Suharto’s Bloodbath

The events of September 30 and October 1, 1965, are very confusing. Unsolved mysteries remain. Essentially, there were two coups. First came an attack on the top Indonesian army leadership on the night of September 30, and then a slow-motion coup lasting until March 11, 1966, when General Suharto officially seized power from President Sukarno.

In the first coup, six generals and a lieutenant were kidnapped and killed by a renegade faction within the military. While that putsch failed within a few hours, historian John Roosa has shown that their deaths were the pretext for a mass murder campaign.

On October 1, General Suharto assumed control of this crisis and the US-trained army leadership immediately moved into action, declaring the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) responsible for this attempted coup. They rounded up and executed PKI members as well as those belonging to related political, cultural, and intellectual groups. This systematic mass murder started in northwestern Sumatra, moving south through Sumatra and east through Java.

The bloodshed culminated in 1966 when the army moved onto the island of Bali. Perhaps as much as 8 percent of the island’s population was killed. Both the Indonesian army and local anti-communist groups shot, stabbed, strangled, and bludgeoned their victims.

Some bodies were desecrated and many more were dumped into semisecret mass graves, ensuring that their souls would never find peace. Nor would their families be able to properly grieve for the dead in accordance with the rituals of Balinese Hinduism.

Sporadic anti-communist killings continued in eastern Indonesia for over a year. The last military activity against the PKI was in east Java in 1968.

Exterminating a Party

Historian Annie Pohlman has documented widespread sexual violence against the bodies of women. In early October 1965, as if following a prepared script, intelligence officers spread rumors that the feminist organization GERWANI had sexually mutilated the generals. The anti-PKI violence was shockingly misogynistic. Deemed witches, prostitutes, and worse, women associated with the PKI faced years of gender-specific terror during the New Order dictatorship.

Up to September 30, 1965, the PKI was a legal political party committed to a parliamentary path to power, and it enjoyed a close relationship with Indonesia’s charismatic leader Sukarno. There were several million party members and somewhere between fifteen to twenty million supporters in a range of mass organizations. Having been founded on May 23, 1920, without the Comintern’s consent, it was Asia’s first Communist party. In 1965, it was the largest Communist party outside of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China.

However, since the PKI had no armed component, the army was able to swiftly exterminate or imprison its members and fellow travelers. Members of labor unions, peasant organizations, and artistic groups as well as left-leaning intellectuals were killed or imprisoned. Since only a handful of people were involved in the September 30 coup, known as G30S, the rank and file of the party and most of its leadership had absolutely nothing to do with the kidnapping and murder of the generals.

As a schoolteacher and active PKI member, I Gusti Made Raka was a typical target. He was murdered by his neighbors under the supervision of the army.

False Memories

The New Order regime that held power from 1966 to 1998 prioritized anti-PKI propaganda. The state-sanctioned narrative of PKI treachery was institutionalized in the national history curriculum.

Streets and airports bore the names of the slain generals. Municipalities erected statues to them. There is a massive museum complex on the site where their bodies were found and other museums in the generals’ homes.

Suharto commissioned a four-and-a-half-hour docudrama, which won major awards at the Indonesian Film Festival and became mandatory screening every September 30. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the film was broadcast on state television. Children were marched from their schools and forced to watch the films. Many of my friends have told me how traumatizing this was.

More than a quarter century after Suharto’s fall and the restoration of democracy, the Indonesian government still refuses to discuss the victims of the darkest and perhaps most consequential chapter in Indonesian history. The anti-PKI monuments are still standing, and the grossly inaccurate museums are still open and well-funded. There is no truth and reconciliation process. Anniversary events and roundtables have been shut down, and it remains dangerous to speak of this history.

Taman 65 challenges this silence. The site was created in 2005 by the teacher’s son, Agung Alit, as both shrine and study circle. He wanted a place to release the grip of fear that kept families silent for decades. His initial act was simply to repeat the number 65 five times in the tiles in front of their home.

Later, he posted those four English words on the wall. The first years were rough. Older relatives bristled; some were angry, some afraid. Undercover security agents lurked about, their costumes fooling no one.

Reflecting on Taman 65’s origins, Agung called it a challenge to the Suharto-era historical orthodoxy: “Indonesia under the New Order, our education is based on militarism: from massacre to mass grave to mass stupidification [sic] to mass tourism and mass problem.” He and the rest of Taman 65 embody the do-it-yourself ethos and thumb-your-nose-at-authority sensibilities of the classic punk era.

Return of the Suppressed

In time, the space built a local community and an international reputation for those in the know. Former prime minister of Timor-Leste Mari Alkatiri stopped by. So did the Algerian freedom fighter turned diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, when he was a member of Nelson Mandela’s The Elders. Indonesian writer and former political prisoner Hersri Setiawan launched a book at Taman 65, and Superman Is Dead, Indonesia’s most famous punk band, played sets in the yard and shot their most expensive video here.

The personal is political at Taman 65. Made Raka’s bust, installed in 2022, has the gentle lines of a man known for his love of books. The family placed it here in lieu of a body never properly laid to rest.

Alit’s older sister, Ibu Mayun, figures in the memorial’s oral histories. So do a stepmother and an aunt whose trauma surfaces in stray reactions — a moment of panic at a film screening when the PKI-affiliated folk song “Genjer-Genjer” comes on; a fear, even decades later, that a simple sign on the family compound will invite another flattening of the house. This is what traumatic memory does when the state refuses to allow healing: it becomes a stubborn intergenerational pain.

For decades, the killings in Bali were explained away with Orientalist tropes of an inscrutable people run amok (“amok” is one of the few Indonesian words in the English language). Geoffrey Robinson’s work on Bali and the national massacres dismantles the fiction of “spontaneous communal violence,” placing the killings squarely within the context of a Cold War counterrevolution and local class politics.

But this inconvenient scholarly truth has a hard time puncturing the image of a carefully curated tourist economy, the “paradise made” according to historian Adrian Vickers. As the truth of 1965 is bad for business, the market suppressed memory. Taman 65 rectifies this situation. This is a place safe for memory.

That is why the names matter. Family and friends built Taman 65. Agung Alit, the founder, his sister Mayun, and his brother anthropologist Degung Santikarma wanted to honor their father Made Raka. Many relatives and neighbors initially disagreed but eventually made peace with the space.

Then a younger generation of organizers turned the courtyard into a workshop of civic education. Among them is researcher and activist Roro Sawita, who has spent years documenting Bali’s dark 1960s; Ika Alvania, whose recent public programs carry the project’s pedagogy forward; and a rotating cast of musicians and cultural workers — Made Mawut, Ngurah Termana, Man Angga — who bridge the gap between testimony and popular culture.

In and around Taman 65, these organizers assembled Prison Songs, a book-and-album project resurrecting tunes written by detainees in Denpasar’s Pekambingan Prison and recomposed with contemporary artists. The result is not nostalgia but transmission of suppressed memories in a form capable of hopping past state taboos.

Structural Violence

In 2019, Artrak, a street artist and Agung’s nephew, painted a mural to challenge the insipid “Eat, Pray, Love” view of Bali. In it, Dewi Sastra, the goddess of knowledge, becomes Dewi Kali, a force of righteous violence against injustice. She comes armed with a rifle and pistol. Behind her is a Bali with features like “oligarch’s villa” and “money-laundering hotel.”

The mural protests corruption, environmental degradation, and the selling of a beautiful island to outsiders. Agung explains that this is the reality of Bali under neoliberalism. When asked about the mural, Degung states that “Bali is not paradise for the Balinese,” noting that the island has the highest suicide rate in Indonesia: “I hope the visitors will be aware of this structural violence.”

These straightforward politics are radical in a country where anti-communism remains a legal cudgel. Taman 65 does not ask visitors to declare ideological allegiance; it asks them to listen. On some afternoons, there is a book talk or a film; on others, an impromptu tour of the site. One can see the laid-open rectangle where a bedroom once stood; the words on the wall, the bust of the teacher, the family’s recollections of a hurried exhumation at a mass grave in the 1970s — children watching men pull bones from the ground, hoping one set might be “Father.”

In that sense, the courtyard is also a school for method. It trains visitors to recognize how a sanitized “heritage” economy depends on what is left unsaid, and how the labor of remembrance falls to those the New Order bureaucratic code stigmatized as politically “unclean.”

The memorial’s temporal markers are precise and defiant. The family formally founded Taman 65 on May 6, 2005 — 6-5, a date encoded in the name — and brought their father “home” as a sculpted bust in July 2022. Notes from the modest ceremony speak in the first-person plural — “we” — and refuse euphemism: “Our father, a teacher, together with three uncles and a cousin, were slaughtered in December 1965.”

The line that follows is pure Taman 65: “It’s not important to be important, it is more important to be human.” Against more than a half century of stigmatization and the temptation to mythologize, the memorial advances a humble, patient, and realistic humanism, without promoting grievance or vengeance.

Triumph Over Fear

These memories also offer class analysis. Long before the tourist boom, Bali’s politics were structured by unequal landholding and the power of aristocratic lineages; the mid-’60s violence was not only a purge of the Left but a reassertion of old hierarchies under military tutelage.

The Prison Songs project and the talks that surround it insist on this context: land reform debates, student activism, how quickly the same families who lost loved ones also lost jobs, houses, and futures under an administration that weaponized the label “ex-tapol” (former political prisoner). The courtyard teaches us that impunity is not just a legal practice but a central feature of the island’s political economy: hotels built over mass graves, police raids on “leftist” books, and an education system that shrouds 1965 in Cold War propaganda.

None of this is the “dark tourism” found in post-genocide Cambodia or postwar Vietnam. Taman 65 is too small, too intimate, and too modest for that. Nor is it a commercial venture. It is a grassroots truth commission without subpoena power — one that works because it is woven into ordinary life.

A visit might include a chat with Alit about his father’s love of radio, or with Mayun about a witness who stops by in the evening to recount what he saw in the village of Kapal in 1965. It might include a school group asking why a country still polices symbols half a century after the fact. Or it might just be a couple who came because they recognized the courtyard from a punk rock video and stayed because the people here made them tea and asked about their own grandparents. Every encounter chips away at the orthodoxy that says reconciliation is a private matter.

For those who built it, the memorial is also an answer to fear. If fear incubates lies, Taman 65 metabolizes it into literacy. That is why musicians matter. When a punk anthem fills a memorial courtyard with its irresistible chorus, or when a compilation resurrects camp songs from a prison where hundreds were held without trial, memory becomes contagious. No security law can censor a tune once it is hummed in schoolyards.

To be sure, a courtyard cannot be a substitute for justice. The Indonesian state still has not acknowledged its role in the killings or the mass detention that followed, let alone prosecuted those responsible. But to dismiss Taman 65 as “only symbolic” is to misunderstand how power works.

The New Order’s victory was not merely to kill and imprison its opponents; it was to enforce a common sense in which the dead deserved their fate and their children deserved their stigma. Every time a teacher’s bust is garlanded, every time a teenager learns the name and story of those murdered, that common sense loses ground.

Democracy without historical truth is a facade. People must be allowed to create institutions for their memory. In Indonesia, where formal mechanisms have stalled, the institutions are often improvised — reading rooms, small archives, traveling exhibits, courtyard memorials. Taman 65 is a model because it links the intimate and the public, the family altar and the open mic. It honors the dead and trains the living. It promotes healing through truth.