The Indonesian genocide files explain, in the military’s own words, how the military initiated and implemented the 1965-66 mass killing as a deliberate national campaign. This presentation will examine the orders and chains of command recorded in these documents.

As Indonesia commemorates twenty years since the fall of the New Order military dictatorship, it is worth remembering that the foundation myth of the regime and the post-New Order state remains stubbornly in place. Not only has there yet to be an historical reckoning of the brutal mass killings that swept the country in 1965-66, there has yet to be an historical reckoning of how the military came to power. The Indonesian genocide files- 3,000 pages of previously classified documents produced by the Indonesian military during the time of the genocide that I discovered during research for The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder– explain, in the military’s own words, how the military initiated and implemented the 1965-66 mass killing as a deliberate national campaign. This presentation will examine the orders and chains of command recorded in these documents. It proposes that in order to make a clean break with New Order propaganda is necessary to turn this propaganda on its head.

Speaker:

Jess Melvin is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD, Mechanics of Mass Murder: How the Indonesian Military Initiated and Implemented the Indonesian Genocide, the Case of Aceh at the University of Melbourne in 2015. She was Rice Faculty Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies and Postdoctoral Associate in Genocide Studies at Yale University in 2016-2017.