Indonesian Massacres Research Articles

The act of remembering. The Indonesian Massacres, memory and counter-histories

The act of remembering. The Indonesian Massacres, memory and counter-histories

Indonesia 1965, Half a Century Later

In The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, Geoffrey B. Robinson offers the most comprehensive history of Indonesia's mass killings to date, arguing that the army, foreign governments, and monopoly capital must all be jettisoned from the country's ruling coalition for meaningful justice to be achieved.

Book Review: Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966

Book Review: Geoffrey B. Robinson, <i>The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966</i>

Trace and Memory of Trauma: From Bodily Memory to Symbolic Memory

ObjectiveThis article presents a reflection at the convergence of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art on the relationships between the construction of memory and different forms of traces of traumatic events. The interactions of psychic and physical, material and symbolic traces of trauma are analyzed to understand their vicissitudes and possible elaborations at the intersection of the individual and the collective. MethodStarting from an analysis of the psychic processes mobilized by trauma, the conditions of the possibility and the stakes of the work of memory for subjective and social life are examined. The concepts of trace, memory, forgetting, repetition, and remembrance are articulated, through a study of a documentary film by J. Oppenheimer on the Indonesian massacres of 1965 and of texts by J. Améry and I. Kertész that refer to the Shoah. ResultsThe traumatized subject suffers in her/his body from the incessant return of physical and psychic, fragmentary and haunting traces, which cannot be considered a veritable remembrance. Memory is a diachronic process that selects, arranges, and transforms traces into a subjectivated remembrance on which the subject can rely to survive trauma. The work of memory as it operates in writing is a particular form of elaboration of the trace: it enacts the possibility of the passage from a somatic inscription of the traumatic event, which destabilizes the psyche, in the flesh of the body to a symbolic and exosomatic inscription of it. This writing allows for a rewriting of an experience at the limits of the humanly possible, of that which, having marked the body, imposes the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of telling and representing that lived experience as history. DiscussionThe elaboration of memory cannot be considered a strictly individual process. In this ordeal of the elaboration of remembrance, the subject of the trauma cannot be left behind by the other. The work of memory thus always implies a discursive construction of remembrance that calls for examination. In this sense, the archaeologist, the historian, and the therapist can provide the conditions to make this construction possible, or to question it. Nevertheless, most of the memory work consists, from the point of view of the therapist, in the successive positions adopted by the subject at each new remembering. ConclusionIn writing, the work of remembrance engages the subject, in her/his body of drives, in a construction of the trace through which s/he can preserve her/his integrity in the face of the catastrophe. In this way s/he can remember not to “forget,” but to relieve her/himself of having to bear the traces of the traumatic unrepresentable alone.

Debate on The Killing Season: A history of the Indonesian massacres, 1965–1966 by Geoffrey B. Robinson, with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Vannessa Hearman, Gerry van Klinken and Geoffrey Robinson

Debate on The Killing Season: A history of the Indonesian massacres, 1965–1966 by Geoffrey B. Robinson, with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Vannessa Hearman, Gerry van Klinken and Geoffrey Robinson

Trace et mémoire du trauma : de la mémoire du corps à la mémoire symbolique

ObjectiveThis article presents a reflection, at the meeting point between psychoanalysis, philosophy and art, on the relationships that the construction of memory entertains with different forms of the trace of a traumatic event. The interactions of psychic and physical, material and symbolic traces of the trauma are analyzed to understand their vicissitudes and possible elaborations, at the articulation between the individual and the collective. MethodStarting from an analysis of the psychic processes mobilized by the trauma, the enabling conditions and the issues at stake in the work of memory for the person's subjective and social life are examined. The concepts of trace, memory, oblivion, repetition and remembrance are explored in the light of a documentary film by J. Oppenheimer on the Indonesian massacres of 1965 and texts by J. Améry and I. Kertész referring to the Shoah. ResultsThe traumatized subject suffers in his body from the incessant return of physical and psychic, fragmentary and haunting traces, which often do not deploy as a remembrance as such. Memory is a diachronic process that selects, arranges and transforms traces into a subjectivated remembrance on which the subject can rely to survive trauma. Writing is a particular form of elaboration of the trace: it stages the possibility of the shift from a somatic inscription, “in the flesh”, of the traumatic event that undermines the psyche, to a symbolic and exosomatic inscription. Writing enables a rewriting of experiences on the very limits of possible experience, and of what, having marked the body, nevertheless leads to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of telling and representing that experience as history. DiscussionThe elaboration of memory cannot be considered as a strictly individual process. In the ordeal of the elaboration of remembrance, the subject of the trauma cannot be left aside by the other. The work of memory thus always implies a discursive construction of remembrance that calls for examination. In this sense, the archaeologist, the historian and the therapist in some instances provide the conditions that enable this construction, and in other instances question it. Nevertheless, most of the work of memory consists, from the point of view of the therapist, in the successive positions that the subject adopts towards remembrance at each recall. ConclusionBy way of writing, the work of remembrance engages the subject, through his bodily drives, in a construction of the trace that can enable him to preserve his integrity in the face of the disaster. In this way he can remember, not so as to “forget”, but to relieve himself of having to bear alone within him the traces of the traumatic unrepresentable.

Epistemic Ignorance and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Righting the Wrongs of the Past and the Role of Faith Community

ABSTRACTThis study demonstrates how ignorance works in the Indonesian massacres of 1965–1966. This atrocity, which claimed roughly five hundred thousand lives, is one of the most forgotten human tragedies of the twentieth century. For many years, the massacres were hidden from public view. Ignorance was reinforced by the New Order under the presidency of Suharto. Drawing on contemporary political philosophers’ studies on the epistemology of ignorance, I contend that ignorance, like knowledge, has structures, criteria, and practices. Ignorance, thus, is not merely a “lack of knowledge” or a state of not knowing, but epistemic and political. By appropriating the epistemology of ignorance, I seek to show how the Indonesian people remember the historical wrongs and how Christian theology provides resources for right remembrance. To confront the epistemic ignorance of the Indonesian mass killings, I argue that the churches must assert their identity as the community of memory and lament.

The Killing Season: A History of The Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, by Geoffrey B. Robinson

The Killing Season: A History of The Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, by Geoffrey B. Robinson

1965 Today: Living with the Indonesian Massacres

The year 1965 marked a dramatic turning point in Indonesian history. On 1 October, a shadowy group of left-wing military officers calling itself the 30 September Movement kidnapped and killed sever...

Reflections on the Indonesian Massacres in Cold War Historiography and Political Economy

In a previous article for Genocide Studies International (8.2), entitled “Polluting the Waters,” an examination of the anti-communist propaganda campaigns and their relationship to the Indonesian massacres was offered. This follow up article presents provocative reflections on the manner in which the massacres have been treated within the anti-communist Cold War canon. The treatment of the massacres is an example of how ideological factors have not only shaped perceptions of this event, it has also falsified and diminished important elements of this history. The result has been to effectively excuse the perpetrators of the Indonesian massacres on ideological grounds leaving the victims to be forgotten.

Polluting the Waters: A Brief History of Anti-Communist Propaganda during the Indonesian Massacres

In response to an alleged Communist coup in Indonesia on 1 October 1965, ambassadors Sir Keith Shann (Australia), Sir Andrew Gilchrist (United Kingdom), and Marshall Green (United States) initiated anti-Communist propaganda campaigns. In conjunction with the Indonesian army, these campaigns helped to underpin the rationale for widespread, army-coordinated anti-Communist repression throughout Indonesia. Through a careful re-examination of Australian archival materials regarding Indonesia between October 1965 and February 1966, this article provides a detailed, transnational chronology of propaganda efforts during the period of the massacres, highlighting the direct and indirect connections between them and the killings.

Voices from S-21: terror and history in Pol Pot's secret prison

The horrific torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge during the 1970s is one of the century's major human disasters. David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, examines the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by focusing on one of its key institutions, the secret prison outside Phnom Penh known by the code name 'S-21'. The facility was an interrogation center where more than 14,000 'enemies' were questioned, tortured, and made to confess to counterrevolutionary crimes. Fewer than a dozen prisoners left alive. During the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) era, the existence of was known only to those inside it and a few high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials. When invading Vietnamese troops discovered the prison in 1979, murdered bodies lay strewn about and instruments of torture were still in place. An extensive archive containing photographs of victims, cadre notebooks, and DK publications was also found. Chandler utilizes evidence from the archive as well as materials that have surfaced elsewhere in Phnom Penh. He also interviews survivors of and former workers from the prison. Documenting the violence and terror that took place within is only part of Chandler's story. Equally important is his attempt to understand what happened there in terms that might be useful to survivors, historians, and the rest of us. Chandler discusses the 'culture of obedience' and its attendant dehumanization, citing parallels between the Khmer Rouge executions and the Moscow Show Trails of the 1930s, Nazi genocide, Indonesian massacres in 1965-66, the Argentine military's use of torture in the 1970s, and the recent mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda. In each of these instances, Chandler shows how turning victims into 'others' in a manner that was systematically devaluing and racialist made it easier to mistreat and kill them. More than a chronicle of Khmer Rouge barbarism, Voices from S-21 is also a judicious examination of the psychological dimensions of state-sponsored terrorism that conditions human beings to commit acts of unspeakable brutality.

Coming to Jakarta: Poetry, Information, and Disaster

Academics have very little leisure time. The only games we play are Clifford Geertz calls deep games, in problematic essay on Bali cited so frequently in this poem. In order then to make time for things like genocide and New World Order in his busy life, and in ours, Berkeley medievalist Peter Dale Scott has invented a poetic board game called Coming to Although it comes without instructions, most people get hang of it pretty quickly: five-page bibliography in back of book and marginal glosses and citations throughout are heavy clues, at least to academic readers and knowledge buffs, that game is in fact about following clues - it's a research game, an intelligence-gathering game. Our kind of game. Two of three writer-academics who wrote on poem for 1990 issue of Agni Review (31/32), as well as man who interviewed Scott for that issue, took same tack, discussing results of research they found themselves conducting into American involvement in Indonesian affairs as they read poem. Robert Hass's review ends in fact with an update of government's account of Indonesian massacres - this just in from San Francisco Examiner. I'd like to account here, at least in part, for exhilarated awe with which these readers and others like them participate in intelligence game of Scott's poetry. Ross Labrie, reviewer for Canadian Literature (no. 122/23, 1989), writes from off in left field that what one with fondness from Scott's poem are boyhood scenes in Westmount and Memphremagog area... (146). That attitude towards poetry, or kind of reading it attests to - aesthetic pursuit of private nostalgia - is not in play here: as Scott proposes in canto 2, Let us examine carefully // good reasons / you and I / don't enjoy reading this. Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror is an epic, and one that explicitly claims its place in a continuum poet both acknowledges and accuses: Virgil is invoked by name in first tercet (the stanza form poem shares with The Divine Comedy), and whole narrative is framed as a descent into Hell, begun as a near-drowning in a childhood lake, Avernus Canadian Literature's reviewer fondly remembers as the Memphremagog area. It is divided into five cantos, each further divided into several two- or three-page sections, and it oscillates by something like free association between hard-factual narrative of covert American involvement in post-colonial political unrest, particularly in Indonesia in 1960s, and an autobiographical account of author's own involvement, one way or another, in that defining American crime. (Before he threw his lot in with poets and professors Scott had been a Canadian diplomat, a Ph.D. in political science educated at places like Oxford and Paris, a family friend of people like the Dulles clan who also summered in Lake Memphremagog area.) After first short canto margins are littered, like those of Coleridge's Rime of Ancient Mariner, with reference notes - much of poem's language is a tissue of fragmented quotation and paraphrase. A bibliography of 108 items gives full data on these sources in back. This list is not latest event in trend set by Eliot's Waste Land - these are not additional remarks from a poet bent on teaching us how to read his poem, but a set of sources from which we can learn more about concrete historical circumstances which occasioned poem. The emphasis is not on Scott's meanings, but on meanings of Jakarta. As a result, poem is in a way subsumed by its bibliography, becoming itself another source of information on American involvement in 1965 massacres that attended overthrow of Sukarno. In an essay about poem's occasion, Scott writes, the poem arose initially out of impossibility of reaching any U.S. audience on this unspeakable subject in prose. …