No Place to Remember: Haunting and the Search for Mass Graves in Indonesia
There are thousands of mass graves across Indonesia which hold the remains of nearly one million people murdered during the anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966. During these purges, the Indonesia army and co-opted civilian militias captured and killed men,
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No Place to Remember: Haunting and the Search for Mass Graves in Indonesia Annie Pohlman
This chapter considers the politics of social memory in contemporary Indonesia by exploring the search for the mass graves of those murdered during the mass killings of communists in 1965–1966. There are thousands—potentially tens of thousands—of mass graves across the country that hold the remains of an estimated one million people (Cribb 2001; McGregor et al. 2018). During these purges, the Indonesian army and co-opted civilian militias captured and killed men, women, and children because of their suspected communist sympathies, dumping their bodies into pits, ravines, and rivers. Indonesia has never come to terms with these killings: these places are unmarked, and their dead cannot be mentioned in a country which still celebrates their murder (Wieringa 2019). Yet the dead are not quiet: each of these mass graves is an open secret to nearby locals, and most of these places are haunted. In a country where there is no place to remember or commemorate the dead of 1965, I focus on the work of two men, Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris,1 who are attempting to map the locations of the mass graves. Both belong
A. Pohlman (*) The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. L. Hubbell et al. (eds.), Places of Traumatic Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_4
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to a non-government organisation, a survivor network called the YPKP 1965–1966, or the Foundation for Research into the Victims of the 1965–1966 Massacres, and it is through the various branches of this foundation that they locate these graves. As they travel around the country, they photograph the gravesites they find and the people who lead them to them, and then post these photographs on their Facebook pages. Most of the photographs taken by Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris take in a range of sites: an open field, trees along a riverbank, a small clearing in a forest, an old water tower, even an old gravesite, overgrown with plants. Sometimes a bare patch of ground is the focus of the photo, with unremarkable grass and earth taking up the entire frame, or a dirt path running between rows of palm trees. Some of the photographs show two or three old men standing or moving around in these otherwise empty landscapes. Some of these are of the men, lined up together, standing posed for the photographer to capture them as a group. Usually when these men appear, however, they are pointing towards places in the landscape (e.g. Fig. 4.1). To discuss the search by Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris for the mass graves of 1965, I first sketch a brief account of these massacres and the memory politics of the military regime which perpetrated them. I then examine the consequences of the dead’s ‘bad deaths’ and the interruption of necessary mortuary rituals. As told through the testimonies of survivors and victims’ relatives, the bad deaths have created haunted, uncanny sites (angker): they are
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