Page - 17 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

The Banality of Ghosts | 17www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 15–34 During the night of 30 September/1 October 1965, soldiers belonging to the Tjakrabirawa Regiment, Sukarno’s elite guards in Jakarta, staged a military coup.2 The putschists took control of the national radio and announced they had prevented a coup against the president. That night six generals were tak- en from their homes and executed. Other departments within the military un- der the leadership of General Suharto, relatively unknown at the time, quickly gained control of the city and the radio waves. The coup is generally referred to as the Gerakan 30 September (The 30 September Movement, or the G30S). Because of the chaos in the days immediately following the coup, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI – Communist Party of Indonesia) had trouble choos- ing sides, and partly as a result of the clumsy response of the PKI, the central committee of the party was blamed for orchestrating the coup. In the years before the coup, the PKI had been a vociferous presence in Indonesian pub- lic space and its growing political influence over President Sukarno had been viewed with distrust. A number of influential generals in the Indonesian military had seen the PKI as a real political threat. In parts of the country (East Java, for example) where a strong PKI had clashed with local leaders and landlords over land reform, tension involving branches of the PKI was tangible. The PKI proved too reluctant to condemn the coup, with some regional PKI departments even openly supporting the takeover and seizing control locally. When the communist newspaper Harian Rakjat published a cartoon in favour of the coup, many anti-communists took their chance and blamed the whole party.3 Rumours about the sexual torture of generals carried out by Gerwani, the women’s organisation allied to the PKI, spread rapidly. A massive anti-com- munist hate campaign was launched and was enthusiastically received, espe- cially by Indonesia’s many religious youth groups like ANSOR, the youth organi- sation of the Muslim Nahdlatul Ulama on East Java and the Pemuda Pancasila, a nationalist movement in North Sumatra, where Oppenheimer would find his killers forty years later.4 A ban on communist news media followed, while the population was whipped up against communists and communist sympathisers. As rumours proliferated, tension increased. Communists were depicted as ma- levolent.5 Many people participated in the mass killings that followed, as perpetrators, bystanders and accusers. With the military as facilitators, the killings were pre- dominantly carried out by civilians who were members of youth groups and para- military groups. The vehemence of the victorious killers correlated with the paraly- sis of their many victims in an example of the process described by Randall Collins 2 Anderson 2012, 270. 3 Hughes 1967, 77. 4 Anderson 2012, 273. 5 See Collins 2008, 118.