The nomination of Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning documentary, The Act of Killing, for an Academy Award, has opened a new round of tensions in China-Indonesia relations.
The film depicts a group of aging thugs in the North Sumatra capital, Medan, as they recall and then re-enact their role in the 1965-66 massacre of Indonesian communists. Once or twice, the film mentions Chinese victims of the killings.
This mention, along with the Oscar nomination of the film, has prompted a stormy reaction in China.
The official Chinese news agency Xinhua wrote of 300,000 Chinese allegedly killed in the 1965-66 events, citing these figures as proof of the acute victimisation of Chinese in Indonesia. Chinese bloggers on the Chinese social media site Sinaw Weibo have called for Indonesia to apologise for the massacres.
But the reality is different.
The Act of Killing trailer
The 1965-66 massacres targeted the Indonesian Communist Party. With three million members it was the largest communist party in the non-communist world. With a large and efficient organization, it looked poised to come to power.
Few Chinese Indonesians were members of the party, and the few Chinese organizations affiliated with the Left were small. When the killings came, Chinese were not targeted.
Most killings took place in the countryside, where impoverished Javanese peasants had been the party’s mainstay. Most Chinese lived in the towns and cities.
We now know, too, that most of the killings were coordinated and authorized by the Indonesian army and were not a spontaneous reaction to political tensions in the civilian population.
In a pattern established before 1965 and continued long after, Chinese Indonesians were harassed, sometimes their houses and shops were burnt, but they were only a tiny part of the total death toll. Some 500,000 Indonesians died, about 2,000 of them Chinese.
In the aftermath of this harassment, thousands of Chinese decided to leave Indonesia, fearing that the country had become too dangerous. They returned, however, to a China that was on the brink of the Cultural Revolution. Some of them regretted their decision. The Red Guards who spearheaded the Culutral Revolution were deeply suspicious of anyone with outside connections.
But when some Chinese Indonesians tried to return, they were blocked from doing so by the Indonesian government.
Lights, camera, murder!
The story of Indonesia's 1960s genocide has been turned into a film, but with the real-life killers acting out their crimes for the cameras.
When referring incorrectly to massacres of Chinese in 1965-66, many Chinese commentators also referred to a massacre of Chinese in 1998 upon the fall of President Suharto.
In 1998, as in 1965-66, rioting in larger Indonesian cities including Jakarta, Medan, Solo and Surabaya targeted Chinese Indonesian businesses and homes. Chinese women were among the many women raped during this time. But the thousand people who died were almost all non-Chinese Indonesians.
They had taken advantage of the riots and absence of security forces to enter malls to loot the stores inside, and they were trapped when the buildings began to burn.
In fact a close examination of the circumstances in 1998 suggests a coordinated event of systematic violence, including anti-Chinese violence, rape and arson, not at all like previous outbreaks of violence. This violence would not have been possible without some form of military involvement or know-how.
During the Suharto era, security forces (sometimes working as private entrepreneurs) used the threat of popular anti-Chinese violence as a device to extort protection payments from Chinese businesses. With military personnel seriously under-paid, these payments became an important supplement to the wages of soldiers.
Orchestrated violence to make Chinese Indonesians feel insecure was a feature of Suharto’s Indonesia.
Indonesia has never apologised to the victims of the 1965 and 1998 violence, ethnic Chinese or non-Chinese. There has been no offer of compensation and not one perpetrator has been brought to justice.
Many Indonesian commentators argue that the painful experience of the past violence is better forgotten. But there is a growing willingness to explore the implications of these terrible events.
Chinese have often felt at risk in times of trouble in the archipelago. But false stories of a vast massacre of Chinese are seriously unhelpful.
They create a mood of fear that is not warranted and a sense of grievance that is not justified. Despite occasional appalling outbreaks of violence, Indonesia has an enviable reputation for ethnic harmony, given its size and diversity.
China’s government should have the strength and common sense to repudiate the shrill calls for apology.
Professor Robert Cribb is an Indonesia expert based at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
Dr Jemma Purdey is an Indonesia specialist based at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University.
