Table Of Content“This book is a breakthrough for the study of the mass murder of 1965–66. Melvin
has uncovered much new evidence and has leveraged the case-study of the province
of Aceh to reveal hidden aspects of the national-level decision-making. She presents
an original argument on why the mass murder should be understood as a genocide.
Her book is not an ordinary contribution to the field of Indonesian history – it is a
game-changer.”
— John Roosa, University of British Columbia, Canada
“ It seems impossible to overstate the significance of Jess Melvin’s monumental,
heartbreaking work. Not only does she make a devastating argument that Indonesia’s
mass killings constitute genocide under international law, she took a simple yet
fateful step in the history of scholarship on Indonesia: she walked into a military
archive and asked for their records. That nobody had done this before attests to
the formidable courage it required. She analyzes thousands of pages of hitherto
secret documents with patient attention to detail and unflinching moral clarity. The
result transforms our understanding of Indonesian history, identity, and politics.
Beautifully written, endlessly important, Jess Melvin has authored one of the great
studies of genocide, anywhere. Period.”
—J oshua Oppenheimer, Academy Award–nominated director,
The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Denmark
“ Melvin’s book is a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding of the Indonesian
killings of 1965–66. She taps new archival sources to demonstrate powerfully
that the Indonesian military was deeply engaged in planning and carrying out
the murder of Indonesian communists. In the process, the military manipulated
domestic and international public opinion to conceal its role in political genocide.”
— Robert Cribb, Australian National University, Australia
The Army and the Indonesian
Genocide
For the past half-century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965–66
killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed
civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only
denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could
ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign.
Using documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency’s archives in
Banda Aceh, this book shatters the Indonesian government’s official propaganda
account of the mass killings and proves the military’s agency behind those events.
This book tells the story of the 3,000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise
the Indonesian genocide files. Drawing upon these orders and records, along with
the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators and other eyewitness
of the genocide in Aceh province, it reconstructs, for the first time, a detailed
narrative of the killings using the military’s own accounts of these events. This
book makes the case that the 1965–66 killings can be understood as a case of
genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.
T he first book to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the genocide using the
army’s own records of these events, it will be of interest to students and academics
in the field of Southeast Asian studies, history, politics, the Cold War, political
violence and comparative genocide.
Jess Melvin is Rice Faculty Fellow in Southeast Asia Studies and Postdoctoral
Associate in Genocide Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for
International and Area Studies at Yale University.
Rethinking Southeast Asia
Edited by Duncan McCargo
University of Leeds, UK
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
Southeast Asia is a dynamic and rapidly changing region which continues to defy
predictions and challenge formulaic understandings. This series publishes cutting-
edge work on the region, providing a venue for books that are readable, topical,
interdisciplinary and critical of conventional views. It aims to communicate the
energy, contestations and ambiguities that make Southeast Asia both consistently
fascinating and sometimes potentially disturbing.
Some titles in the series address the needs of students and teachers, published
in simultaneous in hardback and paperback, including:
Rethinking Vietnam
Duncan McCargo
Rethinking Southeast Asia is also a forum for innovative new research intended
for a more specialist readership. Titles are published initially in hardback.
11 Civil Society in the Philippines
Theoretical, Methodological and Policy Debates
Gerard Clarke
12 Politics and Governance in Indonesia
The Police in the Era of Reformasi
Muradi
13 Transnational Islamic Actors and Indonesia’s Foreign Policy
Transcending the State
Delphine Alles
14 Reporting Thailand’s Southern Conflict
Mediating Political Dissent
Phansasiri Kularb
15 The Army and the Indonesian Genocide
Mechanics of Mass Murder
Jess Melvin
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute,
Columbia University
The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University
were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new
research on modern and contemporary East Asia.
A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Columbia University
Mechanics of Mass Murder, © Alit Ambara, 2017.
The Army and the
Indonesian Genocide
Mechanics of Mass Murder
Jess Melvin
Description:For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the k
