Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia
Vannessa Hearman
NUS Press: 2018
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Buru Island: A Prison Memoir (translated by Jennifer Lindsay)
Hersri Settiawan
Herb Feith Translation Series, the Herb Feith Foundation and Monash University: 2019
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The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide
Saskia E. Wieringa, Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman
Routledge: 2019
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Many years ago during Suharto’s dictatorship, when the mass killings of 1965-66 were a taboo subject, I interviewed Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of Indonesia’s greatest writers, who was living under house arrest in Jakarta after his release from a decade of brutal existence as a political prisoner on Buru island. Those interviews with Pak Pram, as he was known, were revelatory to me, a young US journalist who knew next to nothing about the botched coup of 1 October 1965, which the army blamed on the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and then used as a pretext to massacre up to a million suspected communists and imprison another million Indonesians, including Pak Pram. I took a deep dive into this little-known chapter of the Cold War in my attempt to understand Pram’s role as a fellow traveller and leading leftist intellectual before 1 October, and then a locked-up, banned and silenced writer after Suharto and the army seized power.

Back then, facts were hard to come by. It was dangerous to challenge the official narrative that the army saved the nation and that the people rose up in a frenzy to annihilate the PKI. After Suharto was toppled in 1998 and Indonesia entered its cacophonous yet fragile democratic era, a battle over memory and history erupted over the events of 1965. While the official narrative still prevails and continues to be taught to schoolchildren, that official narrative has been debunked by scholars, journalists, writers and political prisoners who survived the killings. The ongoing excavation of the hidden history of what happened is crucial for Indonesians, but it is also important for citizens of the US, UK and Australia to understand the role their governments played in supporting the mass killings and then helping to hide them.

• Tags: Annie Pohlman, Hersri Settiawan, Indonesia, Issue 16, Jess Melvin, Margaret Scott, Saskia E. Wieringa, Vannessa Hearman