Denial of genocide in Indonesia takes the shape of justification of genocidal murder, ‘cleansing’ the society of communist evil, for the good of the nation, its ideology, and its religions. During the New Order regime of General Suharto (1966-1998), the campaign created the illusion of stability, through the normalization of hatred against anybody suspected of communist sympathies. Trade unions and women’s and farmers’ organizations were all brought under army control.
The Indonesian genocide of 1965-6 started in early October 1965; by the end of 1966 most mass killings were over, but sporadic murders still occurred. Probably around one million (some say three million) leftist people were murdered. They were either members or sympathizers of the Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) or staunch nationalist supporters of President Sukarno. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. After that date, prisoners in the slave labor camps and other detention centers also died, due to starvation, torture, and in general the inhuman conditions in which they were held. The genocide was motivated by the desire for regime change. Both the army and right-wing Muslim forces nationally and Western governments internationally wanted to replace the leftist, nationalist, and hugely popular President Sukarno. His power was eroded by the loss of his support base and in 1967 he was replaced by the right-wing military dictator General Suharto.
Denial of the role of General Suharto and his supporters in the Indonesian genocide was built in from the design of the ‘events of 1965’ which were presented by Suharto as a ‘communist coup’.
The denial of the Indonesian genocide is an example of historical denial involving deceptive planning and implementation as well as falsification. Since then a deliberate propaganda campaign was launched which shifted the onus of genocidal guilt to the victims’ group. The victims were portrayed as deserving to suffer as being guilty of their own slaughter. The perpetrators on the other hand were not prosecuted but treated with military decorum. They had pride in their ‘success’, they had ‘saved the nation’.
The denial was couched in claims that communism is an inhuman, sexually perverse ideology, opposed to religion and the national ideology, and therefore alien to Indonesia. The silencing and impunity surrounding the ‘events of 1965’ have enabled a string of human rights violations in Indonesia, for instance in Aceh and Papua, as well as in East Timor (Loney 2016). As Bevins (2020) has argued, the ‘Jakarta Method’ had international repercussions.
At the community and individual level, the silence imposed by the military regime has taken various forms. Disturbing information on the size and the brutality of the genocide and the involvement of the army and General Suharto was repressed, disavowed, reinterpreted, or simply ignored, while veterans’ organizations and conservative militias were allowed to continue spreading disinformation
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