Postcolonial Citizenship in Provincial Indonesia by Gerry van Klinken. (Courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan)

Gerry van Klinken’s latest book was to be called Murder in Maumere. Strangely, this selling title was scrapped for the prosaic but academically acceptable Postcolonial Citizenship in Provincial Indonesia.

A few shops in the largely Catholic city of Maumere in East Nusa Tenggara sell religious items. Some are imprinted with mottos, such as “Jesus Engkau Andalanku” (Jesus is My Mainstay).

Perhaps the faithful in the East Flores city find comfort with the phrase. However, this was not the case in February 1966.

Five months earlier in Jakarta, some 1,700 kilometers to the west, a failed coup against the government of first president Sukarno had been followed by an Army-organized bloodletting; an estimated 500,000 real or imagined communists were slaughtered by militias.

The genocide had just about petered out in Java and Bali when orders came to Maumere from the Army in Jakarta listing locals to be arrested. Almost all were Catholics.

Instead of demanding their congregations be protected and given fair trials, the clergy helped the Army. Apart from administering last rites to some of the 800 or more victims, the priests stayed silent.

This little-known story of the church failing to shield its flock, and often siding with the gunmen, can now be widely spread thanks to Dutch anthropologist Gerry van Klinken. In Australia, he used to edit the prestigious Inside Indonesia magazine.

His latest book was to be called Murder in Maumere. Strangely, this selling title was scrapped for the prosaic but academically acceptable Postcolonial Citizenship in Provincial Indonesia, guaranteed to frighten away casual browsers.

Wrong. Knowing this history should help ensure there is no repetition. It is tragic, brutal, shaming and a damnation of the Catholic church. It is also a powerful argument for revising the government narrative of citizens’ spontaneous and unstoppable rage, still the only version allowed in classrooms.

One of Van Klinken’s sources was Egenius Pacelly (EP) da Gomez, 79, and living just outside Maumere where he writes about history and studies politics.

In 1966 he was a Catholic Party activist and present at a meeting of Komando Operasi (Komop) and local officials.

They were told the Jakarta “instructions” were to “secure” all communists and their sympathizers, and that political parties had quotas to fill. There were then about 2,000 people in Maumere and maybe 10 times more in Sikka regency villages; most citizens knew each other as neighbors, through intermarriage, or casually.

A report of the meeting and some of what followed was written eight years later by Anon and titled Menjaring Angin (To Reap the Whirlwind). Van Klinken identifies the author as Da Gomez, though the Indonesian said it was later edited by others. 

The report concerns “human beings, society and their relations with the Creator [...] a search for something that if seen clearly, might be best called meaning”.

But how can one find meaning in slaughter at the hands of fellow parishioners with nods from those wearing cassocks?

Van Klinken tries to answer that devilish question through the mind of a Western-educated social scientist. 

His endeavors are not alone: In 2015, John Prior, a British-born priest who came to eastern Indonesia in 1973 and is now in Maumere, coedited an essay collection titled Berani, Berhenti, Berbohong (Dare to Stop Lying) with philosopher Otto Madung.

Da Gomez has read the book and rejects explanations for the 1966 violence such as rising nationalism, lay criticism of the church, hostility toward traditional regal rule, factional politics, old hates and supernatural fear. Boiled together at a time of national uncertainty they created an environment where some locals took revenge for past wrongs.

Instead, Da Gomez will only say (to this reviewer) that the sole cause was the “instruction” from Jakarta.

One who rejected state orders was Father Fredrik de Lopez, who demanded his people be released. So the Army contacted his bishop and De Lopez was moved to a seminary. Although his protest failed, he did not die for his defiance. 

This showed the cowardice of his colleagues who used the defense of “we’ll be killed if we don’t cooperate”. None sought sainthood.

They had also been indoctrinated through strident Catholic teachings, largely driven by foreign priests, into believing that communism was satanic. They did not differentiate between the ideology, open to challenge through better ideas, and those who liked party policies such as land reform, but were not card-carrying members. 

After the killings, Van Klinken writes of Da Gomez: “The bloodshed had not left him cold.” On a visit to Jakarta, the Indonesian was verbally attacked by Florinese students and accused of complicity.  This led him to join a group wanting to ventilate the atrocities and name the main killers.

For this action he was jailed and today is still reluctant to speak out, referring questioners to chapters in Berani, Berhenti, Berbohong, including one by Van Klinken in Indonesian.

“I never took part in the killings, or saw them, or the bodies,” Da Gomez said. One of many unmarked mass graves is 300 meters behind his house, but he says he never visits.

The first section in Van Klinken’s book tells the story “forensically” largely through the life and death in prison of Jan Djong, “the district’s republican rebel”. 

It then locates the events within a set of theories about former colonized societies adjusting to self rule when old structures fall and there’s much jostling to fill the vacuum.

This is interesting but tends to dampen the hot horror of what happened in Flores. The text will find a snug place in university libraries overseas, when it’s most wanted scorching desks of local students seeking their nation’s real history.

“We need Gerry’s book in Indonesian and we need reconciliation,” said Da Gomez. “The initiative should come from the church.”  Van Klinken said a translation is being considered by an Indonesian publisher.

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‘Postcolonial Citizenship in Provincial Indonesia’

by Gerry van Klinken
Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2019
152 pages

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