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The Aftermath of Violence in Indonesia: Narrative and National Identity
Organizer and Chair: John Roosa, University of British Columbia
Discussant: I Gusti Agung Putri Astrid Kartika, Elsam, Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy
Indonesia has gained (or regained) an international reputation for violence in recent years. Some events have been widely reported, such as the May 1998 riots, the scorched operation in East Timor in 1999, and the massacres in West Kalimantan in 2001. Scholars have been writing much more about the theme of violence in Indonesia; at least four edited collections of scholarly essays have been recently published on the theme. This panel proceeds from the premise that closer attention needs to be paid to what Indonesians have been saying outside of public forums. How have particular groups narrated past violence? What are the differences between what is narrated inside the group and what is narrated to people outside the group? How have groups created coherent storylines? What is elided, occluded, or fetishized in the process? How do they relate their narratives with the national history sanctioned by the state and taught in the schools? Is violence for them the predictable outcome of what is explicitly expressed everyday or the uncanny return of the repressed? The papers in this interdisciplinary panel, all based on oral interviews and/or ethnographic fieldwork, engage with narrative analysis and semiotics to answer these questions. The authors have pursued the signs of violence’s afterlives in the hidden sides of Indonesian discourse: in the behind-the-scenes formations of the metonymic figure of the female dancer, in the opinions whispered inside a Balinese family compound, in legends passed down within an underground network, and in the private recollections of torture victims.
The Female Dancing Body and State Terror: Post-1965 Cultural Reconstruction in Indonesia
Rachmi Diyah Larasati, University of California, Los Angeles
In this paper, I will discuss how the post-1965 cultural reconstruction in Indonesia functioned as a form of domination to maintain control over women's cultural identity formation and how that has been reflected within performing arts in Indonesia. I will focus on how state narratives of the 1965 –1966 massacres were reproduced in the society, both through sustained reproduction of a "fabricated memory" and through the suppression of any contesting or dissenting forms of memory. In an effort to trace the interventions of the government into the lives and memories of civilians, I will explore the figure of the female dancing body, which is has been traditionally viewed as outside the realm of politics. I will examine state interventions into cultural practices to further discuss how state terror has been encoded in the female body. I will analyze the state's appropriation of the female body as a manipulation of memory and will emphasize the paradox inherent within the appropriation: on the one hand, demonizing and marginalizing the female dancing body and on the other hand offering a refined, state aligned body as an ideal representation of the nation.
Embodied States: Torture as Viewed by Three Generations of Darul Islam Militants
John MacDougall, independent scholar
The Darul Islam movement waged guerrilla warfare against the Dutch in the late 1940s and against the post-colonial Republic of Indonesia until being militarily defeated in 1962. Under the Suharto regime (1966-1998) the Darul Islam partisans maintained an illegal clandestine network committed to the ideal of establishing an Islamic state in Indonesia. In this paper I will describe the moral perspectives of Islamic militants who experienced torture during the Dutch period, the Sukarno period, and the Suharto period. In oral interviews with me, three generations of militants narrated the history of their movement and explained their interpretations of "proper" and "improper" violence, the corporeal cum moral dimensions of personal propriety, property, and just or unjust suicide. In one frame of reference, the tortures they experienced can be described as human rights violations and they can be described as victims. But they did not speak in the framework of human rights and victimhood. Even if we are committed to the universalism of human rights, we need to understand the particular ways in which the experience of torture becomes interpreted by a community and how it is given significance across generations, for it often happens that the roles of perpetrator and victim become reversed.
The Truths of Torture: Victims’ Memories and State Histories in Indonesia
John Roosa, University of British Columbia
Torture has been understood by its practitioners and advocates as a means of eliciting true statements. One critique of torture has been on its effectiveness in uncovering the truth. As Beccaria wrote, this “crucible in which truth is assayed” is flawed when the victim chooses “the quickest route to relieving himself of the immediate pain.” Victims lie in the hopes of appeasing the torturers. But another critique suggests that torturers are not searching for the truth; they are instead fulfilling fantasies of wielding absolute power. The Indonesian military under General Suharto detained some 1.5 million people accused of being communists, largely from late 1965 to late 1969. Most of those detained were interrogated and many of those interrogated were tortured. Their torture was, I argue, largely designed to validate the Suharto regime’s pre-determined narratives. This paper is based on oral interviews with victims of torture, who often felt a sense of absurdity in recalling how they admitted to what the interrogators demanded. The military, in writing the public history that justified the mass arrests, cited some of the transcripts of interrogations as evidence. The secret torture sessions became crucibles in which fantasies were turned into official truths. As the Suharto regime overturned the Sukarnoist ideas that had defined Indonesian nationalism, it reassured itself with proofs that violence could indeed create a new reality.
Building a Monument: The Intimate Politics of Reconciliation in Post-1965 Bali
Leslie K. Dwyer, Haverford College
On September 30, 2005 – 40 years after an alleged communist-backed coup attempt provided the pretext for the state-sanctioned slaughter of some 500,000-1,000,000 Indonesians – a small group of children and grandchildren of survivors of the violence in Bali prepared to inaugurate a “monument” to victims of 1965-66 in their family compound. This site, and the vociferous debates that emerged from it, provides an entryway into understanding how local semiotics of terror and ethics of knowledge intersect with post-Soeharto discourses of “reconciliation” to shape the limits and possibilities of political subjectivity in post-massacre Bali. Drawing on 48 months of collaborative ethnographic research on the aftermath of 1965-66, we call for attention to complex forms of post-conflict narrative that exceed opposition between “speech” and “silence” and that ground political claims in representations of the past.