Studies
on ’65 still trying to reveal truth
Asvi Warman Adam ; A
visiting research scholar
at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto
University;
The following is a summary of his paper presented at Waseda
University, Tokyo, Jan. 17
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JAKARTA
POST, 27 Januari 2015
This year people will remember that half a century ago, in
1965, the Sept. 30 Movement (Gerakan 30 September or G30S) made a place in
Indonesian history. For 50 years there have been various discourses on the
coup, a failed attempt leading to a national tragedy.
The first wave of narratives about G30S concerns who
masterminded the movement. The Indonesian Army had PKI, the Communist Party
of Indonesia, to blame. Published articles in the US said it was a matter of
the army’s internal affairs.
A book, 40 Hari Kegagalan “G30S”, 1 Oktober-10 November
1965 (40 Days of the failure of “G30S”, Oct. 1-Nov. 10, 1965) was published
on Dec. 27, 1965, by the History Institute, Defense and Security Staff, in a
project initiated by former military commander Gen. Nasution who assigned a
number of historians from the University of Indonesia. It only took a month
to complete. The book did not use the label “G30S/PKI” but mentioned the
involvement of PKI in the coup.
Two US scholars, Ben Anderson and Ruth McVey, who believed
that the Army was involved, offered a different view. The report, later known
as the “Cornell Paper”, alluded to in the Washington Post on March 5, 1966.
Earlier in February 1966, a similar piece by Daniel Lev was published in
Asian Survey.
In 1967, Maj. Gen. Soewarto, the Army Staff and Command
School (Seskoad) chief, went to the US to Rand Corporation, an agency
incorporated after World War II as a watchdog for the US during the Cold War.
It was supposed to conduct research on communism in many countries
Guy Parker of the agency told Soewarto of the Cornell
Paper and suggested writing a book to counter it. Soewarto sent to the US the
historian Nugroho Notosusanto and Lt. Col. Ismail Saleh, a prosecutor for the
extraordinary military tribunal where those convicted of the G30S were tried.
With Parker’s help, Notosusanto and Saleh wrote The Coup Attempt of September
30 Movement in Indonesia.
Included in the file was a post-mortem examination report,
visum et repertum, of the bodies of the six generals murdered in the G30S.
Ben Anderson, after reading the documentation, prepared an article that
stirred a controversy. It was not true, as stated in the army’s newspaper
that the eyes of the generals were gorged out and their genitals cut off.
The second stream of the G30S narrative was part of the
government’s campaign to plant its sole version of history. The six-volume
National History of Indonesia was published in 1975 and the volume 6 edited
by Nugroho Notosusanto legitimized the New Order regime’s rise to power.
Notosusanto also initiated the production of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (G30S/PKI
Treachery), a film by Arifin C. Noer in 1984. It was aired on national
television on the evening of Sept. 30, every year.
The day president Soeharto fell from power in May 1998
marked the third phase of the G30S narrative. Survivors started to speak up.
Among the oral accounts of history, several caught public attention — 1965:
Tahun yang Tidak Pernah Berakhir (1965: The Year that Never Ended), Menembus
Tirai Asap (Coming Out of the Curtain of Smoke) and Menguak Kabut Halim
(Unclouding Halim Mist). The country began to correct its history; I
published a number of writings on this subject.
The G30S narrative hit the fourth wave when John Roosa’s
book, Dalih Pembunuhan Massal (Pretext for Mass Murder), was released in
2008. While previous debates had been on who was behind the 1965 coup d’état,
now the focus shifted to who masterminded the mass killings of 1965. Roosa,
in his book banned by the Attorney General’s Office, argued that G30S
movement was a pretext for the mass killings.
Communism was crushed to get the sympathy of the US and
its allies, and this in turn brought in investments and loans to help
Indonesia get its economy moving. On Dec.15, 1965, without president
Sukarno’s permission, Gen. Soeharto flew by helicopter to Cipanas Palace.
In the meeting chaired by deputy prime minister Chaerul
Saleh, Soeharto talked about the Army’s objection to the move of
nationalizing Caltex.
The film Jagal (The Act of Killing) set up the milepost of
the fifth wave of the G30S narrative. Years ago, survivors spoke about what
happened, and now came the time for murderers to testify.
A winner in different film festivals — Istanbul,
Valenciennes, Warsaw and Barcelona — and best-film nominee at the Oscars, the
movie has been for the last two years the center of attention in almost all
scientific conferences hosted by observers of Indonesia in Australia, Asia,
Europe and the US.
Depicting the killings of individuals in North Sumatra
after the G30S coup, Jagal deconstructed the narrative developed and
intensively campaigned for during the New Order. The scholar Ariel Heryanto
thought the movie “the most spectacular and politically most important
production about Indonesia I have ever watched”.
This new phase of the narrative reveals the significance
of the international community on the G30S massacre.
The post-G30S series of arrests, detentions and killings
had to do with the efforts of putting Indonesia on the list of US allies to
make the country eligible for economic aid from the West. People outside
Indonesia challenged the New Order’s version of the G30S history by
presenting an Oscar-nominee film played today in many countries.
The
international factors causing these events are not eliminated in history.
Indonesian society wants the truth of history revealed even though there are
parties preventing the revelation of different versions than that exposed by
the New Order — among others because of their involvement in human rights
violations of the past. ●
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