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Shedding light on a dark past
A surge of fictional and non-fictional works has added more fuel to the curiosity machine regarding Indonesiaâs buried, decades-old history of bloody communist purges between 1965 and 1968
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A surge of fictional and non-fictional works has added more fuel to the curiosity machine regarding Indonesia's buried, decades-old history of bloody communist purges between 1965 and 1968.
In 2012, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invited members of the Tempo magazine editorial team to an early viewing of his documentary The Act of Killing, which follows Anwar Congo and his colleagues, who claim in the film to have killed an untold number of alleged communists in North Sumatra.
Tempo chief editor Arif Zulkifli said the movie triggered a decision to get firsthand accounts from people across the archipelago about their involvement in the killings. More than 60 journalists were involved in the three-month investigation, which resulted in a report of dozens of interviews in the magazine in October that year.
In July of the same year, the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) declared in its findings that the systematic prosecution of alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) after the failed 1965 coup was a gross violation of human rights. After investigating the murky matter for four years, the commission also called for military officials who were involved in the purge to be brought to trial.
The following year, cultural and literary researcher Wijaya Herlambang had his PhD dissertation published as a book entitled Kekerasan Budaya Pasca 1965: Bagaimana Orde Baru Melegitimasi Anti-Komunisme Melalui Sastra dan Film (Post-1965 Cultural Violence: How the New Order Legitimizes Anti-Communism Through Literature and Film).
In the book, Wijaya investigates factors that contributed to the establishment and the survival of the anti-communist movement in Indonesia and finds that anti-communist sentiment prevails not only as a result of political campaigning but, more importantly, because of structured cultural aggression ' backed by a global anti-communist drive led by the US ' against communism and justification of the violence experienced by alleged communists.
Oppenheimer said art is about showing people what they already know but are perhaps too afraid to acknowledge and remember.
'In this sense, the role of art and the role of non-fiction art or cinema in so far as its political role is rather like a child and the emperor's new clothes, pointing out a reality that everybody either knows or is too afraid to talk about or used to know and is too afraid to remember,' Oppenheimer recently told The Jakarta Post.
'And I'm not the only child; The Act of Killing is not the only child. There are also so many activists and oral historians who have been trying to raise this issue. We're trying to create a space where people can talk about and, therefore, address their biggest and most frightening problems because, if we don't address them, we're doomed to continue living in the nightmare,' he added.
Also in 2012, a number of fictional novels using the 1965 events as either a backdrop or main setting were released, including Laksmi Pamuntjak's Amba, Gitanyali's 65 and Leila Chudori's Pulang (Home).
Pulang is about Indonesian people who had their citizenship revoked during the failed coup and found themselves stranded in foreign countries, longing to return home.
Leila said she owed it to herself to find out about the black hole covered up by the New Order regime for 32 years and to reveal the suffering of those who were silenced and expunged.
'The advantage of fiction is it allows you to dig into the emotional struggles of characters who went through the historical events. The struggles are part of building the characters,' said Leila, a senior editor at Tempo magazine.
Acclaimed author and journalist Seno Gumira Ajidarma, who has written fictional works about military violence in Timor Leste in the height of the Soeharto era at the mid-1990s, pointed out that, unlike the troubles that might have been caused with the regime if he had expressed the stories through journalism, he did not face any objections when writing a fictional account about a sensitive issue.
'They even gave me an award through the Language Center [now the Center of Language Development and Guidance]. I didn't face any resistance, at least nothing direct ' different to when I was a journalist, which is why I wrote it as literature,' he said, referring to an award given by the government's language center to Saksi Mata (Eyewitness), his short story collection about Timor Leste in 1995.
Seno is famous for his adage, 'When journalism is silenced, literature must speak; because while journalism speaks with facts, literature speaks with truth'.
Digging up hidden histories, he said, would always be relevant. 'Opening up things surrounding the 1965 events will always be necessary. Now is the time for it,' he said.
Leila said the New Order rulers had given their version of events for too long and had dominated Indonesian history with their views.
'It was my turn to try and listen to and understand those who had lived their lives as shadows, who were non-entities and were not treated as complete human beings. As a storyteller, I wanted to hear and retell their stories,' she said.
