ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the mass violence in Indonesia in recent years is its inscrutability. If the violence could be explained, the solution to prevent it from occurring again would appear more or less obvious. Under the Suharto regime, it was fairly easy to understand most cases of large-scale violence as state violence. Even the ‘mysterious killings’ of neighbourhood hoodlums in 1983-1984 were not so mysterious, as it was an open secret that the military was organizing the executions. Indeed, it was too easy to explain mass violence. A dictator and an omnipresent military, with its myriad territorial commands and freedom to conduct covert operations, could be blamed for just about every case of mass violence, from the mass killings in 1965-1966 onward. However, once the Suharto regime, the major cause of political violence in the past, disappeared from the scene, the violence did not abate. Having only this paradigm of state violence, many analysts of Indonesian politics have been caught flat-footed in trying to understand recent cases of mass violence that have emerged from complex social conditions. Analysts have either tried to fit these cases into the paradigm of state violence (trying to determine who among the army officers and Suharto’s cronies was the hidden mastermind, or dalang, and what his political motives were) or have reverted to the Suharto regime’s own perspective: that the Indonesian people are primitive and prone to conflicts over primordial identities – religion, race and ethnicity (Siahaan 1998; Mangunkusumo 1999).1
