Headhunting Sukarno: The Cold War Murder of an Impossible Country
And the origin of the 'Jakarta Rules'
An academic consensus of English-language historiography now assigns responsibility for the mass killings of 1965-66 to the Indonesian army and Suharto with critical aid from western powers which then sought to replicate their success in other countries. This paper contextualizes the politicide 1965-66 of 500,000-1.5 million people within an emerging historical definition of the word “genocide” as a state or nation destroying some part of itself, with gendered performance of violence and deliberate creation of palingenetic renewal myths being a characteristic of that process. Prevalent in the Indonesian case, headhunting and decapitation neatly contain as symbol the discursive construction of a new nation, an Indonesia free of feminists and leftists.
Guided Democracy
Three thousand miles from end to end, with hundreds of large and thousands of small islands, many languages and thousands of dialects, and hundreds if not thousands of micro-identities within six major ethnic groups, the Indonesian state fits no naturalistic theory of state formation.[1] Thanks to their education system, 95 percent of Indonesians do speak the national language, a form of Malay that had been used as the lingua franca of regional trade before the Dutch arrived. Most of the population is Javan, however, and Javan is the most common first language in the country.[2] Some parts of the Indonesian state contain societies with Stone Age lives and ancient traditions. There is no linguistic, geographic, ethnic, religious, cultural, or historical thing that unifies Indonesia, not even the history of Dutch colonial rule.[3] Indonesia only truly exists in the imagination of Indonesians.
In the two decades from his declaration of an independent state upon the surrender of Japan in 1945 until the murderous year 1965, Sukarno’s imagination shaped Indonesia’s imagination of itself. His slogan Nasokom summed up the impossibility of his vision. It is an abbreviation of the initial syllables for nationalism, religion, and communism in Bahasa Indonesia (nasionalisme, agama, komunisme). Religion and communism had a strained relationship after 1948, and decisively parted ways during 1965. Thereafter, a concerted political effort to unseat Sukarno allied the first two parts of his slogan against the third. The Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), the world’s third largest communist party, was to be destroyed “down to the very roots.”[4] A slow-motion coup under the rubric of destroying communist influences extended to everything and everyone associated with Sukarno: his Foreign Minister Subandrio, the rest of his cabinet, his centrist PNI political party, friendly reporters, his fiction editor.[5] Sukarno the statesman was progressively destroyed from within by annihilating all that he contained, that would not be contained in the new Indonesia.
Suharto, the man who replaced Sukarno as leader of the nation after 1966, imagined a country without a left of any kind, political or cultural. By destroying it, he consumed Sukarno and hid him away, demonstrating his own power. The Indonesia he imagined is what still exists today. Genocide and political change came hand in hand.
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