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| Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018. Xx + 429. Index. $35.00 (cloth). |
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I am seething with jealousy over Geoffrey B. Robinson's most recent book, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966. I mean this in the most complimentary way. Indeed, it is the highest personal and professional praise I can give an academic work. I wish I had written this book. Since I first saw The Year of Living Dangerously as a high school student and became aware of the Indonesian army's brutal destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party or PKI, the largest communist party outside of the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C., I have wanted to write such a book. For decades it has been frustrating that there has been so little written about one of the most stunning acts of political mass murder in the 20th century. Because General-cum-President Suharto's brutal New Order (1966–1998) ruled Indonesia, the handful of scholars working in the field faced serious consequences should they publish something that challenged the regime's anti-Communist narrative. Most famously, a young Indonesianist named Benedict Anderson found himself persona non grata. Unable to enter the country until after the dictator's ouster, Anderson turned his energies elsewhere and wrote Imagined Communities (1983), arguably the most influential study of nationalism to date. Yet even after the restoration of democracy in 1998, known as the Reformasi era, the Indonesian army and New Order loyalists in the civilian government have made it clear that research into the killings is unwelcome. In recent years, events ranging from human rights demonstrations, meetings of survivors' groups, literature festivals, film screenings, and academic conferences have been shut down by the military, government officials, and para-military thugs. In 2017, as I started a book project on the army's anti-PKI museum, military intelligence decided to ban foreigners from the site. In a frightening but comical scene, armed soldiers refused to grant me entry as a group of Indonesian school children on a field trip waved at me as they entered the museum complex. Robinson's work is both a scholarly tour de force and an important political intervention. The Killing Season is the best researched, most comprehensive, and even-handed book on the subject. It is certain to be the definitive study of the origins, conduct, and legacy of the murder of between 500,000 to perhaps over a 1,000,000 people and the mass detention of an even larger number in brutal concentration camps, a subject that must be integrated into courses on 20th century world history. Building on original research and the work of his colleagues, the author offers a nearly flawless book. Robinson is a gifted writer. The Killing Season is very well organized and written with clear and engaging prose, making it accessible to a wide audience. Coming in at a little over 300 pages, the book is divided into eleven carefully argued chapters. After a preface that acknowledges Robinson's personal connections to survivors of the New Order and some of the most important names in Indonesian studies (including Anderson, Ruth McVey, and Audrey and George Kahin), the first chapter gives a useful summary of the history in question. Robinson then presents the primary schools of thought on the massacres, before laying out the three main points of the book's argument. First, The Killing Season contends that "the violence of 1965–1966—its patterns and variations—cannot be properly understood without recognizing the pivotal role of the army leadership in provoking, facilitating, and organizing it" (19). Second, as part of the larger Cold War struggle, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia encouraged, condoned, and silenced discussion of the bloodshed. Third, the specific patterns of violence in Indonesia cannot be understood outside of the historical context of post-colonial Indonesia, which includes an intense Left/Right polarization, the military's perception of the PKI as an existential threat, the radicalizing impact of decades of war and revolution on Indonesian politics, the army's doctrine of mobilizing local civilian militias for national campaigns, and the ways in which the Cold War tensions of the early 1960s impacted a local "politics notable for its militancy and high levels of mass mobilization" (25). The Killing Season systematically refutes contending theories and myths that blamed the violence on Islamic intolerance, an allegedly primitive culture of running "amok," and popular anti-communism. Rather, the murders and subsequent oppression were orchestrated by Suharto and his allied generals and colonels for specific political and economic gain. The West, which saw political contests in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a zero-sum game, aided and abetted the violence, greeting the destruction of the PKI with enthusiasm. In "Preconditions," the second chapter, Robinson skillfully guides the reader through the potentially bewildering history of anti-colonial politics, the Japanese occupation (1942–1945), the Dutch war to reoccupy their lost colony (1945–1949), and the upheavals of the early Indonesian republic (including the CIA supported regional separatist and Islamist rebellions of the 1950s). In this narrative, the charismatic nationalist leader Sukarno worked with both the conservative army leadership and the PKI. Importantly, after disastrous revolts in 1926 and 1948, the PKI eschewed armed struggle in favor of a parliamentary path to power. Meanwhile, the army developed a series of economic interests that clashed with PKI labor-organization and land-reform activism. Chapter three, "Pretext," covers the most confusing moment in Indonesian history: the kidnapping and murder of six generals on the night of September 30/October 1, 1965. Most readers will be grateful for Robinson's clear discussion of this still unsettled event. Following the work of John Roosa, The Killing Season holds that while PKI leader Aidit and President Sukarno likely knew about the plot, there is no reason whatsoever to conclude that the rank and file of the PKI had any direct or indirect involvement. Rather, General Suharto and his allies seized upon the event as a justification to overthrow Sukarno, eliminate the PKI and other political rivals, and enact a radical change in the nation's political trajectory. Chapter four, "Cold War," details Western, Soviet, and Chinese competition to influence Indonesia. Robinson debunks the myth that the P.R.C. was arming the PKI in any significant manner and shows that American, British, and Australian intelligence services wooed right-wing generals. The next three chapters, "Mass Killing," "The Army's Role," and "'A Gleam of Light in Asia,'" detail how the politicide happened. Robinson shows that killing started in Medan, Sumatra, and Central Java and then spread to East Java and Bali. Later, there were episodes in northern and eastern Indonesia. The Killing Season makes the case that the army leadership mobilized civilian paramilitary organizations in premeditated campaigns. Lists of PKI members, but also union organizers, peasant activists, feminists, and artists were prepared, indicating that this right-wing reaction was more comprehensive than the political purge of a single party. Often the army would round up prisoners and hand them over to death squads composed of Muslim or Catholic youth or criminal networks. The descriptions of the killing are extremely graphic and detail truly horrifying scenes of torture, the public display of corpses and body parts, and sexual violence. The author links a number of specific practices to training from Japanese troops and to the example of Dutch counter-insurgency tactics. While showing central planning and coordination, Robinson holds that local officers had some discretion. For example, in West Java, where there was a recent Islamist insurgency, there were very few killings, but a general ordered mass arrests and long-term detention. Chapter seven notes that the events were treated as good news by the West, which facilitated the bloodshed by providing intelligence and equipment, as well as covering up the murders. Chapters eight and nine, "Mass Incarceration" and "Release, Restrict, Discipline, and Punish," look at the New Order's institutionalization of brutality. For well over a decade, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were held in cramped prisons in Java or sent to work as slave laborers throughout the archipelago, with distant Buru Island being the most infamous tropical gulag. Suharto tried to curry favor with the Carter administration by releasing the majority of them in the late 1970s. However, even after their time was served, former inmates' identification cards bore the mark "ET" for "eks-tapol" or "former political prisoner." They faced weekly or monthly requirements to report to the police and widespread social discrimination from the general population. The final two chapters, "Truth and Justice?" and "Violence, Legacies, Silence," analyze Indonesia's inability to come to terms with the events of 1965–1966. The New Order rationalized Suharto's heavy handed rule as a necessary bulwark against an alleged latent communist threat until the corrupt dictator was toppled in a "people power" revolution in 1998. The restoration of democracy led to the election of Gus Dur as President in 1999. While this Islamic cleric made major human rights reforms and moved towards reconciliation between victims and killers, he angered the military and other establishment politicians. The army removed him from power in 2001. Subsequent presidents, including Sukarno's daughter, have been reluctant to pursue a significant truth and reconciliation process. While there have been moments of potential thaws, the fact is that the perpetrators of mass murder and their descendants rule Indonesia. Some may have a guilty conscience and others might fear PKI family members out for revenge. None of them want to discuss this history. In addition to its historiographic contributions, The Killing Season will have an impact on Indonesian politics. It will be very difficult for the army to counter Robinson's well-documented and persuasive argument. In combination with films such as Joshua Oppenheimer's films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence and other recent academic monographs such as Jess Melvin's The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (2018) and Vanessa Hearman's Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia (2018), The Killing Season will cast a spotlight into some of the 20th century's darkest history. Teachers of world history would be well served to incorporate Robinson's work into their lectures on genocide and Cold War violence. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. Author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2019), he is currently writing a comparative history of representations of Cold War mass violence in Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Cambodian museums. You may contact him at mikevann@csus.edu. |