The shift in the regime of silence: Selective erasure of the 1965 massacre in post-New Order Indonesia’s official narrative

Abstract

This study revisits the regime of silence surrounding the official representation of the Indonesian 1965 massacre after the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998. Focusing on the educational arena, where textbooks convey knowledge as well as moral meaning of the past, I conceive textbook authors as memory agents and seek to highlight narrative strategies in their representation of the 1965 killing. I argue that the narrative strategy opted by post-New Order textbook writers underscore silence as a selective erasure, featuring a continuance as well as a shift in the regime of silence before and after 1998. This article suggests that while before 1998, Suharto’s New Order regime imposed an official narrative that emphasized the leading role of Suharto pertaining to the 1965 killing, after the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998, the official narrative instead opts for the strategy of selective erasure, circumventing a direct link between Suharto and the 1965 massacre while maintaining the rest of the New Order’s account of the perpetrators, victims, as well as when, how, and why the killings took place. This study further contributes to the existing discussions of strategies opted for maintaining or breaking the cycle of silence pertaining to the past. Through the strategy of silence as selective erasure and by crafting double-layers of silence, not only do state-supported memory agents in this study perpetuate the cycle of silence, but they also pave the way to join contesting efforts to shape post-memory of the past despite more than two decades of regime change from an authoritarian to a more democratic political system.