Session 3: Mass Murder and Violence

Session 3: Mass Murder and Violence
Chair: Rachel Waterstradt

The 1965 Political Genocide of PKI in Indonesia (The Local Killings in East Java and Bali)
Iwan Sudjatmiko
Department of Sociology, University of Indonesia, Indonesia

The paper will discuss the local contexts of the killings of communists and suspected communists related to the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) during the political genocide in 1965. [1] Based on my field study I found that that most of the killings were more rationally and organizationally conducted and are closely related to the “Collective Action” perspective. These findings are different from several analyses based on the “Collective Behavior” perspective that emphasize “amok,” or the anarchic behavior of crowd or individuals.
In general, the killings must be seen as a rationally orchestrated political action and were oriented to the future since they were considered a “short cut to the final victory” such as the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that time, non PKI camps were afraid that President Soekarno would protect the PKI or create a new communist party. So the killings from October, 1965 to February, 1966 were “Strategic” killings as systematic demoralization attempts by the non-PKI camps that include the military/army, the Islamic parties and organizations in East Java and the nationalist party in Bali.
This “Strategic killings” occurred in East Java and Bali in many areas where the army and local organizations were strong. However, the killings at the local level show other several factors: first, the “preemptive” killings particularly in the early days of conflicts in areas where the PKI was stronger; second, the “vengeance” or “get even” in areas where non-PKI Moslems in East Java became the victims of the killings by the PKI in 1948; third, the “old rivalry” killings in Bali where some nationalist party members (PNI) executed PKI members who were previously their arch rival as socialists party members (PSI) banned by Soekarno in 1960; and, fourth, the “symbolic” killings where hamlet (“banjar”) in Bali conducted the killings to show their solidarity to neighboring hamlets.

The Algerian conflict of the 1990s has inspired countless scholarly and literary responses. Literary works have tended to document the disintegration of communities and the effect on individuals of the unrelenting violence and intolerance and to conclude with a condemnation of Islamists, the state military or both. Such remembrance of the violence, however, often traps writers into endlessly repeating the violence without being able to work through it or even understand it – especially as regards their own status as bystanders and survivors. The question these works set out to answer, about the origins of the conflict, remains only partially answered.
In Assia Djebar’s 1995 text, translated in English as Algerian White, the author remembers friends and colleagues killed in the violence that engulfed Algeria in the 1990s. While others have considered this work of Djebar’s in terms of the assault on intellectuals and the links she establishes between the violence of the 1950s struggle for independence and the violence of the 1990s, this paper will look specifically at the form of Djebar’s commemoration. As her text evokes traditional Arabic and Berber elegies for the dead (to which Djebar makes explicit reference), her text fulfills the traditional role of the elegy in expressing the pain of loss and lauding the qualities of the deceased. Whereas elegies have also served a further political function of encouraging the living to get on with their lives and to take over where the deceased left off, Djebar’s text seems to refuse this comforting role of closure.
Considering women’s use of the elegiac form in other contexts, critics have argued that women typically subvert the public and political function of the elegy by refusing to put the past behind them or “to render up their dead.” This paper will consider the degree to which Djebar’s commemoration, as it oscillates between the documentary and the imagined, works through the violence of the 1990s.

The outset for the paper is the widespread notion that literature, and other forms of narrations, are better suited than philosophy for understanding and relating experiences of evil. A problem with this supposedly post-metaphysical notion, exemplified by an essay written by María Pía Lara, is that it implies a metaphysical conception of an inherent goodness in narrations as such. To find a more critical approach, I then turn to Theodor W. Adorno, and his infamous comments on poetry after Auschwitz. From his perspective evil is just as present in the interior of every artwork as in society in general – literature is neither less rational, nor less evil, than anything else. Due to its material character, however, every artwork does harbor a possibility of understanding and reconciliation that philosophical thinking lacks. Finally, two examples are used to illustrate the difference between Adorno’s and Lara’s points, namely Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, and the Swedish novel Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen by Nikanor Teratologen. Both could be seen as two extremely cruel narrations of evil, totally lacking all reconciliation. The point is that a reconciliation can be found in the interior of the works. This reconciliation is not situated in the narration however, but rather on the level of the material. In that way, the two works demonstrate a sensibility of the immanent violence of their own form.