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	It is 50 years since the Indonesian massacre of 1965 but we cannot look away by Laksmi Pamuntjak Guardian News, ABC, agencies Indonesia   As 250 million Indonesians face up to the 50th anniversary of one of the most crushing episodes of our nation’s history – the massacre of up to 500,000 or more alleged Communists between 1965 and 1968 by the Suharto regime – the business of confronting the past has reached a new urgency. And it is an urgency that has only a week ago was sharpened by new disappointments.   That new disappointment is our president Joko Widodo’s stance on “1965” – as the tragedy is commonly referred to. In a statement in front of the leaders of the Muhammadiyah, the country’s second largest Muslim organisation, he has refused to apologise to the victims of 1965. And so ended the campaign promises he made –hollow ones to start with, of giving priority to the country’s unresolved cases of human rights violations, including 1965 – that earned him the people’s votes.   It is a staggering, utterly dispiriting verdict, especially as it came on the heels of the tide of cynicism, both from those who demand an official public reckoning and from those who oppose it, when it seemed he was still toying with the possibility of a groundbreaking gesture.   This recent development notwithstanding, there still is no easy picture to paint about what we have achieved in terms of our struggle against forgetting. Clearly, right now the call is for action. The call is an accelerated series of concrete measures. An official state apology, even if it were to come to pass, would simply not have been enough. It is too late to pledge mere words, for words too have an expiry date.   It has, after all, been almost 20 years since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. After 32 years of obsessive and systematic conditioning by the Suharto regime of the perils of Communism, Indonesians, to the limited yet vigorous extent that they have been able to, have since indulged their new thirst for alternative readings on 1965. Since 2000, thought-provoking revisionist histories have been produced by the academia.   The works of the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, previously banned, were sought anew. Survivors of Suharto’s prisons published their memoirs with admirable courage and panache. Novelists and documentary filmmakers were emboldened.   That such a surge was even possible has not been taken for granted, for the most part. At school, my generation was taught categorically – with no room for other interpretations – that all Communists were atheists and the enemy of the Indonesian state, and that the defeat of the Indonesian Communist party was crucial to the survival of the nation.   Absurdly, not only has this steady propaganda produced a generation schooled in silence and apathy; it has also given birth to successive generations that are wholly ignorant of that period of history.   A survey published by the Jakarta Globe in 2009 showed that more than half of the respondents comprising university students in Jakarta had never even heard of the mass killings of 1965-1966. Never mind the fact that it happened to be, as stated by a CIA report, “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the second world war, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.” Thus, any sign that “1965” has not been forgotten is a burst of fresh air, a salve to the soul.   Sure, there were the occasional hitches that often seemed like a huge setback: the blatant rejection by a cabinet minister, last year, of the findings of the National Human Rights Committee because he believed that the mass killings were “necessary at the time”; the recent naming of a Suhartoist known for leading the purge, as a national hero; the odious crackdown on a gathering of the families of 1965 survivors, most of them elderly, in Padang Pariaman, West Sumatra.   All such insults, on top of the president’s flip-flopping, coalesce to sharpen our fear of the limit of what is truly achievable.   For while it is impossible to speak of unveiling the truth as though there is only one truth, it is no longer possible to deny that a systematic, politically-charged pogrom in fact took place and that it was, in the simplest possible terms, a crime against humanity.   We know that no great historical struggle ever occurs in a vacuum, and that the seeds of discontent between the left and the right in Indonesia had been sown for decades prior to the tragedy. Prior to 1965, the left, buttressed by the ascendancy of the Indonesian Communist party, were persecuting the right too. Yet what anyone who has watched Joshua Oppenheimer’s landmark documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, or read Tempo magazine’s 2012 special edition on 1965, in which the perpetrators spoke unapologetically about their role in the killings, cannot do today is to look away.   As with most calamities in history, our collective memory fails because the collective memory can bear only so much. So what does it mean, these days, to not look away? When each passing year takes us further away from the impact and meaning of the tragedy, let alone the full measure of it?   Could it be possible that as we hit the 50 year mark, and as more stories are being told – stories of ordinary people, people who had been excluded from the panoptic view of history – there is, despite the failures of the current regime, something extraordinary happening at the moment?   Having witnessed for years what continued stigmatisation did to people, I never thought we would reach this point: to be anticipating, in The Hague this coming mid-November, an International People’s Tribunal on 1965 Crimes Against Humanity in Indonesia.   This is not to say that this undertaking won’t be painful and full of risk. Even those among the survivors have pondered the wisdom of letting sleeping dogs lie. Transcendence may never be achievable, as is rendering “justice” to the hundreds of thousands of victims. The tribunal, which does not seek punitive measures for the alleged perpetrators, but, rather, to issue a morally-charged verdict which will become the basis for future government policy-making, will not be able to provide answers to every question it asks, nor will it able to put those they can into immediate action.   As such, it is already facing tremendous opposition from certain quarters in the government with prevailing links to the Suharto regime.   In other words, civil society still has to continue its part in setting up “truth-seeking commissions” in order to reveal abuses, to empower victims in telling their stories, to produce and disseminate a revisionist history (especially in schools), and to find ways of properly compensating the victims and their families and rehabilitate their good name.   But the spirit and the commitment of the tribunal, no matter the ambivalences and reservations it too may contain, suggests that memory is a strange and often wondrous thing: there is, blessedly, such a thing as the duty of memory – and it often imposes a continuity, particularly when the time calls for it, upon the act of remembering.   It rebukes us for thinking in terms other than deep outrage, mourning and a call for justice, for to do so would be to dishonor the explicit moral gravity of the subject.   What it embodies promises this anniversary as a marker, a new beginning. It is a time to reckon, reflect, and repair. It is a time to pay tribute to the resilience and vitality of the individual human spirit in the face of unspeakable loss and destruction. Because it isn’t as if there is much else we can hang on to, in the face of the self-righteousness and cowardice of those in power.   * Laksmi Pamuntjak''s first novel Amba, which has been translated into English under the title The Question of Red, will be published in German in September 2015 by Ullstein Verlag, is about the historical violence in 1965, in which up to one million accused Communists in Indonesia were massacred.   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/30/it-is-50-years-since-the-indonesian-genocide-of-1965-but-we-cannot-look-away   Aug 2015   ABC Reporter Tony Jones speaks with the acclaimed film maker Joshua Oppenheimer on his latest work which follows a grieving family trying to make sense of the Indonesian anti-communist purge of 1965.   Tony Jones: A startling new film, The Look of Silence, follows a grieving family trying to make sense of Indonesia''s anti-communist purge of 1965 in which at least half a million people were killed. It''s a companion piece to the earlier documentary The Act of Killing, where the killers bizarrely re-enacted their crimes for the camera, the film has been screened over 3,500 times in Indonesia.   Well that extraordinary film by director Joshua Oppenheimer drew both praise and criticism when it was released in 2012. Praise for his courage in confronting serious questions. What kind of person joins in a program of mass killing? Are they monsters or ordinary people capable of savage brutality? But he was also criticised for the way he allowed the killers to reconstruct their crimes and revel in the savagery of their own performances.   This time around in The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer follows an optician, Adi Rukun, as he confronts the men who killed his brother. Adi gains access to the killer''s homes by arranging to test their eyes. This companion film deals with the impact of state-sanctioned mass murder on the surviving families of the victims, but it also raises uncomfortable questions about modern Indonesia, where a number of those involved in the killings still occupy positions of power.   Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer spoke to us in this exclusive interview. And a warning: some of the killer''s confessions are genuinely disturbing. Joshua Oppenheimer, thanks for joining us. Now can we start by telling us a little bit about Adi Rukun, the optometrist, because it''s through his eyes, strangely enough, that we see the mass murderers in this film?   Joshua Oppenheimer: That''s right. Adi Rukun''s brother was killed in the 1965 genocide. Adi was born two years later and was seen by his parents as his older brother''s replacement. And when he met me all the way back in early 2003, he latched on to my film-making as a way of trying to understand really what had happened to his family, what had happened to his village, what had happened to his country.   And he essentially was using my film-making as a way of finding himself. And he started by gathering survivors to tell me their stories, but after three weeks, the Army threatened all of them not to participate in the film. And it was Adi then who said, "Don''t give up. Try to film the perpetrators," and sent me on the journey that really would lead to making my first film, The Act of Killing.   And after editing The Act of Killing, but before it had its first screenings, I went back to Indonesia in 2012 to make The Look of Silence, and Adi said, "I''ve spent seven years watching your footage with the perpetrators. It''s changed me. I need to meet the men who killed my brother to see if they can take responsibility for what they''ve done so that we can reconcile ourselves."   Tony Jones: It''s also extraordinary that he plies his trade, his optometry trade while speaking to the actual killers, so you see him fitting the testing device on their eyes and they are talking, they''re going back into the past and recalling murdering his brother and others. These are scenes I guess you would find hard to do in any other place.   Joshua Oppenheimer: Yes, it was first of all, when Adi suggested that he wanted to confront the perpetrators, I said immediately, "Absolutely not. It''s too dangerous." You see, The Look of Silence is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It''s normally never done because it is too dangerous.   But we realised - after Adi explained to me why this was so important to him, we realised that my - the production of The Act of Killing was well known across that region to such an extent that I was well known for being close to the most powerful men in the country. The current Vice-President of Indonesia is in The Act of Killing. I was believed to be close to him, the national paramilitary leaders, members of the cabinet - members of the cabinet, members of the Parliament. And because no-one had seen The Act of Killing yet - we realised that I was still believed to be close to these people.   And the men Adi wanted to confront, the men who were involved with death of his brother, were regionally, but not nationally powerful, and they would therefore be unlikely to even detain us, let alone physically attack us.   But I also realised that we would still have to take many precautions to make these confrontations safe if we were to do them at all, and among them, one of the things I realised was that if Adi were to test these men''s eyes, while - they would then in a sense be disarmed. Their guard would be down and they would be likely to tell him the details of what they had done in the same way they''d told me years earlier.   The eye test began as a kind of safety consideration, but I also swiftly realised that they would become this surreal, almost nightmarish, strange, mysterious metaphor for blindness, because Adi is of course testing people''s eyes who are wilfully blind, wilfully blind to the moral meaning of what they''ve done.   http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4288632.htm http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/1965/6973522
	India"s Poverty is Social Violence by Harsh Mander Centre for Equity Studies, agencies India   There are many exiles faced by India"s poor. They are exiled from the consciences of the people of privilege and wealth. They are exiled from our cinema, television and newspapers. They are exiled from the priorities of public expenditure and governments. They are exiled from debates in Parliament and offices. They are exiled from institutions that could offer them some basic security through education, healthcare and social security. And they are exiled from the hope that their children or their grandchildren will one day escape a life of backbreaking toil and social humiliation.   This last is the most profound of their exiles. In my new book "Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India" I speak of these many exiles, but most of all, the exile from hope.   P Chidambaram, former Finance Minister, in an interview with the BBC in 2007, declared his confidence that by 2040, India would wipe out poverty. What is noteworthy, firstly, is that the poverty of which he promised erasure is closer to near starvation-level ultra-poverty, not poverty as defined by the global norm of $2 income per day; secondly, he did not regard this timetable problematic in any way. The deputy chairperson of India''s Planning Commission during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) years, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, also went on record with the same time frame. Anthropologist Akhil Gupta observes: ''By the time the Indian government plans to wipe out poverty, very few of the poorest people living today will still be alive. Such a statement makes sense... only against a backdrop in which high rates of poverty are taken as normal.''   Gupta illustrates this normalisation of poverty by posing a vexing question: why does a state whose legitimacy should derive from bettering the lives of the poor, continue to allow between 250 and 427 million people to live in desperate poverty, and deny them food, shelter, clean water, sanitation and healthcare? He suggests that poverty is a form of ''structural violence''; that there is little substantive difference between genocide and simply allowing poor people to die. He calculates conservatively that about 2 million people have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases every year in post-colonial India. The total number of people who died in India''s last major famine, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, was three million. The annual number of India''s hidden, avoidable deaths dwarfs the annual loss of human life resulting from all natural disasters globally, estimated at about 300,000.   The reason why the preventable deaths of these many millions year after year is not ''considered exceptional, a tragedy and a disgrace'', according to Gupta, is the normalization of poverty.   Indeed, for most people in India, just as there are hills, valleys, deserts, rivers and forests in this teeming, ancient country, there is also poverty. There has been poverty in the past, it exists in the present, and it will endure long into the foreseeable future. The social acceptability of letting people stay poor, therefore, is not considered problematic. Not providing food, clothing, shelter and healthcare to people in dire need is not seen as killing them. This social violence is rendered invisible so that poverty does not constitute a scandal, and the preventable deaths of masses of the poor do not provoke soul-searching or public outrage.   I argue also that the challenges of inequality in India are compounded by the powerful revival of the politics of difference, a new conservatism, and the evidence of active social and state hostility towards minority groups and communities, reflected in grossly under-provisioned Muslim ghettoes, religious profiling in both terror-related and other crimes, and the extra-judicial killings of tribals, Muslims and Dalits. There is a growing appeal among the middle classes of right-wing politics that often combines market fundamentalism with hostility towards minorities and India''s neighbours. In the general elections of 2014, this mood was best represented by Narendra Modi, who fought a blistering electoral battle deploying ''shock and awe'' tactics against his adversaries-including liberals, socialists, ''secularists'' and minorities - whom he felled decisively to become India''s sixteenth prime minister.   Of all the major political parties seeking votes in the 2014 elections, the BJP, through its prime ministerial candidate, offered the Indian electorate perhaps the most cohesive, if troubling, vision for the country. Modi offered a combination of three fundamentalisms.   First, a market orthodoxy, which guarantees unprecedented levels of subsidies to big business in the form of long tax holidays, soft loans, cheap land and electricity, at the expense of public expenditure on education, health, social protection and public infrastructure.   Next was communal fundamentalism, constituting barely -disguised hostility towards religious minorities, especially Muslims, which was the main rallying agenda on the ground in electorally-crucial states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. And the third was a militarist fundamentalism, envisioning an aggressive foreign policy.   Modi''s offer to the voters was a kind of ''buy one, get two free'' political bargain, but one in which you cannot embrace one of the fundamentalisms without also accepting the others.   The attraction to the middle classes to this kind of politics, I argue in my book, is because they are raised in three normative systems which justify inequality.   The first of these is the caste system, which validates a social order in which a person''s birth legitimately determines her life chances, her access to education and the livelihoods open to her.   The second is the British class system, in which people with old wealth, combined with exclusive education, acquire ''refined'' lifestyles that mark them out from the ''boorish lower classes'' and the ''upstart new rich''.   And the last of these is the more recently acquired celebration of conspicuous consumption associated with the collapse of the socialist world and the rise of neo-liberal, market-led growth.   The dominant value is that ''greed is good''- it is time to liberate oneself from the ''socialist guilt'' of the past, to abandon old-fashioned values of thrift, restraint and modesty, and instead to make - or inherit - money and spend on oneself with no restraints or inhibitions.   This is the new India which celebrates when India''s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, follows up his gift of a 60-million-dollar jet-plane to his wife with the most expensive residence in the world, a twenty seven-storey house for a family of four, built at an estimated cost of one billion dollars, which boasts three helipads, four storeys of hanging gardens, and a staff of 600 domestic helpers.   This, in a city where at least two hundred thousand people sleep on pavements, and more than 40 per cent of the population lives in shanties.   In the words of film-maker Saeed Mirza, "Large sections of the formerly ''stoic'' middle class got seduced. It got seduced by all the goodies on display: food, clothes, cars, electronic gadgets, toiletries, beverages, shoes and everything else on display in those incredibly inviting store windows and shelves. It began to party.   It was almost as if after years and years of abstinence this solid bloc of sobriety had gone on a binge. What nobody realized was that the centre of the nation had caved in. There was nothing to temper the onslaught of excess.   All this was happening in a country where over seventy per cent of citizens lived on less than two dollars a day."   This explains also why there is resistance among people of relative privilege to legislation which aims to make access to food, shelter, education, work and healthcare the fundamental right of every Indian citizen. Or to efforts to implement policies of affirmative action for historically -disadvantaged groups.   There is, in reality, a hierarchy of citizenship under the thin veneer of equal citizenship guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. Full citizenship is enjoyed only by the middle and upper classes-and even within these groups, it is enjoyed much more fully by urban, upper-caste, Hindu, non-tribal, able-bodied, heterosexual men.   Today, the neo-middle classes and the aspirational classes are knocking on the doors of these dominant groups, hoping not to change the status quo, but to share its privilege.   * Harsh Mander is a director at the Centre for Equity Studies and Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court of India in the Right to Food case. He has been awarded the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Award for peace work, and the M.A. Thomas National Human Rights Award.   http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/indias-poverty-is-social-violence-756994 http://centreforequitystudies.org/articles-and-essays http://scroll.in/article/715781/when-modi-mocks-nrega-he-ridicules-the-80-million-indians-contributing-to-the-nations-development http://www.hindustantimes.com/harshmander/the-margins-to-oblivion/article1-1344955.aspx http://www.frontline.in/columns/Jayati_Ghosh/the-land-of-exclusion/article6632861.ece http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.com.au/ http://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog Visit the related web page
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