Session Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

191. Still Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings 1965-68. Sponsored by the Indonesian and Timor-Leste Studies Committee

Sat, March 18, 8:30 to 10:30am, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, Dominion Ballroom South

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

In early 1965 the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest communist organization in the world outside the communist bloc and the most important political party in Indonesia. By March 1966 its leadership was dead or in exile and hundreds of thousands of its alleged supporters executed, displaced, or imprisoned without trial. The killings, lauded in the West and celebrated by the New Order regime of General Suharto, remain one of the least understood episodes of mass murder this past century. Fifteen years ago Robert Cribb identified key gaps in knowledge about the killings: the relative role of civilians and the military, the numbers killed, and the importance of the killings in contemporary Indonesian life. Since then civil society and scholarly discussions have increased, culminating in the first government sponsored symposium on the killings this past year.

This panel fills the gaps first identified by Cribb while also drawing attention to new problems that have emerged as victims begin to speak and as new archival materials emerge. The panel focuses on civil-military ties during the killings, the rapid demographic changes that resulted, and how the killings continue to influence Indonesian society. The papers in this panel rely on extensive interviews with former prisoners, witnesses, and perpetrators; declassified US archival materials; census data; and seldom seen military archives from within Indonesia. This panel brings together scholars across a broad range of disciplines to identify the key actors, national and regional patterns of violence and displacement, and their contemporary significance across the archipelago.

Area of Study

Session Organizer

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant