The Army and the Indonesian Genocide

Mechanics of Mass Murder

Jess Melvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351273305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign.

Using documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency's archives in Banda Aceh this book shatters the Indonesian government's official propaganda account of the mass killings and proves the military's agency behind those events. This book tells the story of the 3, 000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise the Indonesian genocide files. Drawing upon these orders and records, along with the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitness of the genocide in Aceh province it reconstructs, for the first time, a detailed narrative of the killings using the military's own accounts of these events. This book makes the case that the 1965-66 killings can be understood as a case of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The first book to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the genocide using the army's own records of these events, it will be of interest to students and academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, History, Politics, the Cold War, Political Violence and Comparative Genocide.

1
Why genocide?

Since the 1965–66 killings, Indonesian and foreign commentators have debated the appropriate language with which to label them. The scale of the killings – believed to have claimed up to a million lives – along with their killers’ stated aim to “exterminate down to the roots” (menumpas sampai ke akar-akarnya) an unarmed civilian group have led many to ask whether the 1965–66 killings constitute a case of genocide. For those who wish to use the term, the motivation has often been twofold: to provide an analytical tool with which to understand the killings as an event and to underline their criminal nature.

Genocide as a concept has a very specific origin. The term was first coined in 1943, by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer, for his book on Nazi imperialism, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.¹ Derived from the Greek word for people – genos – and the Latin suffix – cide – for murder, the term was intended to capture the idea of the “murder of a people”.² This act, epitomised by the state-sponsored liquidation of European Jews and other national minority groups during the Nazi Holocaust, was believed to be especially egregious because it not only destroyed individuals, but eradicated entire peoples.³

The term was not, however, meant to apply only to the Nazi Holocaust. Lemkin described the murder of Armenians in 1915 as another example of genocide.⁴ Meanwhile, the introduction of the term into international law through the 1948 Genocide Convention was intended to establish a framework through which future cases of genocide could be identified and their perpetrators brought to account.

Genocide, as a legal term, also possesses a more specific meaning. Genocide, according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, is the act of attacking members of a particular target group with the intent to destroy this target group “as such”.⁵ This targeting occurs outside a situation in which such targeting might be described as a reasonable use of force, as in the context of a security operation, although such targeting may well be portrayed as an act of self-defense.⁶ Meanwhile, a target group of genocide must constitute a stable group within society that can be described as a “national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.⁷ The members of a political organisation cannot, as such, be the target of genocide, though political affiliation may well overlap with such a sociocultural group.⁸ For a particular event to be described as genocide, these two key requirements relating to intent and identity of the target group must be met.

In the case of the 1965–66 killings, it has been unclear whether these two requirements could be established. This ambiguity has been caused, in large part, by the severe shortage of information available with which to make this assessment. Throughout the New Order period, the Indonesian government retained obsessive control over its official propaganda narrative of events, while making independent research both difficult and potentially dangerous.⁹ Since the fall of the New Order in 1998, the limited success of Indonesia’s democratisation process has meant this official propaganda narrative has remained potent.¹⁰ Specifically, until the discovery of the Indonesian genocide files, it has not been possible to prove military intent behind the killings. Likewise, it has remained difficult to prove exactly how victims of the killings were identified, as the precise manner in which they were targeted remained unclear.

This evidentiary lacuna has not stopped Indonesian and foreign commentators from using the available information to describe the 1965–66 killings as a case of genocide. Since the early 1980s, there has been general consensus among genocide scholars that the 1965–66 killings constitute a case of genocide in its general sense.

This chapter reviews how the term has been used and interpreted in Indonesia before turning to an overview of how genocide studies scholars have applied the genocide concept to the Indonesian case. It then presents an overview of the new information now available with which to address this evidence problem. The chapter argues that this new evidence meets the key concerns raised by genocide scholars to confirm the early assumption that the 1965–66 killings can be understood as a case of genocide according to both its sociological (non-legal) and legal definitions.

How has the term been used and interpreted in Indonesia?

Within Indonesia, it was dangerous to publicly criticise official narratives of the 1965–66 killings until the fall of Suharto in 1998. The first uses of the term “genocide” to describe the killings within Indonesia coincide with the radical period of reform (reformasi) that accompanied the fall of the dictatorship. Reformasi was characterised by sharp political criticism of Suharto and the New Order regime. Newspapers ran front-page exposés of Suharto’s economic and political crimes, including “investigations” into Suharto’s alleged role in “G30S/PKI”, which had brought the New Order regime to power.¹¹ As the country transitioned to democracy, there was an expectation within Indonesian civil society that Suharto and other key officials would soon be arrested and put on trial.¹²

One of the earliest uses of the term “genocide” to describe the killings within Indonesia can be found in a fictional “trial” of Suharto, published in 1999 by Wimanjaya K. Liotohe.¹³ Through this text, Liotohe, who had been arrested and interrogated in 1994 for alleging Suharto had been behind the 30 September Movement¹⁴ – the abortive coup movement used as a pretext by the military to launch its attack against the PKI during the morning of 1 October 1965 – accused Suharto of “carrying out mass killings against his own people (genocide) outside a situation of war”.¹⁵ The military, he explains, “armed” and “incited” civilian groups “in order to carry out a holy war (perang suci)” against “kafir”, with the intent to “terrorize” the population into accepting Suharto’s new “fascist-military” regime.¹⁶ He also links the 1965–66 killings with other atrocities committed by the Indonesian military throughout the New Order period, including in East Timor, West Papua and Aceh, which he describes as “genocidal”.¹⁷ His use of the term is centered on both apportioning accountability for the killings and pointing to the asymmetric nature of the killings.

In 2002, Indonesian historian Bonnie Triyana would also describe the 1965–66 killings as genocide. After explaining Suharto seized “de facto” control of the state on 1 October 1965, Triyana proposes the military became the “main supporter” of the killings in Indonesia’s provinces.¹⁸ These killings, he explains, were portrayed within the community as an extension of local tensions over land and religion, but did not begin in Purwodadi, Central Java, where he conducted his research, until “the military [became] directly involved”.¹⁹ In using the term genocide to describe the killings, Triyana adopts Helen Fein’s 1993 definition (discussed below), to propose “genocide … is a strategic kind of killing, not just caused by hate or revenge, towards a racial, ethnic or political group to eliminate the [perceived] threat from this group to the validity of the power of the killers”.²⁰ Triyana thus proposes that it is the strategic nature of the military’s killing campaign, targeted at the elimination of a particular group, which is decisive in his adoption of the term genocide.

The idea that the Indonesian state should be held accountable for the 1965–66 killings gathered momentum during the early reformasi period. This understanding translated into real legal and political changes. Restrictions placed on former political prisoners were eased. Indonesia became a signatory to numerous human rights conventions it had previously abstained from. In 2000, a law was passed to establish a Human Rights Court to resolve gross violations of human rights, including genocide and crimes against humanity.²¹ Four years later, in 2004, a new law was passed concerning the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, specifically to deal with gross human rights violations in the nation’s past.²² While, in a symbolic breakthrough, school curriculums were adjusted in to remove “PKI” from “G30S/PKI”, the official name used as shorthand to refer to the events of 1 October 1965 that laid blame squarely on the PKI. These advances, however, did not go unchallenged.

From the mid-2000s, the winds of reformasi began to falter. The government, having churned through four successive presidents since the fall of Suharto by 2004, began to see talk about digging up the past as potentially destabilising. Meanwhile, the military, still smarting from its forced removal from East Timor in 1999, was keen to reassert its right to use force to resolve growing separatist struggles in Aceh and West Papua. In late 2006, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court overturned the 2004 law establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as unconstitutional,²³ while in 2007 the use of the term “G30S/PKI” in school teaching materials was reasserted. In March of that year, Indonesia’s Attorney General would go so far as to order the burning of 14 offending school history textbooks.²⁴ It was within these conditions that old propaganda narratives of the killings began to reassert themselves.

Tensions began to develop between the increasingly articulated understanding that the military was responsible for the 1965–66 killings and New Order– era propaganda accounts. This tension is neatly captured in the introduction to Husnu Mufid’s 2008 book Epilogue to the G30S/PKI Coup D’état: Who Was Resisting Who? Here it is asked by the book’s editor: “Is it true the mass actions against the PKI and the killings of its members and supporters were the result of ‘spontaneous’ actions, or were they, indeed, carried out with the ‘blessing’ of the military?”²⁵ Mufid responds by repeating, almost verbatim, the military’s original propaganda version of events: “When, in the regions, rumors were heard that Muslims had been killed in Yogyakarta by the communists, the Acehnese, who were enveloped in an overflowing mood of jihad (diliputi suasana jihad yang meluap-luap), began to take action to kill all communists in Aceh.”²⁶ This impulsive violence, Mufid alleges, then spread spontaneously to other provinces throughout Indonesia.

Many of the books published during this period that support this new reactionary stance did not attempt to engage with new accounts of the killings. They certainly did not engage with the issue of whether the killings should be understood as a case of genocide.²⁷ In many cases the killings are ignored completely, as attention was turned, once again, to the actions of the 30 September Movement and the alleg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on translations and pseudonyms
• Acronyms and glossary
• Introduction: the Indonesian genocide files
• 1 Why genocide?
• 2 The struggle for the Indonesian state
• 3 The order to annihilate: 1–6 October
• 4 Djuarsa’s coordination tour: 1–11 October
• 5 Pogrom and public killings: 7–13 October
• 6 Killing to destroy: 14 October–23 December
• 7 Consolidation of the new regime: anti-Chinese violence and purge of Aceh’s civil service
• Conclusion: anatomy of a genocide
• Index