across the archipelago of 17,000 islands.

During these months of terror, PKI members and the many farmers and workers who belonged to leftist mass organisations were terrified and bewildered. Hearman’s book furthers our knowledge of how party members went underground, developed networks to help each other survive and even devised a plan to resist.

Her use of interviews with survivors is uneven and the writing is often clunky, but her research comes alive in the second half of the book, when she tells the story of the creation ­ and then the destruction ­ of an underground PKI base in South Blitar, a poor and mountainous area of East Java that sits between the Brantas River and the Indian Ocean.

The remarkable history of the South Blitar base is little understood, and Hearman’s research is an important contribution. By December 1966, the PKI was decimated, most of its leaders had been killed or detained, and it had been banned. Word went out from what was left of the party leadership that survivors should head to South Blitar. “In moving to South Blitar, the party leaders attempted to resurrect the organisation and to spearhead a resistance movement to the New Order regime,” Hearman writes.

Party leaders invoked Mao’s Long March to a base in Yenan, China, where he rebuilt the Chinese Communist party and then emerged victorious in 1949. South Blitar, the surviving PKI leaders wrote in a report, was to be their Yenan. This turned out to be a delusional plan, but it shows both how fluid the political situation was and how desperate the party was to return to its former strength. Hearman writes that the survivors of South Blitar were reluctant to talk about the base since, as delusional as it was, its existence gave credence to the army’s propaganda that Communists were plotting a comeback. Suharto’s New Order invoked the “latent danger of communism” to create an elaborate intelligence apparatus that reached down to the village level to quash dissent or signs of leftism. The base in South Blitar provided perfect proof.

In fact, according to Hearman’s research, while scores of PKI members made their way to South Blitar, guided by an underground network of couriers, they barely survived, and it was a struggle to find weapons and avoid army spies. Once the army discovered the base, it was eradicated through a full-scale military invasion, called the Trisula Operation, which lasted from June to September 1968.

Guerrilla force planned
Some 5,000 soldiers and 3,000 civilians, including NU militias, were involved, and 2,000 supposed members of the base were killed. One of the PKI leaders who was there told Hearman that they had plans for a 150-strong guerrilla force, but they were not yet active when the army launched Trisula. After it was over, the army said thirty-four pistols or firearms, fifty-seven sharp implements, 2,700 bullets and fourteen hand grenades were seized.

Tuti is the pseudonym Hearman gives to a woman who was the East Java leader of Gerwani, a leftist women’s organisation that was the brunt of the false propaganda that leftist women had tortured the generals on 1 October.

Tuti worked on literacy programmes and land occupations for the PKI. She went underground after the killings began, and eventually made her way to South Blitar. She told Hearman that the she and other PKI members had to resist or be killed. She was captured during the Trisula Operation, and eventually sentenced to twenty years for setting up a “Democratic People’s Republic”.

Tuti was released in 1988, and lived as a non-person. Her two daughters were wary of her, and didn’t want anyone to know of her past. She died in 2012.

Of the PKI members who were not killed in South Blitar, most were imprisoned like Tuti. For the people of South Blitar, largely subsistence farmers who endured years of army surveillance and forced relocations after the Trisula Operation, a sense of collective victimhood took hold.

For Suharto and his New Order, the obliteration of the rump PKI base, memorialised in a huge monument, showed the army’s absolute dominance and that the New Order was here to stay.

The next year, in 1969, the New Order came up with another plan to erase what remained of the left: some 12,000 political detainees, many of them artists and intellectuals, were shipped to Buru and forced to hack away the jungle and build their own barracks and farming plots. Pramoedya, after four years in a Java prison, was part of the first shipment of detainees to the mostly uninhabited and unforgiving island in the Moluccas.

Life on Baru
Another leftist poet and writer, Hersri Setiawan, wrote Buru Island, a searing record of daily life on Buru: the brutality, the hunger, the beatings and the long days in the hot fields desperate to grow enough to eat. Setiawan, who belonged to the same leftist cultural movement as Pramoedya, was sent to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to represent Indonesia in the Asia Africa Writers Bureau, but was kicked out by the colonial government in August 1965.

Partly because he had been away and partly because the military intelligence did not know his face, Setiawan writes that he played cat and mouse with the authorities for four years before he was arrested. He lived underground in Jakarta and kept some contact with other PKI comrades.

In an eerie echo of Hearman’s book, Setiawan describes a courier finding him in December 1966 and telling him the party leadership has ordered him to join the Long March to the base in South Blitar. He explodes, and says he won’t go. The courier asks why.

“I am sure you also listen to the broadcasts of Radio Peking. It would be strange if you didn’t. And how many times a day does that radio antennae blast out the news about the base in South Blitar? One little spark burns a whole field, it says!”, Setiawan writes of his answer. He asks the courier to tell the party leadership that the no one could survive the army anywhere on Java.

Setiawan refuses to go to South Blitar, but the army does find him. And, in 1971, it is his turn with 850 others to be shipped to Buru. He describes arriving on Buru and marching barefoot for hours through tall and sharp jungle cogon grass to their barracks.

“The law is in our hands”, the guard tells the new exiles, “we can kill you whenever we want”. As they reach the spare, tin-roofed barracks built by prisoners already there, the guard adds: “That’s where you will eat, drink, sleep, work, and … don’t forget … pray. Forever. Until you die.”

Bird’s eye view
Buru Island offers a bird’s eye view of what the prisoners endured, but there is a lot of repetition, as though he wrote snippets and then pieced them together without shaping the narrative. Setiawan, though, is a keen observer of the generational and ideological rifts that divide the prisoners, and he gives a fragmentary record of how the prisoners struggle to make sense of their collapsed world.

He also pays close attention to language, and his translator, the veteran Jennifer Lindsay, nimbly conveys in English the nuances, regional differences and playfulness of the Indonesian language.

She captures Setiawan’s focus on the slang and wordplay of the prisoners, as well as the language used by the soldiers to show their resentment of the more educated prisoners from Java. The army refers to the Buru penal colony as a “humanitarian project” and a “utilisation location”, meaning a place to put prisoners to work.

Those euphemisms and other false news or propaganda are derided by the prisoners as bom boman, or dropping bombs. Informers are called cockroaches. The shakes of a malarial fever become riding a Honda motorbike. And the slang for being killed in prison is “Mangkubumi,” a reference to a cruel tyrant and the translation of mangku, meaning embrace, by bumi, the earth.

Over time, Setiawan describes shifts in the attitudes of many prisoners. Young people feel betrayed by the PKI leadership and are less willing to defer to the older leaders. He writes that there is a move away from a collective spirit and solidarity, and towards a liberal, individualistic, each-for-himself spirit. Setiawan laments this change.

By the mid-1970s, a new commander eases up on the brutal conditions. Setiawan is asked to write a report on the importance of culture ­ he changes the language from people’s culture to the culture of Pancasila, the New Order’s ideology ­ for the commander. Soon, a whole set of musical instruments arrives, and a “Command Band” is set up. A while later, the commander allows a special barracks for prisoners with skills. A wayang kulit or shadow puppet troop forms, and so does an engineers group. Finally, Pramoedya is designated a writer and given a typewriter and paper.

On Buru, Pram conceived and wrote four historical novels that tell the story of the emergence of Indonesia, known as The Buru Quartet, which now top any list of the classics of Indonesian literature. During our interviews more than twenty years ago, Pram, who died in 2006, told me that he first told the stories to other prisoners as he worked out the plot.

Copies bartered for food
When he was finally given permission to write, he asked for carbon paper so he could have multiple copies. He used the copies as barter for food and cigarettes. All his writing was confiscated when he was finally released from Buru, but his fellow prisoners compiled the carbon copies they had secretly saved, and the novels were published. They were immediately banned. After 1998, Pram’s house arrest was lifted and his novels were reissued.

In late 1978 Setiawan hears that many prisoners are returning to Java. His name is on the list. On his last day, he writes, he goes to the prison hospital where his old friend, Heru Santoso, is dying. On Buru, Santoso and Setiawan worked together closely, figuring out how secretly to harvest sago from a swamp and how to rig up pipes made of bamboo to bring running water to their barracks. But one day, Setiawan writes, “Heru Santoso exercised the one and only right left to a prisoner. The right to escape.”

Santoso lasted on the run for more than a week. Back in prison, his health deteriorated and now he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Setiawan writes of their tearful farewell and of Santoso telling him to leave Buru with a light heart. As Setiawan leaves, Santoso ever so slowly raises his right arm and makes a fist. “It was as though he wanted to give me a final eternal message. Be resolute!”

The release of Buru prisoners in 1979 was the result of a sustained campaign by Amnesty International and other human rights organisations. But in Indonesia they continued to be stigmatised, seen as polluted and prevented from holding government jobs or working as journalists or teachers. Pram lived under house arrest. Setiawan eventually moved to the Netherlands.

Since Suharto was toppled, there has been a steady stream of memoirs, documentaries and novels dealing with 1965. Buru Island is the fourth book published by the important Herb Feith Translation Series and Monash University. These books, all translated by Lindsay, are designed to increase understanding outside Indonesia of how the mass killings continue to shape Indonesia.

These Indonesian voices in translation add to the important scholarly work that has shattered the official narrative, especially John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder, Geoffrey Robinson’s The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 and Melvin’s book on Aceh. Efforts to uncover the past atrocities gathered momentum when Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, was elected president in 2014. Jokowi promised to bring open, pluralist rule to Indonesia’s 250 million people, and many hoped that he would end the impunity for past human rights abuses, starting with the 1965 massacre.

By this time, the Indonesian massacre had come into focus for many through Joshua Oppenheimer’s astonishing films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), which look at this dark chapter in the country’s history, first through the eyes of the killers and then of its victims.

Discussion shut down
Although there is an appetite, especially among young people, to know more about what happened in 1965, there has also been a fierce backlash from army generals and Islamist politicians who warn that any talk of reconciliation or apology is a plot to revive communism.

Hard-line Islamist groups and the army have shut down discussion groups, book openings and film screenings about the killings. Any effort to investigate the past is seen as a neo-communist threat to the nation. The democratic era has brought contested direct elections and a vibrant free press to Indonesia, but it has failed to dislodge either the immunity from investigation or prosecution enjoyed by the Indonesian army or the determination of elite politicians and Islamists to enforce silence on the killings.

In 2015, after years of pushing for accountability, a group of scholars, lawyers and transitional justice experts held an International People’s Tribunal in the Hague to codify the crimes committed in 1965- 66, with an eye on promoting rule of law and preventing the crime of silence, according to Saskia Wieringa, of the University of Amsterdam and one of the editors of the volume, The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide.

Each essays delves into the different types of crimes against humanity ­ enslavement, sexual violence and torture ­ that were prosecuted at the tribunal.

The Hague tribunal had no enforcement powers, but it was an effort to record systematically what happened and who was responsible. Todung Mulya Lubis, a well-known Indonesian lawyer, was the chief prosecutor. He laid out the crimes of the state and showed that the army organised the killings and mostly used NU militias to carry them out.

Now Lubis is Indonesia’s ambassador to Norway, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of this reviewer that he has spearheaded the dubious campaign to have NU and Muhammadiyah, another mass Muslim organisation, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In an essay called “Propaganda and complicity, 1965-66”, Adam Hughes Henry, a lecturer at the Australian National University, writes poignantly about the complicity of the US, the UK and Australia. Their support for the extermination of the PKI, he writes, is “the very reason these events have never been subject to legal sanctions. US and British support for the army shielded the army from any potential legal sanctions outside Indonesia.”

Five young journalists and writers offer an interesting essay on Ingat65 or Remember65, an admirable online attempt to create a repository of stories and memories about 1965.

If the cycle of silence and impunity is ever broken, it will be at the hands of young Indonesians. But citizens of the US, the UK and Australia can help. First, they can call for the declassification of many crucial documents from the various diplomatic, military, and intelligence services that remain secret.

These new books should offer support for those searching for the truth. At the very least, they reveal the urgent need for a new official account of a tragic chapter in Indonesia’s past that continues to haunt the present.

• Vanessa Hearman (2018). Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press.
• Hersri Setiawan (2019). Buru Island: A Prison Memoir (translated by Jennifer Lindsay).
  Herb Feith Translation Series, the Herb Feith Foundation and Monash University, Melbourne.
• Saskia E. Wieringa, Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman (Eds) (2019). The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide. London: Routledge.
• Margaret Scott teaches at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service, contributes to The New York Review of Books and is a cofounder of the New York Southeast Asia Network. This review is republished from the August edition of Mekong Review.

When the earthquake and tsunami hit the city of Palu, Central Sulawesi, last weekend, they not only brought wreckage and death. The twin disasters also swept away efforts by activists and the municipal administration to support the survivors of Indonesia’s violent anti-communist purges in 1965-1966.

In the rest of the country, such survivors are still very marginalised.

In Palu, a city of some 350,000 inhabitants and the capital of Central Sulawesi province, activists had convinced local government leaders to work with them in helping these survivors.

READ MORE: One week on, Palu quake survivors begin to worry about the future

Palu is the only place in Indonesia where a government leader has made an official apology to the victims of the anti-communist violence in the area. Some nine days after the devastating natural disaster, the fate of some of those activists is still unknown.

Indonesian people lived under Suharto’s New Order authoritarian regime between 1968 and 1998, when the president was forced to resign. From 1965-66, the army, under Suharto, spearheaded anti-communist operations that killed half a million people and led to the detention of hundreds of thousands.

The army blamed Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI) for the murder of seven army officers on the night of 30 September and in the early hours of 1 October, 1965, by a group calling itself the Thirtieth September Movement. The 53rd anniversary of these events coincided with the terrible disaster in Central Sulawesi.

In 2012, the Palu mayor, Rusdy Mastura, apologised to the victims of the anti-communist violence. He pledged to provide assistance to them and their families in the interests of “equality, openness and humanitarian considerations”.

In his speech, Mastura recalled how, as a boy scout in 1965, he had been tasked with guarding leftist detainees.

Victims of abuses
Mastura was speaking at an event organised by local human rights group, SKP-HAM (Solidaritas Korban Pelanggaran Hak Asasi Manusia, Solidarity with Victims of Human Rights Abuses).

SKP-HAM was founded in 2004. Its best-known leader is the dynamic secretary, Nurlaela Lamasitudju, the daughter of local Islamic cleric, Abdul Karim Lamasitudju.

SKP-HAM is part of the national Coalition for Truth and Justice (Koalisi Pengungkapan Kebenaran dan Keadilan, KKPK).

In 2012, the KKPK held several public events and community “hearings”, dubbed the “Year of Truth Telling”, to pressure the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to rehabilitate the victims of the violence.

In April 2012, Yudhoyono was reported as having expressed his intention to apologise to victims of human rights abuses committed during the Suharto New Order regime.

Yudhoyono’s promised apology never materialised. However, the “Year of Truth Telling” events yielded some important gains in Palu.

Following his apology, the SKP-HAM lobbied Mastura to deliver on his promises by providing healthcare and scholarships. A mayoral regulation and a Regional Action Plan for Human Rights (Rencana Hak Asasi Manusia, Ranham) were promulgated to enable this.

Autonomy laws
These local government instruments have been made possible through Indonesia’s regional autonomy laws.

The mayoral regulation also established a committee to oversee human rights protection and restoration of victims’ rights. On May 20, 2013, Palu was declared a “Human Rights Aware City”.

Each year, the city holds a series of human rights-related events.

In May 2015, the Palu City Regional Planning Body oversaw the process of checking and verifying the identity of victims and their needs, using the information compiled by human rights groups as a base.

A trailblazing city
SKP-HAM had collected 1200 testimonies about the 1965-66 violence from victims in the area. From these testimonies, it had created and uploaded to YouTube short films of survivors’ testimonies.

It had also published a book about the 1965-66 events in Sulawesi, in collaboration with Indonesian author, Putu Oka Sukanta. Mastura wrote the book’s preface.

The group supported weaving cooperatives involving women survivors and ran a café and meeting space, Kedai Fabula, at its office in Palu. In partnership with religious groups and the municipal administration, members of the group organised social activities to involve abuse survivors in the life of the city.

The activities of SKP-HAM Palu is a reminder of what has been lost. It was a trailblazing city whose achievement in human rights advancement provided a model for the rest of the country.

The people of Palu, with a great deal of assistance, will rebuild, but we still wait for more news from the city.

SKP-HAM leader, Lamasitudju, survived the earthquake and tsunami. With a sprained ankle and having lost several family members in the disaster, she is volunteering to collect and provide information regarding the situation in Palu.

Indonesia needs groups like SKP-HAM that campaign for inclusiveness and equal rights to survive into the future.

Dr Vannessa Hearman is a lecturer in Indonesian studies at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. She is a member of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Council. Charles Darwin University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU. Asia Pacific Report republishes this article under a Creative Commons licence.

• How Indonesia’s 1965-1966 anti-communist purge remade a nation and the world
• How should Indonesia resolve atrocities of the 1965-66 anti-communist purge?
• Palu disaster: Why Indonesia’s tsunamis are so deadly
• Chaos in Palu after quake and tsunami

Islam Defenders Front (FPI) leader Rizieq Shihab has called on the Indonesian government to pull from circulation the newly-issued rupiah banknotes, which he claims have an image that resembles the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party’s (PKI) hammer and sickle logo.

Rizieq attended on Monday the Jakarta police’s summons for questioning on his statement, during which he brought several new rupiah banknotes, from Rp 1000 (less than NZ$1) to Rp 100,000 (NZ$10) bills, and showed them to investigators to try to prove his claims.

Rizieq said the banknotes’ rectoverso image, which according to Bank Indonesia (BI) functions as an anti-counterfeit feature, resembled the PKI logo.

“We ask the government to explain to us why, from thousands of rectoverso images they could have used, they chose the one that looks like a hammer and sickle logo. This is dangerous,” Rizieq told reporters.

“We ask the government to retract all new banknotes, from the Rp 1,000 to Rp 100,000 bills, because they can all give the perception that there is a hammer and sickle logo on our banknotes,” said the firebrand preacher, who had to answer 23 questions from the police regarding his statement.

In an earlier statement, the bank brushed off Rizieq’s claim, saying that the rectoverso image on the bills was actually the central bank’s logo printed in such a way to protect the money from counterfeiting.

Mass organisation Jaringan Intelektual Muda Anti-Fitnah (Young Intellectuals Anti-Slander Network, or Jimaf) reported Rizieq to the police, in which they said the FPI leader’s statement constituted hate speech because his claim was baseless and could provoke public unrest.

Jakarta Police spokesman Senior Commander Raden Prabowo Argo Yuwono said Rizieq’s status was still that of a witness.

• FPI leader denies allegations of provoking public unrest with communism symbol claim

A national symposium on the Indonesian bloodshed of 1965 has brought together the persecuted, the persecutors and their respective families.

Seating positions at the tables were being rearranged until late at night before a recent symposium about the 1965 anticommunist violence.

No glasses were provided beside the bottles of mineral water, “lest participants throw glasses at each other”, one of the organisers, Ezky Suyanto, wrote on her Facebook account along with posted pictures of a big group of grinning participants of the National Symposium on 1965.

She added that, in any event, most of the participants were too old to throw glasses.

Police tanks were parked outside the Aryaduta Hotel in Central Jakarta, where the symposium took place on April 18 and 19, but most of the police, who were of a generation of the grandchildren of those who experienced the events of 1965, just snacked and chatted.

High-ranking officials have previously addressed the 1965 issues with survivors in talks held by national human rights bodies, but the opening of this official symposium saw the elderly survivors facing members of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s Cabinet, including Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut B. Pandjaitan, and National Police chief General Badrodin Haiti, along with Sidarto Danusubroto of the president’s advisory team.

The latter is a former adjutant of Sukarno, the country’s first president who was ousted following the coup attempt in October 1965 that was blamed on the now banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

Old suvivors ignored
During the symposium Luhut blurted that the state “won’t go here and there asking for forgiveness […] I’m not that stupid”, ignoring the old survivors in the room and backing up what Jokowi had previously said, that “nothing has been decided” on the issue.

On the second day, a participant wondered why there were more victims than persecutors at the event. “Why are so many victims present?” he asked.

Behind that question was a deep sense of offence, since the people — including activists with Christian and Islamic student organisations — who went all-out on the communist witchhunt were told at the time they were heroes saving the nation, but now they are considered villains by those advocating for the survivors, who with their families have endured life-long stigma and discrimination.

Meanwhile survivors, many in their 80s, are still hurt and scared because they are now accused of seeking to “revive the PKI”.

So the packed ballroom brought together two “camps” — the persecuted, the persecutors and their respective families. “Actually, we’re all victims,” one said.

A few barking matches seemed enough to represent the pain felt on all sides. Former Christian activists, just like Islamists, said that around the time of 1965 they really feared the aggressive PKI and the looming powerful communists next door in Indochina.

Also, the military, as former local commander Sintong Pandjaitan told the forum, was indeed assigned to “safeguard” the countryside from communists.

‘Let bygones be bygones’
As everyone felt they were either innocent of crimes or a victim of them, or that they did what they had to do at the time, one proposed settlement was to “let bygones be bygones”. “Sing wis yo wis,” Harry Tjan Silalahi, a member of the former PMKRI Catholic students’ organisation, said in Javanese.

“That’s not for you to say. It’s the right of victims,” responded Ilham Aidit, the son of slain PKI leader DN Aidit.

Such statements, repeated 51 years later, had extra weight in the government-sponsored forum when they were uttered fearlessly. So amid officialdom and under the glare of staunch believers of the New Order version of 1965, the alternatives and counter-allegations were roared out:

“The ousting of Sukarno was a military coup!” shouted one of his daughters, Sukmawati Soekarnoputri, standing with clenched fist, to loud applause. “Bung [brother] Karno should be the first to be rehabilitated!” said historian Asvi Marwan Adam.

The founding father, who had named himself president for life, is still blamed for his indirect role in facilitating the PKI’s rise to power.

The witchhunt and killings were “a political genocide!” shouted an organiser of the recent International People’s Tribunal on 1965 held in The Hague. Reza Muharram was reacting to insinuations that the tribunal organisers were “selling out the country” to international donors of NGOs.

“That Gerwani sliced off the general’s penis is a lie!” shouted a former member of the women’s organization affiliated to the PKI about a scene in the government propaganda film called G30S/PKI. The Gerwani became known as an “immoral” group based on decades of propaganda about their role in the generals’ murders.

‘No horizontal conflict’
“It’s no horizontal conflict when violence lasts for months across many areas,” said Ariel Heryanto, who was among the rebellious scholars under Soeharto. He said the conflict “shifts the responsibility of the state to civilians”.

Dealing with the 1965 atrocities, the government states, will be the “gateway” to settle other major abuses and controversy surrounds where that gateway will lead — whether reconciliation is merely based on “forgive and forget”, “rehabilitation”, “truth revelation” or the involvement of a judicial process.

If judicial methods are used, “I’m afraid we will enter the wrong chamber”, said Agus Widjojo, a co-founder of National Leaders’ Children’s Forum (FSAB), a forum of children of leaders during past conflicts (his father was the slain General Sutoyo). “If you haven’t made peace with your past you cannot enter reconciliation yet.”

However, Kamala Chandrakirana, a member of the Coalition of Justice and the Disclosure of Truth (KKPK) and a former chairperson of the National Commission on Violence against Women, said reconciliation would be the end result of the prior steps, including revelation of the truth and rehabilitation of survivors and the dead victims.

Peaceful conflict settlement, say experienced mediators, requires recognition of mutual suffering. Last week both sides had started to listen to each other.

Nearing the closing of the event, amid booing from the audience, the poet Taufiq Ismail who was among the writers formerly harassed by the PKI’s Lekra cultural body launched into verses about questions from his grandchildren:

“There is said to be a party/That has slain 120 million people for 74 years in 75 lands/Every day they slaughtered 4,500/Datuk (Grandfather), how come people are so vicious?/They imposed forced labor/Their own people collapsed and died […]”

An elderly participant, Sayuto, described his own experience of detention without trial and forced labor in Serang, Banten, where they were forced to build schools and roads. As they were not fed, his friend said, “It must have been a deliberate decision to let us die.”

But Sayuto said residents had fed them while the local military watched. “People would say, come, eat here; they knew we were innocent.”

• 1965 symposium Indonesia’s way to face dark past

The groups – Amnesty International, ETAN (East Timor and Indonesian Action Network), TAPOL and Watch Indonesia! – have made their plea in an open letter to Minister Luhut Panjaitan.

In their letter, the groups have argued that the national symposium on April 18-19 must be followed by a full investigation into human rights violations committed between 1965 and 1966.

This was not only to “establish the truth” but to also ensure that those “suspected of committing crimes are prosecuted”.

The rights groups also said the authorities must provide “full and effective reparation” for the victims and relatives.

“A formal public apology, including acknowledgement of the facts and acceptance of state responsibility, must not be ruled out,” the tights groups said.

On the night of 30 September 1965, the Indonesian army led by General Suharto aborted a coup attempt against then-President Sukarno and blamed the Indonesian Communist Party, reports ETAN.

‘Murderous campaign’
“Backed by the West, General Suharto unleashed a murderous campaign of terror against suspected communists and alleged associates, including leftwing activists, artists and intellectuals, peasant’s groups and labour unions,” reported ETAN.

Suharto took over as President and maintained hardline authoritarian rule in Indonesia for decades to come and estimates put the death toll at more than 500,000 during the purge.

The open letter says:

29 April 2016

Dear Minister,

TRUTH-SEEKING AND FORMAL PUBLIC APOLOGY ESSENTIAL FOR 1965/1966 RESOLUTION

Amnesty International, ETAN (East Timor and Indonesia Action Network), TAPOL and Watch Indonesia! are writing to urge you to take the important steps necessary to ensure that the national symposium on the 1965 tragedy, held in Jakarta on 18 and 19 April, leads to justice, truth and reparation for victims.

This initiative must be followed with a full investigation into human rights violations committed between 1965 and 1966. This is to not only establish the truth of what happened but also, where sufficient admissible evidence exists, ensure that those suspected of committing crimes are prosecuted. Further, the authorities must also ensure that victims and their relatives are provided with full and effective reparation. A formal public apology, including acknowledgement of the facts and acceptance of state responsibility, must not be ruled out.

The symposium, ‘Examining the 1965 Tragedy: A Historical Approach’ (Membedah Tragedi 1965: Pendekatan Kesejarahan), brought together survivors, scholars, human-rights activists, artists, members of the Indonesian military and government officials to give testimony about the events that happened across Indonesia following an abortive coup in September 1965. These crimes, which have been documented by human rights organisations, include: unlawful killings, torture, enforced disappearances, rape sexual slavery and other crimes of sexual violence, slavery, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced displacement and forced labour. Many victims and their families faced violations of their social, economic and cultural rights, and continue to experience discrimination in both the law and in practice. There have been many instances where internal meetings or public events about the 1965-1966 violations held by victims or human rights NGOs, especially around the 50th anniversary in 2015, were disbanded or harassed by vigilante groups while police failed to intervene.

A three-year investigation into the violations was carried out by the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) and completed in July 2012. The Commission found evidence of widespread human rights violations committed across the country between 1965 and 1966, and that violations continued at a lower level well into the late 1970s.

According to the Commission, these findings meet the criteria of gross human rights violations, and include crimes against humanity, as defined by the Indonesian Law No. 26/2000 on Human Rights Courts. To date, however, there has been no indication that the Attorney General will even launch an investigation.

Meanwhile attempts to establish a truth commission on the national level have stalled due to a lack of political will.

A number of key recommendations were highlighted in the concluding comments delivered directly at the symposium to move the process forward. Some of these calls echo those made over decades by many human rights groups calling for an end to impunity for the appalling human rights violations committed across Indonesia between 1965 and 1966 including: the need to recognise state involvement and its role in the events; the need to provide right to truth, justice and reparation victims and their families; an end to the stigmatisation of survivors and the discriminatory laws and practices that prevent them enjoying full citizenship; and a call to authorities to end all forms of restrictions against the right to freedom of expression and assembly for any public discussion of the events.

The symposium will serve as a useful step towards ending impunity for human rights violations committed by the Indonesian security forces against suspected members and sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) between 1965 and1966.

Our organisations reiterate that the government’s commitment to establish a non-judicial mechanism to resolve past human rights cases, does not change Indonesia’s obligations under international law to investigate and, if sufficient admissible evidence exists, prosecute those suspected of human rights violations and crimes under international law in fair trials without recourse to the death penalty. Furthermore, this mechanism does not replace the government’s obligations to provide rights with an effective remedy including the truth and full and effective reparation to address the harm they have suffered.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Amnesty International, ETAN, TAPOL and Watch Indonesia! call on the Indonesian government to undertake the following steps as a matter of priority:

• Take steps to ensure that the Indonesian authorities fulfil their obligations to provide the victims of 1965 rights with access to truth, justice and reparations and include a full investigation into human rights violations committed between 1965 and 1966 to establish the truth and, where sufficient admissible evidence exists, ensure that those suspected of committing crimes including those with command responsibility, are prosecuted in civilian courts in proceedings which meet international fair trial standards, without recourse to the death penalty;
• Issue formal public apology, including acknowledgement of the facts and acceptance of responsibility;
• Ensure that all forms of restrictions against public discussions on 1965 are lifted and ensure that the government starts listening to victims and others, instead of supressing their voices.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. We would be pleased to discuss this matter with you.

Yours sincerely,

Rafendi Djamin (Director for Southeast Asia Pacific Regional Office of Amnesty International)

John Miller (National Coordinator of ETAN)

TAPOL

Alex Flor (Watch Indonesia!)

• ETAN
• Indonesia holds dialogue on 1960s purge
• Indonesia’s 1965 anti-communist purge

A high school Indonesian history teacher in Batam, Riau Islands, has brought alternative narratives of the 1965 to 1966 communist purge into class as a way to reveal the truth behind the mass killings done during those years.

“In school, the lesson materials of our history must reveal the truth about the state’s failure in the past because history itself should represent the country,” says Diah Wahyuningsih, a 42-year-old history teacher at state senior high school SMAN 4 Batam.

“Don’t deceive the people any more. The young generation is not as stupid as they might think because they now could find everything on the internet,” she said.

Diah said she had held discussions about the 1965 tragedy and its impacts on society in her classes.

She even asked her students to together watch Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary film The Look of Silence, which was released in December 2014.

Diah claimed her grandfather had been a spokesperson for former president Sukarno’s Indonesian National Party (PNI). However, she said, her grandfather was murdered in West Sumatra during the 1965 tragedy.

The kidnapping and killing of six Indonesian Army generals on September 30, 1965, which was suspected to have been orchestrated by the now defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), led to an attacks against the PKI by the military under the leadership of Suharto.

Following the attacks, scores were arrested, tortured and murdered. It is estimated that between 500,000 to 1 million people were killed during the “cleansing” of people suspected of having leftist connections, regardless of their age or level of “connection”.

Survivors and relatives of the victims have also been stigmatised and face discrimination to this day. Moreover, the perpetrators of the mass killings have never been revealed.

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and the Presidential Advisory Board (Wantimpres) held a two-day symposium in Jakarta this week to discuss and bring recommendations on the 1965 to 1966 mass killings.

The symposium involved academics, human rights activists, 1965 victims, politicians and representatives of several government bodies.

• 1965 symposium Indonesia’s way to face its dark past
• The Look of Silence

It all started with Yayak Yatmaka writing Militarism for Beginners, an Indonesian picture book intended for younger audiences that he wrote years ago when he lived in Germany.

Then, last year a member of a discussion group, consisting mostly of young idealist intellectuals, students, artists and activists like Yayak, became born-again after reading a book about the history of communism in Indonesia.

To make a long story short, the artist stumbled upon a historical fact that it was the Indonesian Communist Party’s (PKI) anti-colonialist and nationalist spirit in the early 1920s that fired up our founding fathers’ struggle for independence.

The reading gave the artist a whole new perspective that was never available to him at school — the PKI was in fact a significant movement in laying down the foundations of Indonesia but its contribution is nowhere to be found in history books.

“The only communism the youth know comes from the propaganda created by the New Order [regime], which stigmatised the PKI as a frightening party worthy of nothing but loathing,” says sculptor-cum-activist Dolorosa Sinaga, referring to Suharto’s authoritarian military-backed regime that controlled Indonesia between 1965 and 1998.

Dolorosa was the lead organiser of the Turn Left Festival that was disrupted by a bunch of intolerant thugs with the apparent backing of the police, with the latter then forcibly dispersing attendees when the event was just about to begin at Taman Ismail Marzuki, a government-owned cultural center in Jakarta on February 27.

Scores of people from an alliance of Islamic and nationalist groups chanted slogans, intimidated the organisers and accused them of being sympathetic to the PKI.

No official permit
The police argued that the gathering should be banned because “some groups” had raised objections and the organisers had failed to obtain the official permit.

The ban, which forced the organisers to relocate the festival to the premises of the nearby Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, was only the latest incident in a string of banned events that include seminars, film screenings and publications containing anything that smacks of “leftist” activism (see “Left out in the cold”).

Instead of cowering, the festival organisers have vowed to extend the festival — that features discussions, leftist books sales and art shows — every weekend “until the nation has transformed for the better”.

They will be marching on with the battle cry of “resist Suharto’s propaganda”.

The more than 32 activists that spearheaded the festival have a noble purpose of making a better Indonesia that is free from fear, which has been deeply rooted due to the corrupt culture built by the Suharto regime, since he seized power on the heels of the 1965 deadly aborted coup, blamed on the PKI.

“Until today, we all see the continuing reproduction of the New Order [regime’s] culture and values,” Dolorosa says.

“With the Turn Left Festival, we want to resist the whole legacy of the New Order that managed to cling to power for so long thanks to their effective propaganda.

Suffering now
“Intolerance as we [festival organisers] are suffering now is an example of the New Order political culture I’m talking about.”

The main event was the launch of a provocatively titled book History of Indonesian Leftist Movements for Beginners and discussions about leftist movements that “few young people know about”.

“The festival aims to inspire the young and make them aware of the need to learn history that hasn’t been twisted, [in order] to build a better Indonesia. I’m wondering why the government is so afraid of the festival,” Dolorosa said.

It is not that the activists want to promote the “isms” as some government officials may suspect.

In fact, they believe that communism, Marxism and Leninism are dead and irrelevant. They seek to rewrite history, which they say has been distorted.

The Turn Left Festival is a major collective project mostly by and for younger activists who strive for greater freedom of speech. With the preparatory work having begun a year ago, the canceled event was hosted by 40 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 from major cities across Indonesia in addition to the 32 authors of the 527-page History of Indonesian Leftist Movements.

Among familiar names that co-authored the book are Ayumail, Harry Waluyo, Iwan Gunawan, Kuncoro Adibroto, Tsoe Tjen Marching, Usman Hamid and Yayak Yatmaka, just to name a few.

‘Education city’
Dhyta Caturani, one of the organising committee members, said Turn Left was only one of many similar events initiated by young people.

In Yogyakarta, an “education city” where activism has always been vibrant, the city held a discussion on the 1965 tragedy.

In Salatiga, Satya Wacana University students published Lentera despite a ban on its August 2015 edition on 1965.

The young want the state to allow them greater room to exercise their freedom of speech and have a say in policymaking.

“Our aim is to encourage young people to exercise critical thinking. We are targeting the young […] many of them quench their curiosity about what actually happens to their rights through the internet.”

The Indonesian Military (TNI), which officially quit politics after Suharto’s downfall but still wields clout in the government, retains its strong stance against communism as it believes the ideology still poses a threat to the state ideology, Pancasila.

A week after the festival was banned, Defence Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu told a media gathering that communism was one of the four main ideologies in the world that the military closely watched, with the other three being radicalism, socialism and Leninism.

Adopted liberalism
“It’s not that they are bad but it’s just because they are not suitable for Indonesia. The US may not be as strong as it is now had it not adopted liberalism. Communism is good in China. In Indonesia, radicalism began only after the Bali bombing [in 2002].”

Sharing Ryamizard’s concern, the Home Ministry’s director-general for political affairs and general administration, Sudarmo, warned that the danger of leftist movements were that they “lurk in the dark and wait for the right time to come into the open”.

Leftist ideologies, Sudarmo said, provoke civil organisations — especially the Islamic ones — to come forward and oppose activities they see as adverse to Pancasila.

Sudarmo, who also formerly worked at National Intelligence Agency (BIN), acknowledged most of the various hard-line groups that helped disperse the Turn Left Festival were registered with the Home Ministry and that the police did not use them to intimidate organizers as many suspected.

“Supporters of the festival may hold a grudge against the New Order but remember that everyone living in the country must follow the rules.”