ABSTRACT
In the history books of the Suharto regime, the killings of half a million members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia and other leftist organizations in 1965-66 were non-events. The only significant killing that occurred at that time was supposedly the killing of six army generals and a lieutenant in Lubang Buaya, a small village on the outskirts of Jakarta, on 1 October 1965. The regime commemorated the killing every year with a national day of remembrance and a ceremony called ‘Sacredness of Pancasila Day’ (Hari Kesaktian Pancasila). With textbooks, films, and field trips to the Museum of the Extreme Left at the site where the killings of the army generals took place, the regime tried to make school children feel repulsed and horrified by this violence, and to feel thankful that Suharto had taken power to save the country from any further treasonous and treacherous acts. If many Indonesians were killed at that time, then it was a matter far removed from Suharto’s rise to power. It was only a matter of old feuds among civilians surfacing at a time of anarchy. The regime’s most comprehensive propaganda book, authored by the army historian Nugroho Notosusanto and the prosecutor Ismail Saleh (Notosusanto and Saleh 1989), devoted all of two paragraphs to the mass killing, or ‘clash’ in their terminology, and concluded that ‘the bloodbath among members of the society was directly related to events in the past’. The authors suggested that civilians who had been previously maligned or harmed by the PKI took their revenge in 1965-66. The military itself had no relation to the killings.
