UNMARKED GRAVES: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia. By Vannessa Hearman. ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019. xiii, 272 pp. (B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7868-9.
THE END OF SILENCE: Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia, By Soe Tjen Marching with original photography by Angus Nicholls. Asian History, no. 4. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2017. 219 pp. (B&W photos.) US$105.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-6298-390-8.
East Java in the 1960s, with around 23 million people, was an Indonesian province with a population larger than that of most countries. The provincial capital, Surabaya, was an industrial powerhouse and the countryside was full of farms and plantations producing sugar and tobacco for export. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), established in 1920, found fertile ground for growth in such a heavily commercialized society. In the 1955 elections, the PKI finished third in the province, winning 23 percent of the vote, just one percentage less than the second-place party. The party grew by leaps and bounds and occupied positions in the local governments. The mayor of Surabaya was a communist. When the anti-communist army officers and political leaders set about to repress such a large party in 1965–1966, they resorted to mass arrests and massacres. The death toll in East Java—about 150,000, according to Siddharth Chandra’s recent demographic research—was probably the highest of any province. To understand the rise and fall of the communist movement in Indonesia, East Java is one of the most important provinces to study.
Hearman’s book is a pioneering effort to narrate the history of the PKI in East Java. Informed by over 30 life-history oral interviews, the book focuses on the generation attracted to the party in the late 1940s and 1950s. It is a kind of collective biography of a generation of Indonesian nationalists inspired by the struggle for independence from the Netherlands and committed to empowering the poor through literacy campaigns, land reform programs, and union organizing. The book, with a comprehensive grasp of the existing literature, weaves scholarly analysis with personal stories. The second chapter of the book profiles nine former party supporters, describing how they joined the party or one of its affiliated organizations. The party operated legally, participated in elections, and disavowed armed struggle. It became part of the political mainstream, attracting a wide variety of people into mass organizations for women, artists, youth, peasants, workers, and university students, among others. The third chapter describes the murderous repression of 1965–1966 that targeted those organizations and left the survivors mentally and physically scarred for life.
One of the ongoing disputes among historians is over who was responsible for that repression. The longstanding belief held by many writers on Indonesia is that East Java was a clear case of the violence being carried out by anti-communist civilians, with little contribution from army personnel. The religious organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), was the main political party in the province (winning 35 percent of the vote in 1955). Its supporters were certainly active in rounding up and killing PKI supporters. The question has been whether they were largely following the army’s lead or acting on their own.
To answer the question, Hearman argues that one needs to attend to the precise chronology of the violence and the changing roles of the NU and the army over time. Her analysis of the violence in chapter 3, partly based on oral interviews with NU members, shows that there were two stages to the killings. In the first phase, NU mobs, with incitement from the army, moved out on their own and attacked PKI members in public. In the second phase, the prisoners being held in army-controlled prisons and detention camps were taken out at night by the truckload and massacred. The role of the NU members was different in the two stages. In the first, they were largely autonomous as mobs rampaging through villages and urban neighbourhoods. In the second, a smaller number of them acted as executioners under the close command of army officers. The first phase produced much terror and drove many fearful people into prisons and detention camps in search of safety. The second phase was much more lethal, as the prisoners, no longer able to flee or fight, were tied up and hauled out of their places of detention to be massacred.
Researchers in other provinces have found a similar two-stage pattern to the killings. Now that the pattern has been recognized, further research needs to be done on understanding the motivations for the army’s decision to order the killing of prisoners. The repression of the communist movement could have been accomplished by mass arrests, as it was in West Java. Why did the second phase occur at all in East Java? Who in the army issued the order to kill prisoners and how did other officers down the chain of command either comply with or resist such an inhumane order? Such questions are worth asking in the interests of refining our knowledge of the events, though the paucity of evidence suggests that answers may never be found.
A particular strength of Hearman’s book is its attentiveness to the life histories of the victims. She does not present them only as victims. She brings out their agency in making decisions on how to respond to the repression. Chapter 4 focuses on the PKI supporters who fled their homes, went into hiding, and attempted to avoid being captured. Chapter 5 reveals new information about the PKI’s misguided project to launch an armed struggle along the southern coast of East Java in 1967–1968. By describing how the PKI supporters engaged in both flight and fight, she moves beyond much of the existing literature about the 1965–1966 violence. Indeed, she shows that for East Java, our terminology for the periodization of events should be modified; the entire three-year period from late 1965 to late 1968 should be considered a time of violence.
Like Hearman, Marching grew up in East Java. Her book, while having a national scope, contains many stories from the survivors of the violence in that province. One autobiographical chapter describes her knowledge of her father’s pre-1965 political activities in Surabaya and his political imprisonment. Her book, unlike Hearman’s, is a compilation of personal stories, what she calls “accounts.” Each chapter presents one person’s story and that story is told in the first person. There is no scholarly analysis of broader spatial and temporal patterns of the victims’ experiences. The author’s voice is limited to brief introductory and concluding chapters, occasional footnotes explaining the meaning of terms, and a few paragraphs in italics before and after each account (that usually concern how she first met the interviewees and how she has communicated with them after the interview). The book contains no discussion of the method by which these first-person accounts were composed. The reader assumes that she transformed the transcripts of her oral interviews into these first-person accounts; dialogues were converted into monologues. The extent to which these individuals participated in that process is not described.
The value of Marching’s book lies in its highlighting of internal family dynamics. The book is organized in terms of family relations. The first accounts are those of political prisoners (three men and two women). They are followed by accounts of the siblings, children, and grandchildren of the victims of the 1965–1966 political repression. Each person she interviewed spoke about the impact of state violence on families. All the children’s accounts describe broken families. With one or both parents killed, disappeared, or imprisoned, the children were often raised by relatives and friends of the family.
One sibling of a victim profiled in the book is well known: Adi Rukun, the protagonist of the famous documentary film The Look of Silence (2014). His backstory, however, is not well known. His account of his family’s history and the murder in late 1965 of his brother, Ramli, an activist in the plantation workers’ union, has not, to my knowledge, been so clearly presented before. Viewers of the film will find his account helpful for understanding many of the scenes in the film. It also explains the relationship between him and the director of the film, Joshua Oppenheimer.
The silence mentioned in the book’s title does not refer only to state censorship; it also refers to the “internalized fear” (213) within the families of the survivors. Parents and relatives tended in later years not to admit to the children that they had been supporters of the PKI. The lack of open discussions and written records about the human rights violations of 1965–1966 resulted in much confusion “even amongst the survivors and their families” (213). Marching notes that her mother had always told her that her father had not been a PKI member. Only recently did her mother acknowledge that he had actually been a fairly important leader of the party in Surabaya and that he had given her the name Marching in honour of the Chinese Communist Party’s Long March. Many of the stories in her book from the children and grandchildren of the victims are about their difficulties in gaining reliable information about their parents and grandparents. Some of the children, exposed to constant state propaganda about the evilness of the PKI, have struggled to feel proud of their relatives.
Given the immense scale of violence in Indonesia in 1965–1966, one cannot help but feel that these two books are still only scratching the surface. Both books indicate how difficult it is to dig deeper. Very few written documents of that time have come to light and both books have to depend on oral interviews to make sense of the events. The survivors in East Java and many other provinces have not felt free to speak; living in villages and urban neighbourhoods, they have been surrounded by the families of perpetrators who committed the violence. An ex-political prisoner who is an important source for both authors, the former journalist Oei Him Hwie, has been quite vocal; he established a library in Surabaya that is open to the public. But as I know from my discussions with him over the years, he has to be cautious. Like all ex-political prisoners, he lives under the constant watchful eye of the army, which has personnel stationed in command posts throughout the country to police the civil society. One of the functions of what the army calls its Territorial Command is to sustain the old propaganda about the PKI and prevent stories about the 1965–1966 massacres from becoming common knowledge. The authors must be commended for their courage in forging ahead with historical research in such an inhospitable environment.
John Roosa
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver