Back in 2017, when I first arranged to meet survivors, Baskara Wardaya, a Jesuit Catholic priest and historian who specializes in 1965, warned me, “Many survivors are tired of talking, tired of fighting. It’s been so long, and they’ve gotten absolutely nowhere.”
The mayor of Solo in 1965 was a member of the Communist Party named Utomo Ramelan. Over the years, as I visited Solo and met survivors, I met quite a few people who had worked in his administration, young Indonesians just excited to get an official job at City Hall. After Suharto took over the country, he was arrested and sentenced to death.
In 2005, a former businessman in the furniture industry, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, was elected mayor of Solo. In 2014, he was elected president. His candidacy was supported by a range of human rights groups, many of which thought that as the first leader of Indonesia who did not come from Suharto’s military-oligarchical nexus, he would recognize and apologize for the crimes of 1965, or start some inquiry on the fiftieth anniversary of the killings.
They were wrong. Not long after starting, he smiled and told reporters he had “no thoughts about apologizing.”8 In 2017, the year my roommate was terrorized in Jakarta for attending a conference on 1965, Jokowi, who had been accused of being a communist himself, took a stronger position. “If the PKI comes back, just beat them up,” he said.9 In 2019, Jokowi was re-elected for another five-year term.
I had a very hard time in Solo. These interviews are very hard to do, and I had to go slow, so the weeks were long and languorous. At first I thought I could speak to Indonesians with the help of an interpreter, but it quickly became clear that many people are still far too traumatized, and too afraid of the stigma still attached to them in their old age, to speak freely in front of an Indonesian they don’t know or trust. Even for those who would speak to me through an interpreter, the questioning was far too delicate to pass the responsibility for wording on to someone else. So I improved my skills in that language enough to do one-on-one interviews, and slowly earn their trust. I talked to many, many people whose stories I could not include; some, it became clear, did not really feel comfortable telling their full stories, and many others did bravely, helping to shape my understanding of the events as I selected the few stories I could pick for a book like this. I feel guilty even admitting the process was very psychologically difficult for me, since my tiny ordeal pales in comparison to theirs—and because I could go back and live a comfortable life in the United States whenever I wanted.
In Solo, I had to spend a lot of time in the town’s new megamall, where all the important businesses are. In some ways the megamall now functions as the cultural center of Indonesian cities, with children’s concerts in the lobby. People can wander aimlessly, buying iced coffee and doughnuts. Often, the escalators leave you quite literally trapped on its upper floors, so you wander more and buy something else. And like every other mall in Indonesia, the music on the speakers is American-produced pop almost all the time. You do not hear Indonesian music. You do not hear Japanese music, even K-pop, or anything from Asia. No European or Latin American music. It will all have been packaged and sold in the USA.10
Sakono also lives near Solo. He’s still very feisty, and still applying sharp political analysis to the world around him. Unlike Magdalena, he can talk about the old days without going quiet, without staring off into the distance, or breaking into tears. Like Magdalena, he converted to Christianity in prison. This is also very common among survivors, especially among 1965 victims who were raised to observe the Javanese form of Islam. After being accused of atheism, communists were rejected by the large Muslim institutions in Java, which often collaborated in the killings, but they still believed in God and sought spiritual comfort from the material horrors of their lives.
The only thing Sakono likes to talk about more than Marxism is grace and forgiveness. He is adamant that he holds nothing against his captors or the men who killed his friends. He wants no vengeance and is at peace with his past. But he’s equally adamant that the country is not at peace with this history.
“The solution is for this nation to recognize its sins and to repent. I value even the most difficult experiences I went through, because they taught me to show love to everyone,” he said. “If we can recognize what our nation has done, and ask for forgiveness, we can move forward.”
New York City
Thirty Rockefeller Plaza is a big building in Midtown Manhattan. I had never been there before, though I had heard of it—I think I caught a couple episodes of 30 Rock, with Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan, whose title made the address even more famous.
It’s clearly a place tourists visit. On the ground floor, the walls display pictures of Seinfeld and Friends and all the other shows that NBC has produced. On the twenty-third floor is Squire Patton Boggs, a “white-shoe” law firm.
Frank Wisner Jr. has an office there. He served in the State Department for decades, including as Reagan’s ambassador to Egypt and the Philippines, and as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to India. But I mostly asked him about his father, things he remembered him saying about Indonesia or the fight against communism. It would be unfair to make him answer for the deeds of his father, but there was one thing he could tell me, one myth he wanted to dispel.
He told me that whether or not the CIA overestimated the strength of the Soviet Union, and despite what the outcome might have been, his father truly thought that he was fighting communism. He didn’t think he was doing it to help his business buddies back in New York; he thought it was about the cause. For what it is worth, I believe that he believed that.
After going very carefully over the 1950s and 1960s, we talked about life in Indonesia now. Packing my bag, I remarked that for many countries, that history is hugely important to this day. While Americans may have forgotten about these events and those countries, the residents don’t have the option to forget. Wisner agreed with me quickly and enthusiastically.
That’s true, he said, as I stood up to leave. In many ways, we are “the land of the great amnesiac,” he said.
“We have a psychological habit of looking ahead and not behind,” he said. Musing freely, as friendly men in their eighties often do, he said the US government would not have gotten itself into its current situation in the Middle East if we had paid attention to history. Speaking with dark sarcasm, he finished: “There’s a long and honorable record of American indifference to the world around us.”
Santiago
Carmen Hertz is a busy woman. She’s a congresswoman now, elected in 2017. She’s still in the Communist Party, which has eight members in the Cámara de Diputados, led by a young former student leader, Camila Vallejo.
When I tell Indonesian victims of 1965–66 that it’s sort of OK to be a communist now in parts of Latin America, or even that former guerrillas, once imprisoned, became presidents, they can’t believe it. But reconciliation did happen, of some kind, in much of South America.
Chile as a center-right capitalist country is far from perfect. It’s certainly not what Carmen thought the world would be like back in 1970, when she and her friends believed they were on their way to building a world without poverty or exploitation.
Santiago has a powerful monument to the victims of the Pinochet regime, called the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. As you walk in, there’s a single candle lit for every single person killed by the dictatorship. The guides on the walls do not shy from the fact that many of the victims were indeed leftists, even communists or supporters of Marxist armed struggle. One wall has a small display of every single truth and reconciliation process that has ever taken place: in South Africa, in Argentina, in more than thirty countries. There’s the beginning of a small plaque for Indonesia. Then it ends abruptly: “Indonesia abolished the law that would establish their truth commission.”
Jakarta
In the center of Indonesia’s capital, there is a structure called the Monumen Pancasila Sakti, or Sacred Pancasila Monument. My ride there, just like any ride be
tween two points in Jakarta, was through gridlock traffic, slowly making my way through crowded, polluted streets.
For reasons that are hard to describe, in many parts of Indonesia, if you’re a white foreigner, people will ask you for a selfie. It is deeply strange, disturbing even, but I usually comply. I do not at the Sacred Pancasila Monument—because I think I have technically snuck onto the grounds. Recently, Indonesia’s military has banned foreigners from entering this complex of memorials and museums—it appears authorities don’t want international researchers to examine the site.11 After visiting, I understand why.
The Sacred Pancasila Monument is a large white marble wall with life-size figures representing the victims of the September 30th Movement standing in front of it. It’s just a few steps from Lubang Buaya, the well where the generals’ bodies were found.
But as for everyone else who was killed, there’s no memorial. There is an entire museum—the Museum Pengkhianatan PKI (Komunis), or the Museum of Communist Betrayal—that exists to reinforce the narrative that the communists were a treacherous party that deserved to be eliminated. As you walk down a bizarre series of darkened halls, a series of diorama installations take you through the history of the party, demonstrating each and every time they betrayed the nation, or attacked the military, or plotted to destroy Indonesia, down to reproducing Suharto’s propaganda narrative about the events of October 1965. There is no reference to the up to one million civilians killed as a result.
At the exit, kids pose for photos in front of a big sign that says, “Thank you for observing some of our dioramas about the savagery carried out by the Indonesian Communist Party. Don’t let anything like this ever happen again.”
Guatemala City
I rode back from Ilom to the capital in one of those old, cramped American school buses that serve as the only “public” transportation in this part of rural Guatemala. I’ve traveled a lot, rarely having the money to do so luxuriously, and often in places where luxurious travel doesn’t even exist. But being on these buses meant being in constant pain, for almost two days straight.
But I was grateful for the ride. The bus belonged to Domingo, the brother of Antonio Caba Caba. They had both watched that morning in 1982 as the US-backed military executed most of the people in their village. Domingo had worked in the United States for years so he could save up and make this investment, and generate some income for the family. It is painted beautifully and he is proud of it. On the front, he had written, “God is love.”
In Guatemala City, if you ask people when democracy ended in the country, many will give a quick answer: 1954. Árbenz was the last chance for social justice, they say. Most above a certain age will know someone who was killed in the decades of violence that followed. Stop and ask someone on the street, and they’ll often have a horror story, and be able to tell you about the importance of 1954, of America’s power here.
When I spoke with experts like Clara Arenas, head of the Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala, we used slightly different terminology.
“Was the relationship that the United States had to Guatemala in 1954 imperialist?” I asked.
An easy one: “Yes.”
Is the relationship between Washington—the government now—and Guatemala still imperialist? Still easy. Still yes.
On the bus from the town of Ilom to Nebaj, people had a slightly different understanding of twentieth-century politics. There was a different way of speaking employed by the Ixil people, most of whom still speak broken or accented Spanish. I asked them what they thought communism was. Domingo, the owner of the bus, had this answer: “Well, they said they were communists and that communists are dangerous. But actually, the government are the ones who did all the killing. So if anyone was dangerous, if anyone was ‘communist,’ it must be them.”
Amsterdam
Like many other Indonesian exiles, Francisca Pattipilohy lives in Amsterdam. She’s just a few miles outside the city center, in a tasteful little apartment packed with books. She reads slower than she used to, but she gets excited when each new title comes out—on Indonesia 1965, on Dutch colonialism, on art theory and capitalism, on US foreign policy—and makes her way through each.12 I love visiting. She’ll prepare snacks and talk for hours—maybe repeating herself sometimes, but spilling out more information than I’ll ever have in my head.
Lots of older Indonesians live in the Netherlands too. Gde Arka and Yarna Mansur, the student couple trapped in the Soviet Union in 1965, finally made their way here. Sarmadji, who was stuck in China on October 1, 1965, lives here, and has other exiles round his small apartment for Indonesian food.
They were all born in Dutch territory, and now they are back. Over their entire lives, the dream of an independent Indonesia they could call their home only lasted a short fifteen years.
It was often hard to schedule interviews with Francisca. I’d have to make arrangements far in advance, because at ninety-four years old, she’s extremely busy. She was deeply involved in the formation of the International People’s Tribunal on the crimes of 1965–66. And now she’s active in a new group lodging protests with the Dutch government. The group is opposing the direction of some new Dutch research into the period just before Indonesian independence, arguing it pays insufficient attention to colonial brutality. She’s still fighting to tell the world what really happened in Indonesia.
She does take some breaks. She went on a family trip to Bali; then she had a stroke. But that didn’t stop her, either. After a few months of rest, she started fighting again.
Acknowledgments
I’m fairly certain that even a talented expert could not write a book like this alone, and I am not a talented expert. So lots of thanks are in order.
First, I owe a debt of gratitude to my mother, and father, and brothers and sister, for always being there to support me, and to Sung, for being my smartest critic.
I have already thanked Baskara Wardaya, whose expertise and kindness made this book possible; and Bradley Simpson, whose diligent work and expansive generosity were crucial; and Febriana Firdaus, whose introductions and early encouragement were vital; but I want to thank them again here for allowing this project to exist in the first place. I’m also deeply grateful to John Roosa, Patrick Iber, Matias Spektor, Tanya Harmer, and Kirsten Weld for patiently explaining how I could write a book like this, or reading an early manuscript to (even more patiently) explain how it could be better, or doing both.
More than deserving thanks, there are a few people who should be recognized as coauthors of this book. I worked with a number of brilliant researchers who did some part-time work for me around the world. In the world of journalism, there is a spot after an article where you can write “additional reporting by”—that doesn’t exist on book covers, but I want to note that the following people contributed crucial investigation: Willian de Almeida Silva at USP in São Paulo; Tyson Tirta and Stanley Widianto in Jakarta; Benjamin Concha at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago; Yen Duong in Hanoi; Andrea Ixchíu in Guatemala City; Molly Avery at LSE in London; and João Vítor Rego-Costa at Cornell.
Of course, I am deeply grateful to everyone at Sekretariat Bersama ’65 in Solo, especially Winarso, Didik Dyah Suci Rahayu, and Nicholas Gebyar Krishna Shakti. They were my hosts for weeks and weeks, and held my hand through a long, difficult process. They’re still holding my hand.
I’m truly unsure how I can ever pay back the survivors and witnesses who sat with me and told me their stories. Obviously, that goes for Francisca, and Benny, and Ing, and Sakono, Carmen Hertz, and Magdalena Kastinah, and Nuri, Sumiyati and Agung Alit and Ngurah Termana and Wayan Badra, and Gde Arka, Yarna Mansur, and Sarmadji, Pedro Blaset and Guillermo Castillo, Clara Arenas, Antonio Caba Caba, Miguel Ángel Albizures, and Josefa Sanchez Del Barrio.
But it also goes for the many people who are not in the final version of the book. So I also want to offer my deepest thanks to Sunaryo, Vanius Silva Oliveira, Adriano Diogo, Sri Tunrua
ng, Bedjo Untung, Rangga Purbaya, Maridi Marno, Sanusi, Nin Hanafi, Soe Tjen Marching, Djumadi, Franchesca Casauay, Zevonia Vieira, Coen Husain Pontoh, Made Mawut, Suratman, Sutarmi, Darsini, Soegianto and Maria Sri Sumarni, Rusman Prasetyo, Pramono Sidi, Supriyadi, Hariyono Sugiyono Raharjo, Hadi Pidekso, Liem Gie Liong and The Siok Swan, Hendra Winardi and Hediandi Lesmana, Ivo Herzog, Francina Loen, Tjin Giok Oey, Manuel Cabieses, Roberto Thieme, Orlando Saenz, Eduardo Labarca, Patricio “Pato” Madera, Pedro del Barrio Caba, Magdalena Caba Ramirez, Inenga Wardita, everyone at Taman 65 in Bali, Martin Aleida, Dilma Rousseff, and Zuhair Al-Jezairy.
The experts, scholars, and authorities who took the time to explain things to me, trade ideas, or point me in the right direction were more valuable than any amount of time I could have spent in the library. I want to offer my sincere gratitude, and apologizes for when I—perhaps behaving too much like a journalist—went to smarter people to ask for help, rather than trying to find the answer myself. So thank you, so much, to Ratna Saptari, Elio Gaspari, Mario Magalhães, Olímpio Cruz Neto, Marcos Napolitano, Petrik Matanasi, Ivan Aulia Ahsan, Hizkia Yosie Polimpung, Windu Jusuf, Andreas Harsono, Yerry Wirawan, Greg Grandin, Robert Wade, Lê Đa˘ng Doanh, Jess Melvin, Taomo Zhou, Saskia Wieringa, Frank G. Wisner Jr., Peter Kornbluh, Greg Poulgrain, Joma Sison, Pedro Dallari, Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Luciano Martins Costa, Mariana Joffily, João Roberto Martins Filho, Fathi Alfadl, Ascanio Cavallo, Hector Reyes, Mario Castañeda, Noam Chomsky, Ben Kiernan, Alfred McCoy, Vijay Prashad, Patrice McSherry, Federico Finchelstein, Jason Hickel, Branko Milanovic, Frederick Cooper, Ben Fogel, Adam Shatz, Kate Doyle, Tim Weiner, Sean Jacobs, Alexander Aviña, E. Ahmet Tonak, Ghassane Koumiya, Raimundos Oki, and Carlos H. Conde.
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