Endy M. Bayuni, Jakarta – If I had to sacrifice the lives of two million Indonesians to save the lives of 200 million Indonesians, I would do so: So once said one of former president Soeharto's top military chiefs to a closed House of Representatives hearing.
When Gen. Benny Moerdani uttered these words, during his stint as defense minister from 1988 to 1992, he was explaining the national security doctrine that his military and political mentor Soeharto had used so effectively to rule the country with little serious challenge.
Soeharto never publicly spelled it out this way, and it is unlikely that anything like it was ever put in writing in any state document, but it was a national security doctrine that helped launched his presidential bid when he led the army in purging Indonesia of communists and left-wing activists in 1965-1966, and later propped him up in power for more than three decades.
This year marks 50 years since the mass killings, a national tragedy that has left a deep scar to this day. Going by official statements these past few weeks, however, it is clear that the nation is far from feeling remorseful about the state taking the lives of many of its people.
Forget about getting any apology from the state. The nation is still very much in denial. At best, it entertains the idea that it was an inevitable or even necessary tragedy to prevent Indonesia from falling into communism.
The scariest part of this is that in the absence of any feeling of remorse, many here would probably endorse another round of killings, given circumstances similar to those that surrounded the 1965-1966 massacres.
Most independent estimates put the death toll between 500,000 and one million. With Indonesia's population then just surpassing the 100 million mark, this gives us the "tolerable" number to kill off: 1 percent of the population. When Benny spoke in the early 1990s, Indonesia's population had just surpassed 200 million, so it was no coincidence that he picked two million as the tolerable limit.
Killing 1 percent of the population for the good of the other 99 percent may make sense in a national security doctrine drawn up by the military. But for Indonesia, 1 percent translates into a staggeringly huge absolute number.
If Soeharto were still in charge today, going by his national security doctrine, the state would have to be prepared to kill up to 2.5 million people for the good of some 250 million plus people.
States kill to protect people, and yes, often this means killing their own citizens. Undemocratic states use their military, rather than police, to carry out the killings. In Soeharto's case, he was the president and the military had always been his personal tool.
Soeharto was not the only leader who killed his own citizens on a large scale for the "greater good".
World history is full of leaders who brutally murdered in the name of the state and the people, including the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, communist China's Mao Ze Dong, Germany's Adolf Hitler, Cambodia's Pol Pot, junta leaders in Latin America and more recently, the generals in the Myanmar junta.
One can even throw the US into this category when it decided to use the nuclear bomb in Japan in 1945 to end World War II once and for all.
Any attempt to look into the reasons for the 1965 killings would do well to scrutinize Soeharto's national security doctrine.
The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in 2012 published a detailed report of its four-year study into the killings and concluded that it amounted to a crime against humanity. The report spared the armed forces, then ABRI, from any institutional culpability, instead laying the blame on the Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order (Kopkamtib).
This was the command Soeharto created in 1965 to give him the powers to take whatever steps he deemed necessary to restore peace and order.
The command usurped the powers of Sukarno, who had become a sitting duck president after Oct. 1, 1965. Although Soeharto was still reporting to Sukarno, he was able to ignore and circumvent the president by using his Kopkamtib authority. In March 1966, he edged Sukarno out of power and assumed the presidency himself.
Soeharto kept Kopkamtib in operation, at first leading it alongside his job as president, but over the years he put the command in the hands of his most trusted general answerable to him. Thus Indonesia for the next three decades was de facto ruled by a dictator with a national security doctrine that tolerated mass killings.
None of the killings during his tenure, including in East Timor, matched the scale and horror of the 1965 massacres, but the doctrine was very much at work throughout Soeharto's rule, using fear and terror effectively to remain in power for three decades.
But something must have happened to the old man that changed his mind by May 1998. Then military chief Gen. Wiranto reported to Soeharto about the plan for an assembly of up to one million people in Jakarta to call for his resignation. Wiranto said cracking down on the protestors could lead to a bloodbath. He asked for instruction.
This should have been a no-brainer for someone who had overseen the mass killings more than 30 years earlier. But Soeharto, then 77, asked for time to consider anyway. A few hours later, he informed Wiranto not to bother. He quit the next day.
[The writer is senior editor of The Jakarta Post.]