INDONESIA’S Open wounds -After half a century, Indonesia opens a debate about its darkest year

INDONESIA’S Open wounds -After half a century, Indonesia opens a debate about its darkest year

IN LITTLE more than a decade, starting in 1965, Asia suffered four man-made catastrophes apart from the Vietnam war; altogether they cost millions of lives. China endured the Cultural Revolution. Bangladesh was born amid horror and mass slaughter. In Cambodia Pol Pot’s Khmers Rouges inflicted genocide on their own countrymen. And in Indonesia hundreds of thousands of suspected communist sympathisers died in 1965-66 as the then General Suharto consolidated what was to become a 32-year dictatorship. None of these disasters has been subject to a thorough public accounting, let alone a truth-and-reconciliation process. Of the four, however, Indonesia’s has been the least examined at home. Unlike the others, it has remained a taboo topic; its survivors still suffer censorship, discrimination and persecution.

So a symposium held this week in Jakarta, the capital, titled “Dissecting the 1965 tragedy”, was remarkable. Human-rights groups, former army officers, government representatives, victims’ families and survivors met in a public forum. Opinions on the worth of the exercise varied. That it happened at all prompted protests from some Islamic groups, seeing, implausibly, the thin end of a communist-revival wedge. Government spokesmen questioned the scale of the killings being discussed. Even some of the activists, who for decades have been urging Indonesia to face up to the carnage, saw the symposium less as historic breakthrough than as history rewritten.

How many died that year is unknown. It started with the murder of six generals in the early hours of October 1st 1965. This was blamed on an alleged coup attempt by the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI. Purging the country of supposed PKI sympathisers meant murdering, by one common guess, 500,000 people. Haris Azhar of Kontras, a charity that campaigns for the rights of the victims, thinks it was between 1m and 2m, with a far larger number affected in other ways: by imprisonment, torture, forced labour, rape or exile. The obscurity is deliberate. Suharto held power until 1998; twice as much time to bury the truth as to unearth it. But the period is still glossed over in school history lessons and books about it are banned.  
Its shadow falls across islands where millions live side-by-side with former tormentors or victims. An estimated 40m are still excluded from government jobs because of their families’ alleged association with the PKI. Some of the bloodiest massacres happened in Java and Bali, but violence scarred most of the archipelago. Indonesia, hiding its past, never learns its lessons. The grim techniques of control that were honed during the terror were later used with disastrous effect against faraway secessionist movements: East Timor (now Timor-Leste), Aceh and Papua.
It counts as progress that the symposium drew together so many people on both sides of the killings—or at least their children. One of the organisers was Agus Widjojo, an intellectual former general and a son of one of the six assassinated in 1965. One delegate was the daughter of D.N. Aidit, leader of the PKI at the time—when only the Soviet Union and China had larger communist parties. Another was Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, one of the daughters of Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding president, who was squeezed out of power by Suharto in 1966.
Yet the former army men and the government seemed to cast doubt on whether there was anything to discuss at all, dismissing the notion that hundreds of thousands had died. A retired general, Sintong Panjaitan, said the figure was closer to 80,000. Another former general, Luhut Panjaitan (no relation), now the government’s security minister, went further: “I don’t believe the number was more than 1,000; probably fewer.”
Some activists claimed that the symposium, a worthy idea of academics and NGOs, had been “hijacked” by the government. Mr Haris of Kontras boycotted it, arguing it was designed to portray the tragedy as the result of a “social conflict” between rival groups—ie, ignoring the “dirty hand” of the government and army. Others, however, such as Andreas Harsono, of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby group, welcomed the symposium as a “tiny” but important first step. Optimists hope it will be followed by other meetings round the country and so, at long last, by a national reckoning. The generals’ estimates of the death toll may be ludicrously understated, but at least they open the way for a discussion about the real numbers.
Many hoped that the administration of Joko Widodo, the president elected in 2014, might be happy to open such a debate. The first president from outside the old elite, with no military links, he seemed to have much to gain. But maybe the Islamic groups, the army and others opposed to open discussion have more political clout, even today, than survivors and victims’ descendants. Mr Luhut ruled out any government apology, and appeared to see calls for openness as a foreign plot, thundering: “I’ll be damned if this country is controlled by other countries.”

The sound of silence

Perhaps he was thinking of the part played in raising awareness of the slaughter by two harrowing, prizewinning documentaries (“The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”) by an American film-maker, Joshua Oppenheimer. But in fact for years the West connived in the silence: America, Britain and other countries were aware of the massacres. In 1966 Australia’s prime minister, Harold Holt, seemed pleased that Indonesia had been straightened out, telling an audience in New York that “with 500,000 to 1m communist sympathisers knocked off...I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.” It is not only inside Indonesia that an examination of the year of living dangerously raises embarrassing questions about the cold war and its effect on basic human values. But it is Indonesia that has to live with the consequences, and Indonesians, above all, who are demanding truth in the hope that one day justice and reconciliation may follow.

By Banyan for The Economist