Interview

“With the recognition of anti-communist purges, Indonesia emerges from collective amnesia”

Indonesian President Joko Widodo delivers a speech at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia January 11, 2023. Widodo admitted that serious human rights abuses have occurred across the nation in the past and pledged to compensate the victims and their families.

AP - Muchlis Jr

Text by: Vincent Souriau

5 mins

For the first time, Indonesia recognizes its responsibility and offers an official apology for the anti-communist purges committed during the Cold War: a death machine implemented by the army and the militias on the orders of the dictator Suharto, who decreed the massacre of more than 500,000 people between 1965 and 1966 and banned the Indonesian Communist Party from public life.

60 years later, at the end of his second and final term, outgoing President Joko Widodo chooses to drive away the ghosts of the past, tackles a taboo deeply rooted in the collective unconscious of the country and expresses the regrets of the Indonesia for human rights violations that occurred until 2003. Decryption with Rémy Madinier, CNRS researcher and historian of contemporary Indonesia.

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RFI: To what extent does Joko Widodo's speech constitute a break with what the official history of Indonesia has to say about these events?

Rémy Madinier 

: This is a major change, because for the first time, the top of the Indonesian state is initiating a process of recognition of these massacres and presenting a public apology.

It must be read in a long-term process, as a reconciliation of Indonesian memory, an exit from the collective amnesia that began at the founding of the New Order [Suharto's authoritarian political system] and which has continued, despite the process of democratic reform initiated at the end of the 1990s. 

You speak, in one of your articles, of “ 

” around these events.

What form did it take?

For nearly 40 years, Indonesians have been told that in 1965 the Communists were responsible for appalling massacres, and that the people who disappeared at that time were victims of the Communists.

It is a psychological, even psychiatric knot, which holds the whole of Indonesian society and which appears from the first weeks following the tragedy.

A fabricated narrative, according to which the Communists are responsible for everything, have already tried to take power in 1948, are traitors to the Nation and represent a permanent danger.

Since 1965, this narrative has been delivered to the people of Indonesia through every means of propaganda imaginable.

And any alternative version has been met, including among educated and well-meaning people, with total disbelief.  

The second element is that the oligarchy managed to stay in power despite the fall of General Suharto and the advent, in 1998, of a largely democratic regime.

The oligarchy retains, in particular through the financing of political parties, a very significant power, and remains very attached to the idea that communism is toxic.

Therefore, any attempt to denounce the glaring inequalities that exist in Indonesia can be assimilated to a desire to return to communist ideology.  

After 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party was banned from public life, even though it had a considerable number of sympathizers at the time.

Can we speak of a reversal of the political field?

It's a total reversal and you can only understand the violence of what happened between 1965 and 1966 by grasping the power of this formation.

The Indonesian Communist Party has a long history, it is one of the very first created outside the Soviet Union.

In 1965, he was at the height of his power, sitting on citizen organizations and trade unions which had tens of millions of members.

It had become, in the regional elections, the first party in Indonesia, a political force which could have taken power as the army did.

We were in the middle of the Cold War and Indonesia was an absolutely major front.

Because 1965 is also the height of the Vietnam War, and if Indonesia had fallen into the communist camp,

it would have been a resounding failure for the United States and the Western bloc.

This partly explains the enormous tensions that governed political life and the violence of the repression, which perhaps would have been just as bloody in the other direction, namely, if the Communist Party had taken power.  

The anti-communist purges launched by Suharto are terrible, they kill more than 500,000 people.

And at the end of this macabre mechanism, the Communist Party is banned.

60 years later, can we address the subject of communism in today's Indonesia?

No, communism remains taboo, and beyond this observation, Indonesian political life is completely amputated from its left flank.

This considerably impoverishes the political debate and can, in my opinion, shed light on President Joko Widodo's decision.

This is not the first report written about these massacres, the National Human Rights Commission and several associations have been working on it for a long time.

But he decided to publicly approve the conclusions of the study he had commissioned, which in my opinion takes the form of an act, even a political will.

Joko Widodo is approaching the end of his second term, he cannot run again and he is making a very important symbolic gesture, especially since he has been criticized lately for having, in a way,

forgot his humble origins and smoothed out his deftly socializing speech.

It is, moreover, not at all impossible that President Widodo's family and relatives were themselves victims of the purge, which would explain their hasty departure in 1965 from the village where they lived and their exile to the suburbs of the city of Surakarta, where he grew up and lived in rather difficult conditions.  

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