Mass Violence and Regime Change in Indonesia

Not so long ago it was common to hear that the “events of 1965”—to use a convenient but perhaps misleading shorthand—loomed ominously over the study of Indonesian politics. This view contained an obvious kernel of truth. The mass violence that left hundreds of thousands dead and many more lives shattered ushered in three decades of authoritarian rule. The founding myth of General Suharto’s regime was that the military, together with its civilian allies, acted to protect the nation from a communist takeover. Once in power, the Suharto regime employed the bogey of the latent “extreme left” paired with the fainter, parallel specter of the “extreme right” (i.e., political Islam) to legitimize the military’s role in politics and to set the icy parameters of political participation and discourse. At the same time, the suggestion that 1965’s events haunted the study of Indonesian politics was a polite way of indicating the paucity of scholarship on what all observers agreed to be a foundational period and tragic set of events of worldwide, historical significance. Indeed, during the thirty-two years Suharto ruled Indonesia, the events of 1965 received remarkably little attention from foreign scholars and virtually none from Indonesians themselves.

Of the many reasons for this scholarly void during the long night of the New Order, three are worth noting. First, the Suharto regime (1966–98) tightly controlled research permits and banned the few foreign scholars who did speak out about the mass killings and detentions as a warning to others. As a result, few scholars who had invested time to specialize in the country’s languages, history, culture, and politics were willing to jeopardize access to their chosen area of study by focusing their research on the violence on which the regime was founded. Second, official documentation on the mass violence was scant (though by no means nonexistent) and identifying sources, let alone convincing them to speak openly, made research daunting. Third, ideological considerations were at work: with the lingering influence of modernization theory and the subsequent celebration of the “Asian economic miracle,” some scholars focused on the challenges and accomplishments of the New Order itself rather than the horrific circumstances under which it came to power. As a result, the mass violence against the political Left was common knowledge among scholars, but never generated a significant corresponding literature.

Not surprisingly, Suharto’s resignation in 1998 opened the door for the proliferation of new scholarship on 1965’s events. Building on his 1990 edited volume,¹ Robert Cribb produced a series of articles and book chapters situating the attack on the political Left in 1965–66 alongside better known cases of genocide. Other scholars re-examined the events of October 1, 1965, of which John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder is far and away the most important.² Alongside this, a new body of literature emerged on the 1965 events’ international context and the real or alleged involvement of foreign powers in the army’s attack. But the greatest number of new works have been local studies in which oral accounts receive pride of place. These efforts have greatly expanded our knowledge of the scope and dynamics of the violence beyond Java to parts of Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Nusa Tenggara. One of the most commendable aspects of this outpouring of regional studies is that Indonesian authors have been well represented. This has included not only works by established scholars, such as Asvi Warman Adam and Baskara Wardoyo, but also undergraduate and masters theses—of which there are now well over one hundred—produced at Indonesian universities.³ Yet, for five decades there was not a single comprehensive, book-length account of the global coordinates within which the eradication of Indonesia’s political Left took place, the domestic interests and processes by which it was carried out, and the long-term consequences it has had for Indonesia.

It is in this context that we welcome the publication of Geoffrey Robinson’s book The...