 This month marks the 50th anniversary of a watershed event in Indonesian history. The abortive coup of 1965, where six army generals were murdered and their bodies thrown in a well in South Jakarta. A little-known major general of the armed forces and strategic reserve named Soharto took control, placing President Sokano under house arrest. He would go on to rule Indonesia for the next 33 years under what became known as the New Order authoritarian regime. In the immediate aftermath of the abortive coup, the Communist Party of Indonesia was directly blamed, which led to mass purge of communists, communist sympathizers and others throughout 1965 and 1966. Around half a million people were murdered by the army paramilitary groups and in some cases their own neighbours. The bodies of the victims were thrown into rivers and mass graves, and those responsible were never held to account, let alone tried in a court of law. Joining me today to discuss these events and the scholarship and issues surrounding the 50th anniversaries are two professors of international repute at the School of Culture, History and Language here at the ANU, Professor Robert Kribb and Professor Ariel Harianto. Thank you for coming. Robert, let's start with the abortive coup. In Indonesian schools, as I mentioned, it was taught as carried out by the communists in the West or at least in Australia. It was kind of taught as this mystery that undergraduate students should try to solve through their critical thinking. And then John Roos's book came out, Pretext to Mass Murder, which looked at, uncovered, the role of lower ranked army people involved in the actual events. Is it still a mystery or is Roos' book the definitive account of what happened that night? It's the closest thing that we have to a definitive account, but it's probably not the last word to be had on the events. I think the two really important things that Roos' book show are first, just how those junior officers engaged in the coup, just how they planned, what they failed to plan, why things went wrong. And it also shows that the leader of the Communist Party, Dan Idet, and a very small group around him were also very closely involved in the planning for the coup. What it clearly shows from that is that the vast majority of the members of the Communist Party who were blamed by the New Order government had absolutely nothing to do with the planning for the coup. There were rumors at the time propagated by the army that there was a kind of mass conspiracy in which local branches of the Communist Party would engage in mass murder of their immediate enemies. And we always suspected that that was completely wrong. We now know for certain that that is not the case. What we don't yet know is whether or how much there may have been international involvement in the planning for the coup. We know that Western powers were hoping that the PKI, the Communist Party, would stage an unsuccessful coup which would provide a pretext for its suppression. What we don't know, and we really don't know it, so it may not be the case, what we don't know is whether there was any element of direct manipulation or management or provocation in order to produce that PKI involvement in the coup. Ariel, as well as Indonesian students learning in schools, that the Communist Party was behind the coup, Indonesians had to watch a film, Gayatigapulu S, every on the anniversary. What was the effect of watching that film or that film being shown on the anniversary during the New Order period for so long? I cannot think of a more important propaganda material than the film for at least the first decade of its release. The film was the primary and perhaps the only source of detailed information to a lot of Indonesians of what might have happened during the fifth full month of 1965. And what about young people today? I think the average age of Indonesians is about 28. So what about the younger generation that's come through the education system after the fall of the New Order? What do they know about the coup? Of course, having said that that was a very important propaganda doesn't mean that necessarily that people simply swallow everything that the government have given to them. I have noticed a number of misunderstandings on young people of how to interpret that. I have seen challenges and counter narratives of that. So there's been a mix of reactions to that. But I would say quite safely that, yes, most people were convinced that the communists were responsible for that because of the film. I was down at Lubuang Boya recently where the generals were thrown into the well and more funding was put into this museum of communist atrocities, therefore justifying the coup by the SPY government putting more money in. Is this something that a lot of students, a lot of school students go to? Is the memory of the coup still relevant in this museum? Or is it really just something that is irrelevant now? Well, about two years ago I was there and I was quite surprised with the number of loads of buses that came to visit. But I guess they just wanted to have holiday. I don't think it matters what's there. It's near time on many. But I don't think young people's understanding, perception of the event would be the same today than it was 20 years ago. Most people even have said that they have never heard of the killings, for example. And I'm talking about university undergraduate students in Jakarta who claim they've never heard of them. Well, let's talk about the killings. Robert, you were one of the first scholars to try to investigate the killings through your edited book, The Indonesian Killings of 1965-66. How has scholarship changed over 50 years on the killings? Well, I think the big change has been from an emphasis on the social dimensions of the killing to an emphasis on the role of the military. So when we first began looking at the reasons for killing on such a massive scale, it was very difficult to imagine that it could be an instrumentalist act by the military. The army could have destroyed the Communist Party by killing, say, 10,000 people or even just imprisoning 10,000 people. They didn't need it appeared to kill half a million people. And therefore, we spent a lot of time looking at the forces within society that might have generated hatred, might have generated antagonism towards the Communist Party. And that involved looking both at deep roots, at antagonism between Islam and communism. It also involved looking at the immediate circumstances, the way in which the killing of the generals was portrayed as an act of special brutality and and cruelty. But we put a lot of emphasis on trying to explain why ordinary Indonesians might have taken part in killing other Indonesians. Now, what has gradually become clear over the last 30, 40 years is that the role of the military and the killings was much more important than we had originally supposed. Although those elements of social participation were still very important and all the stories that underpin those that social participation are still reliable. Nonetheless, most of those who were killed were killed after they had been in detention under the control of the military or under the control of security forces. And they were then handed over to militias or or handed over to other army units for killing. So the shift has gone from explaining social involvement, which sometimes involved trying to look at the dark side of Indonesian culture to trying to explain why the military was interested in killing on such a mass scale. Ariel, what about in film and art or television and popular culture? How have the killings been represented over a 50-year period in a nutshell? It's a very big topic and it's quite complex. I've seen over the decades there are many, many works have been done on this in different forms, in art forms, in literature, in sculpture, in theater works. There's a lot of plenty of them. They usually tend to be very suggestive rather than analytical, as you can expect. But one thing that I found a bit discouraging is that in most cases the blame has been put on the victims. In other words, in narratives such as cinemas and literature, for example, the villains of the communists or it's a very innocent villagers who are so gullible to be misled by the evil, the communist, or someone who is so unfortunate to have married the wrong person, the communist. So in the end somehow the killings of those victims were justified one way or another because of either being stupid or being so evil. Okay and recently of course the documentary films The Active Killing and the follow-up sequel The Look of Silence have been released. Joshua Oppenheimer, American producer there, has talked about the impact that this has had in broadening understanding or knowledge of the killings both in Indonesia and throughout the world. What's your summary of the impact of these documentary films? I think the film is important to sustain people's interest, to remind them some of the unfinished business I'd say. So it's very good contributions to that, but also I think the film has been really good in three areas I think. One is the fact it was presented in film with that powerful illusion of something so immediate so you feel that you're there. Right. Secondly the film I think is very important because it's very rare that you have the face and the voice of the killers. We have plenty of other cases of the victims. And finally I think Joshua Oppenheimer has been really good and generous in distribution of the film. He organized with a number of NGOs across the country to get access to the film and free of charge so to speak. So it's very generous of him to do that. What are your thoughts on the active killing? I'm not as positive about the active killing as many people. It emphasizes the role of civilian gangsters, in fact a group of psychopaths in the killing, in a way that I think distorts what we now understand about what took place. Because we now understand that the military took such an important role in the killing. I think that the film partly by virtue of its power as a film ends up giving a misleading impression and it takes us back in many ways to the paradigm that we started with 30 or 40 years ago of a dysfunctional society that is ready to destroy its own people rather than an Indonesian military that was willing to kill its people. And in that respect I think it's a bit of a problem. Well I agree with Robert if you take the film as a precedent for what happened. I don't think the film intends to present that history I think. In fact the film I think is, I think I like the film a lot precisely because it depicts something that is so crazy, so unique, which I would not take as face value as presenting what really happened. It's a bunch of people who blow off about what happened but that I think equal very much of what happened today and that is impunity, the question of impunity. And a lot of the officials of the new order were there in the films showing how they give blessings to these killers. So speaking of impunity obviously there was hope that Kom Nass Ham and the Indonesian government would look into the killings and where can you give us an update Robert of where we're at regarding this? Well there have been a number of attempts to try and establish some kind of a reckoning with the perpetrators or at very least to have an official statement of apology or regret for the killings that took place and thereby a rehabilitation of the victims, a statement that they were innocent victims rather than deserving of what happened to them. And that hasn't happened. There have been hints of apology but I think basically there is no one in government who sees it as in any respect in their interests to offer any kind of apology and the the political cost of an apology would be substantial because to everyone's surprise anti-communism remains very strong in Indonesia. It's one of the few bastions in the world of strong anti-communist feeling. That's partly because of the the effect of films like Gey Tika Bulues. But it's also a little bit of a mystery why communism is so disliked in some circles in Indonesia. Do you have views on that? I slightly differ from Robert in that sense. I think there's been a change among young people these days and for better or worse I think young people care less about what happened 65. That worries me too. So I agree anti-communist propaganda continues today to surprise surprise and the surprise of others and so have been the counter narrative of that. But what worries me is that neither the anti-communist propaganda or the counter movement have appealed to the younger generations these days. So that's another thing for better or worse. This is obviously you mentioned the role of the West before. This is obviously a time of deep reflection hopefully for many in Indonesia and the Indonesian government. But what about in the West? What is the message or what can we reflect upon do you think in the West's role in this period the 1965-66 Cold War period and throughout the Cold War? Well we don't have any definitive knowledge on the contribution of the West either to the coup or to managing or encouraging or organizing the killings. We have fragments of evidence which some people have emphasized but which really don't add up to any significant role and if it was a role it was clandestine and therefore it was the CIA not the people of the West in general. But it seems to me that the big thing is that this took place in the 1960s and the world changed dramatically I think in the mid 1970s with the Cambodian genocide. Cambodian genocide took place on such a huge scale that it changed the terms for the obligation of the West to be involved in human rights abuses in the in the rest of the world. Many terrible things happened in the world before 1975 that were basically ignored or brushed over. The Indonesian killings were one of them. But I mean it's Ariel was it was it were we ignoring I mean Time magazine said that this is the West's best news in in years and I think the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt had said you know kind of the reorientation has taken place over there we were kind of this was the defeat of communism on a doorstep right this was seen as positive. So again I think Robert is correct in indicating that very cautiously about you know making wild accusation of that. But from my side I think it's also definitely clear that the West has been supporting in the sense of being silent for so long it's been justifying what happened or pretending not to see the evils and in many ways protecting and supporting the regime that took a lot of benefits from this bloodbath you know. Okay I think that's all we have time for thank you Professor Robert Cribb and Professor Ariel Harianto and please sign up and watch New Mandala and watch it read our articles online thank you very much.