In Indonesia, Popular Memory Fights Against Official Amnesia
Sixty years ago today, the Indonesian army seized power and began a campaign of mass murder to annihilate the country’s left. Relatives of the victims are still fighting against a culture of amnesia about one of the century’s bloodiest massacres.
Seventy-five-year-old Sri Muhayati holds a photograph of her parents on May 6, 2016, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, who died in the 1965 mass murders due to suspected ties to the PKI. (Ulet Ifansasti / Getty Images)
Behind a low wall on a traffic-choked stretch of Denpasar’s east side, a small courtyard insists that Bali’s famous “paradise” has a history. And that history is troubled.
On a brick wall is a simple injunction — “Forgive but never forget” — and in the center stands a white bust of a schoolteacher, I Gusti Made Raka, who was murdered in the wave of anti-communist killings that swept the island in late 1965 and early 1966. This is Taman 65, a family-made memorial built on the site of a home razed by a mob. With its punk DIY attitude, it is one of the most quietly radical public spaces in Indonesia today.
Taman 65 (“65 Park”) is not a state monument, and that is the point. There are no official memorials to the 500,000 to 1,000,000 Indonesians killed in a massive anti-communist bloodbath. Many more were imprisoned, tortured, and raped during Suharto’s New Order dictatorship, which began with a military coup sixty years ago today.
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