These essays investigate institutionalized violence in New Order Indonesia and the ongoing legacy Suharto's dictatorship has conferred on the nation. The collection includes papers on East Timor, Aceh, Biak, the police, and the Indonesian military, among other topics.

In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship. Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation. Finalist, Social Sciences Book Award, the International Convention of Asian Scholars

Jakarta, Sambas, Poso, the Moluccas, West Papua. These simple, geographical names have recently obtained strong associations with mass killing, just as Aceh and East Timor, where large-scale violence has flared up again. Lethal incidents between adjacent villages, or between a petty criminal and the crowd, take place throughout Indonesia. Indonesia is a violent country. Many Indonesia-watchers, both scholars and journalists, explain the violence in terms of the loss of the monopoly on the means of violence by the state since the beginning of the Reformasi in 1998. Others point at the omnipresent remnants of the New Order state (1966-1998), former President Suharto's clan or the army in particular, as the evil genius behind the present bloodshed. The authors in this volume try to explain violence in Indonesia by looking at it in historical perspective.

This volume foregrounds the dynamics of displacement and the experiences of internal refugees uprooted by conflict and violence in Indonesia. Contributors examine internal displacement in the context of militarized conflict and violence in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua, and in other parts of Outer Island Indonesia during the transition from authoritarian rule. The volume also explores official and humanitarian discourses on displacement and their significance for the politics of representation.

Opposing Suharto presents an account of democratization in the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia. It describes how opposition groups challenged the long-time ruler, President Suharto, and his military-based regime, forcing him to resign in 1998. The book’s main purpose is to explain how ordinary people can bring about political change in a repressive authoritarian regime. It does this by telling the story of an array of dissident groups, nongovernmental organizations, student activists, and political party workers as they tried to expand democratic space in the last decade of Suharto’s rule. This book is an important study not only for readers interested in contemporary Indonesia and political change in Asia, but also for all those interested in democratization processes elsewhere in the world. Unlike most other books on Indonesia, and unlike many books on democratization, it provides an account from the perspective of those who were struggling to bring about change.

This study discusses the process of military reform in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto?s New Order regime in 1998. The extent of Indonesia?s progress in this area has been the subject of heated debate, both in Indonesia and in Western capitals. Human rights organizations and critical academics, on the one hand, have argued that the reforms implemented so far have been largely superficial, and that Indonesia?s armed forces remain a highly problematic institution. Foreign proponents of military assistance to Indonesia, on the other hand, have asserted that the military has undergone radical change, as evidenced by its complete extraction from political institutions. This study evaluates the state of military reform eight years after the end of authoritarian rule, pointing to both significant achievements and serious shortcomings. Although the armed forces in the new democratic polity no longer function as the backbone of a powerful centralist regime and have lost many of their previous privileges, the military has been able to protect its core institutional interests by successfully fending off demands to reform the territorial command structure. As the military?s primary source of political influence and off-budget revenue, the persistence of the territorial system has ensured that the Indonesian armed forces have not been fully subordinated to democratic civilian control. This ambiguous transition outcome so far poses difficult challenges to domestic and foreign policymakers, who have to find ways of effectively engaging with the military to drive the reform process forward.This is the twenty-third publication in Policy Studies, a peer-reviewed East-West Center Washington series that presents scholarly analysis of key contemporary domestic and international political, economic, and strategic issues affecting Asia in a policy relevant manner.

Publisher Description

Controversial topic: Indonesia, human rights, Asian values Major contribution to the understanding of the Suharto regime

The military is one of the few institutions that cut across the divides of Indonesian society. As it continues to play a critical part in determining Indonesia's future, the military itself is undergoing profound change. The authors of this book examine the role of the military in politics and society since the fall of President Suharto in 1998. They present several strategic scenarios for Indonesia, which have important implications for U.S.-Indonesian relations, and propose goals for Indonesian military reform and elements of a U.S. engagement policy.