Thammasat University students interested in Indonesia, ASEAN studies, history, political science, sociology, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia: Embedded Remembering is an Open Access book available for free download at this link.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Indonesia history.
Its author is Assistant Professor Grace Tjandra Leksana, who teaches history at the Universitas Negeri Malang in East Java, Indonesia.
The publisher’s description of the book follows:
This book examines how community remembers […] the anti-communist violence in 1965 in Indonesia. Through a case study in a rural district in East Java, this research presents complexities of memory culture of violence. These memories are not exclusively determined by the state’s repressive memory project, but are actually embedded in intricate social relations and local context where the violence occurred. What people remember, forget, or silenced is part of the continuous negotiation to claim one’s right, to relate to the state, and to be Indonesian citizen. This book redefines the politics of memory – that it does not necessarily appear in formal arenas, but actually lies in the intricate web of local dynamics, often involving transactional and clientelistic practices.
Large-scale killings and civil unrest primarily targeting members of the Communist Party (PKI) were carried out in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Other affected groups included alleged communist sympathisers, Gerwani women, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese, atheists, so-called “unbelievers”, and alleged leftists in general. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed during the main period of violence from October 1965 to March 1966. The atrocities, sometimes described as a genocide or politicide, were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Research and declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
It began as an anti-communist purge following a controversial attempted coup d’état by the 30 September Movement. According to the most widely published estimates at least 500,000 to 1.2 million people were killed, with some estimates going as high as two to three million. The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the “New Order” and the elimination of PKI as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War. The upheavals led to the fall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto’s three-decade authoritarian presidency.
The killings are skipped over in most Indonesian history textbooks and have received little attention by Indonesians due to their suppression under the Suharto regime, as well as receiving little international attention. The search for satisfactory explanations for the scale and frenzy of the violence has challenged scholars from all ideological perspectives. The possibility of returning to similar upheavals is cited as a factor in the “New Order” administration’s political conservatism and tight control of the political system. Vigilance and stigma against a perceived communist threat remained a hallmark of Suharto’s doctrine, and it is still in force even today.
A CIA report from 1968 stated that the massacres “rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.”
Assistant Professor Leksana writes that
the 1965 violence was not merely the result of a political coup, but it was also a destruction of the persistent class struggle of Indonesian leftists. It was important, then, to erase such memory of a struggle, to treat it as non-existent, and to make sure that no similar struggles would appear in the future (at least not during the days of Suharto). And to make this happen, is to create a collective memory that juxtaposes class struggle with a demonic treachery against the nation. Therefore, it is important to look at the construction of memories of violence not only as an effect of a national political coup, but also as an attempt to marginalize the grassroot struggles during Indonesia’s post independence era. […]
In Indonesia, patronage relations already existed in pre-colonial society, transforming from personal-affective ties between patrons and clients in colonial society into an expanding patronage network covert in bureaucratic institutions in the New Order period – showing the long lasting characteristic of patronage that persists through different courses of Indonesia’s history. Even today, clientelism remains a strong feature in Indonesia’s democracy, leading some scholars to argue that patronage can coexist with democracy and also exacerbate further such democratic shortcomings as economic and cultural inequalities. The term patronage democracies emerged to characterize the situation where achievement in elections is gained through money power to buy voters, or muscle power of allied criminal elements to coerce voters. In the context of agrarian societies, Gillian Hart even predicts that state patronage can become a threat to state intervention in agrarian policies in the long run, because patronage has been used as a means for those who control the state to pursue their own agrarian interests, within and beyond the rural sector. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the success and failure of all political agendas at the local level rely on patronage network. David Hardiman has argued against the framework of factionalism (which represents clientelistic practice) in India by showing that the peasant movement in Kheda district was a class-based collective act. Peasants joined the movement not because their patrons told them to or they would be rewarded by their patrons. The movement was a class solidarity which resulted in an organized movement to resist the power-hungry landlords. Therefore, according to Hardiman, a nationalist movement is best understood as a class based movement, rather than a factional one. The leftist movement of PKI and BTI in the village is a case in point. Their campaigns, although varied in different areas, demonstrate a form of class struggle rather than directives from manipulative elites. BTI’s unilateral actions that took extreme forms of violence and squatting were a class movement against the landlords who were reluctant to comply with the land reform regulations. The leftist organizations were actually the ones who tried to challenge the entrenched patronage practices in Indonesia’s political sphere. They were trying to formulate Indonesia’s citizenship which is based on ideological values of anti-colonialism and self-determination. The violence in 1965 terminated this effort and maintained clientelistic practices in Indonesia’s politics.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)