This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:
“Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.
Finally, the fifth consequence of the crusade: fanatical anticommunism has never really left us, even in the First World. Not only in Brazil and Indonesia in the past few years, it has become clear that this violent, paranoid style in politics remains a very potent force.
But I think it’s clear that the ghosts of this battle most actively haunt the countries of the “developing” world.
12
Where Are They Now? And Where Are We?
Denpasar
Wayan Badra, the Hindu priest, lives on the street where he grew up, in Seminyak, Southwest Bali. But the neighborhood has changed drastically. That same beach that he used to walk on for forty minutes every morning, as he headed to school down in Kuta, is certainly not empty. It’s packed wall to wall with luxury resorts and “beach clubs,” a very common type of business on the island, where foreigners can sip cocktails all day, and take a dip in a pool, right on the sand.
It’s the same sand, of course, where the military brought people from Kerobokan, a few miles east, to kill them at night. Right on the beach, a few feet from Badra’s home, is one of the bigger, more upscale beach clubs in Bali. Seminyak has become one of the more expensive places to stay on the island, where the tourism usually revolves around wellness, and spa treatment, or “mindfulness,” and meditation and massages, or, of course, sun and surfing.
If aliens from another world landed on Bali, they would immediately conclude that our planet has a racial hierarchy. The white people who come here for vacation are orders of magnitude wealthier than the locals, who serve them. It is just accepted as a natural part of life. Almost everywhere in Southeast Asia, white people have the disposable income to buy lavish hospitality, or sex, from the locals. They were born with this wealth. Compared to the rest of Indonesia, Bali has done OK for itself economically as a result of the tourism, and Balinese people often obediently reproduce the “Bali smile” as they get Australian surfers their eggs or Russian Instagram models their coconuts.
Almost none of the tourists who come, no matter how well meaning and well educated, know what happened here, says Ngurah Termana, the nephew of Agung Alit, the man who spent a darkly absurd afternoon sifting through skulls in search of his father’s body. In contrast to Cambodia, where Western backpackers faithfully (or morbidly) visit the Killing Fields Museum outside Phnom Penh, few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs.
“Even when we meet with NGO groups, the most internationally informed type of people, that know about Rwanda, Pol Pot, everything, no one has any idea what happened here,” said Ngurah Termana, who is a founding member of Taman 65, or the 1965 Garden, a collective dedicated to promoting memory and reconciliation on the island. The group put out a book on the killings in Bali as well as a CD of songs that prisoners sang in the concentration camps here.1
The members of Taman 65 know that there’s a reason none of the tourists know about the violence that took the lives of so many of their relatives. The government has buried that history deep, even deeper than it was buried on the island of Java. The tourism boom, which started in the late 1960s, required that. Before Suharto, a huge amount of Bali’s land was communal, and often disputed. “They needed to kill the communists so that foreign investors could bring their capital here,” said Ngurah Termana.
“Now, all visitors here see is our famous smile,” he continued. “They have no idea the darkness and fire that lurks underneath.”
The luxury beach club a few steps away from Wayan Badra’s home has a name that is almost comically on the nose. It’s called Ku De Ta, Bahasa Indonesia for “coup d’état.” I asked the staff there if they knew why that might be ironic. They did not.
Over the years, Wayan Badra and his neighbors have found bones and skulls in the sand around Ku De Ta. As the elder priest for this village, he takes it upon himself to give the bodies a proper Hindu funeral. Recently, one of the villagers made a mistake. He kept a skull for himself in his office, and put it next to some flowers on a table. Playing around, he put a hat on the skull.
“Maybe the person who died didn’t like being treated like this. The skull started to move” on its own, Wayan Badra said. The man got scared, and quickly brought it to Wayan Badra for a respectful, proper burial.2
Stamford
I met Benny Widyono at his home in Connecticut. It took a very long time to find him—at first he was just a rumor: an Indonesian who had lived in Chile under Pinochet. I had to chase leads across a few countries. But he became very real to me, and a valued friend.
After his time trying to help rebuild Cambodia, Benny settled into academic life in the United States, teaching at the University of Connecticut and writing a book about the UN’s successes and many failures in Cambodia.
He was wickedly funny in person. When he recounted his stories about trips to strip clubs, back in Kansas in the 1950s, he’d cover his mouth, pretending to hide the story from his smiling wife. After hours of showing me his photos and his materials on Cambodia, he drove me back to the train station, at the spry age of eighty-two. Just a few weeks later, he finally became a US citizen.
We kept in touch for months after that. I’d call to ask follow-up questions, or he’d send me news and links over WhatsApp. One day, he sent me a note; it looked like a mass message, saying that he was going in for heart surgery. I wished him my best; then I sent him a get-well card from Guatemala; then I called his home later to see how he was doing. I had just missed him. His wife told me he had died a week earlier.
I want to dedicate this book to him, and to Francisca Pattipilohy, and to all the innocent victims of state terror in the twentieth century.
São Paulo
Ing Giok Tan met me near Praça da República, just below my apartment in Brazil’s largest city. The meeting was convenient for her. It was October 2018, and she was marching in a rally there to stop Jair Bolsonaro from being elected.
Fifty-eight years old, wearing red and absolutely radiant, she was in the square with a few friends, waving flags and passing out pamphlets. This was not one of the huge, all-inclusive anti-Bolsonaro marches that all kinds of people went to. This was a group of dedicated activists, the kind who were out there a few times a week.
And they were going to lose. That was becoming increasingly clear. This very moment, as Bolsonaro breezed to the second round of voting without even showing up to debate his opponent from the left-leaning Workers’ Party (PT), was perhaps the lowest point for
the Brazilian left since democracy had returned. But Ing Giok was out there with five or six women, unafraid to defend Lula, the popular former president and the country’s first left-leaning leader since the fall of the dictatorship. She had been a supporter of the PT, his party, since she voted for him in 1989 (in that election, Brazil’s TV Globo manipulated the footage of a key debate between Lula and Fernando Collor, who went on to win and then be impeached for corruption). But she became especially active in 2016, as gathering right-wing forces assembled in the attempt to impeach Dilma Rousseff. She didn’t think that would turn out well. She was right.
If you had to sum up Jair Bolsonaro’s political career in two words, “violent anticommunism” would be a very good choice. He was an unremarkable soldier and an unremarkable politician, popping between nine parties over two decades in the lower house of the legislature. The only noteworthy thing about him was that he would sometimes scream, into empty congressional chambers or on late-night TV, that everyone was a communist, or that the state should have killed more leftists. He once said, “Voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing! Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do. Killing some thirty thousand people, and starting with FHC [referring to then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party]. If some innocents die, that’s just fine.”3
Over the years, his vehement defense of the dictatorship, including its most abhorrent practices, shocked and dismayed even the military high command, who preferred to leave those things in the past, or at least unsaid. Bolsonaro’s ideology can be traced directly back to 1975, and to the days of Operação Jacarta.
Back then, there was a split within the military. General Geisel wanted a gradual democratic opening, and a radical group within the military, whose power derived from terror, opposed this abertura. The leader of this violent, ultra-right faction was Brilhante Ustra, the man Bolsonaro praised during his impeachment vote on the day I met him.
“Bolsonaro represents the faction of the Armed Forces that gained power when torture became an important part of the military regime,” wrote Celso Rocha de Barros in Folha de S. Paulo. In other words, his presidency is the return of the very impulse that led to anticommunist mass murder in the twentieth century.4
Ing Giok is now Brazilian in every way, to the extent that she is now just “Ing,” pronounced “Ing-ee” in the local style (words in Brazilian Portuguese can’t end on a consonant). I also got to meet much of the Indonesian community in Brazil. They are almost all of Chinese descent. Some were conservative; some were center-left. None of them knew that the original anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia were the result of US policy in the region. Some of them had no idea why they really came to Brazil in the first place. Others, like Hediandi Lesmana and Hendra Winardi, came later, after the chaos of 1965–1966, when anti-Chinese sentiments in Jakarta’s student community made life for them very difficult. Hendra went on to start a very successful engineering career in Brazil, literally building some of its most important architectural landmarks. His company helped build five of the World Cup stadiums in preparation for the 2014 event that now feels like it took place in a different, much better world.
Ing Giok and I spoke many times. When I got back to my computer after one of our conversations, I checked Twitter, and something caught my eye. Bolsonaro supporters had already been calling members of the international press “communist” for weeks, because of our critical coverage.
But this time the accusation came with an illustration, clearly old. There was a red, devilish hand holding a long spike, as if to stab the heart of Brazil, and it was being held back by another hand, this one green. It was obvious what it meant—the communists wanted to destroy the country, but the military would save them. But I recognized this one, and checked my history books. It was an illustration created in the 1930s, based on the legend of the communists murdering generals in the middle of the night, the myth surrounding the Intentona Comunista.
Bolsonaro was elected on October 28, 2018. I was in Rio, furiously typing up a story as the final results came in. Below me, on the streets of Leme, a few blocks from Copacabana Beach, I heard screaming, and ran to the window to witness a brief, early explosion of political violence. That day, many of the people in the neighborhood had been wearing stickers supporting Haddad, the left-leaning candidate.
“Comunistas! Comunistas!” a group of bulky men started screaming at them “Fascistas!” a few women screamed back. But they were scared. These guys were a lot bigger than them, and they shuffled off quickly, removing their stickers.
After the results, I spoke to Ivo Herzog, the son of Vladimir Herzog, the journalist killed in the putative Operação Jacarta. “I think we may be taking a huge step backwards. I’m very afraid,” he said. “The political situation puts me under intense stress. I can’t sleep without medication. But I’ve decided now is not the time to back down from the fight.”
Paris
I was sitting and waiting in Djakarta Bali, an Indonesian restaurant a few blocks from the Louvre, when an elderly woman came zooming toward the front door. I couldn’t see her feet, so I was confused how she was going this fast.
But then she hopped off a Razor scooter and walked in. It was Nury Hanafi, the daughter of Sukarno’s ambassador to Cuba. This restaurant is her family’s, opened in Paris after they came here from Cuba. On the walls, there are photos of her father with Che, and with Fidel, back in the days when they thought they were building a tricontinental movement. We had the excellent daging sapi rendang, one of my favorite dishes from Indonesia. She told me the scooter was her “Harley Davidson.”
It might have looked strange, a white American man and an old Asian woman speaking Spanish in Paris.
After years in Bulgaria, she came back here, and was reunited with her family. But even in Paris, they couldn’t escape the stigma of communism. The Indonesian embassy in Paris refused to recognize the restaurant ever existed. She doesn’t know what country she belongs to; she feels she lost Indonesia back in 1965.
“When I talk to younger people from Indonesia now, I realize we don’t have the same history,” she said. “I don’t mean that we have different personal stories. I mean they don’t even know the truth of what our country used to be—our struggle for independence, and the values we held.”
Life for the exiles in Europe and Asia remains hard. But, she admits quickly, things for victims back home have been much worse.
Solo
Magdalena has been beautiful her entire life. All throughout the time she was in prison, guards tried to marry her. She resisted, even though she knew this would improve her situation, maybe even get her out early. She didn’t want a relationship like that.
When she did get out of prison, more men tried to marry her. She resisted. She didn’t feel safe with any man who had not been imprisoned himself.
She knew that she was marked for life as a communist, as a witch. Any regular man was likely to view her as a reject, she worried, and treat her like garbage if and when he felt like it.
“How could I trust a regular man to be my husband?” she asked me. “What if he got angry? He could just beat me, call me a communist, and no one would help me.”
Much worse things happened than this to the families of communists and accused communists. In Indonesia, being communist marks you for life as evil, and in many cases, this is seen as something that passes down to your offspring, as if it were a genetic deformity. Children of accused communists were tortured or killed.5 Some women were prosecuted simply for setting up an orphanage for the children of communist victims.6 One Indonesian businessman close to Washington warned US officials, years after the killings, that a strong military was needed because the offspring of the communists were growing up.7
Magdalena is serene and radiant at seventy-one, but also shy and guarded. She lives alone, in a tiny one-bedroom shack, down an alleyway in the city of Solo,
in Central Java.
She lives on two hundred thousand rupiah a month, or about fourteen US dollars. She gets a tiny bit of help from her local church, which supplies her with a monthly stipend of five kilos of rice. But she has no family, and she has none of the traditional ties to her community that sustain most women her age. Those were cut when she was accused of being a communist. When I first pushed my motorcycle down the little road to her home, and walked into her living room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This is not how elderly Indonesians live. They live in houses with big families—and if they don’t have that, the neighborhood takes care of them. As I walked into her house, no one on her street greeted us. She was not wrong when she figured that she would be marked for life.
This kind of situation is extremely common for survivors of the 1965 violence and repression. There are an estimated tens of millions of victims or relatives of victims still alive in Indonesia, and almost all live in worse situations than they deserve. This ranges from abject poverty and social isolation to simply being denied the admission that a parent or grandparent was killed unjustly—that their family was not guilty of anything at all.
The small organization that advocates for survivors in this region, Sekretariat Bersama ’65, has fought for decades for recognition of the crimes committed against people like Magdalena. The survivors thought there could be some kind of a truth commission or national reconciliation process; they thought there should be reparations paid to the victims; they thought, at least, there should be a public apology for what happened to them, an affirmation that they are not less than human. None of that has taken place.
The Jakarta Method Page 30