Breaking the Silence (2012) is a collective memoir of 15 people who survived the anti-communist purges of 1965–66 when over 500,000 were killed. The acclaimed films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) cover this same era, although censorship has prevented their showing in Indonesia.
Coup & Anti-Communist Purge
Meanwhile back in the heartland, the PKI was encouraging peasants to seize land without waiting for official redistribution, leading to violent clashes in eastern Java and Bali. By 1965 the PKI claimed three million members, controlled the biggest trade union organisation and the biggest peasant grouping, and had penetrated the government apparatus extensively. Sukarno saw it as a potential counterweight to the army, whose increasing power now had him worried, and decided to arm the PKI by creating a new militia. This led to heightened tensions with the regular armed forces, and rumours started to circulate of a planned communist coup.
On 1 October 1965, military rebels shot dead six top generals in and near Jakarta. General Suharto, head of the army’s Strategic Reserve, quickly mobilised forces against the rebels and by the next day it was clear the putsch had failed. Just who was behind it still remains a mystery, but there’s no mystery about its consequences. The armed forces under Suharto, and armed anti-communist civilians, took it as a cue to ruthlessly target both communists and supposed communists. By March 1966, 500,000 or more people were killed, chiefly in Java, Bali and Sumatra. The anti-communist purge provided cover for settling all sorts of old scores.
The film and novel title The Year of Living Dangerously is that of a major 1964 speech by Sukarno, which was drawn from Italian leader Mussolini’s slogan ‘Live Dangerously’, which itself was originally penned by 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche!
WHOSE COUP?
Some things about the 1965 attempted coup have never quite added up. Six of the country’s top generals were killed by a group of officers who included members of Sukarno’s palace guard and who said they were acting to save Sukarno’s leadership – presumably from the threat of a plot. If that was really what they were doing, it was a very botched job.
These rebels appear to have made no effort to organise support elsewhere in the armed forces or the country. Both Sukarno and the communist leader DN Aidit visited the rebels at Halim air base near Jakarta but kept their distance from events – Sukarno leaving for the mountains in a helicopter and Aidit instructing his party to take no action and remain calm. If the officers expected the armed forces simply to fall into line under Sukarno’s leadership, or the communists to rise up and take over, they miscalculated fatally.
The biggest question mark hangs over why they didn’t also eliminate General Suharto, who was at least as senior as several of the generals they did kill. There is even a theory that Suharto himself might have been behind the attempted coup. Given his manipulatory talent and inscrutability, this can’t be ruled out, though no evidence to confirm it has ever come to light.
Sukarno Pushed Aside
Sukarno remained president but Suharto set about manoeuvring himself into supreme power. On 11 March 1966, Suharto's troops surrounded Sukarno's presidential palace, and Sukarno signed the 11 March Order, permitting Suharto to act on his own initiative to restore order. Sukarno loyalists in the forces and cabinet were soon arrested, and a new six-man inner cabinet including Suharto was established. After further anti-Sukarno purges and demonstrations, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) named Suharto acting president in March 1967. A year later, with Sukarno now under house arrest, the MPR appointed Suharto president.
Sukarno died of natural causes in 1970. An inspirational orator and charismatic leader, he is still held in great affection and esteem by many older Indonesians, who often refer to him as Bung Karno – bung meaning 'buddy' or 'brother'. He was a flamboyant, complicated and highly intelligent character with a Javanese father and Balinese mother, and was fluent in several languages. His influences, apart from Islam, included Marxism, Javanese and Balinese mysticism, a mainly Dutch education and the theosophy movement. He had at least eight wives (up to four at once) at a time when polygamy was no longer very common in Indonesia. Throughout his political career he strove to unite Indonesians and, more than anyone else, he was the architect and creator of Indonesia.
Peter Weir’s gripping The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), based on the eponymous novel by Australian Christopher Koch (1978), stars Mel Gibson as a young Australian reporter caught up in Indonesia’s 1965 upheavals. Mel’s best movie?
‘Pak’ Harto
Once the dust had settled on the killing of communists and supposed communists, and a million or so political prisoners had been put behind bars, the 31 years of Suharto’s rule were really one of the duller periods of Indonesian history. Such a tight lid was kept on opposition, protest and freedom of speech that there was almost no public debate. Under the New Order, as Suharto’s regime was known, everybody just had to do what he and his generals told them to, if they weren’t already dead or imprisoned.
Career Soldier
Whereas Sukarno had led with charisma, Suharto's speeches seemed designed to stifle discussion rather than inspire. 'Enigmatic' was one of the kinder epithets used in his obituaries when he died in 2008. The normally restrained Economist magazine called him a 'kleptocrat' and 'a cold-war monster', behind whose 'pudgily smooth, benign-looking face lay ruthless cruelty'. Suharto wielded a supreme talent for manipulating events in his own interests and outwitting opponents of all kinds.
Born in Java in 1921, he was always a soldier, from the day he joined the Dutch colonial army in his late teens. He rose quickly up the ranks of the Indonesian army in the 1950s, and was involved in putting down the South Moluccas and Darul Islam rebellions. He was transferred to a staff college after being implicated in opium and sugar smuggling in 1959, but in 1962 Sukarno appointed him to lead the military campaign against Dutch New Guinea.
UNREST AT THE EXTREMES
Two regions at opposite ends of Indonesia, Sumatra's Aceh and Papua resisted efforts to create a unified state over the last several decades, although Aceh now seems to have found a way to coexist.
ACEH
The conservatively Islamic, resource-rich region of Aceh was only brought under Dutch rule by a 35-year war ending in 1908. After the Dutch departed, Aceh wasn't happy about Indonesian rule either. The Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM), founded in 1976, gathered steam after 1989, waging a guerrilla struggle for Acehnese independence. The 1990s saw Aceh under something close to military rule, with the population suffering from abuses by both sides. Peace talks collapsed in 2003 and Aceh was placed under martial law.
Everything changed with the tsunami on 26 December 2004, which wrought its biggest devastation on Aceh, killing some 170,000 people. The government was forced to allow foreign aid organisations into Aceh and to restart negotiations with GAM. A deal in 2005 formally ended three decades of armed struggle which had cost an estimated 15,000 lives. The peace has held since, even as the regional government becomes ever-more fundamentalist while adhering to sharia law. In 2015 Christian churches were torn down and gay people were told they faced caning if they had sex.
PAPUA
Like Aceh, Papua wasn't brought into the Dutch East Indies until late in the colonial period. Papuan people are culturally distinct from other Indonesians, being of Melanesian heritage and having had very limited contact with the outside world until the 20th century. Today most of them are Christian. Resistance to Indonesian rule has continued ever since Sukarno's takeover in 1963, in the form of sporadic guerrilla attacks by the Free Papua Organisation (OPM; Organisasi Papua Merdeka). The Indonesian army keeps a large number of troops in the province and there are sporadic skirmishes with rebels and regular reports of human rights abuses by international groups such as Human Rights Watch.
Papua is a resource-rich region seen by many Indonesians as ripe for exploitation. About half the population is Indonesian – primarily migr
ants – and this adds to Jakarta's reasons for keeping Papua close. That the economy and administration are dominated by non-Papuans fuels indigenous people's grievances and makes an Aceh-type autonomy solution impossible. Pro-independence sentiment among Papuans is high.
The New Order
The New Order did give Indonesia stability of a sort, and a longish period of pretty steady economic development. Whereas Indonesians had thought of Sukarno as Bung Karno, Suharto was never more than the more formal Pak (father) Harto, but he liked to be thought of as Bapak Pembangunan – the Father of Development. Authoritarianism was considered the necessary price for economic progress.
Suharto and his generals believed Indonesia had to be kept together at all costs, which meant minimising political activity and squashing any potentially divisive movements – be they Islamic radicals, communists or the separatist rebels of Aceh, Papua (former Dutch New Guinea) and East Timor.
Suharto Inc
Near absolute power allowed the forces and Suharto's family and business associates to get away with almost anything. The army was not just a security force, it ran hundreds of businesses, legal and illegal, supposedly to supplement its inadequate funding from government. Corruption went hand-in-hand with secrecy and most notorious was the Suharto family itself. Suharto's wife Ibu Tien (nicknamed Madam Tien Per Cent) controlled the state monopoly on the import and milling of wheat; his daughter Tutut won the 1987 contract to build the Jakarta toll road; his son Tommy gained a monopoly on the cloves used in Indonesia's ultra-popular kretek cigarettes in 1989.
In 1995 Indonesia was ranked the most corrupt of all the 41 countries assessed in the first-ever Corruption Index published by Transparency International (TI). In 2004 TI placed Suharto at the top of its all-time world corruption table, with an alleged embezzlement figure of between US$15 billion and US$35 billion from his 32 years in power.
Extending Indonesia
Suharto's regime saw to it that the former Dutch New Guinea stayed in Indonesia by staging a travesty of a confirmatory vote in 1969. Just over 1000 selected Papuan 'representatives' were pressured into voting unanimously for continued integration with Indonesia, in what was named the Act of Free Choice.
In 1975 the left-wing party Fretilin won a power struggle within the newly independent former Portuguese colony East Timor. The western part of Timor island, a former Dutch possession, was Indonesian. Horrified at the prospect of a left-wing government in a neighbouring state, Indonesia invaded and annexed East Timor. Fretilin kept up a guerrilla struggle and at least 125,000 Timorese died in fighting, famines and repression over the next 2½ decades.
The End of the New Order
The end of the New Order was finally precipitated by the Asian currency crisis of 1997, which savaged Indonesia's economy. Millions lost their jobs and rising prices sparked riots. Suharto faced unprecedented widespread calls for his resignation. Antigovernment rallies spread from universities to city streets, and when four students at Jakarta's Trisakti University were shot dead by troops in May 1998, the city erupted in rioting and looting, killing an estimated 1200. Even Suharto's own ministers called for his resignation, and he finally resigned shortly thereafter.
The Road to Democracy
Suharto's fall ushered in a period known as reformasi (reform), three tumultuous years in which elective democracy, free expression and human rights all advanced, and attempts were made to deal with the grievances of East Timor, Aceh and Papua. It was an era with many positives and some disasters and was ultimately a time when Indonesia's democracy emerged.
Of 18 people tried by an Indonesian human-rights court for abuses in East Timor in 1999, only militia leader Eurico Guterres was convicted. His conviction for a massacre of 12 people was quashed by the Indonesian Supreme Court in 2008.
The Habibie Presidency
Suharto's vice-president BJ Habibie stepped up as president when Suharto resigned. Habibie released political prisoners, relaxed censorship and promised elections, but he still tried to ban demonstrations and reaffirmed the political role of the unpopular army. Tensions between Christians and Muslims in some parts of Indonesia also erupted into violence – especially Maluku, where thousands died in incidents between early 1999 and 2002.
EAST TIMOR TROUBLES
Indonesia, under President Habibie, agreed to a UN-organised independence referendum in East Timor, where human rights abuses, reported by Amnesty International among others, had blackened Indonesia's name internationally. In the 1999 vote, 78% of East Timorese chose independence. But the event was accompanied by a terror campaign by pro-Indonesia militia groups and Indonesian security forces, which according to Amnesty International killed an estimated 1300 people, and left much of East Timor's infrastructure ruined. The region finally gained full independence in 2002, and is now officially known as the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.
The Wahid & Megawati Presidencies
Indonesia's first free parliamentary elections for 44 years took place in 1999. No party received a clear mandate, but the MPR elected Muslim preacher Abdurrahman Wahid president as leader of a coalition. The eccentric Wahid, from the country's largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (Rise of the Scholars), was blind, had suffered two strokes and disliked formal dress and hierarchies. He embarked on an ambitious program to rein in the military, reform the legal and financial systems, promote religious tolerance, tackle corruption, and resolve the problems of Aceh and Papua. Unsurprisingly, all this upset everybody who was anybody, and in July 2001 the MPR dismissed Wahid over alleged incompetence and corruption.
Vice President Megawati of the Indonesian Democratic Party – Struggle (PDI-P) took over as president in Wahid's place. Supported by many conservative, old-guard elements, Megawati – daughter of the legendary Sukarno – had none of her father's flair or vision and did little for reform in her three years in office.
The word sembako refers to Indonesia’s nine essential culinary ingredients: rice, sugar, eggs, meat, flour, corn, fuel, cooking oil and salt. When any of these become unavailable or more costly, repercussions can be felt right through to the presidency.
The SBY Era
The year 2004 saw Indonesia's first-ever direct popular vote for president. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), leading the new Democratic Party (formed as his personal political vehicle), won in a run-off vote against Megawati. A popular and pragmatic politician, SBY quickly won favour by making sure foreign aid could get to tsunami-devastated Aceh and sealing a peace deal with Aceh's GAM rebels.
SBY's unspectacular but stable presidency saw the military forced to divest most of their business enterprises and edged away from politics (they lost their reserved seats in parliament in 2004). There was also progress against corruption. A former head of Indonesia's central bank, an MP, a governor of Aceh province and a mayor of Medan were all among those jailed thanks to the Corruption Eradication Commission, established in 2002, although no really big names were ensnared.
Fears of an upsurge in Islamic radicalism, especially after the Bali and Jakarta terrorist bombings of 2002 to 2005, proved largely unfounded. The great majority of Indonesian Muslims are moderate and while Islamic parties receive a sizeable share of the vote in elections, they can only do so by remaining in the political mainstream.
Indonesians clearly appreciated the stability and non-confrontational style of SBY's presidency, and his successful handling of the economy, for they re-elected him in 2009 with over 60% of the vote. Interestingly neither religion nor ethnicity played a major part in determining how people voted, suggesting that many Indonesians valued democracy, peace and economic progress above sectarian or regional issues. Predictions that hardline Islamist parties would make huge gains proved false when they received only 8% of the vote.
Meanwhile, Indonesia's disasters – natural and otherwise – continued. In 2009, an earthquake killed over 1100 around Padang in West Sumatra. In 2010, an earthquake off the nearby coast killed 435 and spawned a tsunami that hit the Ment
awi islands. Over the same two-year period, there were eight fatal plane crashes (over 230 dead) and two ferry sinkings (over 275 dead). An SBY-ordered review of transport safety begun in 2007 made little difference.
Beginning in 2000, there were several terrorist attacks in Indonesia (including the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) blamed on Jemaah Islamiah, an Islamic terrorist group. Dozens were arrested and many were sentenced to jail, including three who were executed. Abu Bakar Bashir, a radical cleric who many thought was behind the explosions, eventually received a 15-year jail sentence in 2011.
Joko Ascends
Given that destructive colonialism, revolution, mass slaughter, ethnic warfare, dictatorship and more have been part of daily life in Indonesia in just the past 100 years, it's remarkable that recent elections have been so peaceful. The 2009 national elections were a watershed. More than a dozen parties waged high-energy campaigns. Rallies throughout the myriad islands were passionate and vibrant. Yet what happened in the end? The incumbent, SBY and his Democratic Party, won; Indonesians chose to go with the status quo.
Not bad given that it wasn’t that long ago, at the Millennium, when there was blood in the streets from Lombok to the Malukus as religious and political factions settled scores and simply ran amok. Regional elections across the archipelago have also gone off without a hitch several times in recent years. All this set the stage in 2014 for Indonesia's most dramatic presidential election to date.
Lonely Planet Indonesia Page 140
