The Long Shadow of the Cold War: Indonesia and the Legacy of the 1965 Anti-Communist Purge

Baskara T. Wardaya
Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

The brutal anti-communist purge that took place in Indonesia in the second half of the 1960s was one of the gravest peace-time mass violence of the post- World War II period. Yet for decades, successive Indonesian governments were able to refuse to officially acknowledge and deal with the purge, which included the massacres of about half a million Indonesians, beginning in the second half of 1965. Part of the capability to refuse, this article argues, is the lack of pressure from foreign governments on the Indonesian government to acknowledge the violent purge and its impact, let alone to help the survivors of the violence. The reason for the lack of pressure, it further argues, is because many foreign governments benefitted from the purge. While various western governments considered the purge a successful move in preventing Indonesia from going to the communist side of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies did not fully regret the purge, since they believed that in the Sino-Soviet rivalries in the 1960s the Indonesian communist party had sided with Beijing. The refusal of the Indonesian government to acknowledge and address the mass violence, in turn, cast a long shadow in the social and political life of Indonesia today.

Bio:
Baskara T. Wardaya PhD teaches history at Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He holds a Master’s degree and a PhD degree in History from Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. In 2004-2005 he received Fulbright grant to conduct postdoctoral research in the US on the history of US-Indonesian relations during the Cold War. In 2011-2012 he taught history at the University of California-Riverside as Fulbright Scholar in Residence. In 2014 he received grant from AIFIS (American Institute for Indonesian Studies) to conduct archival research on the history of US-Indonesian relations. In 2022 he holds the Francis Wade Chair to teach history at Marquette University. Among his works are Cold War Shadow (2007); Truth Will Out (2013); and Memori Genosida (2021).