The year 1965 in Indonesia

5 October 2015

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 5 October 2015 issue)

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or did something very bad happen in Indonesia in 1965?
Hazy Head

Fifty years ago, Indonesia suffered a wave of massacres across the vast country. When it was all over, President Sukarno had been ousted and was replaced by Suharto, and an estimated 500,000 were dead. When I was in Bali several years ago, I was taken to a quiet and beautiful spot (is there any other kind in Bali?) and a local sadly explained that this was where people were brought to be killed. Indonesia has not and may never officially reconcile itself with the events surrounding what is commonly referred to simply as “1965”. I really don’t know very much about 1965 but I do know that it did not come out of nowhere. The precedent had been set during the particularly brutal Dutch colonial period when massacres and violence were fairly commonplace. I was talking to an Indonesian friend recently about the period of the Dutch East Indies and he said of Malaysians, “You were lucky to have the British.” The Dutch used violence not only for conquest and suppression but also for political diversion, for instance, encouraging and allowing periodic wholesale massacres of the Chinese population of Batavia (now Jakarta). The plundering Dutch regime was, among other things, bad for business, and thousands left Java and Sumatra to come to Malaya where business was booming (well, booming sporadically because the prices of rubber and tin could shoot up and then shoot right down again).

I’ve scanned the history books looking for acts of killing in the history of Malaya/Malaysia and there have been some, although nothing approaching the scale of the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia. Battles were fought in the 1870s in Perak and Selangor, before the arrival of the British. I know more about the Selangor Wars (as they were later called), which were generally fought between one group of Malays allied with one group of Chinese against another group of Malays allied with another group of Chinese. This combination was repeated in each river system as people fought for control of the tin that rested in the sand of the valley. Although the entire Selangor river basin was under the aegis of the sultan (the very canny and long-lived Sultan Abdul Samad), he didn’t have an army or police force so, well, everything was up for grabs. I read a second-hand, perhaps even third-hand account of a “battle” that was fought very near the site of the present-day Ampang Point Shopping Complex. The two sides faced each other, there was lots of shouting, banging of gongs and firecrackers, but not much actual fighting. But I read a British account, and the British always liked to paint the “natives” (that’s Malays and Chinese) as being a bit silly and ridiculous. I read of at least two massacres where mining villages were raided but, curiously and consistently, the accounts suggest that Chinese would attack Chinese, and Malays would attack Malays. It must be remembered that the numbers involved were very small and it all ended with the arrival of the British (the two events might not be related). Some things happened in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in the short period between the surrender of Japan and the return of the British and, of course, there is Kuala Lumpur’s May 13. Each occasion must have been horrific for those involved, but have they left any trace on Malaysian memory, conscious or unconscious?

Remembering and commemorating violence is a difficult thing to do. Indonesians appear to not want to remember 1965, and who can blame them? That year was a terrifying moment of madness but it’s also terrifying to wonder if it could all happen again. Germans have made what must be a very painful effort to remember their nation’s horrific acts of violence in the Second World War. Does that make them better people than the Japanese who have not? Remembering may or may not defuse the possibility of a repeat, but I do not like it when a half-memory is insidiously manipulated to give the impression that violence will definitely be repeated. Especially in a land that has a negligible history of violence and instead an overwhelming history of peace.

Reprinted with the kind permission of