In the self-proclaimed sequel to his groundbreaking book Pretext for Mass Murder,Footnote ¹ John Roosa masterfully weaves decades of archival research and hundreds of oral history interviews into an elegantly prosed narrative synthesizing national history and individual suffering. By wedding a top-down approach with an expansive array of local firsthand experiences, Buried Histories repudiates the abstract understanding of the politicides as one big event by emphasizing the significance of the unique attributes in particular localities while simultaneously utilizing information from those localities to construct an analytical model of the events at the national level. In doing so, Roosa offers several critical interventions in the history of modern Indonesia, interrogational torture, and genocide studies. The meticulous research, cogent arguments, and compellingly interwoven narratives make Buried Histories far more than a mere “sequel” to Pretext for Mass Murder. The book expands upon our understanding of modern Indonesian history in ways that will likely be referred to by scholars for many decades to come.

In 2018, two publications achieved a breakthrough in the historiography of the mass killings in Indonesia. Jess Melvin's detailed analysis of the murders in Aceh convincingly demonstrated that previous accounts of civilian-led killings were incorrect, and that instead, the army initiated and organized the mass murders there.Footnote ² Geoffrey Robinson's bird's-eye view at the national level rejected the “local conflicts” paradigm by asserting a national pattern of provocation, facilitation, and organization of massacres through differing levels of the army hierarchy.Footnote ³ Roosa modestly claims that “this book covers the middle ground” by analyzing both “the national-level pattern of the violence and present[ing] case studies of four regions” (p. 20). However, Buried Histories does far more than that.

Roosa's analysis masterfully sheds light on a critically important yet daunting question that has evaded scholars: how could the largest communist party outside the USSR and China be massacred in such large numbers, with so little resistance? Through a novel interpretation of party strategy leading up to 1965, Roosa outlines an “original and creative attempt to neutralize the coercive power of the state” (p. 56) by infiltrating the army's rank and file. The Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) leaders became overconfident in the plan and were left unable to respond to the military's aggression in any meaningful way. Roosa then expands on Melvin's “mechanisms of mass murder” by identifying a two-phase national pattern that resulted in party supporters becoming either unable or unwilling to resist anti-communist aggression. In the first phase, terrorization of PKI affiliates on the streets led many to willingly enter police custody as a safe alternative to facing anti-communist mobs. The second phase consisted of the mass execution of these prisoners, who had lost the power to resist upon being detained.

Readers will likely divide the book into two main sections—national and local—although such structural bifurcation risks obfuscating the elegance with which Roosa connects overarching analytical structures and weaves his narrative through multiple chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the history of the Territorial Command and the army's rivalry with the PKI. Through a Gramscian framework of analysis, Roosa details the “war of position” as both the army and PKI endeavored to occupy key sites in Indonesia's civil society and state bureaucracy. As the armed forces “turned itself into an army of occupation, capable of intervening in all aspects of civilian government and economic life” (p. 40), PKI leaders were supremely confident in the strategy of burrowing within the military and using the Territorial Command for their own purposes. Ultimately, such overconfidence proved unfounded and left the party unable to respond to the army's offensive.

In chapters 2 and 3, Roosa outlines the army's use of propaganda and torture to incite anti-communist massacres across the nation. By quickly monopolizing control of the media in October 1965, the army was able to silence the PKI, filter Sukarno's messages, and stoke an atmosphere of war and anti-communist fervor using sensationalized propaganda. Army interrogators used torture to force detainees to confess to the false narrative, then used the confessions as proof that the propaganda was true. Through this analysis, Roosa addresses the classic critique of torture producing false or unreliable information and highlights the use of torture as a tool to generate and sustain “a fantasy world” (p. 90). Roosa argues that “the torture room becomes the locus for the reaffirmation of the state's official truths,” and provides “not the extraction of information but the imposition of information” (pp. 92–93).

Chapters 4–7 focus on individual case studies in Surakarta, Bali, South Sumatra, and Riau. Chapter 4 details the purge of the PKI's stronghold in Surakarta by the Army Paracommando Regiment (RPKAD) under Colonel Sarwo Edhie in early October, which escalated the anti-communist propaganda campaign from rhetorical to murderous. “Both the incitement to kill and the precedent of the killings in Central Java created and atmosphere of war in the entire country” (p. 143). Chapters 5 and 6 examine the delay in the killings in Bali caused by the resistance of governor Sutedja and head of the region's Territorial Command, Brigadier General Sjafiudin. By mid-December, traditional elites in the Indonesian National Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia), seeing an opportunity to liquidate their economic rivals in the PKI, successfully lobbied the Central Command in Jakarta to send RPKAD troops to override Sutedja and Sjafiudin's resistance and commence the killings. Chapter 7 continues to build on Roosa's analysis of “resisters” as a crucial addition to the “perpetrator, victim, and bystander” triadic paradigm of genocide studies (p. 151). A comparison of seemingly similar regions in South Sumatra and Riau showcases how successful resistance in Riau resulted in far fewer deaths than in South Sumatra. The chapter also expands upon the economic motivations examined in Bali to define the killings as not merely a political genocide, but a wholesale liquidation of organized labor.

Buried Histories is a must-read for historians of modern Indonesia, scholars of genocide studies, and specialists in the field of interrogational torture. But beyond that scholarly endeavor, within the pages of Buried Histories lie numerous heart-wrenching accounts of human suffering which could be appreciated by many outside of the academy. It is an emotionally devastating book which will likely play a pivotal role in Indonesia's long road to reconciliation.