The Aftermath

The Aftermath

One could regard the army-orchestrated politicide of the PKI as the re- sult of an amoral contest for state power: if the movement had suc- ceeded and the PKI had won, the army and the non-Communist civil- ians siding with the army would have suffered similarly. Both sides could be viewed as boxers. The language used at the time suggests the analogy: “either hit or be hit” and “final blow.” The PKI’s newspaper de- picted the movement as a fist punching the face of the Council of Gen- erals. Because one does not feel sorry for a knocked-out boxer, one should not, so it would seem, feel sorry for the members of the PKI who were arrested and slaughtered by the army. This perspective has been common within Indonesia among the beneficiaries of the Suharto re- gime. The victims were not really victims at all; they were losers who would have committed similar or even worse violence against their op- ponents if they had had the chance.

Such a perspective misinterprets the anti-Communist politicide. The movement was organized as a putsch against the army high com- mand. If Suharto’s army had replied to the movement in kind, it would have captured the twelve members of the PKI’s Politburo, as well as those soldiers and civilians who participated in the movement. That the army went after every member of the Communist Party and every member of every organization that had an affiliation with the PKI indi- cates that the army’s response was not determined by the requirements of suppressing the movement. Thus we are dealing with a boxer who not only knocks out his opponent in the ring but goes on to attack all of that boxer’s fans in the stadium, then hunts down and attacks his opponent’s fans throughout the country, even those living far away who had not even heard about the match.

For Suharto the identity of the movement’s real organizers was im- material. He and his clique of army officers began the assault on the PKI within four days, even before they had evidence that the PKI had led the movement. That they never found evidence that anyone but Aidit and a handful of his trusted comrades were in some way complicit (as Sudisman and Sjam testified in 1967) was not a problem for Suharto and his officers. The army began fabricating evidence against the PKI

Assembling a New Narrative t 225

in early October 1965. The movement was a convenient pretext for im- plementing a preexisting plan for the army to seize state power. The army generals had already determined that their power grab should tar- get the PKI as the enemy while maintaining the pretense that they were protecting President Sukarno.

The tragedy of modern Indonesian history lies not just in the army- organized mass killings of 1965–66 but also in the rise to power of the killers, of people who viewed massacres and psychological warfare oper- ations as legitimate and normal modes of governance. A regime that le- gitimated itself by pointing to a mass grave at Lubang Buaya and vow- ing “never again” left countless mass graves from one end of the country to the other, from Aceh on the western edge to Papua on the eastern edge. The occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999 left tens, if not hundreds, of thousands dead, many buried in unmarked graves. Each mass grave in the archipelago marks an arbitrary, unavowed, secretive exercise of state power and mocks the Suharto-era social imaginary in which only civilians commit atrocities and only the military holds the country together. The fetishization of a relatively minor event (the movement) and the erasure of a world-historical event (the mass kill- ings of 1965–66) have blocked empathy for the victims, such as the rela- tives of those men and women who disappeared. While a monument stands next to the well in which the movement’s troops dumped the bodies of seven army officers on October 1, 1965, no monument marks any of the mass graves that hold the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the name of suppressing the movement. As for the number of dead, their names, the location of the mass graves, the manner in which they were massacred, and the identity of the perpetrators, little is known in any detail or with any certainty. Beyond Lubang Buaya lie many larger, more complex mysteries.

Appendix 1