By SARA SCHONHARDT
Published: January 18, 2012
JAKARTA — As a solitary voice intoned a traditional Indonesian harvest song, dancers acted out the gathering of rice. Members of the audience joined in — most knew the words — until the song was overtaken by a vigorous hip-hop backbeat.
W. Sutarto/Foto Antara, via Lontar Foundation
Anti-Communist purges, spurred by symbolic acts like the burning of a hammer and sickle, killed at least 500,000 people in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966.
Associated Press
In 1967, President Sukarno, left, was replaced by General Suharto, right, who suppressed examinations of the events of that time.
Women in military uniforms stormed the stage. A man in drag rapped while these “soldiers” assaulted the “farmers.” In the end, bodies of victims lay about. A sober audience broke into applause.
The performance marked the release of “Breaking the Silence,” a collective memoir of 15 men and women who experienced the anti-Communist purges in 1965-66, an event that left at least 500,000 people dead and ushered in the 32-year rule of Suharto and his “New Order.”
It is one of the darkest but seldom-discussed periods in modern Indonesian history. But the new book is only part of an emerging examination of this long-suppressed subject. In November, there was the release of “Sang Penari ,” a feature film that depicts the unfolding of a love story against the backdrop of that tumultuous time. The newsweekly Tempo recently published a special report on an army commander who had led efforts to wipe out the Indonesian Communist Party, or P.K.I.
This week, members of the Indonesian human rights commission, Komnas HAM, met with dozens of victims of the 1965-66 abuses to discuss a continuing investigation of the mass killings. The commission’s vice chairman, Nur Kholis, said Komnas HAM had collected testimonies from 350 victims but was struggling to find stronger evidence, in the form of documents and photographs, before submitting its report to the attorney general.
For decades the events of 1965-66 were shrouded in what Geoffrey Robinson, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, calls “enforced silence.”
They began with a coup attempt against President Sukarno on Sept. 30, 1965, in which members of a group calling itself the Sept. 30 Movement, or G30S, killed six top generals. General Suharto, who helped put down the putsch and took control of the army, blamed the P.K.I. and led a campaign to purge the country of party members and other leftists. In the months that followed, security forces, local militias and vigilantes hunted down and killed thousands of people suspected of being Communists.
After Mr. Suharto became president in 1967, government censors routinely screened books, films and other media for mentions of the killings, said Mr. Robinson, whose book “The Dark Side of Paradise” focused on the post-coup massacres in Bali. Even in the 13 years since a popular uprising helped oust Suharto in 1998, the topic has largely been avoided in schools and public forums.
The official history in government-issued school textbooks describes a coup led by the “G30S/PKI” — linking the Sept. 30 Movement to the P.K.I. The subsequent mass killings are played down and cast as part of a patriotic campaign. The ban on Communist organizations enacted in 1966 remains in effect.
Recently, however, the purges have been the focus of academic seminars, personal memoirs and other forums.
In 2010, the Constitutional Court struck down a law that had been used to ban several books about the coup on the grounds of their “potential to disturb public order.” The attorney general can still ban some works for being provocative or misleading — and textbooks must still link the Sept. 30th Movement with the P.K.I. — but rights advocates and academics say the repeal has expanded the space for public discourse.
Since 2009, Ultimus, a publisher in Central Java Province, has released more than a dozen accounts by survivors.
“These books are something new,” said Baskara Wardaya, co-founder of the Center for History and Political Ethics at Sanata Dharma University, which holds seminars, history-writing workshops and book discussions to address past rights abuses.
Publications like “Breaking the Silence” meet a rising demand by Indonesians eager to learn about their past, Mr. Baskara said. Still, Mr. Robinson said, decades of persecution of anyone associated with the banned P.K.I. have discouraged many survivors from speaking out.
Usman Hamid, an adviser for theInternational Center for Transitional Justice , a legal aid group that has been collecting survivors’ testimonies, said many senior military officers and former members of Islamic groups that are alleged to have taken part in the killings resist efforts to bring this part of Indonesian history into the spotlight.
The same holds true, Mr. Usman said, of some political parties that dominate Parliament, reflecting the influence still wielded by Golkar, which is the party founded by Mr. Suharto and has been part of the governing coalition since he was ousted. But Mr. Usman argued that uncovering the truth was necessary to hold political leaders formerly aligned with Mr. Suharto accountable. Putu Oka Sukanta, the editor of “Breaking the Silence,” said sharing accounts of the violence gave a voice to the victims and gave younger Indonesians access to a history they were not taught in school.
“It’s an expression of fighting to become human again,” said Mr. Putu, 72, who in 1966 was detained for 10 years without trial for belonging to the Institute of People’s Culture, a literary and social movement associated with the P.K.I.
Djoko Sri Moeljono, 73, was also among the hundreds of thousands of artists, academics and trade unionists jailed at that time as “leftists.” After his arrest in 1965, for being a trade union member and graduate of a Sukarno-supported metallurgy program in the Soviet Union, he spent six years in forced labor. He was then exiled to a remote island until 1978.
Now he is among the survivors sharing their memories with young Indonesians in discussion groups organized by universities and nongovernmental organizations.
The Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence, or Kontras , recently produced a graphic detailing the nearly two dozen statutes that still bar former political prisoners from employment in fields like education and the military.
To bring the purges into popular culture, dance troupes and puppet theaters have staged performances. The American filmmaker Robert Lemelson’s 2009 documentary “40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy,” examines the impact of the killings on four families from Central Java and Bali.
In 2006, the independent National Commission on Violence Against Women sponsored a documentary in which high school students videotaped interviews with survivors.
Ratna Hapsari, a high school teacher and head of the Indonesian History Teachers Association, is leading an effort to revise the country’s curriculum. The process has not run smoothly.
In 2004, the Education Ministry removed passages linking the P.K.I. with the Sept. 30 Movement in textbooks. But in 2007, under pressure from the military and some leaders of Islamic-based parties in Parliament, the attorney general ordered the new books withdrawn for disturbing public order. In some places, they were publicly burned.
“The curriculum is very restricted,” said Ms. Ratna, who uses alternative texts in her classes and promotes outside learning through other resources, including the Internet.
Many older Indonesians see younger people’s interest in the purges as a positive sign of efforts to reclaim their country’s history. “We were taught that P.K.I. was really something evil,” said Lely Cabe, 30, a cultural officer at the Goethe Institute , the German cultural center, which hosted the event marking the release of “Breaking the Silence.” “Now the younger generation is asking why.”
Taris Zakira Alam, 17, a great-niece of Itji Tarmizi, a painter who was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and spent much of his life in hiding, said it was important not only to discuss the purges but also to make amends to the victims. “As a young generation, we have to fight for this,” she said.