Fears of communism in Indonesia persist — by design — and their insidiousness spares no one. Parliamentarians, military figures, and Islamic groups have cited the alleged resurgence of communism to stoke fears about everything from relations with China to the political legitimacy of President Joko Widodo. ‘Jokowi’ himself has been culpable of waving the ‘latent threat of communism’ banner when it suits him. Messages of communist attempts to destroy the nation from within are spread on social media and by way of messaging apps. As of this writing, rumours circulate that the COVID-19 crisis will provide the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) with the perfect cover to launch a comeback.
From whence does such a virulent narrative arise? With Unmarked graves: Death and survival in the anti-communist violence in East Java, Indonesia, Vannessa Hearman reminds us that the answer is as simple as it is tragic and logic-defying. Seeking a pretext to eliminate a political threat, the Indonesian Right — with the backing of international powers — positioned PKI members, associates, even people unlucky enough to once have attended a communist rally, meeting, or event as the treacherous instigators of an abortive attempt to overthrow Sukarno in 1965.
And the result? Over one million dead at the hands of the army and civilian paramilitary groups in a matter of months including in East Java, ‘where as many as 200,000, were murdered, then buried in mass graves or dumped into the rivers and the sea’ (p. 4). Under Suharto's subsequent ‘New Order’ regime, the stigmatisation of the Left had further terrible outcomes: hundreds of thousands of political prisoners; a legal party demonised and outlawed; the deceased, the living, and their families made into pariahs; generations of Indonesians without an accurate sense of their government's role in perpetrating one of the worst episodes of mass violence of the past century.
Hearman adds admirably to our understanding of a chilling case of Cold War-era state-sponsored violence — some call it a genocide, Hearman prefers policide — by bringing long-deserved attention to historical actors in Indonesia's second-most populous province. She accomplishes this by way of first-hand interviews, including more than thirty original oral histories, with perpetrators and survivors. Newspaper accounts and a range of government and military archival sources provide further invaluable details and data.
As Hearman's interviewees reconstruct the trajectory of the political Left in East Java, we experience the Party's destruction, understand how civilians assisted the army in orchestrating the killings, and learn of the subsequent survival methods of those forcibly imprisoned, compelled to live alongside their persecutors, or forced into hiding. Therein lies the thrust of Hearman's argument: East Java provides an optimal look at ‘cataclysmic times which had long been pushed aside, but yet reverberate in the every day of suffering, of survival and defiance’ (p. 196).
The book's opening two chapters introduce the setting and actors of Hearman's study. East Java during the 1960s was home to some 22 million people. There, following Indonesia's first general elections in 1955, the PKI grew in popularity in urban areas including the provincial capital of Surabaya and the town of Blitar. It subsequently met its match in a formidable political rival. That opponent was the Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which, through its youth wing, Ansor, and paramilitary wing, Banser, would become the main helpmate of the army in carrying out the Indonesian killings. Chapter 2 introduces readers to the women and men who joined the Indonesian Left in the 1950s and 1960s. They include political activists, party leaders, journalists, and teachers who variously were members of Gerwani, the PKI-affiliated women's organisation, the labour union, SOBSI, and the Indonesian Peasants’ Union, BTI, among other groups.
Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, detail the purge of the PKI and the aftermath of the anti-communist violence. Readers who are new to this topic will receive an excellent reconstruction of the mechanics and stages of the mass violence in East Java. Hearman's comprehensive account will facilitate comparisons with concurrent events in Bali and Sumatra among readers familiar with the Indonesian killings. In chapter 3, Hearman's interviewees speak of mass detentions, sexual violence, death squads, and the display of victims’ bodies. Yet, the first-person accounts offered in chapter 4 crucially also show the resistance of the persecuted. Here, Hearman focuses on three main strategies of survival that her interviewees adopted: relocation to the cities, going underground, and entering into exile with fellow leftists. This information is a notable contribution to the existing literature; accordingly, chapter 4 offers perhaps the monograph's most valuable material.
The final third of the volume expands upon and brings to a wider audience Hearman's decades-long research into the causes and consequences of ‘Operation Trisula’, the New Order's violent rooting out of underground Leftists in the town of Blitar in 1968. Blitar was where fugitives fled when it was no longer tenable to hide in Surabaya. In chapter 5 Hearman analyses how the town became a base for the PKI's attempt to rebuild and how that movement prompted the army's effort to liquidate what remained of the Left ‘to ensure a strong transition to the New Order in the whole of Indonesia’ (p. 153). The penultimate chapter offers a poignant argument about the intersections between collective suffering, memorialisation, and historical memory — and forgetting — in South Blitar; Hearman's discussion of historical reconstruction and justice extends that line of analysis in the Conclusion.
As government and civilian parties continue to stoke paranoia about the spectre of communism in Indonesia, Unmarked graves is timely reading. Scholars of modern Southeast Asia and others who seek to understand more about the Indonesian killings, Cold War-era politics in Indonesia, or political violence and its consequences in Southeast Asia more broadly will find Unmarked graves to be an excellent resource. Vannessa Hearman prompts her audience to see that what happened in East Java, ultimately, is a story of resilience and survival. To that end, what readers receive as well is a story of a scholar's perseverance to ensure that the truth will out.
