As the Dutch writer Multatuli has stressed, it is the obligation of every human being to become human. Whoever murders his own kind, therefore, violates the basic principle of his existence. And murder, where there is no legal basis, is a crime against humanity. Simple logic, but it isn't simple in practice. The events in Indonesia of 1965-66 were a test of this basic definition of humanity. Compared with the mass slaughter of those years, all the lies, corruption and nepotism of Suharto's regime are a small, trivial matter.
In early 1966, General Suharto assumed control of the military and the country, months after a faction of the army kidnapped and killed six generals on Sept. 30 the previous year. Indonesian history books and newspapers still refer to this incident as an "attempted communist coup," but there is no evidence that the Communist Party of Indonesia, as an organization, was involved in the kidnapping. The communists had 3 million members and supporters at that time. If they wanted to launch a coup, why didn't they just mobilize their branches in cities and towns outside Jakarta? Why was the party leadership caught completely off guard by the kidnapping? The coup was Suharto's.
For the next 13 days I watched the army hunt, murder and loot until, finally, I myself became one of the victims. People known or suspected to be communists or sympathizers were slaughtered wherever they were found--on the steps of their houses, on the side of the road, while squatting in the lavatory. The Indonesian élites had lost the ability to resolve their differences peacefully, in the political sphere, and the last word belonged to the group that possessed firearms: the army.
During the first days of October, Armed Forces chief General Nasution made commando-like speeches on the radio, urging the public to "destroy the Communist Party root and branch." After these pronouncements, the murder, looting and burning of the army intensified to the point of insanity. It was Nasution who baptized the military regime with the name "New Order," which is used to this day.
On Oct. 13, 1965, it was my turn to be targeted by a pack of armed, masked men. There were no official, written charges. And what happened to me was also experienced by 1.5 million others. Half a million people were killed, according to the Western press, and some military officials say the number is even higher. Suharto needed the slaughter to instill fear in everyone. He tried to legitimize his rule by claiming Sukarno had conferred power on him in a letter dated March 11, 1966--a letter that has never been produced to the public and which is now said to have been "lost."
Suharto's next step, in 1971, was to stage a general election in accordance with his taste and needs. Two years later he required all political currents to merge into just three parties, yielding a "constitutional state" complete with the recognition and support of Western countries.
With the founding of the New Order, the trampling on humanity continued. The killing has never stopped, right up to Suharto's fall and beyond. A prison official once told us: "The only right you still possess is the right to breathe." That was an exaggeration. In reality, many political prisoners were killed, without judicial process, either directly or through inadequate food rations. Outside the concentration camps and the jails, the families of political prisoners were persecuted, humiliated and intimidated by the New Order bureaucracy.
The intellectuals ran for cover beneath Suharto's feet. No one, apart from a few exiles, dared to challenge the New Order, which created new lies to bolster the old ones, so that the untruths were doubled. Every state institution faithfully carried out its main task: to vindicate and support Suharto. Not once did the parliament so much as discuss the fate of the millions who were killed or deprived of their rights.
When I was arrested in October 1965, my study was ransacked and all of my papers destroyed, including unpublished manuscripts. Again, when I left Buru Island concentration camp in 1979, all my papers were taken from me. (Among them was a letter from Suharto, in which he advised me to pray to God for guidance in "returning" to the path of righteousness.) The judiciary never made a sound about the violations of my rights. Everyone agreed with Suharto, every institution was a tool in his hands.
Suharto, whose rule was blighted by the deaths of hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--is a criminal against humanity. Everyone on the face of the earth has the right to bring him to court for his crimes because, as Sukarno was fond of saying, "humanity is one."
I extend my highest respect and appreciation to the students and other people who succeeded in toppling the dictator last spring. They did so without resort to kidnapping, killing, physical abuse, slander or intimidation. It is only their consistent action, to reform the life of the state and the nation, that can rid us of the New Order's criminal brutality and bring Indonesia to a new life.
*Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's best-known author
See: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/asia/magazine/1999/990524/viewpoint1.html
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"Strangers Who Are Not Foreign"
On 1 January 1960, a regulation prohibiting so-called aliens from trading in rural areas came into effect and the livelihood of thousands of Chinese Indonesians was taken away. Taking a strong stand against this measure, Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote nine letters to a friend which were published serially in the newspaper Bintang Minggu. In March, after the tremendous positive response that greeted them, the letters were republished in book form as Hoa Kiau di Indonesia (Overseas Chinese in Indonesia). The authorities reacted by banning the book and imprisoning Pramoedya.
This paper illuminates Pramoedya's public role as an intellectual by examining how his book sparked an unprecedented debate about Chinese Indonesians. In Hoa Kiau, Pramoedya begins to address racialism while interrogating the notion of Indonesian identity. He locates the 1960 regulation in historical context, thereby stressing its continuity with racially based policies of Dutch colonial rule.
In the process, Pramoedya steps outside the overblown public rhetoric of "independence" and "freedom" prevalent at the time, thus gaining a clearer perspective on inherited patterns of power and its abuse. Against the charged anti-Chinese climate which he attributes to a "nationalism suffering from sickness," he crafts a language that provokes empathy, dialog, and critical thinking. Not merely a history of the Chinese Indonesian community or a simple defense of it, his book created a language which disturbed contemporary assumptions about nation and community.
Sumit K. Mandal, Cornell University
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This paper illuminates Pramoedya's public role as an intellectual by examining how his book sparked an unprecedented debate about Chinese Indonesians. In Hoa Kiau, Pramoedya begins to address racialism while interrogating the notion of Indonesian identity. He locates the 1960 regulation in historical context, thereby stressing its continuity with racially based policies of Dutch colonial rule.
In the process, Pramoedya steps outside the overblown public rhetoric of "independence" and "freedom" prevalent at the time, thus gaining a clearer perspective on inherited patterns of power and its abuse. Against the charged anti-Chinese climate which he attributes to a "nationalism suffering from sickness," he crafts a language that provokes empathy, dialog, and critical thinking. Not merely a history of the Chinese Indonesian community or a simple defense of it, his book created a language which disturbed contemporary assumptions about nation and community.
Sumit K. Mandal, Cornell University
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Voices Carried: The Incorporation of Indonesia's Feminist Literary Tradition in the Works of Pramoedya
The female characters appearing in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's 1980s novels project a depth and individuality that is rare in the context of what Sylvia Tiwon has termed Indonesia's "print patriarchy." Critics have yet to consider the sources of his unique perspective and its historical and theoretical implications. It is my contention that, beyond his realistic portrayals of women and their intellectual role in the development of the Indonesian nation, Pramoedya pays tribute to an underestimated body of women's writing from the first half of this century.
In my paper I focus upon Pramoedya's 1950s association with the writer and revolutionary, S. Rukiah. Rukiah, like other women writers including Hamidah and Suwarsih Djojopuspito, realized that her stories could not be told through such "modern" literary strategies as authoritative narration and linear story lines. Instead, these writers experimented with fragmented and polyphonic narratives while exhibiting a radical awareness of the "prison house of (patriarchal literary) language" and its role in Indonesian culture. I believe there is a direct connection to be made between their literary approach to women's struggle for self-definition and Pramoedya's use of unreliable narrators and Jakarta slang in his depiction of dislocated and disenfranchised individuals in such works as Tjerita dari Djakarta.
The events of 1965-66 had a devastating effect on what I call Indonesia's early feminist literary tradition and its writers. To read Pramoedya's 1980s novels is to rediscover the urgency and experimentation of these women.
Julie Shackford-Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
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In my paper I focus upon Pramoedya's 1950s association with the writer and revolutionary, S. Rukiah. Rukiah, like other women writers including Hamidah and Suwarsih Djojopuspito, realized that her stories could not be told through such "modern" literary strategies as authoritative narration and linear story lines. Instead, these writers experimented with fragmented and polyphonic narratives while exhibiting a radical awareness of the "prison house of (patriarchal literary) language" and its role in Indonesian culture. I believe there is a direct connection to be made between their literary approach to women's struggle for self-definition and Pramoedya's use of unreliable narrators and Jakarta slang in his depiction of dislocated and disenfranchised individuals in such works as Tjerita dari Djakarta.
The events of 1965-66 had a devastating effect on what I call Indonesia's early feminist literary tradition and its writers. To read Pramoedya's 1980s novels is to rediscover the urgency and experimentation of these women.
Julie Shackford-Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
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Beholding a Landmark of Guilt: 1960s Pramoedya and the Present Regime
In this paper I discuss how Pramoedya Ananta Toer's works of the 1960s have generated major discursive traditions in Bahasa Indonesia and Indonesian literature. His most significant work in this period was the cultural column "Lentera" in Bintang Timur. This work is remembered as a landmark of guilt by the present regime and its supporters. Ironically, the regime which has declared the most vibrant Indonesian literature anathema, has in the same motion made it prominent.
Bahasa Indonesia evolved from Malay which was a language of the bazaar. As opposition grew to Dutch colonial rule, the revolutionary potential of language to unify became clear, especially through journalism. Pramoedya's works in the 1960s sparked the idea of Bahasa Indonesia not only as a language of unity, but also as a language of disagreement, of struggle, and of liberation, both social and national.
As a creative writer and lifelong autodidact, Pramoedya produced "Lentera" not for an elite or an exclusive class, but for everyone able to read and write. He showed ways of using Bahasa Indonesia to express ideas, concerns, and aspirations. He also challenged the boundaries of official and non-official, formal and informal, kromo and ngoko. Every phrase and expression could be used freely in transforming ideas into a literary form, making creativity the dynamic of new life.
Ben Abel, Cornell University
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Bahasa Indonesia evolved from Malay which was a language of the bazaar. As opposition grew to Dutch colonial rule, the revolutionary potential of language to unify became clear, especially through journalism. Pramoedya's works in the 1960s sparked the idea of Bahasa Indonesia not only as a language of unity, but also as a language of disagreement, of struggle, and of liberation, both social and national.
As a creative writer and lifelong autodidact, Pramoedya produced "Lentera" not for an elite or an exclusive class, but for everyone able to read and write. He showed ways of using Bahasa Indonesia to express ideas, concerns, and aspirations. He also challenged the boundaries of official and non-official, formal and informal, kromo and ngoko. Every phrase and expression could be used freely in transforming ideas into a literary form, making creativity the dynamic of new life.
Ben Abel, Cornell University
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Pramoedya: Autodidact, Example, Guide
This paper argues that Pramoedya Ananta Toer, as an autodidact, exemplifies the potential for critical and creative appropriation of knowledge; and that in his writings he presents material on the dynamics of learning which is itself instructive. Though his career on the schoolbench was curtailed and apparently difficult, Pramoedya has made himself a considerable historian and critic as well as a formidable writer of fiction.
His fictional and non-fictional works have long been informed by issues of pedagogical experience, by the coercions and resistances, humiliations and enlightenments that accompany processes of learning. Authenticity is revealed as a matter of what one has taken to heart and made one's own. Authorization, then, is not borrowed from an outside source: it is a matter of personal courage.
Pramoedya thus provides example and guidance for Indonesian students caught in the disloyalty to and estrangement from "home" (place, people, language) generated by the exilings of higher education. He challenges intellectuals who through education and position have become complicit in a system that reproduces privileged knowledges, received opinions and official facts.
He does so by demonstrating how to win a degree of independent agency in one's acquisition of knowledge. Precisely because he is politically ostracized and his writings are banned, Pramoedya's life and work have come to represent the potential for intellectual autonomy in contemporary Indonesia.
Alex G. Bardsley, Cornell University
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His fictional and non-fictional works have long been informed by issues of pedagogical experience, by the coercions and resistances, humiliations and enlightenments that accompany processes of learning. Authenticity is revealed as a matter of what one has taken to heart and made one's own. Authorization, then, is not borrowed from an outside source: it is a matter of personal courage.
Pramoedya thus provides example and guidance for Indonesian students caught in the disloyalty to and estrangement from "home" (place, people, language) generated by the exilings of higher education. He challenges intellectuals who through education and position have become complicit in a system that reproduces privileged knowledges, received opinions and official facts.
He does so by demonstrating how to win a degree of independent agency in one's acquisition of knowledge. Precisely because he is politically ostracized and his writings are banned, Pramoedya's life and work have come to represent the potential for intellectual autonomy in contemporary Indonesia.
Alex G. Bardsley, Cornell University
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