Mass Violence and Regime Change in Indonesia

Abstract

Not so long ago it was common to hear that the “events of 1965”—to use a convenient but perhaps misleading shorthand—loomed ominously over the study of Indonesian politics. This view contained an obvious kernel of truth. The mass violence that left hundreds of thousands dead and many more lives shattered ushered in three decades of authoritarian rule. The founding myth of General Suharto’s regime was that the military, together with its civilian allies, acted to protect the nation from a communist takeover. Once in power, the Suharto regime employed the bogey of the latent “extreme left” paired with the fainter, parallel specter of the “extreme right” (i.e., political Islam) to legitimize the military’s role in politics and to set the icy parameters of political participation and discourse. At the same time, the suggestion that 1965’s events haunted the study of Indonesian politics was a polite way of indicating the paucity of scholarship on what all observers agreed to be a foundational period and tragic set of events of worldwide, historical significance. Indeed, during the thirty-two years Suharto ruled Indonesia, the events of 1965 received remarkably little attention from foreign scholars and virtually none from Indonesians themselves. Of the many reasons for this scholarly void during the long night of the New Order, three are worth noting. First, the Suharto regime (1966–98) tightly controlled research permits and banned the few foreign scholars who did speak out about the mass killings and detentions as a warning to others. As a result, few scholars who had invested time