The Legacy of Violence in Indonesia

Abstract

In a journal whose primary focus has consistently been on the hic et nunc, on explaining contemporary sociopolitical realities, it may strike our readers as a bit bizarre to devote so much ink and space to events that transpired some 35 years ago, as we have in this issue. But the inherent importance of the massive cataclysm unleashed in Indonesia between October 1965 and March 1966, resulting in the essential extermination of the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party), hitherto the largest communist party in the free world, was to reverberate in the country’s subsequent history. Beginning in 1975, violence was exerted against the struggle for independence in East Timor, intensifying during the culmination of that struggle in 1999. The Asian financial crisis in 1997–99 hit Indonesia harder than any of its neighbors, precipitating nationwide violence during the 1997 elections, which culminated in the fall of the Suharto regime the following year and in the still-fragile transition of the world’s fourth-largest nation (population ca. 228 million) to democracy. This ambitious special issue is hence concerned with violence in the Indonesian archipelago (the largest in the world, with some 13,000 islands and some 300 distinct ethnolinguistic groups): with the phenomenon itself, its origins, its political memorialization, and its future. As Professors Zinoman and Peluso explain below, most of these papers originated in a conference organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley in February 2001; to these we have added the study “Democratization and Regional Power Sharing in Papua/Irian Jaya: Increased Opportunities and Decreased Motivations for Violence,” by Timo Kivimaki and Ruben Thorning, as it is concerned with much the same problematic and in the same region.