NOW that everyone’s in town for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec), it is good to remember that in 1965 the Indonesian government ordered the slaughter of more than 500,000 of its own people, most of them ethnic Chinese. They were not just shot out of hand but burned alive and chopped to death, while pale Chinese girls were raped by swarthy mobs and then chopped up as well.
To this day it is dangerous to talk about it. So far as I remember hearing about Jakarta at the time, the ethnic slaughter was triggered by a false report that six army generals were kidnapped and killed by one communist cadre. One. Maj. Gen. Suharto mobilized the army to crush what he said was a communist coup attempt by left-leaning generals. He then rewarded himself with a 31-year kleptocracy. To give the Indonesian common man his own share of pleasure, and as a celebration of what was becoming the rare American triumph over communism in the Cold War, he gave the go-signal that all ethnic Chinese were fair game, especially if you owed them money. And so rivers were filled with mutilated Chinese bodies, streets ran with Chinese blood, Chinese homes were broken into and strewn with chopped suey, so to speak. And then all of it was ordered to be forgotten. The last remaining Chinese took Indonesian names, and some of them emerged as dummies of Indonesian generals whose families are still pretty much in power and in clover today.
In 1970, right after an unprecedented election to a second term, an event the Americans most feared of a Philippine president—someone with suddenly nothing to lose by defying American interests, after all Laurel-Langley was discontinued under Marcos—student riots broke out and a cardboard coffin was attempted to be overturned on the president’s limo. This was the symbolic coffin of democracy.
Marcos called in the American ambassador and showed him photos of white men with walkie-talkies in the crowd and of Jesuit Father Blanco who was said to have been in Jakarta for the riots that toppled the Indonesian founding father and Asian neutralist Sukarno, the husband of Dewi.
Marcos told the American ambassador that the riots might well drive him out of Manila but he would bomb his way right back in through the US Embassy on Dewey Boulevard. I was there in the Palace with Tito Tito Yulo (a submachine gun slung from his neck), Tito Gilbert Teodoro and others, along with my dad. I recall a pale-looking ambassador emerge from the meeting with Marcos.
My family—well, okay, my dad didn’t like Marcos; he backed Macapagal’s reelection bid in 1965 (which failed because he fought for agrarian reform). However, we campaigned for Marcos in 1969 because the Liberal Party (even then the party of treason) alternative was a Japanese collaborator whose election would be an indelible stain on the nation. My father was a decorated resistance hero. That night Marcos emerged as the first Filipino contemporary hero.
To revive the memory of the Indonesian massacre, Marcos allowed the filming of The Year of Living Dangerously, based on a modern Dutch novel of the same name. The Jakarta 1965 massacre was to be etched indelibly in our minds with the alluring figure of Sigourney Weaver and the face of Mel Gibson, along with those of Kuh Ledesma and Bembol Roco.
Today, the memory of Jakarta 1965 is revived by Joshua Oppenheimer in a six-hour documentary called The Act of Killing and in the companion film, The Look of Silence—both unavailable on Netflix or HBO let alone Sky. One Indonesian politician has come forward to say sorry for his part in the massacre, while Soe Tjen Marching, daughter of a victim, has braved threats of death and rape to bring the massacre to light even if not its perpetrators to justice.
Human-rights activists seek a trial at the Hague. But before we join in the outcry, let us not forget that Indonesia has always stood by us against Malaysian subversion, patrolled our Southern waters to discourage Malaysian arms smuggling, and that with Indonesia we might have shared Borneo
between us.
It is good to remember Jakarta 1965 because truth matters but it is not necessary all the time to do anything about the truth, especially with Apec going on even if the Indonesian president has declined to attend it in case he gets badgered to spare the life a Filipina drug mule of a Philippine Overseas Employment Administration registered recruiter.