In this article: Soe Tjen Marching
Written by Aria Danaparamita, and was originally published in Al Jazeera English
Sep 30, 2015
Written by Aria Danaparamita, and was originally published in Al Jazeera English
Sep 30, 2015
No one told Soe Tjen Marching about the anti-communist killings.
Growing up in Surabaya, East Java, under the dictator Suharto's "New Order", her schoolbooks told her that in the dark of night on September 30, 1965, an Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) cadre kidnapped and murdered six army generals in an attempted coup.
When then-Major General Suharto mobilised the military to crush them, he came out a national hero - and reaped the rewards in a 31-year dictatorship over the country.
It wasn't until Marching's father passed away four months after Suharto's fall from power in 1998, that her mother told her he had been a political prisoner in the 1960s, tortured for his "leftist" ideology.
Read the full article here.