Political Killing in Indonesia

Introduction: Siswa Santoso 

Berikut di bawah adalah laporan Amnesty International yang pertama terkait dengan pembunuhan massal di Indonesia pasca 1 Oktober 1965. 

Laporan ini setahu saya diembargo oleh Amnesty International, namun saya menemukannya lewat arsip Jacques Leclerq di Kitlv [kini ub-Univ. Leiden] di Leiden. 

Izin tertulis saya peroleh untuk mengakses arsip termaksud, dan saya mengetik ulang naskah laporan, karena tidak diperkenankan mengkopi, menscan, atau memfoto naskah asli.

Dengan begitu, segala kesalahan ketik ada pada saya. enarik, penyelidik Amnesty International pada Juni 1966 sudah mengidentifikasi banyak lokasi pembantaian di pelbagai tempat di indonesia terutama Aceh, Sumatra termasuk Medan, Sungai Ular; Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Jawa dan Bali. 

Tentu laporan ini tidak lagi aktual, namun barangkali ada beberapa detail yang berguna...
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Nr.1140:

POLITICAL KILLINGS IN INDONESIA

This report was written by a member of Amnesty International, xxxxx xxxxxx, who was in Djakarta at the beginning of June, 1966. Amnesty does not wish, because of the derivation of some of the facts, to have its name directly connected as a source.

The events of the 30th September last year – the GESTAPU – and the 1st october will presumably remain unclarified for some time. The maze of fear and exaggeration, of lies and political necessity has produced an incredible crop of stories, easily enough to fit any political premise.

However deeply the PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] were involved, and whether Peking gave more encouragement than sympathy, Indonesians have been subject since to a considerable amount of newspaper and radio coverage of accounts of proposed PKI outrage, and a large part of the economic failure of the last years have been systematically blamed on the deliberate undermining of the economy by Peking-backed communism.

Apart from scattered violence that followed immediately after the failure of the coup, the main clashes with the PKI appear to have come only after the arrival of the RPKAD [the army's elite corps of para-commandos] in Central Java towards the end of October. There was little communist resistance although it was said that the killing of PKI in Central Java started as areprisal. The even more severe outbreak in East Javacame on a wave of violence from Central Java at the beginning of November. By the end of november the wave spread to Bali, where the backlog of resentment and rivalry, and the tensions since the beginning of October, produced an emotional fever which resulted in large numbers of houses of communists and Chinese being burned.

Estimates of deaths in Bali range from the official figure of the fact-finding committee at 12,000, to those of reliable observers who quote figures of more than 60,000. At Atjeh violence appears to have been injected with the fire of a holy war. There also there was a great deal of anti-Chinese rioting according to one report no Chinese were left alive in the west coast area of the Province. A notable instance of the strength of the anti-Chinese feeling were the riots in Medan in North Sumatra, where staff of the Chinese consulate frightened by a demonstration, fired above the heads of the crowd, and thereby provoked the wreckage of the Chinese district with a loss of approximately 200 lives. In north Sumatra the army seems to have played a more active role in the attempt to eliminate the PKI – the official figures from Antara were 10,500 arrested, and many of these were shot and their bodies thrown into the Sungai Ular. Reliable information, apart from rumours, about the undoubted killings and arrests in other areas is even more difficult to obtain, although there are some Antara figures, such as the arrest of 30,000 [reported on the 20th December] from S. Kalimantan.

Total figures of any accuracy may never be known. Major General Sumarno's fact-finding committee announced on March 1st a total of 78,000 killed. This would appear, however, to be well below the figures more commonly accepted [excepts, perhaps, by the student groups]. Before Dr. Subandrio's overthrow in mid-March there were strong rumours that he wanted to have Nasution and Suharto tried for genocide, and the number of dead was mentioned at a quarter of a million. The Western press usually quote figures between 300,000 and 750,000, although up to two million has been suggested. But as one Australian journalist pointed out, one raft carrying ten bodies floating down a stream seen by ten differrent people, becomes quite easily 100 dead. A reliable informant, in Bali in late may, said that the figures quoted to him by a village headmen could scarcely make up the lowest estimates. However a Balinese theological student, at home during December, talked of whole villages being wiped out, of streets piled high with bodies and of a total there of three quarters of a million killed.

Certainly the families of the PKI or suspected PKI suffered also. Many women and children were killed. Army authorities on several occasions are reported to have said that the killing of the immediate family was done in order to stop reprisals either in the near or less immediate future. The extent of the death must often have been carried out for fear of future power to redress a balance. There was a similar uprising of the Communists in 1948. PKI members, prior to the coup, numbered in the region of three million [in the 1955 elections – the last to be held in Indonesia – they polled 16.4 per cent of the total]. Their power was perhaps not so great as it appeared, but for years it had been a bluff that was working; andthe general reaction still is 'it was them or us'.

There are official numbers of arrests, but these too seem to be underestimated. Malik mentioned a figure in April of 160,000, but by early June it was generally accepted that the figure was nearer 200,000. even this may well be an understatement. Those reported as being directly involved in the coup [some of these are communists, but many are not] are being tried by military tribunal, and reports indicate that those tried are found guilty and shot. Leaders and cadres of the PKI and its associates, containing the middle echelon of important communists, are considered a major security problem, and despite official assurances, some detainees are being summarily executed. There have been realeases, but both the prison authorities – presumably in most cases the army – and the released prisoners have found themselves in difficulties. Those being released fear the consequences of freedom, an in some cases they are demonstratably correct in their fears. Those responsible for these releases fear both an upsurge of feeling against the ex-prisoners, and perhaps even more, reprisals from them.

Rumours have been heard from different sources of the sending of prisoners from java and Bali to the outer islands, to become auxiliary soldiers and/or forced labourers [settlers?]. Food at the moment is a problem throughout most of the islands, but usually it seems that the ration of six ounces of rice a day is being given to the prisoners. Accounts of illness, insufficient water and malnutrition are current. Food has improved but here certainly were many cases of malaria in the prisons inCentral Java at the beginning of June.

The Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches have been a right of entry and access to prisoners of their own faith. Fear has stultified the sual ability of the Indonesians to care for each other, and apart from some brave exceptions, widows and children have often been totally ostracised, churches there is little effort being made; Muslims [Indonesia is 90% Muslim, though only a small amount of this is at all extreme] regard the elimination of the Communists as being in many ways part of a religious war. The political tensions still extant, even after the banning or the PKI in March and the removal of Subandrio, have effectively frightened most people too much for the usual 'gotong royong' atmosphere. The possibility of the removal of Sukarno as an alternative to the unacceptable donditions he played on the endorsement of the Bangkok Pact [despite the curbing of his powers] is the cause of further tensions, about which, particularly in Central and East Java, and within the army itself there is mounting controversy.
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July, 1966

xxxxxxx xxxxxx is of Investigation Bureau

Nr.1142:

...p.6:

October 1, 1965 and After then came the October 1 coup. Debate will continue for a long time on just what was attempted on that day, and particularly on what the precise relationship was between Lieutenant-Colonel Untung, the palace guard officer who attempted to seize power, and the Indonesian Communist Party which gave him at least qualified support, and on whether Peking was involved. What is clear is that the coup's defeat produced a radically new constellation of power in Indonesia, and that the army leaders who had survived the coup were able to blame it onto both the Indonesian Communists and the Chinese government. This is the explanation which has come to be accepted in Indonesia.

The Chinese in Indonesia were soon a target of army and popular hostility. Baperki, the largest organization of the Indonesian-citizen Chinese was banned in October, and its university in Djakarta was burned down. Chinese shops were burned in a number of towns inOctober and November and there were several attacks on the homes of Communist Chinese diplomats. Moreover there were occasional press demands for Chinese property to be seized. Some hundreds of Chinese reportedly left the country. But the violence directed against the Chinese was on a markedly smaller scale than that directed against the Indonesian Communists and army commanders in a number of the cities seem to have taken pains to see that no anti-Chinese rioting got under way. The tension was certainly great in this two-month period, and the number of Chinese who lost their lives asa result of mob violence – mainly in the smaller towns and rural areas, but also in one or two cities, like Makassar – probably ran to some hundreds. But the worst was still to come.

On December 19 an official at the Chinese consulate in Medan, North Sumatra, let off shots of gunfire against a group of hostile demonstrators outside. This of gunfire against a group of hostile demonstrators outside. This led the demonstrators to march on a part of the Chinese business district, which it proceeded to burn and wreck, with at least 75 and perhaps up to 200 Chinese persons losing their lives on the one day. There was similar violence, on a smaller scale, in Bandjarmasin and a great deal on the islands of Bali, Lombok and Sumbawa. Estimates can only be very general and tentative, but it seems likely that the number of Chinese who [mulai halaman 7:] hen been killed had reached four figures by the end of January 1966. this is not a particularly high figure if one bears in mind that the post-October 1965 massacres of people alleged to have had connections with the coup movement or the Communist party are thought to have cost between 200,000 and 500,000 lives [7]. 

President Soekarno's attempt to reassert his power in February, when he annouced a cabinet reshuffle which involved the dismissal of General Nasution, resulted in a temporary softening of Sino-Indonesian relations and a partial abatement of pressure on the Indonesian Chinese. But the abatement was shortlived. By March 11 President Soekarno had been forced to hand over most of his powers to General Soeharto, and it was clear that those who had brought about this change – a coalition of army officers and the KAMI and KAPPI student organizations – included some strongly anti-Chinese groups.

The Latest Phase [8]

in the period immediately after the “muffled coup: of March 11a new wave of anti-Chinese actions began, one which the Western press has almost entirely ignored. In late March the new government decided that the New China News Agency which had frequently been denounced for its attacks on the Indonesian government and army, would have to close it Djakarta office, and then that the Chinese consulates in Makassar, Bandjarmasin and Surabaja would have to close. A large number of Chinese diplomats left Indonesia around the same time.

In April KAPPI demonstrators seized Chinese language schools in a snowballing series of actions in various cities and towns actions which were justified on the grounds that these schools were centres of Communist indoctrinations. In almost every case the actions of the KAPPI groups were followed by decisions of the local military commanders that these schools would be closed; and these bans were extended in some centres to various Chinese social organizations, some of them said to be harboring fugitive Communists. By the end of April very few Chinese-language schools were open, and government statements suggested that their closing might be permanent. This was to be confirmed on May 19 when it was announced that the government had bannedthe operation of foreign - run schools apart from ones established by foreign embassies for the families of their own staffs.

On April 12 the Peking government demanded that Chinese nationals in Indonesia be permitted to return to China immediately, that emigration procedures be simplified to make this possible, and that the Indonesian governement provide ships to take them there. The Indonesian governement replied by saying that the alien Chinese were entirely free to leave the country, but only after complying with the emigration procedures which obtained, and that it was no part of Indonesia's responsibility to facilitate their travel to China.

On April 15 a rally of Indonesian-citizen Chinese was held in Djakarta, at which resolutions were passed for the closing down of all Chinese-language schools in Indonesia and the breaking of diplomatic relations with Peking. Those attending the rally went on from there to demonstrate outside the Chinese embassy, where they fought with chancery officials, wounding one of them. On the following day Djawoto, the pro-Communist Indonesian ambassador in peking, resighned from his post, denounced the Djakarta governement for its Right-oriented domestic and foreign policy and whipping up of “racist terrorism” and was granted political asylum in China. At the same time China withdrew the technicians who were building a textile mill in West Java under an aid agreement dating back to before October 1965.
by this time most of the stops were out. Radio Peking had been strident in what it ....

[7]: See especially the articles of Nicholas Turner [Guardian, April 7, 1966], of the Special Correspondent of the London Times [April 13, 1966], of C.L. Sulzberger [New York Times, April 13, 1966], of Robert Sa. Elegant [Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1966], and of Stanley Karnow [Washington Post, May 4 and 5, 1966].

Source: 

Siswa Santoso