Indonesia’s Massacres: 60 Years On
by Mark P. Stadler, MA, MSc, MTh: Southeast Asia Scholar, International Public Policy Professional, Civil Military Relations Expert
1965–68: Unfinished Reconciliation of a Global Tragedy
This year in September marks the 60th anniversary of the anti-communist mass murders in Indonesia. Between 1965 and 1968, up to one million people were murdered, hundreds of thousands were sent to prison camps and into forced labor throughout the archipelago, thousands were exiled or barred from re-entering the country based on being labeled as partisan to or members of leftist organizations or the Communist Party of Indonesia, which was the largest Communist Party outside China and the Soviet Union.
In addition, sexual violence was widely exercised against women associated with leftist organizations or the Communist Party and against Indonesians of Chinese decent.
The mass killings, also referred to as the Indonesian Genocide, were a prerequisite to the integration of Indonesia into the pro-western political economy and international system in the late 1960s, whereas the country initially belonged (and officially still belongs) to the non-alignment movement. Recent further research revealed that the Jakarta-based violence had global echoes in many parts of the so-called Global South during the era of the Cold War – it was a blue print for CIA-backed regime change and anti-communist violence in Chile, Guatemala and Brazil (etc.). US administrations and other western governments encouraged anti-communism and the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party and the overthrow of leftist governments throughout the world.
Government Failure from 1965 till today
The massacres have barely been addressed to this day, neither in the media, the government, literature or education – both nationally and internationally. The national trauma has been successfully silenced by the regime under President Suharto, a military general who forced himself into presidential office for 32 years by overthrowing then President Sukarno who was the first Indonesian President and revolutionary of the independence struggle against the Dutch colonizers. Furthermore, the mass killings have been neglected and sidelined by the governments succeeding Suharto’s step-down in 1998 leading towards reformasi – political reformation and democratization – when Indonesian and international human rights activists were anticipating for a nation-wide reconciliation process.
In 2014, Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, a politician without military background, was elected President of the Republic of Indonesia, and in 2019, re-elected for another five-year term. His political campaign was supported by human rights groups, many of which believed he would be the first head of state not affiliated with Suharto’s military-oligarchic regime to acknowledge the gross human rights violations of 1965-68. The hopes of the human rights defenders were disappointed. After the failure to address the massacres during two and a half decades of political stability, the high-powered structures and forces of the unpunished perpetrators have now outwardly seized power in Jakarta again in 2024 with the election of Prabowo Subianto as President, a former military general with unclear human rights track record in East Timor and family ties with the Suharto family.
State recognition of the suffering is lacking up to today, while repression, fear, and disinformation continue to hamper the culture of remembrance. Sixty years after the massacres, there is no whatsoever official reconciliation process or state apology for the remaining victims of the gross human rights violations. There has been neither a form of compensation or reparation judicially, politically, financially, religiously nor culturally, the latter at times being a very valuable added aspect if we take into consideration reconciliation processes of gross human rights abuses globally.
Crimes against Humanity without Consequences
In November 2015, the International People’s Tribunal (IPT) on Crimes Against Humanity in Indonesia 1965, presided over by independent international judges, was held in The Hague, Netherlands. It was launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the mass killings and formally established by human rights activists, academics, and Indonesian exiles in response to an absence of an official domestic process of transitional justice based on truth finding. The judges concluded that the State of Indonesia was guilty of the crimes against humanity as charged by the team of prosecutors and additionally found that the mass killings fall within the acts under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
However, the IPT had no legal consequences for anyone in political or legal office in the administration and government of the Republic of Indonesia. Today, the continued fact finding remains with a few local human rights activist groups as well as a small number of Indonesian and international researchers and lawmakers who take up the unsafe task to detect mass graves, hold remembrance events, speak truth to power and assist the remaining survivors who are of old age now. The reconciliation process remains unfinished.
So at the end of September, we want to take a stand together against forgetting and for remembrance of the people killed, sent to the prison camps and into forced labor or sexually abused in Indonesia in 1965-68. We plea for open and free education about the anti-Communist purges in the times of the Cold War in Indonesia and globally so that the world can learn about the atrocities committed. We pledge our dedication and contribution to the ongoing fact-finding. We express our unconditional international solidarity with victims of violence, forced disappearances and gross human rights violations in Indonesia and globally. In solidarity, we stand with the politically marginalized and we will continue the struggle for global transitional justice, truth finding and world peace.