(Peniwen Memorial)

The killers must have been puzzled as their trucks crawled along farm tracks toward the massacre site.

This was no ordinary ramshackle Indonesian village, but more like a Dutch hamlet with well-built homes behind trimmed hedges and neat lawns. No mosques. Dogs running loose. They passed by a church, its barn-style architecture little different from those in their homeland.

Had the conscripts been properly briefed they would have known that Peniwen, 40 kilometers southwest of Malang in East Java, was a Christian village established a century earlier by missionaries promoting Dutch values of hygiene and personal responsibility.

So the people had built the Panti Husada polyclinic, one of the first in the region and staffed by Red Cross workers. This was the soldiers’ target.

“The Dutch thought the clinic was the headquarters of our military campaign to get the colonialists out of our beloved country,” said veteran Yunas Supratman, 88. He was a 21-year-old guerrilla fighter at the time and living in the jungle nearby.

“There were wounded soldiers being cared for, but this was not the control center.”

The rolling country around Peniwen is rich in jungle cut by twisting rivers and patches of cultivation — a good place to disappear. It had already been invaded twice by Dutch patrols, shooting one man and capturing others who were “maltreated” to make them disclose where Brigade 16 fighters were hiding.

What happened next on that Saturday is unclear, but it seems certain that 12 unarmed and unresisting men including two patients were pushed out of the clinic, tied up and shot dead. Three women working in the clinic were raped and the place was ransacked.

Supratman entered the village next morning and found the bodies had already been buried. The Dutch returned a few days later unsuccessfully hunting for Pastor Martodipuro, who had already lodged a protest with the World Council of Churches.

The Dutch army was forced to investigate, but claimed witnesses could not be found.

Martodipuro’s action alerted the US and European nations, which put pressure on the Dutch, eventually leading to the ceasefire brokered through the Roem-van Roijen Agreement signed in May 1949.

In 1983 a monument was erected above the graves of 10 men. The polyclinic has gone and a primary school now occupies the site overlooking a thousand shades of green tumbling below.

There are about 1,300 households in Peniwen, 90 percent Protestant, according to Pastor Sutrijo, current head of the village church. The village was first settled in the early 19th century by 20 families migrating from Central Java seeking new land. They were led by Zangkioes, apparently a charismatic Muslim who converted to Christianity.

The Javanese name means a beautiful and wealthy place. It looks clean, prosperous and spacious with no graffiti and little plastic in the creeks.

“In Peniwen no one goes hungry,” said Supratman, who later became the village head. “We live in peace. We remember the killings, but we forgive. As Christians we must love our enemy. We are not allowed to hate.”

— Duncan Graham

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