Geographic Perspectives on the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66 in Central and East Java

Siddharth Chandra, Michigan State University

Research Grant, 2017

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The aim of this project is to use demographic and spatial methods to shed light on the mass killings of 1965–66 in Indonesia. With an estimated death toll of five hundred thousand, these killings comprised the single most traumatic political event in the history of independent Indonesia. Directed against people affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the violence killed untold numbers of innocent and unarmed people, many of whom may have had only a peripheral association with the PKI.

With an estimated death toll of five hundred thousand, these killings comprised the single most traumatic political event in the history of independent Indonesia. 

The research findings include the following:

1. The pattern of antileftist violence in Central Java was markedly different from the pattern observed in the neighboring province of East Java. Specifically, in East Java, the killings appear to have been the most severe in areas in which the key political party in opposition to the PKI, the politico-religious Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) party, was strongest. In Central Java, of the three regions in which the killings were most evident, only one area, in the vicinity of East Java, displayed such an association. Locations in the vicinity of the headquarters of the Indonesian Army’s Special Forces and in strongholds of another (secularist) political party in opposition to the PKI, the National Party of Indonesia (PNI), were also severely affected by the violence in Central Java. 
2. In East Java, it was possible to demonstrate an association between the accessibility of areas by road and the severity of killings. This aligns with the multitude of accounts of trucks being used to carry victims away to their deaths or to imprisonment, but had never been established as a systematic and statistically identifiable phenomenon. 
3. The research has also provided indications of locations where the local military or pesantren (religious schools), whose youth organizations were often implicated in the violence, may have been most active.

The project has produced a variety of new and specific research findings that also demonstrate the more general value of using spatial and demographic methods to analyze events of genocide and mass violence. Applied to census data, the methods used or developed during this project can (1) provide estimates about the intensity of violence in different locations, (2) identify hot spots for violence, (3) highlight factors that are associated with variations in violence across space, and (4) use insights from (3) to assign possible responsibility for the violence. The spatial nature of this project also lends itself to the production of maps, which provide an instant and easily interpretable visual representation of the findings of the research for communication to a wider audience. An important insight from this project has been the demonstration of the potential for censuses to be used by independent organizations to monitor anomalous one-time variations in population in times of genocide and mass violence.