A part of history

When Inside Indonesia was launched in November 1983, the events of 1965/66 were still fresh in the Indonesian nation’s collective memory. The official interpretation of those events – that the Army had foiled an attempted coup by the Indonesian communist party (PKI) and its supporters, incarcerating tens of thousands of PKI members and sympathisers in the name of national security – was well-entrenched in the workings of state institutions and popular attitudes. Any challenge to this orthodoxy, including attempts to uncover the suppressed history of the widespread massacres that accompanied the Army’s rise to power, risked reprisals from an increasingly authoritarian state. Nevertheless, a lively climate of dissent continued to feature in Indonesian intellectual debate and expression in literature and the arts. It was given added impetus by the quietly assertive and courageous contributions of a cohort of ‘ex-tapols’, former political prisoners who had been ‘returned to society’ – if not unconditionally ‘released’ – in the period from 1976 to 1979, after sustained international pressure on the New Order government.