Title: 50 YEARS AFTER: FROM MASSACRE TO RECONCILIATION
5 Aspects and 5 Episodes of G30S’s Historiography
Speakers: Asvi Warman Adam, Professor, The Indonesian Institute of Sciences

Date: April 21th (Tues.), 2015, 16:30 – 18:00
Place: Tonan-tei Room No. 201, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
After the coup of 1965 the very drastic and simultaneously change on politics, economics and culture took place in Indonesia. From the perspective of human rights, not just the six generals were killed (ASPECT 1), but also there was a massacre that claimed the lives of at least 500,000 (ASPECT 2). Hundreds of thousands of people in the country were arrested and imprisoned mostly without trial. Thousands of people who were abroad deprived of their citizenship after revoked his passport and had to ask for asylum in the country concerned (ASPECT 3).
More than 10,000 exiled to the island of Buru (ASPECT 4) in 1969-1979 worked as forced labor there including Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who wrote several monumental works. Families of those who are thought to be involved G30S obtain stigma for decades in Indonesia, they are not allowed to work as civil servants, military and police (ASPECT 5).

Throughout his rule, the New Order (1965-1998) set an official history that only have a single version of the G30S, the mastermind is the Indonesian Communist Party. Monuments and museums established gradually over 30 years to give legitimacy to the New Order regime and hit the enemy of nation (“extreme left” communist and “extreme right” radical Islam). The “Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI” (G30S/PKI Treachery) film (duration: 4 hours) was aired by all television channels on the evening of Sept.30, every year.

After Suharto’s fall in 1998 there was a reversal of history. Survivors speak out. The mass media, especially television reveals various versions of history that is not possible in the past. This paper suggests there are five important stage in the historiography of 1965. The first phase is the debat who is the mastermind of 1965, PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia) or is this just a matter of internal army. In the second long period, the New Order government wrote and taught their version of the official history. Since 1998 began the third stage, when the voices of the victims began to be heard. Publication of John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder marks
the fourth stage, no longer mastermind G30S disputed but who mastermind the 1965 massacre. At the same time sounding discourse of reconciliation, followed by the formulation of the Law which was later dropped back. Marked a fifth wave with a screening of the film by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (Jagal) and The Look of Silence (Senyap), the perpetrators have issued their testimony.

About the speaker:
Prof. Asvi Warman Adam is a senior historian at The Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Jakarta and currently a visiting research scholar at CSEAS Kyoto University. He got a doctor from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris in 1990 with his dissertation titled with Les relations entre les Indes Neerlandaises et l’Indochine, 1870-1914. Since 1998 he wrote 12 books on historical controversial topics of Indonesia.

Moderator: Kosuke Mizuno, CSEAS, Kyoto University