Gatra Priyandita – In the morning of 1 October 1965, 37-year-old Eneng (not her real name) woke up in Bandung, about 200km from Jakarta, to an unexpected news broadcast via Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI): a group of people had taken measures to protect President Sukarno from a coup mounted by a "Council of Generals". Although unanticipated, the news relieved her. Sukarno was an ally of the movement she was part of, as a member of Gerwani – abbreviation for the Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women's Movement), one of the largest organisations in Indonesia campaigning for women's rights, anti-imperialism, literacy, and labour.
Eneng felt a flicker of pride as the group – later calling themselves as the Revolutionary Council – sounded appropriately ready, though not for long. By the evening that day, the narratives had changed. The army under Major-General Suharto had gained control of RRI and blamed the Partai Komunis Indonesia/PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) for the coup. Given its affiliation with the PKI, Gerwani was suddenly in the wrong, and Eneng was guilty by association.
A primary school-educated housewife, Eneng had been a Gerwani member for seven years by then. When she joined the movement in 1958 at 30 years of age, little did she know that it would profoundly impact her life – and death. Several months after that morning, in November 1965, Eneng was detained without trial. It was years later, when she was 44 years old in 1972, that her imprisonment was officiated in a set of documents containing her mugshots, fingerprints, and all her personal details, along with a list of all her close family and friends and their addresses. We know little about Eneng's case beyond this time.
Eneng's file is part of the Sukamiskin Prison Papers, a compilation of 58 prison records we, the 1965 Setiap Hari collective, accidentally encountered in a second hand bookshop in Yogyakarta in December 2024. Unlike the other files, hers does not contain the release documents – the so-called "voluntary" agreement to be released back into society only to be systematically surveilled, never to sue the government.
Eneng's story speaks to the experience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Indonesians. That her documents – and others' like them, containing sensitive personal data potentially impacting so many lives – could be sold as mere commodities in a second hand market only underscores the persistence of impunity. After the army took control, it used propaganda to portray members of the PKI and its affiliate organisations – such as Gerwani – as dangerous internal enemies of the country that had to be eliminated.
This propaganda, combined with the establishment of a military structure to coordinate the attack on the Indonesian left, led to widespread civilian participation in mass violence against PKI members and sympathisers. It has been estimated that from late 1965 to mid-1966 approximately 500,000 men, women and children were killed. In addition, over a million people were arrested and detained, often over lengthy periods of time, without formal charge or trial. Conditions of detention were extremely harsh, and prisoners endured inadequate rations, lacked access to health care, and suffered torture and sexual violence. Some prisoners were taken out of prison at night in groups to be killed. Those who survived imprisonment were subjected to systematic discrimination and denied an array of civil rights.
The violence was a crucial part of the ascendancy of Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime. After 1998, there have been various efforts to address the 1965 violence, as well as other human rights crimes of the regime. However, these initiatives have largely failed, which can largely be attributed to the continuing presence of military elites in politics, who were implicated in human rights abuses during the New Order and who have been able to influence policy in such a way that accountability for perpetrators was avoided.
The presidency of Joko Widodo (2014-2024) was prefaced by an electoral promise to address past human rights abuses. However, this promise did not translate into improving existing mechanisms or reviving earlier endeavours. Instead, in Widodo's first term new initiatives were introduced that were presented as more "culturally appropriate" ways of addressing past human rights crimes. In the second term, human rights issues were pushed even further into the background, with the exception of the President's 2023 acknowledgement of past human rights violations, including the 1965 violence placed at the top of the list.
Although this acknowledgment allowed for socio-economic measures, including financial compensation, it fell short of holding those responsible for the violations to account. Moreover, it did not allow for genuine reconciliation measures such as truth-telling or revising official historical accounts to include the experiences and perspectives of those victimised by past human rights abuses. These measures have therefore only shielded the military and other elites from accountability.
Accountability for human rights crimes has only become more elusive following the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto, a former army general responsible for the disappearances of pro-democracy activists in 1997-1998 and human rights violations in Indonesian-occupied East Timor. In May 2025, the Minister of Cultural Affairs Fadli Zon – who has a record of denying human rights violations – announced a Rp9 billion (US$551,000) project to rewrite Indonesia's official history. The project has drawn strong criticism from Indonesian scholars and activists who argue that this new history will conceal darker episodes of Indonesian history – including the 1965 mass violence. The history re-writing project is thus part of a broader context of sixty years of impunity.
Historical rewriting has long been a tool of power-building. The practice of damnatio memoriae in ancient Rome – erasing or excluding names, images, and records – set a precedent for using history, and the act of remembering itself – as rulers' political tool. Later empires reframed colonisation as civilisation, and nation-states in recent decades have gone from recasting history to banning the teaching of significant historical topics – ranging from slavery and systemic racism to nuclear warfare and gender – under the guise of sensitivity, divisiveness, or age-appropriateness. When history is rewritten by power, how do we keep alive the memories it seeks to erase?
Culture, too, is a political route to power. It is telling that the Prabowo presidency, resonating with several cultural power plays in Europe, including the Sweden Democrats' strategic cultural moves, has formed Indonesia's inaugural Ministry of Cultural Affairs under which the very project of rewriting history is being undertaken. Yet culture, by definition, is shaped through connections between individuals – by citizens, by the people. While the state invokes "culturally appropriate ways" to contain justice within symbolic gestures, culture can also be deployed differently. Collective memory work and other cultural interventions cannot substitute for state policy, but they do offer counterweights.
It is only within state narratives, however, that historical events appear isolated. Like the country maps we memorise in primary school, states appear as neatly bounded entities, with self-contained stories. For decades, the global publicity of the American War in Vietnam has obscured both the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesian genocide, even though the model of repression travelled – for instance, in the warning "Jakarta is coming" which appeared in Chile in 1973.
In reality, as state security and methods of exerting power operate beyond borders, practices of memory and solidarity must do the same. The urgent task ahead, therefore, is not to rescue, but to listen, to stand alongside, and to amplify. How can the heirs of Enengs – engaged in struggles worldwide – mobilise culture as a field of aesthetic resistance, connecting across boundaries to resist erasure in the name of power?
Source: https://www.newmandala.org/remembering-1965-against-the-politics-of-erasure