When Lt. Colonel Untung bin Sjamsuri informed the country of his pre-emptive counter-coup against a supposed ”Council of Generals” that had been in cahoots with the CIA on the morning of October 1, 1965, he charged senior Army officers with corruption, elitism, and “insulting” or dishonoring women. This may have been a euphemism with literal meaning. As a member of the Indonesian communist party, or PKI, Untung was held to very high moral standards, whereas the clique of Americanized officers that he opposed had developed a reputation for womanizing that rivaled Sukarno himself.
Like the PKI, the mass feminist organization Gerakan Wanita Indonesia — Gerwani, for short — had puritanical codes of sexual behavior. By 1965, Indonesia’s feminists had been fighting for decades to end sexual exploitation of women, domestic violence, and inequality in marriage laws. Nor was Gerwani an elite organization at all, for its strength lay in average women getting organized. By 1965, Indonesian women’s magazines had barely begun to discuss sex and sexuality in the open. No one was promoting sexual liberation or female separatism anywhere in the country. So when Untung said those words on Radio Indonesia, neither communists nor feminists had a reputation for sexual deviancy. Quite the opposite: they were seen as moral scolds, holding adulterers to account, criticizing Sukarno’s multiple wives as well as his failing economy, and denouncing sexual corruption in high offices.
But then Untung’s coup lasted less than a day, and all of their good behavior was washed out to sea by a great wave of manufactured hysteria. Suharto, a former commander and close personal friend of Untung, would oversee his trial and execution in an atmosphere charged by salacious sexual propaganda.
Organized in the late evening of September 30th, the predawn capture operation killed three of its seven targets, captured three more, and killed an adjutant who may have been mistaken for his boss, General Nasution, who escaped. Bodies and captives were assembled at Lubang Buaya on the Halim air base. The captives were shot, and all the bodies were dumped into a well. Suharto personally disliked Nasution, and also Gen. Yani, another target of the operation. In fact, with Nasution injured and out of the way, Lt. Col. Untung had just made Suharto the highest-ranking able-bodied officer in the Army of Indonesia. He could not have done a better job of clearing the way for Suharto’s rise. Untung appears to have thought Suharto would now support his coup, for he left his friend off the list of generals that he assigned his scratch force to arrest. Sukarno had given Suharto his command of Kostrad, the army’s elite force, because he was untainted by American training. They had all miscalculated.
Moving against the coup, Suharto secured Jakarta the same day, then took Halim air base without bloodshed on October 2. The bodies were discovered on the evening of October 3 and autopsied on the morning of October 4, with both Sukarno and Suharto present to receive the medical examiner’s report. By this point, rumors of Chinese involvement in the foiled coup were rampant. Already locking political horns with Sukarno by refusing to recognize his appointment of a superior, Suharto had every incentive to enlarge the circle of suspicion to include everyone supporting Sukarno.
After co-signing the autopsy, Suharto went on Radio Indonesia to accuse the PKI’s youth wing, Pemuda Rakyat, and the Gerwani women of participating in the murders. Over the days to come, this nebulous verbal charge would cohere into a narrative of demonic debauchery. Army-owned newspapers began to print sensational stories about supposed mutilations in the Lubang Buaya killings the next day, October 5, which was Armed Forces Day as well as the funeral for the dead officers. Photos of their bodies, which had been submerged in water for 72 hours, were ambiguous enough to “prove” that depraved deeds had been done to them.
When some newspapers were allowed to resume publication the next day, Wednesday, October 6, they carried the text of Suharto’s speech and reported rumors that the victims had been mutilated. These rumors of castration and eye-gouging were explicitly connected to the Gerwani organization in headlines on the following day, October 7. It was the same morning that headlines told the country that Irma Ade Nasution, the general’s five year-old daughter, had died of gunshot wounds sustained in the attempted kidnapping of her father. She became both martyr to the communist menace and symbol of the selfless devotion to family that a proper Javan female was supposed to display — a mute indictment of the Gerwani women being framed as monsters.
One week after the abortive coup, Suharto’s target list had grown considerably. Indeed, it would end up hundreds of thousands of times longer than Untung’s had been. The Army called for communists to “turn themselves in.” Paramilitaries organized and trained by the Army attacked communist leaders, torching their homes and offices, raping and killing them, and displaying their mutilated corpses. Tens of thousands of people affiliated with the PKI then sought “protection” from the Army’s killing mobs by entering Army custody. Others ran for the hills, or to rural areas where the PKI was strong. They were soon hunted.
This is where the real mass killings began. Batches of prisoners were taken from jails and temporary prisons to disposal sites: the banks of swift-flowing rivers, fresh-dug holes in new banana plantations, coastal caves with outflow to the sea, remote beaches. Meanwhile, thousands more in custody were poorly-fed, beaten, raped, neglected, or tortured. Methods of extracting confessions were simple but creative: electric shocks with Army field radio generators, crushing feet under table legs, whipping victims with a stingray tail, mock executions. Sometimes the torture was to watch someone else be tortured. By the end of October, untold thousands of people had probably “confessed” to anything that would make the torture stop. In turn, those confessions were used to justify the violence inflicted on Indonesians who had no part in Untung’s coup, including further torture.
The PKI and Gerwani were simply important parts of Sukarno’s political coalition under Guided Democracy, so they were in the way of Suharto’s path to power. Putting them outside the bounds of human responsibility to one another was essential to the task of motivating and empowering their killers. To construct that false reality, the Army turned to the oldest propaganda method in the world. “When states decide to practice torture,” John Roosa writes in Buried Histories, his book about Suharto’s mass murders, “they create their own frame of reference for determining truth and falsity.” Rather than extracting useful intelligence,
Torture represents an effort to turn a preexisting fantasy world into reality; its value becomes self-confirming. By practicing torture, state officials are implicitly admitting that they have abandoned any attempt to subject their strategies to an evaluation outside their internal feedback loop. Their search for truth inevitably pulls them ever deeper into self-delusion. Interrogational torture is the opposite of what it claims to be: it is not the extraction of information but the imposition of information.
Put another way, Suharto’s men imagined they were facing a huge conspiracy against Indonesian manhood, so their torture created evidence of the evil they imagined, and in turn the false confessions inspired even more torture and false confessions. A self-directed information spiral was taking place.
Ibu Djamilah was fifteen years old and two trimesters into her pregnancy when she “confessed” to being present at the Lubang Buaya murders. According to the story based on her coerced confession, published November 6 in the Army-owned newspaper Berita Yudha and then amplified by western news agencies, she and other Gerwani women “were given knives to stab the generals who were killed.” The article took this to refer to rumors that razor blades were handed out to Gerwani women, who were told to mutilate the genitals of the victims. Presented to reporters, she did not know the name of her alleged victim and was even slapped by a guard for asking him about it in their presence.
Sukarno reacted immediately. During a cabinet meeting that day, he directly confronted Suharto. “These journalists are fools! Do they think we’re stupid? What’s the point of this? To whip up hatred! Does it makes sense? No! I mean, is that reasonable, a penis cut up by 100 Gillette blades?” Speaking out alone against a tsunami of noise, Sukarno tried to draw attention to the autopsy, which showed no signs of mutilation. If Suharto was embarrassed, it did not last long. On November 14, a woman named Ibu Trimo similarly confessed to being at the scene, corroborating the story in a clear case of cross-contamination under interrogation.
In fact, some Gerwani members had been present at Halim air base to do a service project, but they were not involved in the coup or the murders. No woman was ever put on trial for taking part in the killings. Instead, this dubious tale of elaborate, sexualized ritual mutilation because more absurd all the time. On December 13, newspapers published another “confession” from a seventeen-year-old girl who claimed that the training at Lubang Buaya had consisted of nonstop orgies. She had supposedly been “assigned the task every day, noon and night, to dance stark naked” before male members of the PKI and then have “free sex” with groups of them. This “Dance of Fragrant Flowers” was wholly false, a fabrication. Yet it had a horrifying power to inflict harm. As documented by Anne Pohlman, over the years to follow, countless women and girls suffered rape and sexual violence by men who verbally justified their abuse of communist women. “What’s wrong with you?” This gaslighting script went. “Gerwani whores enjoy this. Don’t you like it?” When the killings spread to Bali, there were new rumors of castrating Gerwani witches.
The sexualized blood libel of Gerwani women was necessary to destroy them, and now it is remembered as Suharto’s great victory, as well as a re-founding of the Indonesian state. The very word watani, meaning woman, was tainted with the implication of sexual immorality. In its place, the word perempuan — meaning “mother” — has come into general use for adult women. Saskia Wieringa has made a strong case that the militant Gerwani threatened male prerogatives with their independence and persistence in a deeply patriarchal society. To be sure, castration was a constant theme of anti-Gerwani propaganda, projecting a deep insecurity about manhood and modernity. As a class, Indonesian women would not return to mass politics for decades; Suharto clearly thought of these regressive changes in the New Order as his crowning victory.
I argue they are the surest proof of his genocidal intentions, and I am not alone. In his thorough analysis of the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, The Killing Season, Geoffrey Robinson shows how important the Gerwani libels were to the larger campaign of enlisting religious and partisan organizations against “communism,” “atheism,” and “infidels,” all to be loosely defined as necessary to ensure the elimination of the political left, including its unions and other mass organizations, and Sukarno with them. What began as a violent struggle within the army had become the army’s war against the Old Order. By design and with malice aforethought, its uppity women were at the top of the target list.