In an article by Yenni Kwok for TIME (July 20, 2016) this photo of Sri Muhayati, 75, is shown holding a photograph of her parents on May 6, 2016, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, following the ruling by an international panel of judges that declared that Indonesia committed crimes against humanity during the 1965–66 mass killings of members of the PKI and their families. For survivors of the 1965 tragedy like Sri, who spent five years imprisoned without trial for suspected ties to the Indonesian Communist Party, the ruling gives them not only a revelation but also validation of their grievances.
The journalist Febriana Firdaus, whose grandfather disappeared half a decade ago, is quoted at the end of Yenni Kwok's article:
“The final ruling of the IPT 1965 judges have opened my eyes, and maybe the young generation’s, that the events in 1965 need to be discussed so that we get a complete picture of what happened at that time.”
What happened?One significant fact that emerges from this process is that the U.S., the U.K. and Australia were complicit in these crimes.
Margaret Scott, writing for The New York Review of Books, sets out, succinctly, the Cold War politics and policy, that resulted in a "tragedy", on a scale so grotesque, that it required the facts and the history to be hidden from view, until very recently.
NYR Daily November 2015
Indonesian President Joko Widodo and US President Barack Obama at the White House, Washington, DC, October 26, 2015
President Barack Obama has several things in common with Joko Widodo, the president of Indonesia, whom he welcomed to the Oval Office last week. The two men are the exact same age, and Widodo, whom everyone calls Jokowi, looks like a shorter and skinnier version of Obama. They also share something else: a personal connection to one of the worst massacres anywhere since World War II. In the late 1960s, Obama lived in Jakarta with his mother, in the years just after the killings of hundreds of thousands of suspected Indonesian Communists, a carefully orchestrated purge that brought the US-backed New Order regime to power; Jokowi grew up in poverty in Central Java, near a river that was filled with corpses in 1965.
As it happens, a cache of intelligence documents declassified by the CIA this fall offers a new opportunity to revisit those events, and the US’s involvement in them. Moreover, Jokowi took office last year as the first president from outside the tight circle of oligarchs and political elite that flourished for decades under the New Order and even after its collapse in 1998. He promised to bring open, pluralist rule to Indonesia’s 250 million people, who are spread across 17,000 islands and who make up the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. Many hoped Jokowi’s reforms would include a full reckoning with the fifty-year-old killings. The question is whether Obama is prepared to support Jokowi, whose troubled administration faces stiff resistance to addressing what happened in 1965.
The Indonesian massacre was a critical moment in the cold war. In the early morning of October 1,1965, six Indonesian generals were killed by a group of junior officers who claimed they were forestalling a takeover by a CIA-backed “Council of Generals.” The putsch was poorly planned and collapsed in twenty-four hours. At the time, Indonesia was led by the leftist, romantic revolutionary-turned-autocrat Sukarno, and also had the third largest Communist Party in the world, the PKI, with some 3 million members. The Indonesian Army and the US government quickly blamed the botched coup on the PKI. (There is still much we don’t know about these events, but the head of the PKI, D. N. Aidit, was at least aware of the coup attempt; he was killed shortly thereafter by the army.) Seizing on an opportunity to unseat Sukarno and roll back communism, the army unleashed a campaign of violence in which perhaps five hundred thousand or perhaps one million suspected Communists were killed—no one knows for sure.
The assassination of the six generals, and fabricated stories that they had been tortured by Communist women, were used to stir up anti-Communist sentiment. Within days, the army and army-affiliated militias spread out across the archipelago, arresting anyone who was associated with the PKI and its many labor and farmer organizations. Then, mostly at night, those arrested were taken out and shot, beheaded, or stabbed to death. The army’s militias did most of the killings, and their members ranged from gangsters to young men who belonged to the country’s two largest Muslim organizations. The victims were thrown in mass graves or into rivers, and there are harrowing stories of rivers in Java, Sumatra, and Bali so filled with bodies that the water turned red.
For the Lyndon Johnson administration, the bloodbath was a momentous victory, shifting the balance of power in Southeast Asia. But for many Indonesians it was a terrifying time. In addition to those murdered, hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned, and their families and the families of the victims were formally shunned. When the killings ended, Indonesians lived under the military rule of General Suharto, who promoted the founding myth that the army saved the nation from the atheist Communists. No one talked about what had happened.
In 1967, a six-year-old Obama moved with his mother, Ann Dunham, to Jakarta as Suharto consolidated his jackboot rule. “Innuendo, half-whispered asides; that’s how she found out that we had arrived in Djakarta less than a year after one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times,” Obama writes in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. “The idea frightened her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely.”
Since the late 1990s, however, there have been growing efforts to recover that history. In 1998, Indonesians rose up against Suharto, whose military dictatorship had lasted thirty-two years. This movement, known as reformasi, and Suharto’s fall, brought new scrutiny to the events of 1965. Many Indonesians rebelled against the taboo of talking about the mass killings, which they began investigating through journalism, books, and films. In recent years, local organizations have also sought to locate the mass graves and assist the survivors. These efforts have been aided by US records. In 2001, despite the efforts of the CIA to prevent it, the US released Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, a State Department volume that included long-secret government documents from that period. It describes how US officials pushed for the annihilation of the PKI, providing covert assistance and urging the Indonesian army to complete the job.
But the documents did not reveal when the plan for mass killings was devised, and when the US knew about it. Some of these questions have now come more sharply into focus with the release on September 16 of more CIA documents, including, for the first time, records of what the CIA was telling President Johnson as the failed coup quickly became a pretext for mass murder. Prodded by a court ruling, the CIA declassified redacted versions of all of the Presidential Daily Briefs, considered the most important and most closely held intelligence information, from 1961 to 1969. These documents don’t change the underlying story we have about 1965, but they do provide the best evidence yet of how hard the US was pushing for the eradication of the Communists and the routing of the pro-Chinese Sukarno.
Despite the fact that the US was at the time escalating its involvement in Vietnam, Indonesia was the first item on the president’s daily brief almost every day from the failed coup at the beginning of October to the end of November of that year. To read these briefs is to be immersed in the Johnson administration’s analysis of this period as the now-or-never time “to roll up the Communists” in Indonesia, as the October 4 brief puts it. (It is the same period that Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary films, The Act of Killing [2012] and The Look of Silence [2014] explore—first through the eyes of the killers and then of the victims.)
Day after day, President Johnson was updated on the Indonesian army’s move against the Communists, with little regard to the violence involved. “From all indications,” the October 6 brief states, “the army’s leadership still very much wants to have it out with the Communists and is becoming more wary of Sukarno himself.” Two days later, Johnson was told that “the generals’ staying power in a drive against the Communists remains to be established,” and then there are five lines redacted. Some of the briefs mention arrests and army sweeps at night, but there is no mention of the mass killings that continued for months.
Indonesian newspapers did not report on the atrocities. The New York Times and The Washington Post noted that there were reports of secretive, organized killings of suspected Communists, but the army confined foreign correspondents to the capital for months. By December, Indonesia was no longer number one in the briefs, but still appeared regularly, with reports on the continuing power struggle between the army and Sukarno, who still considered himself “president for life” and maintained popular support as Indonesia’s leader in the war for independence from the Dutch. Most of the briefs from December to March describe the slow but sure ascendency of the US’s strongman, General Suharto.
On March 12, 1966, Indonesia once again led the daily brief. “The army now has the situation in hand, but it is too early to assume that Sukarno is down for good. The people in Djakarta nevertheless are clearly with the military and the capital is reported quiet,” the brief explains. “It still remains to be seen whether the army will move quickly to consolidate its position. The first signs look promising; the Communist Party has finally been banned.” By this point, the killing spree was largely over.
Because the released documents are heavily censored, many secrets remain. Obama would do Indonesia’s fragile democracy a lot of good by helping Jokowi pry loose more of this still-hidden history, including other classified documents such as the daily reports of the CIA—which might indicate how much the generals were telling the CIA and how the US responded. This seems unlikely, since further declassification would likely require a forceful request by the Indonesian government or by a truth commission.
That’s too bad for Indonesians, who have been slowly creating a new democratic politics since 1998. Seventeen years later, Indonesia and Jokowi are caught up in a dramatic but predictable mess: a vibrant democracy struggles to exist alongside an entrenched oligarchy and a corrupt political elite. One reason is that while Suharto is long gone, much of the elite of the New Order dictatorship—the generals, the oil and coal tycoons, the political elite and powerbrokers—have thrived. The reformasi era has brought hotly contested direct elections and a boisterous free press, but it hasn’t taken away the impunity of the Indonesian army, which has never had to answer for the 1965 massacre.
The struggle between reformers and holdovers of the New Order was the backdrop of Jokowi’s presidential campaign. Jokowi grew up in the 1960s in a poor neighborhood in Solo, a regional city in Central Java; in 2005 he became Solo’s immensely popular, can-do mayor. He was the face of reformasi, and his humor, his humble manner, his famous strolls through markets, and his quirky love for Heavy Metal bands made him a darling with the Indonesian press. He soared onto the national stage, becoming Jakarta’s governor in 2012, and then, in 2014, making a successful run for the presidency.
Those who elected Jokowi had sky-high expectations of a reinvigorated fight against corruption, and even an effort to take on the army for its human rights abuses. There was talk before the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 killings this month that Jokowi would offer a formal apology to the survivors and victims’ families. But Jokowi’s first year in office has revealed the limits of his power. He does not control the parliament, and even the party that nominated him refuses to push his agenda.
China’s downturn has hurt Indonesia’s economy, and Jokowi’s government is scrambling to create jobs while nearly 40 percent of Indonesians live on $2 a day or less. A horrible haze has settled over the region because of forest fires to clear land, often so that oligarchs and well-connected military figures can build palm oil plantations; Jokowi has been unable to do anything. And through his own political missteps, Jokowi has weakened the Anti-Corruption Commission, the most effective reformasi institution. His poll numbers have plummeted, and a recent poll showed that if there were another election, Prabowo Subianto, the establishment politician he defeated last year, would beat him.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that talk of a truth commission or an apology for the killings has stopped. Already in August, leaders in parliament said they opposed it, while generals and Islamist politicians warned darkly of a revival of atheistic neo-communism. Jokowi got the message. Revisiting 1965 is politically risky; too many have acquired great wealth and power because of the New Order and they have no interest in reexamining its founding myth.
Even unofficial discussions of the massacre have provoked a backlash from the political establishment. This month Indonesia was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the three novelists receiving the most attention have each placed 1965 in the center of their fiction. The day the book fair opened, Islamist groups protested in Jakarta that these Indonesian authors were actively promoting communism. Indonesia’s own premier annual literary event, the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, which began on October 28, was forced to cancel three sessions about 1965, including a screening of Oppenheimer’s second film and a panel with the novelist Eka Kurniawan, one of the authors featured in Frankfurt. A police official said that unless those sessions were omitted, the whole festival would be shut down. “The spirit of the festival is not to discuss things that would just open old wounds,” he said.
November 2, 2015, 1:29 pmThe new details emerging from the archives in both Indonesia and in Washington, however, may make this history harder to ignore. For example, Jess Melvin, an Australian Ph.D. student, recently discovered, in government archives in Aceh, Indonesian army documents that confirm that the killings were organized by the army as a systematic campaign. According to Melvin, these records show a military chain of command and orders that drove the killings and help explain the civilian participation in them. “The documents,” she writes, “demonstrate that the military leadership understood and implemented what they called the ‘annihilation of the PKI’ as an intentional and centralized national campaign.”
The US ambassador to Indonesia at the time, Marshall Green, has insisted in interviews and in his memoir that the only US covert assistance provided to the Indonesian army was some walkie-talkies and medicine. But from the 2001 volume and from even earlier press reports, we know that the US Embassy in Jakarta also gave the army lists of PKI members—perhaps with thousands of names. And the daily briefs at least hint at greater American involvement. Until more US records are released and until the Indonesian army’s records are made public, however, the full story will not be known.
The US has done a lot to unlock the secrets of the cold war, but it can do more. Indonesia’s struggle to remain democratic, and avoid a return to strongman rule, in part depends on knowing its own history. Obama knows this, and, as president, he has the power to help fill in the historical record.
TIME April 2016
TIME (WORLD - INDONESIA) covered the Indonesian government's planned Symposium in an article titled:
Indonesia Calls a Symposium on the 1965–66 Killings, but May Not Be Ready for the Findings
"A half-century after at least half a million people were killed in a brutal pogrom against suspected communists and communist sympathizers, Indonesia is still unsure about whether it is ready to glance at — let alone actually face up to — one of the darkest chapters in its history."
The article shows this picture of a man walking toward a graveyard in Boyolali, Indonesia, where hundreds of victims were buried during the 1965 massacre of people allegedly involved in the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
Yenni Kwok reports (April 15, 2016):
Among the architects of the conference are Sidarto Danusubroto, a member of the presidential advisory committee, and Agus Widjojo, a retired general whose father was one of the high-ranking army officials who, according to the official version, were allegedly killed by the PKI.
“It is to guarantee that we will not repeat in the future what had happened — forgive but not forget,” said Agus, co-founder of Forum Silaturahmi Anak Bangsa, an umbrella organization that seeks to facilitate dialogue and reconciliation between children of ex-PKI members, the families of army generals killed in 1965 and other victims of conflicts.
The report continues:
However, the symposium’s focus on reconciliation, while remaining reticent on the facts of what happened, has sparked criticisms from human-rights activists who have long called for a full and frank approach to the massacre on the part of the state.
Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, a human-rights lawyer and activist who was one of the coordinators of the International People’s Tribunal on the 1965 massacre, held in the Hague last year, welcomes the symposium on one hand, hoping that it “will facilitate a national dialogue” toward reconciliation. “But,” she adds, “finding the truth is a prerequisite.”
Days before the national conference, two human-rights groups, the New York City–based Human Rights Watch and the Jakarta-based Kontras, made a joint call for the U.S. to release secret files on the 1965 massacres. “We want to know the working level involvement between the U.S. government and the killers in 1965,” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth told journalists in the Indonesian capital on Wednesday.
Although the fall of authoritarian President Suharto in 1998 has unleashed a certain level of openness on the massacre, it remains a controversial topic. It is not uncommon for any activists seeking to address the human-rights violations of the 1965-66 victims and survivors to be harassed and intimidated by Islamic hard-liners or members of the security forces.
This was what happened to one group that is scheduled to take part in the national seminar next week. The Research Foundation on the Victims of the 1965/66 Killings (YPKP 65) was forced to relocate its preparatory meeting for the symposium on Thursday following harassment by Islamic hard-liners, said YPKP 65 chairman Bejo Untung. He also said military intelligence interrogated the group’s members before they even arrived in Jakarta.
“The government or the state, especially the military, shouldn’t repress or intimidate us,” Bejo told online radio station Portal KBR. “We are very disappointed because until today, the victims of the 1965 [tragedy] are threatened whenever they hold a meeting.”
This video records the briefing by Human Rights Watch and KontraS urging the U.S. to release secret files on Indonesia's anti-communist massacres of 1965-66, as the Southeast Asian country takes a tentative step toward a reckoning with one of the worst atrocities of the last century.
A Call for Justice for the 1965-66 Massacres
Human Rights Watch was co-founded by Robert L. Bernstein and Aryeh Neier as a private American NGO in 1978, under the name Helsinki Watch, to monitor the then-Soviet Union's compliance with the Helsinki Accords. Helsinki Watch adopted a practice of publicly "naming and shaming" abusive governments through media coverage and through direct exchanges with policymakers.
Pursuant to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Human Rights Watch (HRW) opposes violations of what are considered basic human rights under the UDHR. This includes capital punishment and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. HRW advocates freedoms in connection with fundamental human rights, such as freedom of religion and freedom of the press. HRW seeks to achieve change by publicly pressuring governments and their policy makers to curb human rights abuses, and by convincing more powerful governments to use their influence on governments that violate human rights.
The current executive director of HRW is Kenneth Roth, who has held the position since 1993. Roth conducted investigations on abuses in Poland after martial law was declared 1981. He later focused on Haiti, which had just emerged from the Duvalier dictatorship but continued to be plagued with problems. Roth’s awareness of the importance of human rights began with stories his father had told about escaping Nazi Germany in 1938.
The Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence or abbreviated as KontraS is an Indonesian based task force formed by a number of NGOs. KontraS was formed on March 20, 1998, and was originally named KIP-HAM which was formed in 1996 . As a commission that works to monitor human rights issues, KontraS receives many complaints and grievances from the public, from both victims and communities who dare to express their aspiration for upholding human rights and addressing human rights problems when they occur in the regions.
"In its journey KontraS has not only handled the issue of forced abductions and disappearances but was also tasked by victims to deal with various forms of violence that have occurred in Aceh , Papua , Tanjung Priok and East Timor, along with human rights violations in Maluku , Sambas , Sampit and Poso . KontraS has developed into an independent organization that has worked to dismantling the patterns of violence and human rights abuse as a result of the abuse of power."
Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who sets out the brief in this video, said that the massacres, orchestrated by the military in 1965-66, were "one of the most horrendous crimes of our era."
There is no official figure for the number of people killed but researchers estimate half a million.
Within Indonesia, widely accepted accounts of the era gloss over these deaths.
The role of the U.S. is cloaked in secrecy. At the time, the U.S. viewed Indonesia as a bulwark in its efforts to thwart the influence of communist Soviet Union and China in Southeast Asia.
"We want to know the working level involvement between the U.S. government and the killers in 1965," said Roth. "Who knew what and what were the channels of communication? Were there names (of suspected communists) conveyed by the U.S. government to the Indonesian government and what happened to those people."
Yenni Kwok reports for TIME, April 19, 2016, on the Indonesian government-supported conference, entitled “National Symposium: Dissecting the 1965 Tragedy, Historical Approach”.
The headline to the TIME article runs:
There Were No Apologies at Indonesia's First Hearing Into the Savage Killings of 1965
"For the past two days, Indonesia’s focus has been on a posh hotel that stands in central Jakarta, opposite a Soviet-made statue of a farmer armed with a rifle and a woman serving him food — an image that has often been identified with communism, which remains controversial in Indonesia still."
So the article begins, and continues:
"Hotel Aryaduta has been the venue for the country’s first official discussion on the anticommunist massacres of 1965–66 that saw at least 500,000 alleged leftists and leftist sympathizers killed (some say millions lost their lives) and hundreds of thousands jailed in remote gulags."
The government-supported conference, entitled “National Symposium: Dissecting the 1965 Tragedy, Historical Approach,” was attended by 200 people, including Cabinet ministers and other VIPs — among them police chief Badrodin Haiti, Attorney General M. Prasetyo, Muslim scholar Syafi’i Maarif, former First Lady Sinta Nuriyah and Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of former President Sukarno. It brought together survivors of the pogroms, scholars, human-rights activists and members of the Indonesian military, all in one room.
In his opening speech on Monday, Chief Security Minister Luhut Panjaitan — a retired general and one of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s most trusted and influential ministers — said he personally wanted to resolve cases of human-rights violations but ruled out any official apology.
Following Luhut’s speech, Sintong Panjaitan, a retired general involved in the hunt of the communists, downplayed the killings. He refuted the estimated death tolls and said that only one person was killed during the military operation he led in Central Java.
Other participants, however, voiced dissatisfaction. Many survivors and rights activists have criticized the symposium for focusing on reconciliation, rather than fact-finding or apology.
Historian Asvi Warman Adam called for the government to issue an apology. “The one who should apologize is President Jokowi, because what happened in the past was the state’s wrongdoing,” Asvi said in a session on Monday.
The killing of six generals and other officers in the night of Sept. 30, 1965 and early morning hours of Oct. 1 were blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party, better known as the PKI. The army, helped by Islamic organizations and paramilitary groups, launched a massive anticommunist witch hunt across the nation. Members and sympathizers of the PKI, suspected leftists and their families were killed, imprisoned, tortured and exiled overseas.
General Suharto, who led the purges, ousted President Sukarno in 1966 and ruled Indonesia with an iron fist until his downfall in 1998. Five presidents later, Jokowi — the first Indonesian leader who didn’t come from the military and political elite — has vowed to resolve gross violations of human rights.
Although the fall of Suharto loosened restrictions on the discussion of communism and the 1965–66 pogrom, the topics are still controversial in Indonesia. In the hotly contested presidential election in 2014, Jokowi was hit by a smear campaign alleging he was a communist. Last week, days before the government-sponsored event began, Islamic hard-liners drove away the elderly members of the 1965 victims’ group YPKP 65 from their preconference preparatory meeting in the outskirts of the capital, forcing them to seek refuge at, and sleep on the cold tiles of, the Legal Aid Institute office in central Jakarta. Demonstrators from the Pancasila Front held a protest in front of Hotel Aryaduta on Monday, saying the event was “a PKI Symposium.”
Ilham Aidit, son of D.N. Aidit, the chairman of the PKI who was executed following his capture, said finding the truth behind the massacres was crucial before talking about reconciliation. “Reconciliation is necessary, telling the truth is also necessary,” Ilham said on Monday.
Speaking on Tuesday, Agus Widjojo, son of Sutoyo Siswomiharjo, a high-ranking general killed in 1965, and former military man who initiated and leads the symposium, agreed that the resolution to the 1965 tragedy needed to start with “finding the truth,” but he also added that reconciliation was necessary “so that we can make peace with the past.”
Survivors of the purges — many are now in their 70s — told heartrending stories of how their lives were turned upside down and how they remain socially ostracized. “What’s my sin?” asked Sumini, who was spent years behind bars for joining Gerwani, a progressive women’s group affiliated with the PKI.
Luhut had made a promise to settle serious human-rights abuses by May 2, and the symposium is expected to give recommendations to Jokowi on how to resolve the human-rights violations of 1965–66. Agus expressed skepticism that rights violations could be resolved in court, however.
Despite the occasionally heated exchanges and fierce disagreements on the resolution to the darkest chapter of Indonesia history, the symposium also gave the opportunity for people who were on the opposite camps in history to sit in the same panel and share their trauma.
Svetlana Njoto, daughter of PKI leader Njoto, and Catherine Pandjaitan, daughter of D.I. Pandjaitan, one of the assassinated generals, told the audience how they struck up close friendship after meeting in a group that Agus co-founded to unite children affected by political conflicts. “Catherine is like my own sister,” Svetlana Njoto said.
Joshua Oppenheimer, right, director of the documentary The Look of Silence, and Adi Rukun, whose brother Ramli Rukun was killed during the violence described in the documentary, pose for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Feb. 9, 2016. Shot in Indonesia and nominated for an Oscar, the documentary is at once a source of national pride and of shame for the world's third largest democracy. photo - Mario Anzuoni—Reuters
A follow-up story by Yenni Kwok (June 27, 2016) was headlined:
The Look of Silence and Indonesia's Quest for Truth and Reconciliation
This article was about the American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary film The Look of Silence:
After filming a group of elderly gangsters boasting about their role in murdering suspected communists in the 1965–66 anticommunist pogrom in Indonesia, American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer followed it up with another documentary: this time focusing on the family of a massacre victim.
In The Look of Silence, to be aired on PBS on Monday night, optician Adi Rukun travels from village to village in North Sumatra not only to ply his trade but also to meet those who were responsible for killing his elder brother Ramli, one of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Indonesians who lost their lives in the massacres. He sits down with his brother’s killers and their families — and encounters anger, hostility, denial and tears.
Adi’s quest for truth, and attempt at reconciliation, mirrors Indonesia’s own reckoning with one of the darkest chapters in its history. It has been 50 years after the mass killings, but the government has only taken the first step to investigate and reconcile with the country’s bloody past. In April, it held a two-day symposium that brought together survivors of the pogroms, scholars, human-rights activists and members of the military in one room.
“The symposium is an important step forward,” Oppenheimer tells TIME. “The Indonesian government facilitated a talk between the victims and the military, it was an acknowledgment of a whole new level.”
Vice Asia on YouTube
VICE Published on Nov 30, 2018
Through director Joshua Oppenheimer’s work filming perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered and the identity of the men who killed him. The youngest brother is determined to break the spell of silence and fear under which the survivors live, and so confronts the men responsible for his brother's murder—something unimaginable in a country where killers remain in power. For this episode of VICE Talks Film, Oscar nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer discusses his latest critically acclaimed film THE LOOK OF SILENCE as well its companion piece THE ACT OF KILLING.
JAGAL - The Act of KillingVice News (stylized as VICE News) is Vice Media, Inc.'s current affairs channel, producing daily documentary essays and video through its website and YouTube channel. It promotes itself on its coverage of "under-reported stories".
The Act of Killing (Indonesian: Jagal, meaning "Butcher") is a 2012 documentary film about individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. The film is directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and co-directed by Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian.
It is a Danish-British-Norwegian co-production, presented by Final Cut for Real in Denmark and produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen. The executive producers were Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Joram ten Brink, and Andre Singer. It is a Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) project of the University of Westminster.
The Act of Killing won the 2013 European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. It also won best documentary at the 67th BAFTA awards. In accepting the award, Oppenheimer asserted that the United States and the United Kingdom have "collective responsibility" for "participating in and ignoring" the crimes, which was omitted from the video BAFTA posted online. After a screening for US Congress members, Oppenheimer demanded that the US acknowledge its role in the killings.
The Indonesian government had responded negatively to the film. Its presidential spokesman on foreign affairs, Teuku Faizasyah, claimed that the film is misleading with respect to its portrayal of Indonesia.
Why did these killings happen?
The Wikipedia article on this reads:
The Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 (Indonesian genocide, Indonesian Communist Purge, Indonesian politicide, or the 1965 Tragedy) were large-scale killings and civil unrest that occurred in Indonesia over several months, targeting PKI party members, Communist sympathizers, ethnic Abangan Javanese, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists, often at the instigation of the armed forces and government. It began as an anti-communist purge following a controversial attempted coup d'état by the 30 September Movement in Indonesia. The most widely published estimates were that 500,000 to more than one million people were killed, with some more recent estimates going as high as two to three million. The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the "New Order" and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War. The upheavals led to the fall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto's three-decade authoritarian presidency.
The claims of a coup attempt by Communists released pent-up communal hatreds; these were fanned by the Indonesian Army, which quickly blamed the PKI. Communists were purged from political, social, and military life, and the PKI itself was disbanded and banned. The massacres began in October 1965, in the weeks following the coup attempt, and reached their peak over the remainder of the year before subsiding in the early months of 1966. They started in the capital, Jakarta, and spread to Central and East Java, and later Bali. Thousands of local vigilantes and army units killed actual and alleged PKI members. Killings occurred across the country, with the worst in the PKI strongholds of Central Java, East Java, Bali, and northern Sumatra. It is possible that over one million people were imprisoned at one time or another.
Sukarno's balancing act of "Nasakom" (nationalism, religion and communism) had unravelled.His most significant pillar of support, the PKI, was effectively eliminated by the other two pillars—the army and political Islam; and the army was on the way to unchallenged power.
In March 1967, Sukarno was stripped of his remaining power by Indonesia's provisional Parliament, and Suharto was named Acting President. In March 1968, Suharto was formally elected president.
The killings are skipped over in most Indonesian history textbooks, and have received little introspection by Indonesians, due to their suppression under the Suharto regime.
The search for satisfactory explanations for the scale and frenzy of the violence has challenged scholars from all ideological perspectives. The possibility of a return to similar upheavals is cited as a factor in the "New Order" administration's political conservatism and tight control of the political system. Vigilance and stigma against a perceived communist threat remained a hallmark of Suharto's doctrine, and it is still in force even today.
Despite a consensus at the highest levels of the US and British governments that it would be necessary "to liquidate Sukarno", as related in a CIA memorandum from 1962, and the existence of extensive contacts between anti-communist army officers and the US military establishment – training of over 1,200 officers, "including senior military figures", and providing weapons and economic assistance – the CIA denied active involvement in the killings. Declassified US documents in 2017 revealed that the US government had detailed knowledge of the mass killings from the beginning, and was supportive of the actions of the Indonesian Army. US complicity in the killings, which included providing extensive lists of communist party officials to Indonesian death squads, has previously been established by historians and journalists. A top-secret CIA report from 1968 stated that the massacres "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s."
Sukarno, accompanied by Mohammad Hatta (right), proclaiming the independence of Indonesia
The Proclamation of Indonesian Independence (Indonesian: Proklamasi Kemerdekaan Indonesia, or simply Proklamasi) was read at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, 17 August 1945.
In the Wikipedia article section on "Background" it identifies some of the social, political and ideological forces at play in the first two decades of the state following the declaration of Indonesian independence in 1945:
Support for Sukarno's presidency under his "Guided Democracy" depended on his forced and unstable "Nasakom" coalition between the military, religious groups, and communists.
The rise in influence and increasing militancy of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and Sukarno's support for it, was a serious concern for Muslims and the military, and tension grew steadily in the early and mid-1960s. The third-largest communist party in the world, the PKI had approximately 300,000 cadres and a full membership of around two million. The party's assertive efforts to speed up land reform frightened those who controlled the land, and threatened the social position of Muslim clerics.
Sukarno required government employees to study his Nasakom principles as well as Marxist theory. He had met with Zhou Enlai, Premier of the People's Republic of China, and after this meeting had decided to create a militia, called a Fifth Force, which he intended to control personally. Sukarno ordered weapons from China to equip this Fifth Force. He declared in a speech that he favoured revolutionary groups whether they were nationalist, religious or communist, stating "I am a friend of the Communists because the Communists are revolutionary people." He said at a Non-Aligned Movement summit meeting in Cairo in October 1964 that his current purpose was to drive all of Indonesian politics to the left and thereby to neutralise the "reactionary" elements in the army that could be dangerous for the revolution. Sukarno's international policies increasingly reflected his rhetoric.
As early as 1958, Western powers—in particular the US and the UK—pushed for policies that would encourage the Indonesian Army to act forcefully against the PKI and the Left, which included a covert propaganda campaign designed to damage the reputation of Sukarno and the PKI, and secret assurances along with military and financial support to anti-communist leaders within the army.
The Paris Institute of Political Studies (Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris), commonly referred to as Sciences Po, published an article on The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966 by Katharine E McGregor (4 August, 2009) as part of the
Mass Violence and Resistance - Research Network, that offers a comprehensive overview and a detailed analysis of this tragedy. An explanation of the processes whereby the army and members of communities carried out this mass murder can be found in Section B of this paper under the heading of Decision-Makers, Organizers and Actors:
Key Instigators - The Indonesian Army
The Indonesian army directed the killings with varying degrees of assistance from religious groups and other enemies of the PKI. They targeted members of the PKI and its affiliated organizations, military men sympathetic to the PKI, and Sukarno supporters. The areas of most intense conflict were often those in which the PKI had strong political influence, for example Solo, where the Mayor was from the PKI. The violence spanned the archipelago, but was particularly intense in Java, Bali and Sumatra where the PKI had a larger following (see accompanying maps). Most of the killings took place between October 1965 and March 1966. The killings were politically motivated and in the view of some authors also motivated by related economic interests. Conflicts and resistance continued well after 1966, in some parts of Java until 1969, and many people who had either continued to resist or had gone into hiding were not arrested until this later period.
At an institutional level, the Indonesian Army had clashed seriously with the PKI previously, most notably during the 1948 Madiun Affair. The Madiun Affair involved an attempt by lower echelon Communist Party leaders, aggravated by plans to rationalise the military of left leaning troops, to seize control of the local government in Madiun from the Republican government during the war of independence against the Dutch. Anti-communist elements of the Indonesian army viewed this revolt as a great betrayal. In the 1960s there were also strong differences of opinion over the issues of how far the anti-Malaysia campaign should be taken. Proposals to arm and train peasants and workers and to increase the representation of communists in the army, in accordance with Sukarno’s support for representation of the three pillars of nationalism, religion and communism in all organizations, generated significant conflict. Although these clashes in opinion could not always be expressed openly in the context of the Guided Democracy period, they nevertheless fuelled resentment towards the PKI.
Following President Sukarno’s refusal to ban the PKI, Suharto dispatched the Army Para Commando Unit (RPKAD) under the leadership of Sarwo Edhie to Central Java and then Bali to commence killing communists in the districts in these two provinces. In most cases the killings began when RPKAD forces arrived or when local military leaders declared that they sanctioned the killing of communists (Cribb, 2001a). In some regions military units played a major role in the killings, but they often relied on local militia. Sensationalised reporting on the deaths of the six army generals at the hands of the PKI kindled the hatred of military men and others towards the PKI.
The Indonesian military was not, however, united in its actions and several army battalions including the Diponegoro division of Central Java and a significant number of airforce officers were in fact strongly sympathetic to the PKI.
The Nahdlatul Ulama and other Religious Organizations
The army also played a key role in recruiting, arming and training militia units to carry out the killings. These militia units were largely recruited from Ansor, the youth wing of the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU - meaning awakening of the ulama or religious scholars). The army probably turned to NU because of its extensive networks in rural communities and its demonstrated commitment to opposing communists.
In 1962 Ansor had responded to the growing assertiveness of the PKI by founding Banser (Barisan Serbaguna, or Multipurpose Brigade), an armed wing in preparation for confrontation with the PKI. Prior to the 1965 coup attempt, members of Banser had clashed physically with members of the PKI-affiliated Indonesian Farmers’ Union when they attempted to seize lands owned by Islamic boarding schools as part of a broader program of land reform. In these clashes Banser was usually victorious.
In the months after the coup attempt, members of Banser mobilized, with varying degrees of military assistance and direction, and rounded up and killed members of leftist organizations.
The NU was not the only civilian organization that supported killings. The second largest Islamic organization, Muhammadiyah, also provided rapid support for crushing the PKI, with some leaders declaring this a religious duty. For both the NU and Muhammadiyah, the PKI’s alleged lack of commitment to religion was a major concern.
The Catholic Party was similarly firmly anti-communist because of the perceived threat the PKI posed to religion. Secretary-general of the Catholic Party, Harry Tjan Silalahi, was a key founder of KAP-Gestapu (the Action Front to Crush the 30 September Movement). He helped mobilize youths from PMKRI (Persatuan Mahasiswa Katolik Republik Indonesia) to join together with Ansor in the Action Front to attack the PKI headquarters in Jakarta on October 8, 1965.
Militias attached to non-religiously aligned parties such as the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI - Indonesian Nationalist Party), also participated in the violence. In Bali the PNI-affiliated vigilante group Tameng Marhaen played a key role.
Explanations for the Killings
The Indonesian military’s role was central in instigating and coordinating the killings, but they also relied on participation from broader sections of society. Explanations focusing on elite political rivalry, ideology, or different institutional interests do not, however, capture the reasons why people at a village level, for example, were willing to participate in the killings.
In some areas there was a strong perception that the PKI had overstepped the boundaries of acceptability with regard to the land reform actions, but also in increasingly assertive attacks on religious leaders, who were branded as one of the ‘seven village devils’ due to their land holdings. ‘Seven village devils’ was a term the PKI used in its propaganda to denote forces deemed to be detrimental to the people’s interests. In his recollections of this period Yusuf Hasyim, the religious teacher and former leader of the military wing of Ansor in East Java, recalled how he had received information from the military about the existence of hit lists from the PKI of Islamic figures who were to be killed. Although these lists were probably a military fabrication, Hasyim claims that this led to a perception that there was ‘only two choices: kill or be killed’ (Hasyim, 2005). This is a frequent justification offered by those who participated in the killings.
In addition to local factors and specific sources of political or ideological grievance at the elite levels, the economy was in ruins and many people were struggling to survive. Cribb (2002) suggests that these dire economic conditions perhaps fueled an acceptance of the idea that the PKI were the culprits for both the failing economy and the murder of the army generals and that they should therefore be punished and prevented from coming to power.
The army encouraged a belief in the barbarity of the PKI by means of its propaganda campaign, but it also set about training and mobilising people to take part in the arrest and killing of PKI members and those of affiliated organizations. There was also a degree of coercion in this process such that some people felt that if they did not participate they would be targeted (Sulistyo, 1997). The military thus deliberately co-opted other groups to participate in the killings. Cribb (1990) believes that they did so to ensure broad support for blocking a PKI come back and should they do so, the army would not be the only ones blamed.
CRIBB, Robert, 2002, «Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966,» Asian Survey , 42 (4): 550-563.
CRIBB, Robert (ed.), 1990, The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali . Clayton: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies.
HASYIM, Yusuf, «Killing communists». In MCGLYNN, John et al. (eds.), 2005, Indonesia in the Suharto Years: Issues, Incidents and Images. Jakarta: The Asia Foundation and Lontar, pp. 16–17.
SULISTYO, Hermawan, 1997, The Forgotten Years: the Missing History of Indonesia’s Mass Slaughters Jombang-Kediri 1965–1966 , unpublished doctoral thesis Arizona State University.
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