State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia

Ariel Heryanto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134195688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Excellent case study of the mass killings of 1965 to 1966, still an extremely difficult topic in Indonesia

Examines the significance and impact of the 1965 to 1966 atrocities on identity politics today in the wake of the 'war on terror'

In contrast to nearly all recent publications on terrorism which focus on 'terrorism against the states', this book discusses 'state-terrorism'. It challenges some of the often simplistic uses of the term 'terrorism' as attested to by the majority of post-11 September 2001 publications

1 Remembered signs, dismembered bodies

‘[I]ntimate tyranny’ is the very stuff of which society … is constituted … There is no better sign of this intimate tyranny that makes society possible than ‘language’, or the symbolic, the originary tyranny par excellence, a regime of violence we escape (?) only in death.

(Olaniyan 1992: 50)

Heavy rain on the morning of Thursday 16 November 2000 did not deter some 300 villagers of Kaliworo in the province of Central Java, Indonesia, who gathered in a small forest nearby called Situngkup. What attracted them was an unusual event in their neighbourhood; one whose historical significance for the nation-state was far beyond their, as well as historians’, comprehension. The occasion was the beginning of a series of exhumations of the bodies of local residents who were believed to have been slain with no resistance more than three decades ago for alleged association with the then legitimate and strong PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, Communist Party of Indonesia). The proceeding was sponsored by a group of Jakarta-based intellectuals, called Yayasan Penelitian Korban Pembunuhan 1965/ 1966 (Investigation Foundation for Victims of the 1965/1966 Massacre), founded just a year earlier following the fall of President Soeharto's New Order government.¹

Literally and symbolically, this exhumation marks the first step in an ambitious plan of activities with far-reaching historical consequences to unearth the nation's political past, which was full of violence, propaganda, mysteries, gossip, and lies as much as silences. Understandably, it took persistence, tactful negotiations, and great courage on the part of the committee before permission was granted for the event by local governmental officials and military commanders. Notwithstanding the tensions in the process and distress upon the discovery of skeletons, the proceedings went smoothly. They found the broken skeletons of eight bodies on the first day, nine the next, and seven others on the third and concluding day. Preliminary forensic study on-site by a volunteer physician identified a couple of females among the exhumed, including one with a wedding ring dated 28/06/1965, or nine months prior to the date on which the mass murder had taken place (according to local residents, on 3 March 1966). Most had apparently been shot at point blank range from above, with guns that were available only to the military. As many as 13 cartridges were also found.

As expected, things could not continue much further without serious problems and challenges. When the bodies were brought to Sarjito Hospital in the city of Yogyakarta, it took many weeks before anyone from this reputable hospital had the courage to proceed with the autopsies as requested. They refused to do anything until the Republic's Police Chief granted official permission, which involved another long series of negotiations with local, regional, and national authorities. The most decisive challenge came in late March 2001, when the bones were about to be reburied by the victims’ relatives.

As news of this historic event spread by word of mouth, it evoked mixed reactions. Sympathizers took journeys of hundreds of kilometres from several islands of the archipelago to attend the multi-religious ceremony preceding the reburial on 24 March 2001 in the village of Kaloran, near the town of Temanggung, also in Central Java. The venue was the private house of Irawan Mangunkusuma, aged 80, who had been a political detainee for eight years during the biggest wave of the anti-communist campaign that began in late 1965. The exhumation and reburial had also provoked fear and anger among other segments of the population. On the day of the scheduled reburial, 15 people occupied Irawan's house, while a hostile crowd of around 3,000 according to one estimate (TAPOL 2001b) encircled the house, ‘many of them brandishing sharp weapons and yelling slogans like “Death to Irawan” and “Irawan PKI’” (TAPOL 2001b).

Not only were the ceremony and reburial cancelled, several attendees of the ceremonies were beaten, and vehicles damaged before the police stopped the crowd from burning them. According to one report, at least ‘five coffins … were dragged out, broken into, and the bodies strewn on the ground’ (TAPOL 2001a). The attacking group, which called itself Forum Ukhuwah Islamiyah Kaloran, demanded that no bodies of the alleged communists or their associates and kin should be buried or reburied in their surrounding areas. Several figures on the local council endorsed this demand, and those in charge of the ceremony duly complied.

The incident brought a premature end to the historic investigation. It was estimated that more than 5,000 lives (Andri and Fitri 2000) had been lost around the area where the bodies and broken bones of 24 people were about to be reburied. These figures are a small proportion of the total casualties that ranged from one to two million according to different estimates nationwide (see Cribb 1990), mainly on the islands of Java and Bali. The gloomy past was once again sealed, retaining its mysteries and miseries to haunt the world's fourth most populous nation. The same past, however, was also the foundation upon which the world's longest-running authoritarian regime in a non-socialist country, called Orde Baru (New Order), had been established, with President Soeharto as sole ruler (1966–98), during the height of the Cold War.

This book makes several arguments that are worth spelling out from the outset. One basic premise is that the mass killings in 1965–6 laid the foundations of the New Order's authoritarianism which enjoyed generous assistance from the US government and other leading world advocates of liberal democracy at least until around 1990. With periodic modifications, that past violence has been a crucial force in the formation of the subject identities, fantasies, and everyday activities of this nation for decades, and it has outlived New Order rule itself. Arguably, in varying forms and to varying degrees the same past may continue to be a defining factor in the national imagination and historical trajectory in the decades that follow, presuming that the nation manages to resolve threats of disintegration. Crucially, despite the profound importance of the 1965–6 events, and the impossibility of the nation forgetting or ignoring them, the same violent past remains one of the most difficult and sensitive topics for public discussion, and until very recently it had been largely an unspoken and unknown part of the nation's history (see Purwadi 2003, Zurbuchen 2002).

The official end of the Cold War in 1990 took away one of the basic original reasons for the New Order's existence, as well as the legitimacy and credibility of its protracted anti-communist witch-hunts. Indeed in the 1990s the New Order went through a complex, but nonetheless observably consistent, series of political, cultural, and moral crises before the 1997 economic crisis gave it the final blow. On 21 May 1998 President Soeharto was compelled to resign. Not surprisingly, many Indonesians and sympathetic observers expected a significantly different Indonesia after Soeharto's political exit, not least in matters related to the seemingly obsolete legacies of the Cold War (such as anti-communist policies, militarist institutions, authoritarian language, and routinized stigmatization). However, by 2000 it was already clear to many that a great number of such expectations were misplaced. Several important things have indeed changed in post-Soeharto Indonesia, but certainly not everything that was characteristically New Order. Anti-communism, and the mass violence that was significantly a part of – but clearly irreducible to – anti-communist outrage, outlived the New Order; indeed, in several instances these have in fact become stronger in the first decade of the twenty-first century than in the decade that preceded it.

At face value Indonesia underwent several changes. Between 1998 and 2000, Indonesians had three new presidents, after having lived under one president for more than three decades. To the surprise of many, Indonesians also seemed readily able to forget their recent past in trying to come to terms with contemporary rapid changes and pursuing a better future.² However, it does not take a specially trained eye to recognize that, in several areas, old problems have not gone away. Many long, haunting questions surrounding the 1965–6 killings and their aftermath remain central in public rumours and in the analyses of overseas observers. They still remain too sensitive for public scrutiny and sober response, while a series of mass killings that had no immediate links with anti-communism continued unabated in the years before and after Soeharto lost power. Coming to terms with the violent past, especially of 1965, and with its traumatic legacy in subsequent decades, is a prerequisite to any attempt to rebuild the nation beyond the New Order. In fact it may be a prerequisite for the survival of the nation itself as it confronts the recurring threats of crisis and demoralization, if not disintegration.

This book is primarily an investigation of the profound political consequences of the mass killings in 1965–6, mainly in Java, Bali and Sumatera, upon public life in Indonesia, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the almost unstoppable mechanical reproduction and elaboration of fear and intimidation surrounding the possible re-occurrence of such major violence. This book seeks to examine where, if at all, there is any space for the largely repressed public to negotiate, avoid, or resist the suffocating political environment – decades after the actual killings in 1965–6. It takes issue with the general and easy tendency to see the periodic anti-communist witchhunts as nothing but a political tool in the hand of a powerful military elite and the authoritarian government of the New Order to repress political dissent, discredit potential enemies, or attempt to legitimize its responsibility for past killings (e.g. Goodfellow 1995). It looks at the circumstances that drive otherwise apolitical subjects to be complicit in the engulfing cycles of witch-hunts that also victimize them. The book also argues that elements of what began as an anti-communist campaign took on a life of their own, increasingly (though never totally) operating independently of the 1965–6 violence and of the individual subjects who appeared to be manipulating the campaign in the 1980s and 1990s.

For the purpose indicated above, this book focuses on the various memories and representations in the 1990s of the violence, rather than on the actual instances of mass killings in 1965–6 and others of more recent times. It looks at selected incidences of refractory measures of the anti-communist witch-hunt, and demonstrates how highly comparable practices of othering, stigmatization, and violence can be found in a wide range of the nation's post-independence social relations. To concentrate narrowly on the “substantive” aspects of communist ideology and its individual proponents and followers (or their antagonists) is to miss the point. This is not to suggest that one should study violence and representation in “purely abstract” forms of signification. Indeed, the notion of “pure abstraction” and its opposition to “concrete reality” is highly problematic, and will itself be problematized in the chapters that follow. Particular articulations of such forms of violence in a given history will be accorded considerable, though not primary, attention in this book.

This chapter will further elaborate the main substance of the book's arguments, and will situate the central issue within contemporary Indonesia. I will introduce key concepts adopted in the analysis that follows, and will highlight some of the historical connections and disconnections between the various incidents and related discourses. Chapter 2 will look specifically at the year 1988, when the anti-communist witch-hunt reached a climax in terms of surveillance and extensive stigmatization, if not in terms of the actual violence against people's lives and civil liberties. Chapters 3 and 4 will present one remarkable case study of the trials and prosecutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s of three young activists under the Anti-Subversion Law for possessing, circulating, and discussing novels that allegedly smacked of communism. Chapter 5 will consider the questions of vigilantism and militancy of identity politics in a broader context and beyond anti-communist campaigns. This will allow us to assess what is so particular or general about the remarkably successful anti-communist campaign in much of the New Order's three decades of authoritarian rule. The book will conclude with Chapter 6, where the concepts of power, identity, and resistance shall be critically analyzed on the basis of the preceding chapters and general relevant literature.

Given the centrality of the consequences of the killings in 1965–6 to public life in Indonesia in the second half of the twentieth century, it is necessary for me now to provide some background information on these events for readers who are unfamiliar with Indonesia's history. Given the fragmentary studies on the various aspects of the incidents, and the nebulous and controversial aspects of the incidents themselves, only a brief outline of the major contours and commonly agreed aspects of the events will be presented here.

The 1965 killings: a master narrative

An Indonesian quasi-historical novel of 1986 begins as follows:³

Soft Prayer Turned Into Vicious Shriek

The breeze came without prejudice, caressing the trees in the village of Kanigoro, Madiun, East Java. It soothed the tips of leaves, shook twigs, and played around with the paddy field ghosts that occasionally startled the birds. The rest was a rhythm of peace, a rhythm of eternal tranquil nature. There was also the sound of the stream of water from the clear river, hitting stones, leaving strangely formed but pleasing bubbles. The same bubbles, in much greater numbers, were attached upon the vast sky. The sky became the perfect backdrop to nature's harmony.

Towards the bottom of the first page the narrative shifts from the romantic description of nature to a cryptic one of suspicious shadows in the dark. The following page introduces a different locale and specifies a historical date: 13 January 1965.

From some of the trees, birds flew in fright. They flew forward in haste, passing over a mosque from where emanated the azan [call to prayer]. Inside the mosque, there were clean faces that became one with the morning atmosphere. They were reciting the Subuh [morning] prayer.

The expected violence bursts out by the middle of page three.

All of a sudden the peaceful atmosphere in the mosque was torn. Tranquillity disrupted. The soft prayer was taken over by some vicious shriek. Doors were smashed, reflections of weapons flashing. Hoes, spades, crowbars, knives, and machetes, all hacked, stabbed, slashed, struck, and pierced the bodies that sat solemnly. Blood splashed, spurted in all directions. It flooded the prayer mats that were ripped, torn. The Holy Koran was torn apart and stamped on.

The imam [religious leader] who was in charge of the mosque tried to stand up, as if trying to understand what was going on, when a machete swung, and a crowbar pierced his neck and head. The imam fell, his hand reaching out for the Koran, trying to rescue it from humiliation, when the shouting and stabbing became more frantic.

‘Crush. Destroy the world's poison.’

The coarse shriek. The brutal moves. Innocent bodies fell. The youth who was going to celebrate his birthday lay with the rest.

While the gross violence is stressed, it is never made clear why it has to happen. Events take place ‘all of a sudden’. The motive for the murders is only vaguely hinted at. The killers are unnamed farmers, their victims are anonymous land-owners, and land appropriation is at issue. Neither precision nor causality intrudes into the narrative; pathos subsumes both of them. The novel's intended readership is one already familiar with the message, the main events of the narrative, and the mode of narration. The novel ends with these words: ‘This book records a small part of the PKI's ferocity, which has become a black and repulsive page in our history. Therefore, our caution must never diminish.’ The moral of the story comes out strongly, tearing apart any previous indications that separate fiction from history or propaganda.

The novel is entitled Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, or The Treason of G30S/PKI (the 30 September Movement/Indonesian Communist Party). It is derived from a film of the same title, whose authorship ultimately rests with the military leadership that has ruled New Order Indonesia since 1966. The film was produced by the state's film company Perusahaan Produksi Filem Negara (PPFN), “The State Film Production Company”, in 1982–3 and released in 1984. The novel was published by Sinar Harapan, a major private publisher. It was the work of Arswendo Atmowiloto, a prolific young writer of “popular” fiction, who had been commissioned to undertake the adaptation of the film into novel form.⁴ Recent studies on the event at Kanigoro indicated that there was neither any murder, nor Quran being stamped (Adam 2004).

Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI was the first film accessible to the public about an aspect of the most important series of events in contemporary Indonesian history.⁵ It is blatant government propaganda advocating the official version of the violent events leading to the military's ascent to power. The film runs for almost four and a half hours, and deals mainly with six days of events (from 30 September to 5 October 1965);⁶ this time span is officially designated as the abortive coup d'etat by the Indonesian Communist Party and the army's subsequent victorious counter-movement.

When the film was initially released, students in Indonesian schools were required to pay to attend regular screenings at movie theatres during school hours.⁷ Within a few months a major daily newspaper hailed it as Indonesia's most successful film ‘commercially’, with no reference to the conditions under which it had drawn its audience.⁸ From that time onwards the state television network, TVRI, broadcast the film annually on 30 September, and it continued to do so until the last few years of the New Order regime, joined by several private television stations that were required to follow suit. Off-air on that date all buildings were required to fly their flags at half-mast, returning them to full-mast on the next day, to celebrate the triumph of the military and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party.

What really happened on the night of 30 September 1965 remains less than entirely clear to independent observers. Despite the growing number of studies of the events, many of the central questions surrounding them remain contentious. Worse still, there are no promising prospects for any substantial agreemen...