State Violence in East Asia

6. Counterrevolutionary Violence in Indonesia

6 counterrevolutionary Violence in indonesia Douglas Kammen In October 1965, the Indonesian Army and an alliance of anti-communist civilian forces initiated a systematic attack on the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI). Over the course of the next three years pogroms against the PKI left at least five hundred thousand people dead, hundreds of thousands more under detention, and unknown numbers dislocated within their communities. So horrific was the attack on the PKI that it is often counted as one of the worst cases of mass violence in the twentieth century.1 That much is clear. But what sort of attack was it? Among scholars of Indonesia, debate emerged primarily over the question of perpetrators, with those on the political left typically arguing that the army organized and directed the violence, those on the political right tending to highlight the primacy of societal actors (running “amok” or even civil war). Within the broader field of mass and political violence, by contrast, there is general agreement that this was a case of state-led violence, but there are sharp differences over the question of intent and victims, best characterized by the contested usage of the terms “genocide,” “politicide,” and “ethnocide.”2 Often missing in these debates is sensitivity to the process by which the violence took place and the position of the violence with respect to regime change. For the attack in Indonesia was not limited to members of the PKI or those suspected of being sympathetic to the party. The mass detentions, torture, and murder of communists and those accused of 160 DOUGLAS KAMMEN being “fellow travelers” were in fact only the first stage in a much broader attack on President Sukarno; the system of Guided Democracy he had proclaimed in 1959; the creative amalgam of nationalism, religion, and communism that formed the basis of Sukarno’s thinking; and the social forces (including non-communist nationalists) most closely associated with Sukarno’s regime. This chapter will argue that the mass violence between 1965 and 1968 was a counterrevolution against the ideals and popular mobilization unleashed by the Indonesian Revolution (1945– 1949) and, a decade later, precariously institutionalized under Guided Democracy (1959–1965). Furthermore, the chapter seeks to demonstrate how and why the constellations of both perpetrators and victims shifted over the course of the attack. While the initial violence was perpetrated by an army-led coalition that included the active participation of civilians, as the army consolidated control over the state apparatus, it systematically marginalized its erstwhile allies. As such, what began as a seizure of the state and attack on the regime became a state-led attack. Conversely, the initial pogrom against the PKI was, over time, broadened to include repression of all groups associated with Sukarno and Guided Democracy, the construction of a new regime, and the establishment of new modes of political behavior. The chapter is organized into three parts. The first section provides a brief historical account of political polarization under Guided Democracy and the September 30th Movement that provided the “pretext” for the army-led counterrevolution.3 The second section examines the course of the violence, paying particular attention to regional variation, the forms of violence employed against the political left, the gradual consolidation of central state power and regime construction, and the eventual exclusion of civilian actors from the new regime. A final section turns to the legacies of mass violence, considering both the institutional violence during three decades of Suharto’s rule and the ambitious but flawed efforts to address the legacy of counterrevolutionary violence during Indonesia’s post-1998 transition to democracy. Background The violence against the political left in 1965–1968 cannot be understood in isolation from Indonesia’s political development over the previous two decades. The Japanese invasion in 1942 shattered the colonial myth of Counterrevolutionary Violence in Indonesia 161 white supremacy and breathed new life into the nationalist movement. The Japanese occupation was brutal, though for many young Indonesians it also introduced exhilarating new experiences of military training and mass political mobilization. Immediately after the Japanese surrender in 1945, the nationalist figures Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta declared the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. The Dutch were intent to reclaim their colony, however, and four years of diplomatic maneuvering , further mass mobilization, and guerilla struggle ensued. The broad nature of the revolutionary movement inevitably led to sharp differences over strategy (negotiation vs. armed struggle) and...