The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder PDF
Preview The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder
“This book is a breakthrough for the study of the mass murder of 1965–66. Melvin has uncovered much new evidence and has leveraged the case-study of the province of Aceh to reveal hidden aspects of the national-level decision-making. She presents an original argument on why the mass murder should be understood as a genocide. Her book is not an ordinary contribution to the field of Indonesian history – it is a game-changer.” — John Roosa, University of British Columbia, Canada “ It seems impossible to overstate the significance of Jess Melvin’s monumental, heartbreaking work. Not only does she make a devastating argument that Indonesia’s mass killings constitute genocide under international law, she took a simple yet fateful step in the history of scholarship on Indonesia: she walked into a military archive and asked for their records. That nobody had done this before attests to the formidable courage it required. She analyzes thousands of pages of hitherto secret documents with patient attention to detail and unflinching moral clarity. The result transforms our understanding of Indonesian history, identity, and politics. Beautifully written, endlessly important, Jess Melvin has authored one of the great studies of genocide, anywhere. Period.” —J oshua Oppenheimer, Academy Award–nominated director, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Denmark “ Melvin’s book is a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding of the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. She taps new archival sources to demonstrate powerfully that the Indonesian military was deeply engaged in planning and carrying out the murder of Indonesian communists. In the process, the military manipulated domestic and international public opinion to conceal its role in political genocide.” — Robert Cribb, Australian National University, Australia The Army and the Indonesian Genocide For the past half-century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965–66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign. Using documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency’s archives in Banda Aceh, this book shatters the Indonesian government’s official propaganda account of the mass killings and proves the military’s agency behind those events. This book tells the story of the 3,000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise the Indonesian genocide files. Drawing upon these orders and records, along with the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators and other eyewitness of the genocide in Aceh province, it reconstructs, for the first time, a detailed narrative of the killings using the military’s own accounts of these events. This book makes the case that the 1965–66 killings can be understood as a case of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. T he first book to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the genocide using the army’s own records of these events, it will be of interest to students and academics in the field of Southeast Asian studies, history, politics, the Cold War, political violence and comparative genocide. Jess Melvin is Rice Faculty Fellow in Southeast Asia Studies and Postdoctoral Associate in Genocide Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. Rethinking Southeast Asia Edited by Duncan McCargo University of Leeds, UK For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com Southeast Asia is a dynamic and rapidly changing region which continues to defy predictions and challenge formulaic understandings. This series publishes cutting- edge work on the region, providing a venue for books that are readable, topical, interdisciplinary and critical of conventional views. It aims to communicate the energy, contestations and ambiguities that make Southeast Asia both consistently fascinating and sometimes potentially disturbing. Some titles in the series address the needs of students and teachers, published in simultaneous in hardback and paperback, including: Rethinking Vietnam Duncan McCargo Rethinking Southeast Asia is also a forum for innovative new research intended for a more specialist readership. Titles are published initially in hardback. 11 Civil Society in the Philippines Theoretical, Methodological and Policy Debates Gerard Clarke 12 Politics and Governance in Indonesia The Police in the Era of Reformasi Muradi 13 Transnational Islamic Actors and Indonesia’s Foreign Policy Transcending the State Delphine Alles 14 Reporting Thailand’s Southern Conflict Mediating Political Dissent Phansasiri Kularb 15 The Army and the Indonesian Genocide Mechanics of Mass Murder Jess Melvin Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University Mechanics of Mass Murder, © Alit Ambara, 2017. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide Mechanics of Mass Murder Jess Melvin
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