The World Was Silent? Global Communities of Resistance to the 1965 Repression in the Cold War Era

• In Event: Activism and Justice for the Survivors and Victims of the 1965 Violence in Indonesia - Sponsored by Southeast Asia Council (SEAC)

Abstract

In a recent edited book Schaefer and Wardaya (2013) survey the international government and press responses to the 1965 violence. The general conclusions they and others have drawn are that ‘the world’ was largely jubilant about the rise of the Suharto led military regime and thus silent about the violence against the Indonesian left. This is certainly true of almost all foreign governments yet this elite level analysis misses the small scale transnational ‘communities of resistance’ (Mohanty, 2003) to the violence.

This paper analyses several examples of early transnational activism concerning 1965 including that of the Afro Asia People’s Solidarity Organisation which included some Indonesian leftists trapped in exile after the onset of the 1965 violence: the case of TAPOL founded by British national Carmel Budiardjo who was imprisoned briefly in Indonesia and the protests of Dutch socialist women who had strong connections to imprisoned Indonesian women. The paper asks how in each case activists tried to raise the alarm over the large scale repressions in Indonesia and the obstacles they encountered in generating sympathy at the height of the Cold War. Finally the paper will reflect on how the transnational activist landscape concerning 1965 has or has not changed in the decades since these early efforts.

Author

• Katharine Elizabeth McGregor, University of Melbourne