How to uncover bloody secrets: Just ask
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| Victor's version. Monument in South Blitar to the purge of Communists |
Much commentary on the 1965 coup is heavy with adverbs,
qualifying observations and doubts sown into fields of research.
Was the killing of the six generals and a lieutenant on the
night of 30 September a well-planned Communist Party (PKI) take-over which went
wrong? Did the Army have prior
knowledge so it was able to constrain any uprising? How else could it have seized power so rapidly in the confusion
that followed?
A few months earlier President Soekarno had announced a
‘Fifth Force’, a ‘People’s Army’. This
concerned the existing armed forces, which then planned to undermine the new
group; but what really happened has long been contested.
Not now. Australian academic Dr Jess Melvin doesn’t shilly-shally.
The statements in her book The Army and the Indonesian Genocide are
definitive.
Not for her the excuse that the anti-Communist killings,
which swept much of the nation in the months following the coup, were
spontaneous uprisings of villagers, pious Muslims outraged by godless Marxists.
This is the story that the Army and successive governments
have maintained with absolute authority, ensuring every generation accepted the
‘fact’ by pushing propaganda into schools, the media and daily life.
Even now, 53 years later, some streets fly flags at
half-mast on 1 October to keep the myth alive.
Myth? Absolutely,
according to Melvin, who has built her history on the most rock-hard
foundations. She has used the Army’s
own records.
How she got this academic gold is a lesson for all
researchers: In 2010 she walked into a
military archive in Banda Aceh, asked for their records and got them along with
access to a photocopier – something no other fossicker had bothered to do.
Maybe the custodian of the 3,000 papers didn’t know what
they contained, or didn’t wonder why a young foreigner would be interested in
piles of dusty documents. Melvin has now dubbed these The Indonesian
Genocide Files.
Iconoclast Melvin comments that ‘academia … has also shown a
reluctance to characterize the killings as the result of a centralized military
campaign’ and names the gullible. These
include Professors Robert Cribb and Harold Crouch, both of the Australian
National University, though the latter has now retired
In the megawatt glare of Melvin’s findings some scholars
must now be pushing their once authoritative texts into the backs of bookcases
and deleting references from student reading lists.
We don’t know how many real or imagined Communists were
killed in the six months following the coup.
Melvin goes for ‘approximately one million unarmed civilians’ making
this one of the more dreadful mass slaughters in recent history.
In separate research, using recently declassified US
Government files from the period, she’s shown that the Jakarta embassy was well
aware the Army was coordinating the killings, even giving weapons and prisoners
to mobs for murder.
It’s easy to be horrified in 2019 now Communism is a spent
force in much of the world. Even China, where the ideology is welded into the
ironclad administration, it’s capitalism that’s making the nation rich and
powerful.
Back in the Cold War 1960s, the West was terrified of the
Red Threat sweeping through Southeast Asia; fighting in the Vietnam War was at
its most intense. In this high-stress
atmosphere impartial trials and the rule of law were impediments to be kicked
aside.
That may answer some puzzles about the ferocity of the
genocide, but no excuse. However well plastered, history’s horrors tend to leak
through the damp mortar showing the structural rot behind, staining the favored
story.
Indonesian human rights organizations regularly try to have
the killings ventilated by an independent tribunal.
These have suffocated.
It seems important people with questionable pasts can still ensure the
graves and files stay undisturbed. They overlooked Melvin.
Her research shows that within days of the coup
Major-General Soeharto, later to become the nation’s second president, had
started Operasi Penumpasan (Operation Annihilation). This included an elaborate public relations
exercise to mask the military’s role.
This included fermenting toxic titles like G30S and Gestapu
and barbarizing suspects.
It worked, even overseas.
Writes Melvin: ‘If it seems remarkable that the Indonesian State
continues to justify the killings, it should be remembered that Soeharto’s rise
to power … was openly celebrated in the West.
‘… Time magazine explained just after the worst of
the killings had ended (that this) was ‘the West’s best news for years in
Asia’.’
Most academic literature has focused on the butchery in Java
but the killings started in Aceh.
Melvin already knew her way around the province having worked as an
undergraduate volunteer with aid agencies following the 2004 Indian Ocean
tsunami.
Apart from analysing Army records she interviewed more than
70 survivors and relatives of the victims.
Many had never spoken publicly before and still feared retribution.
Writes Melvin of her ‘humbling experience’: ‘It struck me as
unbelievably tragic that even to this day they have not been able to mourn
publicly.’
She also met men from the death squads: ‘They considered
themselves national heroes. Their
greatest regret was that they had not received more recognition for their
actions.’
Melvin controlled her repulsion: ‘They were not monsters.
They spoke to me politely and in some cases even kindly.’ In extreme circumstance people externalize
evil.
Indonesia is not alone in failing to see history through
clear eyes. Australians still wrestle with the reality that their nation was
built on the bones of massacred Aborigines.
The 2008 ‘sorry statement’ by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd came two
centuries after the British took possession of the ‘empty land’.
Indonesian activists hoping for national reconciliation are
unlikely to see this occur with the present crop of politicians; in the
meantime this book will give them the hard facts they need when that moment of
healing comes.
Should the military and the State be held accountable for
the genocide? Melvin’s unsettling research has finally settled the question.
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