Melbourne businessman Djin Siauw, who has lived in Australia since fleeing Indonesia in 1973, says trauma is ever present. Picture: David Geraghty Source: The Australian
MELBOURNE businessman Djin Siauw still remembers how in November 1965, only a month into the military-led massacres of leftists that brought Indonesian dictator Suharto to power, the police came for his father.
Siauw, now 57, was nine years old, and the bloody targeting of anyone with even remote connections to the Indonesian Communist Party, including many ethnic Chinese, was in full swing. Two older siblings had already fled to China and their father, revolutionary leader Siauw Giok Tjhan and a close adviser to deposed president Sukarno, was to spend the next 12 years in jail without trial as a political prisoner.
He was one of the lucky ones. More than 500,000 people were killed in organised slaughters for which no one has been held accountable, with many of the bodies dumped in mass graves across the islands of Bali, Java and Sumatra. Often they were buried without their heads; these were delivered back to relatives and associates, as a warning.
Fast-forward 47 years and Siauw, an Australian citizen who has lived here since fleeing Jakarta in 1973, is revisiting the trauma after watching a documentary about the events of 1965 and 1966 that is winning awards at international film festivals. Called The Act of Killing, it has been hailed as a masterpiece, with US theatre director Peter Sellars describing it as "the first film of (a) new era . . . an era of sheer impunity".
Sellars, speaking at a US screening of the film, was referring to the fact not one person had been officially implicated in the Indonesian atrocities, despite mass graves being unearthed -- the most recent apparently this month, on a beach in Bali after large seas caused wave erosion.
Siauw admits his family suffered less than many in the purges and that he gained the advantage of an Australian tertiary education through having good connections. But he says US filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer's work confirms some important details. First, he says, it demonstrates clearly that the massacres took place, something barely able to be spoken of during the Suharto years. Even a national human rights commission report last year into the killings remains disputed by the Attorney-General's office.
In the film, Oppenheimer recruits murderers in some cases, men who remain in high office or connected to those who are to recreate their crimes for his camera.
Second, Siauw says, it shows "that the government, the military apparatus, was very much involved in directing the massacres, and obviously the mass arrests and prosecution overall".
In the years following the upheaval, even those who escaped overseas had to deal with the implications for those they left behind. "Family members of those killed and arrested were persecuted for years," Siauw says. "Millions of these people lived in fear, had to hide their identities, could not get jobs they applied for.
"Those who were fairly well off were constantly terrorised and extorted by the military personnel. I know of a case where the persecuted family continued to provide monthly payments to a military official until well after he retired in the 1990s."
Siauw, who built a business empire in Australia after qualifying as an electronics engineer at RMIT University, claims he was later denied a top-level security clearance while working in a senior role on a defence contract.
"I was interviewed by ASIO and they blatantly told me, 'Sorry, (we) cannot provide you with the top-security clearance, we (will) just give you the confidential level, because you are Siauw Giok Tjhan's son,' " he says now. Several years in the mid-70s campaigning in Australia through organisations such as Amnesty International for his father's release also hadn't helped, he says he was told.
University of Sydney academic Vannessa Hearman, who left Indonesia as a teenager in the mid-80s and specialises in research into the events of 1965-66, says the question of true responsibility for the killings may yet take decades to resolve. Significant hurdles include a lack of forensic examination of mass graves as they are discovered and the disappearance of prisons and torture centres from the era, as well as the unwillingness of people to implicate their relatives or associates who may have been murderers.
Oppenheimer's film opens this last door a crack, with its subjects being apparently quite proud to relate their crimes and former vice-president Jusuf Kalla making an appearance to congratulate the paramilitary organisation they belong to on its activities.
Hearman contrasts this sense of impunity with, for example, the criminal prosecutions around Cambodia's "Killing Fields" massacres by pointing out that the Khmer Rouge suffered "a decisive defeat" in 1979, whereas "in Indonesia, the people who benefited from those slaughters are still in power". Furthermore, questions of CIA direction of the massacres partly obscure the reality of what happened in 1965-66, she says.
"It was a realignment of Cold War politics in Southeast Asia and (the CIA) would welcome that, but . . . I don't think it's that simple; there's a whole lot of joined interests circling around (a common aim), which (was) to suppress the Communist Party.
"It wasn't just the CIA that wanted to do that -- the CIA had links with a whole range of institutions, including the army, as to who they wanted to see win this struggle. Everyone had an interest in this, and the interests happened to coalesce at this point."
For Siauw, there is nothing normal in the lasting effects of the massacres. "The trauma continues to haunt most of the people up to now," he says. "Even 47 years later, people from time to time still whisper when they talk about someone who disappeared, about killing, about the fact that their family members were arrested, even if it was only for a day or two for questioning. You can still feel that people were traumatised."
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