A Nightmare

I have many good memories of my first visit to Indonesia in 1989, but one that is not so positive. I was in Jakarta, looking around one of the central squares, one in which there's some kind of monument to the nation. It was all very grand, in a cold and bleak manner, all very military. I was reading an account (for tourists) of Suharto's takeover of the country in the 1960s and it just didn't add up in a logical manner. Indeed, it made little attempt to do so as if aware that coherence wasn't necessary when acceptance of the official version of history was guaranteed by the Powers that Be (or, rather, the powers that were, for the rule of Suharto is long over.) I knew with a sort of despairing certainty that whatever took place in those turbulent years, I wasn't reading anything close to a truthful account. It occurred to me at the time that I should really attempt to find out more about the period, but, sad to say, some thirty years later I haven't attempted to do so in any systematic way.

But I have found out more in a scatter-brained fashion over the years, reading here and there, enough to convince me that one of the worst but least-known mass killings of the twentieth century took place in that period and that echoes of it haunt the nation and South-East Asia to this day, and will continue to do so. Oh, and that my own nation was complicit in what took place.

And now I've decided I really must get down to some serious reading on the period, partly as a result of an excellent article in the print version of The New York Review of Books. Margaret Scott's The Truth About the Killing Fields, in the 28 June issue, points to several obviously illuminating books & articles, including one by a researcher at Singapore's own Nanyang Technological University. It's a desolating read in terms of pointing to the sheer horror of what took place, but sometimes History is a Nightmare from which we really can't afford to wake.