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Insight: Prevent recurrence of 'an event like this': But which one?
Jakarta Post - October 2, 2015
The inscription commands us not just to remember the killing of six Army generals at Lubang Buaya on Oct. 1, 1965. It commands us to see that particular event as one instance of a general category: "an event like this [peristiwa sematjam ini]".
What kind of general category did the monument creators have in mind? What kind of event was the killing of the six generals? The event should be classified as a case of forced disappearances with extra-judicial killings. Those responsible for the Sept. 30 movement (G30S) arranged for six generals to be forcibly abducted from their homes and executed without judicial process. The perpetrators dumped the bodies down a well and covered it.
The monument, by appealing to a general category of events, seems to be instructing us to stand in opposition to all cases of forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings. But then why have so many politicians, officials and military officers who have attended the annual ceremonies there, been so opposed to investigations or even discussions about the other forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings following the G30S? Why have they been urging us to forget those cases but keep remembering that of Lubang Buaya? Why have they prevented victims' families from exhuming mass graves and providing proper funerary ceremonies? Why have they been opposed to an official apology to the victims?
Perhaps the real message of the monument's inscription is that only Army officers or non-communists should never again be forcibly disappeared and executed. The message seems to be that forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings are not objectionable in principle; it depends on who the victims are. If such an event happened to ordinary citizens accused of being communists, that is perfectly acceptable.
Indonesian society since 1965 has demonstrated a remarkable ability to throw all such events down the memory hole. The massacres of people suspected of being affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) have been forgotten all the while the event of Lubang Buaya has been drilled into everyone's memory through films, museums, street names, monuments, books and other methods of state propaganda.
The Soeharto-era publications barely acknowledged that anyone was killed. The 1994 "white book" described the "crushing of the PKI" without mentioning a single death. The Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (National History of Indonesia), in a 660-page volume, contained only one sentence on the killings: "Only in the regions of East Java and Bali arose the chaos of kidnappings and murders which in a short time were brought under control." That was all – a single, factually incorrect, highly ambiguous sentence.
To say those massacres have been forgotten is perhaps inaccurate: they were never meant to be known about in the first place. They were never supposed to enter collective memory. The newspapers did not report on them. Photographers were not allowed to photograph them. Many knew suspected communists were being killed but rarely had any definite, first-hand knowledge. The massacres tended to be carried out at night in remote locations where there were few witnesses.
The mass killings of 1965-1966 should be more precisely termed mass disappearances. My research indicates that most of those killed were people who had already been detained. They disappeared from their places of detention. Forced disappearance is a cruel type of human rights violation – it leaves relatives forever uncertain about the fate of loved ones and forever anxious for their souls.
How many unmarked mass graves are there? They have never been counted but villagers from Aceh to Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, can point to plots of land where captives, with hands tied behind their backs, were executed and then dumped in a mass grave. How many were executed and then dumped into rivers? In President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's hometown of Surakarta, Central Java, captives were killed on the Bacem bridge and their bodies left to be carried away without a trace by the river below.
If Lubang Buaya is evidence of the PKI's "barbarism", then what are the thousands of unmarked mass graves? Evidence of justice? If so, why should they be secret? Why should Indonesians be asked to forget about them? The perpetrators have been strangely quiet about details of the massacres even while they have boasted about their role in "crushing" the PKI.
If one does not care about disappearances and extra-judicial killings on such a large scale, then it is impossible to claim that those violations are wrong in principle. If Indonesia today does not care enough about those mass disappearances to even issue an apology to the victims, then why should it complain about massacres carried out by Dutch troops during the Revolution, such as the one at Rawagede for which the Dutch government has apologized?
Regardless of what the victims did before October 1965, they did not deserve to be disappeared and executed without trial. If politicians cannot uphold that simple principle then they might as well rip up the Constitution and forget about the idea of Indonesia as a state of law.
[The writer is an associate professor at the History Department, University of British Columbia. He is the author of Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia (2006) and numerous articles on the events of 1965-1966.]
Source: http://m.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/10/02/insight-prevent-recurrence-event-but-which-one.html.
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