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No event in modern Indonesian history has been more consequential or more politically sensitive than the events that followed the night of 30 September–1 October 1965. A group calling itself the September 30th Movement (Gerakan 30 September, G30S) kidnapped and killed six senior army generals and a lieutenant in Jakarta. Within days, Major General Suharto had taken control of the army and defeated the movement. Over the following months, perhaps 500,000 people or more were killed in anti-communist violence across Java, Bali, Sumatra and elsewhere, and hundreds of thousands more were detained, many for over a decade without trial. By March 1966 Suharto held effective executive power. By 1968 he was president, and he remained in office for thirty years.
For postgraduate students, 1965 is important not only as history but as a case study in how political regimes create their own founding stories, and how scholarship challenges them.
The New Order account
For more than thirty years, the official account was simple. The G30S was a coup attempt planned and carried out by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The army, led by Suharto, saved the nation and Pancasila. The violence that followed, when it was mentioned at all, was described as the result of spontaneous popular anger against communists. This account was taught in schools and repeated in the 1984 state-sponsored film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, which schoolchildren were required to watch every year until 1998. It was commemorated each 1 October as Hari Kesaktian Pancasila (Pancasila Sanctity Day). Katharine McGregor’s History in Uniform (2007) shows how the military shaped Indonesian historical writing to support this account.
Early challenges: the “Cornell Paper”
The first serious academic challenge came in January 1966. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, with Frederick Bunnell, wrote a confidential analysis later published as A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia (1971), known as the “Cornell Paper”. It argued that the G30S was mainly an internal army affair, a rebellion by middle-ranking officers from Central Java, and that the PKI leadership was drawn in rather than being the organiser. The New Order regarded the paper as subversive, and Anderson was banned from Indonesia for decades.
Harold Crouch’s The Army and Politics in Indonesia (1978) offered a more balanced view. He accepted that some PKI leaders were involved but emphasised the army’s political motives and the way Suharto used the crisis.
John Roosa and the “Special Bureau”
The most important later work is John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder (2006). Drawing on new sources, including the testimony of the military officer Supardjo, Roosa argues that the G30S was organised by PKI Chairman D. N. Aidit and a small secret group, the Special Bureau (Biro Chusus) under Sjam Kamaruzaman, working with sympathetic officers. Most of the PKI’s leadership and its millions of members knew nothing about it. The plan was poorly prepared and collapsed within a day.
Roosa’s key point concerns how the army used the event. Suharto and the army leadership treated a small conspiracy as a pretext to destroy the entire PKI, a legal party with millions of members in affiliated organisations, and to remove Sukarno. The violence that followed was not a spontaneous reaction to the generals’ deaths but the result of a campaign planned and encouraged by the army.
The violence: from “spontaneous” to organised
Research on the killings has advanced significantly. Robert Cribb’s edited volume (1990) brought together early regional studies and set out the difficulties of estimating the death toll. Geoffrey Robinson’s The Killing Season (2018) argues that the army was the key actor. It identified targets, trained and armed civilian militias, often linked to religious and nationalist organisations, and provided logistics and political justification. Regional variation depended largely on the attitude of local army commanders.
Jess Melvin’s The Army and the Indonesian Genocide (2018) used army documents from Aceh to show that the military leadership there planned and coordinated the killings from the first days of October 1965. She argues that the term genocide is justified. The term is debated, because the 1948 Genocide Convention does not cover political groups, and students should consider that debate carefully.
International involvement has also become clearer. Bradley Simpson’s Economists with Guns (2008), together with declassified US documents released in 2017, shows that the United States and the United Kingdom knew the scale of the killings and supported the army politically and with some material assistance.
In 2012 Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) concluded that the events of 1965–66 involved gross human rights violations, including crimes against humanity. No prosecutions have followed. In 2023 President Joko Widodo acknowledged and expressed regret for twelve past gross human rights violations, including those of 1965–66, but this did not lead to judicial accountability.
Why it still matters
Students should be aware that 1965 is still politically sensitive in Indonesia. Communism remains banned under MPRS Decree XXV/1966. Survivors and their families continue to experience stigma. Public discussions and film screenings about 1965 have been disrupted. The debate about this history is, in effect, also a debate about the foundations of the political order that the New Order built.
For comparative politics, 1965 shows three important processes: how regimes are founded through violence, how violence can be organised while appearing spontaneous, and how history is managed afterwards. It invites comparison with Cambodia, Argentina’s “Dirty War” and Spain’s “pact of forgetting” after Franco.
Questions for seminar discussion
- What kinds of evidence would be needed to settle who planned the G30S, and why has the question been so hard to answer?
- Is “genocide” an appropriate term for the killings of 1965–66? What is gained and lost by using it?
- Why have Indonesia’s democratic governments since 1998 found transitional justice for 1965 so difficult?
References and further reading
- Anderson, B. R. O’G., & McVey, R. T. (1971). A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia. Cornell Modern Indonesia Project.
- Cribb, R. (Ed.). (1990). The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies.
- Crouch, H. (1978). The Army and Politics in Indonesia. Cornell University Press.
- McGregor, K. E. (2007). History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past. NUS Press / ASAA.
- Melvin, J. (2018). The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder. Routledge.
- Robinson, G. B. (2018). The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66. Princeton University Press.
- Roosa, J. (2006). Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia. University of Wisconsin Press.
- Simpson, B. R. (2008). Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968. Stanford University Press.
- Wardaya, B. T. (Ed.). (2013). Truth Will Out: Indonesian Accounts of the 1965 Mass Violence. Monash University Publishing.
