There is a jolting moment in Jean Rouch’s famous ‘anthropological’ film Moi, Un Noir (1958), about a small, attractive group of young males from then French colonial Niger trying to find work in the more prosperous, but still French colonial, Côte d’Ivoire. We see them periodically at work, but most of the film shows them at leisure, drinking, joking and hooking up with women, so that the atmosphere is generally lively and cheerful. But toward the end, we find the main character, who calls himself Edward G. Robinson (parallel to a friend who names himself Lemmy Caution), walking with a sidekick and an invisible Rouch along a riverside levee. Quite suddenly he starts to re-enact for the camera an ugly scene from his real or imagined past. He was among the many francophone Africans who were sent as colonial cannon-fodder to fight for France against the Ho Chi Minh-led Viet Minh – before the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He seems to enjoy replaying his bloody killing of captured Vietnamese. His sidekick pays no attention, making us realise that he has seen this shtick many times and knows it by heart. So the brief show is meant for Rouch and for us. Once the scene is over, and the cheerful tone resumes, the viewer is immediately assaulted by the obvious doubts and questions. Why did Rouch include this short scene in an otherwise friendly film? Did Oumarou Ganda, aka Edward G. Robinson, who was Rouch’s main collaborator, insist upon it? Why did the African perform this way, quite suddenly? Did he really do what he re-enacted? Why the sudden turn from jokes to horror – and back? Did Rouch intend to situate the Niger boys of that generation within the larger framework of the ferocious decline and fall of France’s empire? Was Ganda releasing a kind of frustration about his life, and resentment of the French, perhaps even of his patron and friend, the famous Rouch?
When I watched the film, some years ago, it occurred to me that the crucial motif to think about was simply impunity. Like everyone else involved in France’s huge, disastrous military endeavour to recover colonial Indochina between 1946 and 1954, the young African soldier could not be punished for ‘acts of war’, no matter how sadistic and in contravention of the Geneva Convention. He would always be a hero of a very small sort thanks to this impunity. At the same time, impunity is nothing without repetitive, boastful demonstration to different audiences. Drifting, poor, irregularly employed, Ganda takes on the menacing ‘Don’t mess with me, motherfucker!’ persona of Edward G. Robinson, the master actor of gangsters in the Hollywood of that era – who usually dies at the end of each film, but comes back as saturninely alive as ever in the next. But
Moi, Un Noir goes on to show the local hollowness of the impunity. In French Côte d’Ivoire, the colonial auhorities put one of Ganda’s comrades in jail, and clearly would not hesitate to nab the hero of Vietnam, if he broke the local laws. At the end he is beaten up by a large drunken Portuguese sailor in a quarrel over a prostitute.
Always somewhere in the back of my mind, this episode tentatively offers me a way to think about Rouch-fan Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary films about the massacres of communists in Indonesia in 1965–66, and their next-century re-enactment before the camera. One of these films – Snake River (2013) – shows (to me at least) a connection between the situations of Rouch and Oppenheimer, as well as deep differences. The grisly re-enactment of the torture and murder of doomed communists on the bank of this river, half a century after they happened, is also about impunity and boastfulness. The two starring elderly brutes take the young man from anti-comunist USA as more or less on their side, just as Edward G. Robinson took Rouch as a sympathic anticolonial Frenchman. But they also evince a kind of ‘Don’t mess with me, motherfucker!’ attitude which they regularly practice for various other local audiences. They are not suspicious of Oppenheimer’s motives, and Oppenheimer gets his own immunity from this guilelessness and also from inviting them and other killers to participate as they wish in the filmwork, not merely as actors, but also as, up to a point, filmmakers. Another tie between the films is, as we shall see later on, the collaborators’ fascination with Hollywood. This time not Edward G. Robinson, outlaw, but Rambo and the Duke, patriots.
Yet Oppenheimer’s performing killers do not have their exact counterparts – so I think – in other parts of Indonesia, for example, East and Central Java, as well as Bali, provinces where the numbers of those barbarously tortured and murdered were far higher than in North Sumatra where the serpentine river flows. The question is why? In what follows I will try to offer a historical explanation that deals with the national-level and official version of 1965 and its commemorative aftermath, and at the same time contrast North Sumatra with East Java, which can be thought of as the most striking opposites.
1 OCTOBER 1965
In the wee hours of that Jakarta morning, six important generals were murdered by soldiers and NCOs belonging to President Sukarno’s elite guards, the Tjakrabirawa Regiment. At 7am a military group calling itself the September 30th Movement announced over national radio that it had taken action to forestall a coup meant to overthrow Sukarno four days later, on Armed Forces Day. The deaths of the generals were not mentioned. A few hours later, two key announcements followed. One declared that in place of the existing cabinet, a large Revolutionary Council would temporarily take power for protection of the president. Its membership was a weird mixture of left- and right-wing civilians and military men, but also included the leadership of the September 30th Movement: one general, one colonel, one lieutenant-colonel, and two or three lower down. The second announcement was even stranger. The Movement said that lower military ranks were enraged by the corruption and sexual license within the military high command, which also neglected the poverty of the soldiery. Therefore, all ranks above that of lieutenant-colonel were abolished, while all supporters of the Movement would be promoted two ranks. A spectacular mutiny, in effect, creating a crisis-solidarity among clique-ridden generals and colonels. The Movement did not last long. After 3pm it went off the air, to be replaced at 7pm by proclamations in the name of General Suharto, commander of the army’s elite Strategic Forces, who, curiously enough, was not a target of the Movement. By midnight, the mutiny had been crushed, and its leaders scattered and on the hopeless run. The capital’s newspapers, except those of the military, were closed down the next morning, and national TV, along with national radio, fell into Suharto’s hands.
THE COMMUNISTS
The Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI), Asia’s oldest, had made the fateful decision – once Indonesian Independence had been recognised by the Dutch colonialists and the rest of the world at the end of 1949 – to take the parliamentary road to power, shutting down a few small guerrilla bands left over from the Revolution of 1945–49. In the first national elections (1955), it was already the fourth of the four huge parties that dominated Parliament. When provincial elections were held two years later in the densely populated and impoverished island of Java, it secured the largest number of voters, but still less than 25 per cent. After that, elections were not held again. The primary reason for this was the government’s decision, in the spring of 1957 to declare nationwide martial law in the face of warlordism, regional discontent and rising, fanatical anti-communism in the so-called Outer Islands, most significantly in Sumatra and Sulawesi. The situation deteriorated until the point in February 1958 when a civil war broke out between the now military-dominated government in Jakarta and its Sumatran competition, the PRRI, or Revolutionary Government of the Republic, led by a mixture of national-level ‘modernist’ Muslim politicians, regional warlords and many of the local inhabitants. A sister-rebellion in Sulawesi soon joined the Sumatrans. The uprising, in spite of being heavily supported by the CIA, was rather quickly crushed by mostly Javanese troops loyal to the High Command, ironically with help from both the Pentagon and Moscow.
1 By the time President Sukarno repealed Martial Law in May 1963, the army had entrenched itself in national power and refused to tolerate any further nationwide elections on grounds of ‘national security’. But, protected by Sukarno, who used it to counterbalance the dangerous anti-communist Army leadership, the PKI rapidly expanded its popular support by putting its energies into its mass organisations rather than the parliamentary Party. By early 1965, it was the largest communist party in the world outside the Communist bloc, with over three million members, and perhaps eighteen million followers in its mass organisations: for women, students, intellectuals, peasants, agricultural labourers, workers, fisherfolk, youths, artists and so on. (It was far better organised and disciplined than its political-party competitors). The shift had momentous consequences. Electoral politics are punctuated in time from this election to the next; but mass organisation politics are tensely ceaseless, day in day out, especially when no elections are foreseeable.
In the early 1960s Indonesia became increasingly polarised between right and left. A major factor was economic decline and an inflation that eventually became beyond control. People on fixed salaries and pensions, mostly civil servants, tried to maintain their standards of living by corruption, embezzlement and investing in farm land. This last not only put pressure on land-hungry small farmers, tenants and rural labourers, but clashed with the PKI’s attempts to enforce a weak land reform law, fiercely resisted by landowners old and new. Where such landowners were respected
ulamas and rich
hajis, resistance was often couched in terms of religion versus atheism. Many of them shrewdly donated surplus hectares to mosques as unalienable
wakaf property, and sat on the boards administering these gifts. Now religious, no longer personal private properties they were difficult for the PKI to seek to redistribute, since even poor and land-hungry Muslims would come militantly to their mosques’ defence. Generally speaking, the collapse of the currency helped to create a pervasive atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and anger. These tendencies help to explain why the largest and worst massacres took place in the country’s villages, where land was most seriously contested and the big-party mass organisations were most active.
The fatal weakness of the PKI emerged from its decision to take the parliamentary road. It was not an irrational decision, given the vast extent of the archipelagic country and its huge ethno-religious diversity, as well as the Party’s commitment to ‘national integrity’, and the menacing proximity of America’s armadas and air power. But it meant that the Party was mostly above-ground, its members well-known nationally and locally, and it had no armed power of its own at all. The PKI attempted to substitute for this weakness an increasingly harsh rhetoric, which did not add to its real power and frightened its every-day enemies. Meantime, the anti-communist army leadership increasingly backed, openly and surreptitiously, right-wing social, political, religious and intellectual organisations. Membership of any political party was banned within its own ranks as a way of keeping the communists out.
ORIGINS OF THE SLAUGHTER
Army leaders, helped by advice and half-concealed support from both the Pentagon and the CIA – then reeling under heavy reverses in Vietnam – had long been looking for a justification for a mass destruction of the Party. Now the September 30th Movement and the murder of the six generals provided the opening they awaited. Almost immediately the army-controlled media started a lurid and successful campaign to convince the citizens that the Movement was simply a tool, manipulated behind the scenes by the Party, and that it was absolutely not an internal military mutiny. The communists were said to have been planning a vast extension of the murders to the civilian population all over the country. The army’s campaign began on 3 October, when the bodies of three of the generals were exhumed from a dry well in a remote part of the Air Force’s Jakarta base. (They had not been killed at home, but kidnapped to this area and then shot dead.) The media, using blurred and retouched photos of the bodies, claimed that the victims had had their eyes gouged out and their genitals sliced off by sex-crazed communist women. (Many years later, thanks to military carelessness, the post-mortems written up on 3 October by experienced forensic doctors, and directed personally to Suharto that same day, came to light. No missing eyeballs or genitals, just the lethal wounds caused by military guns.)
2In a move that would have pleased Goebbels, the Movement’s full name was deleted in favour of Gestapu (GErakan September TigA PUluh). (No one noticed that the word order here is impossible in the Indonesian language, but is syntactically perfect in English. Very few Indonesian generals then had perfect English.) On top of the hyperinflation, this cunning Big Lie propaganda had the desired effect: massive anti-communist hysteria.
The coolly-considered plan of Suharto and his henchmen for the physical and organisational destruction of the Party was based on the huge numbers of its members, affiliates and supporters. To accomplish this mission as rapidly as possible, army personnel were not enough; civilians had to be involved on a large scale, with half-concealed military direction, financing, intelligence, transportation and even the supply of weapons. As secretive corporate bodies notionally devoted to external defence against foreign enemies, armies almost never boast about mass murder (see the mendacious handling of the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese military and the near-genocide of Armenians by the Turkish army). International scandal was to be avoided as much as possible. National armies are not supposed to slaughter their fellow-citizens, especially, as in the case of the PKI, if they are unarmed and put up very little resistance.
Who were the primary collaborators? The two provinces with the highest number of victims, Muslim East Java and Hindu ‘Paradise Island’ Bali are exemplary. Both provinces were densely populated, ethnically quite homogeneous, and with strong, conservative, traditionalist leaderships. The key thing to bear in mind (when we come to consider North Sumatra) is that they were longstanding strongholds of the two well-rooted legal, ‘national’ political parties, other than the PKI, both with very large organisational and popular bases. In East Java it was the traditionalist, orthodox Muslim Nahdlatul Ulama, with its militant youthful-male affiliate Ansor. In Bali, it was the PNI (National Party) led locally by landowners, Hindu priests and members of the two upper castes of Satrias and Brahmins. Small Catholic and Protestant parties with their affiliates were also used in places where these religious minorities were influential. (The large ‘modernist’ Muslim party, Masjumi, fiercely anti-communist, was organisationally unavailable, since it been banned and disbanded in 1959 for its role in the civil war of 1958–59, of which more later.)
These civilians were not professional killers. Once the massacres were over, they ‘returned to ordinary life’, while the military went on killing large numbers of people in East Timor, Aceh and Papua over the final two decades of the Suharto dictatorship. Many of them, in an atmosphere of media-generated hysteria, genuinely believed that ‘they will kill us if we don’t kill them first’.
*Needless to say, the military had no interest in punishing any of those involved, but their immunity was also guaranteed in part by the national institutions to which they were affiliated.
Aftermaths? During his brief presidency (October 1999–July 2001) Abdurrahman Wahid, the charismatic, ‘progressive’ and politically astute Nahdlatul Ulama leader, decided to ask forgiveness from surviving ex-communists. He did so, however, not for individual killers, but for Ansor in particular and the NU in general. (No other national-level politician has followed his example.) More striking is the fact that over the past decade many young members of Ansor, born well after 1965, began systematically to help communists who had managed to survive the massacres and very many years of brutal imprisonment. Fairly recently a reconciliation meeting was held in Jogjakarta between NU and ex-communist women. Everything went well, until an elderly communist described in detail how she had been raped and tortured by Ansor members. As she spoke a young Muslim girl stood up, ashen-faced, and then fainted. Among the rapists and torturers she recognised her own father. It is interesting to note that, quite early on, stories circulated widely that ‘amateur’ killers had mental breakdowns, went mad, or were were haunted by terrifying dreams and fears of karmic retribution. Otherwise, silence. Nothing to boast about in public or on TV, one might say.
**MEDAN AND NORTH SUMATRA: LOCAL HISTORy
3Oppenheimer’s city of Medan in North Sumatra was and is very different. The strange, dull name of the city already tells one something. It simply means ‘field’ or ‘open space’. It was the last major city begotten by Dutch colonialism – beginning to rise only in the 1870s and 1880s, when the colonial authorities realised that the surrounding fertile and near-empty flatlands were perfect for the development of large-scale agribusiness – tobacco, rubber, palm-oil and coffee plantations. One of the earliest oil-fields in the colony was also discovered there just in time for the automotive revolution. The area was thinly inhabited by Malays, related to the Malays across the narrow Straits of Malacca in today’s Malaysia. In so far as there were any rulers at all, these were very small-scale and without much armed power, even if some called themselves ‘Sultan’. For their own reasons, the Dutch protected these petty rulers and allowed them to share in the profits of the expanding economy; but the ‘Sultans’ had to do what they were told.
Medan was created in the era when the Dutch colonial regime abandoned monopolistic mercantilism and adopted British-enforced economic liberalism and open markets. Hence a motley crowd of investors – Dutch, British, German, Austrian, American and eventually Chinese and Japanese – poured in. From the start there was the huge problem of creating a submissive labour force. The local Malays were too few and anyway not interested, and the large numbers of young Chinese imported from Southeast China and Malaya-Singapore soon proved too refractory and mobile to be long usable. The answer came with the recruitment of indentured labourers from poverty-stricken, overpopulated Java. It was a kind of modern slavery. Labourers were not only pitilessly exploited, but had to sign contracts preventing them from quitting and making sure that their ‘debts’ to the companies that transferred them to Sumatra could rarely be repaid – thanks largely to company stores. Thus, at least until the onset of the Great Depression, Medan was a bit like a Gold Rush town.
Non-indentured Javanese moved in too, serving as small and medium merchants, lawyers, newspapermen, teachers, foremen, accountants, nationalist activists and civil servants. ‘The Field’ was thus far more variegated than any other Indonesian city, including even the capital Batavia (Jakarta today): Europeans of various kinds, Chinese, Americans, Indians, Japanese, Arabs, Minangkabau, Bataks of many sorts, Acehnese, Javanese and so on. None formed a dominant majority. As a consequence, religious variegation too: Protestant British, Dutch, Americans, Germans and Toba Bataks, Catholic Dutch and Austrians, Confucian and Buddhist Chinese, Hindu and Muslim Indians, strong Muslims like the Minangkabau and Acehnese, and syncretic Hindu-Islamic Javanese. Of course, there was always a stable racial hierarchy, with Whites and ‘honorary-white’ Japanese at the top, Chinese, Arabs and Indians in the middle, and natives mostly at the bottom. ‘The Field’ also was notorious for its Wild West social mores – gambling and prostitution were widespread, and handled mainly by mainly Chinese tokés and an ethnically diverse assortment of thugs. (To get a nice picture of Medan at that time, one can profitably read the final, confessional chapter of Mangaradja Onggang Parlindungan’s weird masterpiece, Tuanku Rao.) Opium was a state monopoly.
In early 1942, the Japanese military, having disposed of the British in Malaya and Singapore, took over the Dutch East Indies in a few weeks. Sumatran and Bornean oil was the military’s main interest, but the plantation economy also fell into Japanese hands. However, effective Allied bombing of Japanese shipping soon made the export-oriented agribusiness economy collapse, leaving in place only domestic demand and the military’s local needs. In North Sumatra, the indenture system broke down to make way for smallholder producers of foodstuffs like rice, vegetables, tea and coffee, as well as castor oil. To make this new wartime economy work the Japanese authorities opened the door to ‘illegal’ occupiers of agribusiness lands, including a huge wave of Protestant Toba Bataks from the interior.
After the American atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese state surrendered unconditionally, but several months passed before the British and Dutch could bring colonial military power back to the Indies, and in this vacuum the Republic of Indonesia was born on 17 August 1945. In the exhilarating, chaotic first year of the Revolution (1945–46), there were a number of regions in Sumatra and Java which experienced vengeful revolutionary onslaughts on ‘collaborators’ with Japanese and Dutch, semi-feudal local aristocracies, abusive civil servants, and so on. The most chaotic and bloodthirsty of these occurred – unsurprisingly – in North Sumatra. The local petty sultanates were overthrown with ease; many of the Malay ‘aristocrats’ were murdered and their wealth stolen or confiscated. Indonesia’s greatest poet, Amir Hamzah, was among the victims. Toba Bataks, Acehnese, Simalungun Bataks and Javanese seized Japanese guns, and fought each other for the spoils without being able to establish any coherent political order. The Republic’s Socialist-dominated government was appalled by all this, knowing that it would blacken the country’s name overseas, enrage colonial-era investors wanting their properties back, and alienate possible diplomatic allies. Gradually, with military help, some kind of order was established, after which the Dutch succeeded in reoccupying Medan’s plantation belt. But not for long.
In December 1949, after four years of intermittent war and negotiations, the Netherlands signed over sovereignty of the old colony to a ‘Federal Republic of Indonesia’, one of whose components was North Sumatra (then still called East Sumatra), headed by surviving local aristocrats. But within a year federalism disappeared, the aristocrats succumbed, and today’s Unitary Republic was established. The central condition of this transfer of sovereignty, insisted on by the rapacious Americans, was that all Dutch (and British and American) pre-war properties be returned to their colonial-era owners. The situation was particularly volatile in the surroundings of Medan. Even in the last two decades of colonial rule, ‘the Field’ had become a hotbed of anticolonial nationalism. This trend accelerated in the last year of Japanese rule and after the Declaration of Independence. The radical language of ‘Revolution’ made a deep impression too, mostly for the good. But revolution also allowed hardened criminal elements to operate under its aegis, sometimes with half-genuine revolutionary commitment.
North Sumatra was a natural zone for successful recruiting by a reborn PKI, which had been suppressed by the Dutch after the failed uprisings of 1926–27 and later by the Japanese military. In the 1950s, the single most militant organisation there was the Sarekat Buruh Perkebunan Indonesia, or Sarbupri, a huge union for plantation labourers, whose mass base lay in the once indentured Javanese labour force, combined with leadership mostly provided by educated Javanese and Protestant Batak activists. It is useful to note that the PKI Politburo, headed from 1951 on by D. N. Aidit, had real trouble with Sarbupri’s militancy, since the Party, having chosen to join the parliamentary system (at the national and local levels) was worried by unauthorised local revolutionary activities which could damage its cautious political strategy. A number of Sarbupri leaders were demoted, expelled or disciplined. Sarbupri also got political support from the smallholder migrants of the Japanese occupation whom the returning white planters were eager to kick out or subdue. Strikes in Tandjung Morawa, in the plantation belt, only 14 kilometers from Medan’s city centre, even brought down one of the early constitutional-era cabinets.
***Medan proved an especially difficult city to handle from Jakarta because there was no ‘traditional’ social order to work with, and no ethnic, party-political or religious group in a dominant position. It contained, proportionately, the highest number of ‘foreign Asian’ inhabitants. Situated close to Singapore, it was also notorious for its talented smugglers. In addition, the fractious local military often created additional problems.
When the Revolution of 1945 broke out, the national army was formed in a very unusual way. The core of its middle- and upper-echelon leaders had been low-level NCOs and junior officers in Japanese-created auxiliary forces trained to help the Imperial armies, if and when the Allies landed, in local guerilla warfare. Since Sumatra and Java were controlled by different Japanese armies not subordinated one to the other, the Peta in Java and the much smaller Giyugun in Sumatra had no organic connection. Almost all recruits to the new national army were in their twenties, no matter what posts they held, so that it was usual for commmanders to be chosen by their own men, rather than by any higher authorities. In the 1950s therefore, the High Command in Jakarta had great difficulties in controlling local, and locally popular, military officers, who frequently refused to carry out orders and sometimes acted like warlords. Medan was a striking case. The Protestant Toba Batak commander for the years between 1950 and 1957 was Colonel Simbolon, who controlled large-scale smuggling operations through Medan’s port, and refused to be transferred. But when he joined the anti-Jakarta coalition which in February 1958 started the PRRI rebellion, he was quickly toppled by a counter-coalition of the High Command, leftist local Javanese juniors and the clique of his successor, Lieut. Colonel Djamin Gintings, a Karo Batak who claimed to speak for Karos oppressed by their distant Toba cousins. Once installed, Ginting turned on the leftist Javanese officers. Many Islamic organisations, mostly controlled by Minangkabau, who also supported the PRRI, were crippled by its defeat and the ban on the Masjumi modernist Islamic party.
4The other crucial development came from the mess created by President Sukarno’s rash decision in December 1957 to nationalise all Dutch enterprises in retaliation for The Hague’s constant refusal to settle diplomatically the conflict over Western Papua, which was supposed to have been solved early in the 1950s. Takeovers were initiated by unions affiliated with the PKI’s secular rival, the PNI, but the communists quickly joined in. Not for long. The Army High Command used its emergency powers to take control of all the nationalised enterprises, claiming that they were vital assets for the nation. For the first time in its history the military obtained vast economic and financial resources, especially plantations, mines, trading companies, utilities, banks, and so forth. Needless to say, strikes were forbidden in all these sectors. Since these sectors, owned hitherto by foreigners, were those where leftist and nationalist unions had had the greatest freedom, the military had to develop an effective corporatist counterforce. In partial imitation of the PKI’s SOBSI, a nationwide federation of its affiliated unions, the army created SOKSI. Its name indicated the intentions of its creators. K stood for
karyawan, a corporatist neologism for ‘functionary’, a term that covered everyone – management, office staff and white-collar workers, as well as labour. One could think of SOKSI as an agglomeration of ‘company’ unions. Thus the B in SOBSI, standing for
buruh (labour), was to be eliminated.
In the Medan area, and in the face of SOBSI’s well-established presence, the military needed substantial manpower outside its own active ranks to impose its will on the huge plantation belt. It so happened that an instrument was at hand. In 1952, the Army Chief of Staff, the Mandailing Batak A. H. Nasution, was suspended for his role in a failed mini-coup in Jakarta. Still young and ambitious, he decided to form an electoral organisation of his own, which he called IPKI, Ikatan Pendukung Kemerdekaan Indonesia, or League of Supporters of Indonesian Independence, described as a movement opposed to the existing major parties, especially the PKI.
5In the 1955 elections, it won only four seats, but it was evident that the strongest of its bases lay in Medan. In that year, Nasution was reinstated as Army Chief of Staff by Prime Minister Burhanuddin Harahap, scion of a clan of Southern Bataks (Angkola) well-comnnected to the Nasution clan – but he kept control of IPKI. After the crushing of the PRRI, but with Martial Law in solid place, IPKI developed a ‘youth wing’, parallel to those of the major legal parties, which came to be called Pemuda Pantjasila (PP), nominally composed of retired soldiers and civilian veterans of the Revolution. The key figure in this Pemuda Pantjasila was another Mandailing Batak, a serious Medan gangster and ex-boxer called Effendy Nasution. These gangsters had had their own clashes with the PKI youth organisation, Pemuda Rakjat, over ‘turf’ as well as ideology, and were ferociously anti-Communist. But as members of a ‘national organisation’, sponsored by the top Army officer, they had excellent protection, also for their protection rackets. In the years between 1959 and 1965 the military and the Medan gangsters collaborated more and more closely with each other. The PP significantly helped SOKSI to control the plantation belt against formidable SOBSI/Sarbupri resistance. Thus when Suharto decided to inaugurate the massacre of communists, the Medan underworld, dressed up as Pemuda Pantjasila, was ready to ‘help’ and accustomed to carry out ‘confidential’ Army directives.
The contrast with the East Java plantation belt is striking. We have seen how in this zone the army could rely on the Nahdlatul Ulama’s huge, and legal, mass-organisations, as well as the authority of the mainly Javanese territorial civilian bureaucracy, manned heavily by conservative elements in the PNI. In Medan, the NU presence was minimal, the PNI was factionalised, while the once-powerful modernist Muslim party Masjumi had been banned in 1959. No united civil bureaucracy existed in such an ethnically complex melting pot. This is why, when the massacres drew to an end, NU and Ansor members in Java generally returned to ‘normal’ religious life (and soon came into conflict with the military), while Medan’s gangsters returned to another ‘normal life’, of extortion, blackmail, ‘protection’, gambling dens, brothels and so on, while staying close to the military. But with new patrons, as time passed. General Nasution, now retired, gradually faded away. Eventually, in 1980, the PP’s leadership went to Yapto Soerjosoemarno, the Eurasian son of a Surakartan aristocrat and general, and a Jewish-Dutch mother.
Yapto, ice-cold mercenary killer and big-game hunter, had long been close to the Medan gangsters, but was also a relative of Mrs. Suharto. Officially, PP was an independent organisation, but it always supported Suharto and his policies, and helped to enforce the steady series of electoral victories by Golkar, the regime’s nonparty party-of-the-regime. It remained loyal to its patron right up to his abdication. (Since then, it has found no steady patron, and its power and unity have visibly declined.) Meanwhile, the NU, a national party, tried its best to compete with Golkar in elections, and for a time was the most significant component of the largely impotent legal opposition.
PETRUS
It is instructive to note what happened when Suharto decided, in 1983, to liquidate substantial numbers of petty gangsters. (In the press the killers were initially termed
penembak-penembak misterieus i.e. mysterious shooters, quickly and sardonically given the acronym Petrus, i.e. Saint Peter, since the operational mastermind was Catholic, Eurasian Lieutenant-General Benny Murdani.) In Java several thousand people were brutally murdered, in the dead of night, by Army commandos in mufti. In Medan their opposite numbers went untouched. The reason for the difference is clear. In 1980, Central Java was unexpectedly rocked by a coordinated wave of violence against local Chinese, in which petty gangsters played a visible role. Many of these people had worked as electoral enforcers for Suharto’s
éminence grise, Major-General Ali Murtopo, who also headed Suharto’s private political intelligence apparatus, Opsus. For an always-suspicious tyrant, it looked as if his once-trusted accomplice might be flexing his own political muscles, to show what his shady apparatus might do before and during the next elections. The unexpected and unauthorised anti-Chinese violence hit Suharto’s nerves in another way. Twentieth-century Java had a long history of popular Sinophobic movements, which could spread alarmingly fast if the circumstances were suitable. Furthermore, the successes of Suharto’s New Order ‘development’ economy depended heavily on the energies of the country’s Chinese, whose safety and prosperity were excellent signs of stability in the eyes of foreign investors. Thus the liquidation of Murtopo’s gangster network can be understood both as reassurance to the Chinese, and as depriving Murtopo himself of any independent political power. Not long afterward, he was exiled as Ambassador in Kuala Lumpur where he succumbed to a heart attack. Nothing like this happened in distant Medan, since the gangsters were reliable allies of the local military, not dangerous minions of a key figure in Suharto’s own Jakarta entourage. If, as periodically happened, they were behind anti-Chinese violence, the main motive was not Sinophobia but a raising of the level of protection payments. It is instructive, one may note in passing, that in his bizarre semi-ghosted memoir,
Otobiografi: Pikiran, Ucapan dan Tindakan Saya (‘Autobiography: My Thoughts, Statements and Actions’) Suharto boastfully took responsibility for these extrajudicial killings, in the following dishonest manner:
The press has been busy writing about the mysterious deaths of a number of people, referring to the shooting of thugs as ‘mysterious shootings’ or ‘mysterious marksmen’, or in short form ‘Petrus,’ etc. A number of politicians and a group of intellectuals have spoken or written about all this. The public too has been busy discussing it. […] There is nothing mysterious about what happened. The reality is that before these events, the People were already terrified. They experienced threats from evildoers, robbers, murderers, and so on. […] The actions of these criminals overstepped the bounds of human decency. For example, an elderly person was not only robbed of some of his property, but was also killed. Isn’t that beyond the bounds of human decency? If you want to rob someone, well go ahead, but don’t kill your victim. Then there was the case of a woman who was robbed of her belongings, and was then raped by these thugs, right in front of her husband. That’s too much! Could one simply ignore what was happening? Obviously we [all of us,
kita] had to provide a
treatment, and take decisive action. But what kind of decisive action? Well, it had to be violent. But this violence did not mean just shooting, dor! Dor! [an Indonesian onomatopoeia for gunshots] Not at all! But where the thugs resisted, well, willy-nilly they had to be shot. They were killed because they resisted.
Their bodies then were left where they died. This was to be shock therapy, a real shock. In this way the public would realise that there were still forces that could take action against, and suppress, criminal activity. [Emphasis in original]
But the dictator never boasted about his masterminding the massacres of 1965.
With this comparative background in mind, it becomes easier to understand the peculiar impunity flaunted by Oppenheimer’s collaborators in his films
Snake River and
The Act of Killing (2012). They had been professional criminals all their adult lives, and if some of the leaders had political ambitions these were essentially local or provincial, aiming little higher than the governorship of North Sumatra, and far removed from Jakarta. In power, they pursued traditional gangsters’ interests, money, respect (fear), immunity from the law, and some political positions. They were not associated with any nationally important political or religious organisations beyond Suharto’s own Golkar, which they served obediently. They had worked with the military from well before the massacres, and carried out the killings of communists with savage efficiency. They did not organise substantial Sinophobic murders after 1966, nor did they put the squeeze on local foreign investors. One could say that, in an odd way, they even regarded themselves as a sort of half-hidden left hand of the New Order Leviathan: uncivil servants.
6 Best of all, when Suharto turned on gangsters in Java, the Medan ‘boys’ were left untouched. Not surprisingly, there was no question of Abdurrahman Wahid’s plea for forgiveness.
Nonetheless, we can surmise that they had their disappointments. One of these must have been lack of national-level recognition for their role in the massacres, the one moment in their otherwise humdrum criminal lives where they could imagine themselves as among the saviors of their country. The problem lay with ‘Jakarta’, where Suharto and his henchmen handled the annual commemoration of 1965 by concentrating mainly on 1 October’s first victims. Every town had streets named after these generals, and in Jakarta a special museum was created in their heroic honour. A state-sponsored film – for which annual viewings were compulsory in all schools and colleges – consisted entirely of mourning for the generals, and execration of the diabolical PKI. But in Medan, no general, or indeed any military officer, had been killed.
Furthermore, the basic official account of the last three months of 1965 depended on a rhetoric of popular fury at PKI bestiality. American journalists at the time liked to explain, in colonial-speak, that the primitive population had run
amok. The military’s propagandists employed this idea, describing the Army’s role as curbing and calming down this wave of ‘spontaneous’ popular violence. (In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that the masssacres in Central Java started with the arrival of the red-beret commandos in mid-October, and in East Java one month later when these professional killers moved east.)
Thus, there were no heroic slaughterers honoured by the Suharto regime. The most notorious red-beret officers never made it up to the top levels of the military. Finally, the euphemistic official language of the regime precluded heroism. Thus communists arrested by the military, then executed or imprisoned for years without trial, were said to have been di-amankan, which can be translated as ‘secured’, for the sake of keamanan or ‘public security’. In later years, when generals got the itch to write their memoirs, they used the same euphemisms. They had ‘secured’ communists, not least to protect them from ‘the anger of the people’. The regime never boasted about the massacres and never announced any figures of the number who had died. This entire propaganda strategy, also aimed at foreign audiences, left no national place for the ‘heroic killers’ in Medan’s imagery. But hadn’t the gangsters helped to save the country? So, they set up their own monument to themselves, a 30-feet-high chrome ‘66’ next to the city’s railway station.
Furthermore, had these old-timers been adequately rewarded in practical terms? If one looks at the two killers featured in Snake River, one can see that they are actually nobodies. Elderly men, with decaying muscles and petty bourgeois clothes and homes, few visible signs of prestige, no medals, only local fear. To be sure, the top gangsters have acquired splashy mansions, luxurious cars, expensive kitschy jewelry and wristwatches, and some important but local official posts. But these emoluments were not, primarily, immediate rewards for yesterday’s ‘heroism’, nor were they much then publicised, but rather evolved incrementally over mundane decades of dictatorship and criminality. They are not ‘in national history’, in a country where national history is very important, and national heroes abundant.
This condition helps to explain some of the peculiarities of the figures we can see in Oppenheimer’s films. His camera offers them the possibility of commemoration, and transcendence of age, routine and death. When the more ghastly of the two killers in
Snake River is shown in his petty bourgeois home with his wife and family, he is re-narrating some of the most terrible tortures and murders that he inflicted. The family is used to this endless domestic reenactment. His plump wife giggles to keep him happy, and the children pay no attention at all. (Compare this with the indifference of Edward G. Robinson’s friend to the creepy reenactment on the levee). He boasts of his magical powers, saying that the widows of communists come to him for healing. True? Maybe, but their arrival at his house is merely a sign that forty years later they are still afraid of him. His invisible medal is this abiding terror. A kind of dim hierarchy is still visible, when the two veterans have to decide who will play communist and who killer.
They have a commemorative idea about film, actually Hollywood films which they loved from their teens. The Lone Ranger, Batman, Patton, Shane, Samson, MacArthur and Rambo – all real or imaginary men – are figures of immortality for killers who are heroic patriots, not grand gangsters. This ‘cosmopolitan’ idolising does not mean that the Medan ‘boys’ do not live within local cultures – supernaturalism, Gothic horror comics, kitschy melodrama. Oppenheimer thus comes to them as a kind of providential ‘Hollywood’ ally. They will die soon, but maybe he will make them immortal.
Yet they are stuck. They do not have available to them anything that can represent the communists. While Suharto was still dictator, his regime could issue must-watch films showing the bestiality of the PKI, and mourning the murdered generals. But such films have gone out of circulation since his fall fifteen years go. The ‘Medan boys’ have nothing like this, and the local history of events over 45 years ago is gradually headed for oblivion or myth. Thus some of the ‘boys’ have to act the communists themselves, sometimes even in drag. As nationalist gangsters, however, they have no place in a national history into which the Indonesian Army as a corporate institution with an ‘honorable’ patriotic record can be inserted. Their gangsterism is filmable only in terms of costume, body language and kitschy imaginative success. (This attitude resembles the outlook of American Cosa Nostra people, who, journalists report, love going to gangster movies and identify with the FBI!)
At the same time, these old men realise that they are also within a market of industrial fantasies, access to which comes through the American, who is young enough to be their son. This is a market, which, over the years, has increasingly blurred the boundaries between the established genres of heroic war films, gangster films and horror films, at the expense of the former and to the advantage of the latter. (This condition makes it imaginable to have
Apocalypse Now replace
Bataan.) But it also allows for fantasies not available in 1965. We can take Anwar Congo (the main character in
The Act of Killing) as exemplary. He proudly shows himself as a sadistic murderer, yet he is haunted, or so he plays it, by the ghosts of his victims; but then he congratulates himself on helping to send his prey straight to Heaven, as if in a ‘black mass’ retroversion of jihad theology. He displays his authority by making his favourite, large, overweight henchman Herman dress up as a communist woman. ‘She’ appears with the depressing glitzy outfit of a well-off, middle-aged transvestite in a TV competition. A real communist woman, a gaunt, shrivelled, terrified widow in her seventies would never do. Actually there are no limits (let’s see what we can do!) except that only he and his boys can appear in the film. There is a kind of despair at work.
This despair is actuated by Oppenheimer. The gangsters re-enact whatever they wish and can imagine, but they cannot control what ‘their’ film will be like in the end. Oppenheimer is a conundrum. He is there, like Rouch, beyond the camera’s reach, an unseen interrogator, pal, witness, kid, judge, motherfucker. They have no idea how to control him, because they are his actors and there is no final script that they master. He is not part of their film but they are part of his. There are no famous Hollywood films with invisible interrogating Joshua Oppenheimer’s in them. This is a source of anxiety. (Oppenheimer has written to me that while many of these people trust him almost completely, others are becoming suspicious that he may be betraying them.)
The inevitable response is a strange mixture of motivations. Excess first: ‘Beat this, motherfucker! I sent them all to Heaven and they should grateful to me.’ Second, recourse to the filmic super-natural: ‘That bastard Ramli was so magically invulnerable that it us took ages to kill him, and we had to cut off his dick first!’ Third, pride: Today, so many years after 1965, ‘They are still terrified of us.’ Fourth is hope: ‘We’ll be famous around the world, even after we die, no matter if young Indonesians don’t want to think about us, and the government will never give us the monuments we deserve.’
****Fifth: Truthfulness: ‘There was no amok, and we loyally carried out the instructions of the national army.’ Last: the smugness of impunity. ‘Kid, we can re-enact anything at all, and there is nothing anyone, including you, can do to us.’ All the same, they are, like every one else, under sentence of death from the day they were born. They know they will soon be buried, and nobody will give a damn. There is no one who can send them straight to Heaven.
NOTES
* Comment from Joshua Oppenheimer: Here I think my experience in Sumatra has taught me something different. All of the killers I have met
knew that it was
not ‘a kill or be killed’ situation, but could make themselves
believe otherwise, both at the time and in the decades afterwards. This contradiction between what people believe and what people know is one of the things I have come to understand makes killing possible. The perpetrators I’ve worked with will go through extraordinary intellectual contortions to justify and celebrate what they did, no matter what they
knew to be facts. For example, Amir Hasan (who appears in
Snake River) killed his teachers’ college friend, Subandi, the religious instructor from the mosque and the man who sang the call to prayer. He knew Subandi to be the most religious man in the village, but he was also in the PKI. Hasan rarely bothered with the mosque, but when he did he would without fail meet Subandi there. Still, Hasan could kill Subandi because Subandi was ‘anti-god’. I do not think Hasan believed, at the time anyway, that Subandi’s religiosity was just a guise. He knew Subandi was religious, but he was whipped up, and whipped himself up, into
believing the contrary. People are ready to disregard knowledge – especially when it serves their interest, when they stand to gain money, power, their victim’s land or wife or livestock. They can believe things they know are false, and with just as much conviction or passion as they might feel toward beliefs that they know are true.
** Comment from JO: I’m not convinced that this boasting is unique to Medan. In 1998, the flamboyant Brigadier General Herman Sarens Soediro said ‘Like in the old days, when only seven communists kidnapped [army generals] and wanted to change Pancasila, I ran over a hundred men with a tank. I was protected by the imperative to ensure the survival of the state’s sovereignty and protection of the population. Why should I be scared? I don’t care.’ (AKSI, 2, 100, 13–19 October 1998; translated by J. Oppenheimer).
*** Comment from JO: One might also mention some of Sarbupri’s successes. During the hyperinflation of the early 1960s, Sarbupri was famous for securing its workers payment in the basic essentials (
‘tjatuh’ in Sumatran plantation lingo). These included high quality rice, salted fish, milk powder, sugar, salt, eggs, oil, kerosene, clothing, etc. They also brought cultural activities even to remote plantations, including film screenings and theatre performances. These achievements are summed up with derision in the 1967 NBC special report,
Indonesia: The Troubled Victory: ‘Indonesia has a fabulous potential wealth in natural resources, and the New Order wants it exploited.’ Cut to a Goodyear plantation near Tebing Tinggi, North Sumatra. ‘The communists still work the rubber, but now they are prisoners, and they work at gunpoint. The New Order wants Goodyear to come back. And Goodyear and other capitalists are anxious to return, but not all their findings are happy. When the communists ran the plantations, they built schools, raised salaries, but productivity didn’t rise, and profits went out the window.’ The communists never ran the plantations, and NBC doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that the primary purpose of a public sector company might be something other than making profits for the owners, and instead to provide jobs and lift people out of poverty.
**** Comment from JO: So they build their own monuments, like the ‘66’ monument by the train station in Medan, and the obelisk in the village of Kampung Kolam, celebrating the massacre of the villagers, and inventing their own savagely tortured and killed Pemuda Pancasila members to parallel the national fantasy of generals mutilated by sex-crazed communists in Jakarta.