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Mass killings that were planned: A ‘game changer’

“My wife was burnt alive in Kutaradja [now Banda Aceh] in the mid-1960s along with 11 members of Gerwani [Indonesian Women’s Movement affiliated with the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI].”

Aboeprijadi Santoso (The Jakarta Post)
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Amsterdam
Thu, October 4, 2018

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Mass killings that were planned: A ‘game changer’ Murder ilustration (Shutterstock/-)

“My wife was burnt alive in Kutaradja [now Banda Aceh] in the mid-1960s along with 11 members of Gerwani [Indonesian Women’s Movement affiliated with the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI],” Tjut Husin Fatly told me.

The late Fatly, or Pak Tjut as he was known among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands, was one of the three founding members of the PKI Aceh branch ( 1956 ). He left for China in 1964 so never knew exactly what happened.

That’s all he could tell me when I met him at the residence of the Indonesian Ambassador in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, amid, ironically, the celebration of Indonesia’s 60th independence day in 2015.

The truth is, the home of Fatly’s wife was ransacked and burnt. She was later killed, leaving her preschool-aged daughter in a camp. It was one of at least 1,941 cases of massacre, which Jess Melvin’s study has found in Aceh as part of the operasi penumpasan (planned annihilation) of communists.

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