Buried Histories

In a meticulously researched and compellingly argued study, John Roosa presents, for the first time from up close, the history of Indonesia's anticommunist massacres in [1965][1966].Through personal narrating, he details the experiences emerging from small, individual stories and connects them in an original attempt to help us understand this national event as an instance of genocide or mass atrocity against civilians.While several previous scholars have sought to explain the killing of hundreds of thousands alleged communist members, sympathizers, and their family in Indonesia in 1965-1966, as Roosa notes, most of them attend to the killing as one abstract, big narrative, devoid of ordinary individual events.By unearthing the details of the massacres, the book sheds light on one of the world's most atrocious tragedies of the twentieth century.Facing limited access to sources and the dearth of existing archives-that is, those that have not been destroyed yet-as a consequence of anticommunist propaganda, Roosa's method of oral history allowed him to investigate and reveal the ordinary details of the massacres.He interviewed perpetrators, bystanders, and victims, and meticulously explored archives, including newspaper collections.Stories of the mass killings have lingered among the public through word of mouth, myths, and gossip.Roosa painstakingly crosschecked the validity of these stories by interviewing different subjects and complementing these interviews with archival sources.This project took about two decades and grew as more evidence was discovered and the political climate changed.The result is a one-of-its-kind book that is able to narrate the stories of the victims, humanize them, and present their experiences along with their hopes and daily challenges rather than treating them merely as numbers.Roosa argues convincingly that the anticommunist massacres of 1965-1966 constituted a mass atrocity against civilians.He reveals that the most common method was the army-organized killing of detainees, organized in particular by the army's Territorial Command.As such, the book clarifies the longstanding question of who the perpetrators were-the army, civilian militias, or ordinary people.From this study, it is clear that the methods of torture and killing were systematic and structural.In the same way that Roosa attends to the detailed, disparate stories of individual victims, he reveals various detailed aspects of the army as an organization and their different roles in the killings.The book is structured in two parts.The first part delves into the history of the army's Territorial Command, its rivalry with the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, pki), its anticommunist propaganda

Art · Communism · Genocide · Literature · Media studies · Mythology · Narrative · Newspaper · Oral history · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies