Bibliographical Essay

The Indonesian anti-communist killings in 1965-6 have until recently attracted little scholarly attention within Indonesia. The New Order regime did what it could to block research.

Behaviourist thinking had considerable influence on early thinking about the massacres; see overview in Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Some well-known scholars of Indonesia like Clifford Geertz and Anthony Reid used behaviourist language in the 1960s and 1970s when alluding to the Indonesian killings, and as late as 2003 one historian still described them as a ‘vast popular irruption'; Theodore Friend, Indonesian Destinies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 99). However, book-length work in this vein has tended to come from journalists, notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning John Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval. It has also been prominent in Indonesian accounts that remain close to the army's narrative of the period; Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismail Saleh, The Coup Attempt of the ‘September 30 Movement' in Indonesia (Jakarta: Pembimbing, 1968).

Most scholarly work on the episode has, by contrast, been consciously political.

The political intrigues in Jakarta on the night of 1 October 1965 have been of central interest. What links did the ‘30 September Movement' have with the PKI, the military, Sukarno, or even Suharto? On this topic, refer to military historian Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia, rev. edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). John Roosa's Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) critically and absorbingly discusses all previous work on the episode before coming up with his own conclusions. This will remain definitive for some time to come. The effect of recent research has been to tighten the net around the military (Kammen and McGregor, eds., The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-1968 ; Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (London: Routledge, 2018); Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Essential background is the military history of Ulf Sundhaussen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics, 1945-1967 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1982).

A good older study on the PKI, at the centre of the contention, has recently been reissued, Rex Mortimer's Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959-1965 (Singapore: Equinox, 2006 [1974]). Links between political parties and underlying religious persuasions are expertly explored by M. C. Ricklefs, Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present (Singapore: NUS, 2012). The complicity of the United States government is described in Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

One of the reasons (beyond the behaviourist instinct) that early work on the massacres emphasised societal dynamics was that they showed so much regional variation in timing and extent. The particular savagery in the countryside of East Java, for example, was seen to indicate Javanese cultural motives. A growing number of regional studies have focused precisely on questions of the state-society interface that provides the backdrop for the killings. Among the best of these is still Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Others have discussed the impact of the violence on women (Saskia E. Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)); on literature (Keith Foulcher, Social Commitment in Literature and

the Arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture ’, 1950-1965 (Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1986)); and on film (Krishna Sen, Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order (London: Zed Books, 1994)).

Contemporary awareness of the 1965 massacres received a boost within Indonesia and abroad from two Joshua Oppenheimer films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), and by the International People's Tribunal 1965 held in The Hague in 2015 (‘1965, Today: Living with the Indonesian Massacres', special edition of Journal of Genocide Research 19.4 (2017)).