The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–68, eds. Douglas Kanmen and Katharine MacGregor. Singapore and Copenhagen: NUS Press and NIAS Press, 2012, 305 pp.

Abstract

The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia comprises a selection of papers presented at a three-day conference held at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in June 2009. Neatly edited by two of its convenors, Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor, this volume provides compelling reading by bravely tackling head-on what most innocent Indonesians would probably prefer to just gloss over for either fear or shame. Consisting of ten chapters generally organised around different geographical locations in which the macabre events amounting to the "ideological cleansing" of members and sympathisers of Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) in 1965–1968 took place, this book dwells on a particularly painful episode of modern Indonesian history which implicates directly or indirectly a slew of stakeholders whose influence on the national political landscape was to extend beyond those years. In putting forward their arguments, the researchers rely on extensive primary data, as collated from extensive interviews with both victims and perpetrators of the grim purges that transpired during the three-year period. Despite the obvious violations of human rights committed against Indonesian communists, their families and affiliated organisational partners during a military-dominated stint of unilateral exercise of coercive power, the Indonesian state has been stubbornly clinging on to its official narrative of a morally if not legally justified liquidation of political enemies whose vision, methods and discourse were arbitrarily deemed to be subversive to the revered principles of Pancasila.