Introduction

The concepts of pahlawan (hero) and korban (victim) are central to the contest over history in post-Suharto Indonesia. The first of these concepts, pahlawan, is derived from the Persian term pahlavan meaning ‘champion’. While neither the Indonesian nor the Persian term is exclusively limited to use in the context of military action, the associated connotations of strength and bravery tend to foreground a militaristic conception of heroism at the expense of contributions in other fields. In Indonesia, the state has historically been one of the key promoters of this militaristic conception of heroism. Indeed, by establishing days of commemoration such as Hari Pahlawan (Heroes Day) and official titles such as Pahlawan Nasional (National Hero), the state has ensured that the concept of the hero who defends Indonesia from internal or external threats to its security has remained a conspicuous feature of official discourse about the nation’s past.

In contrast to the state-centric discourse surrounding pahlawan, the word korban is more frequently associated with the rhetoric of civil society organisations. Notably, the word korban is frequently invoked by NGOs such as the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS) in instances where the state itself is regarded as a perpetrator. It is also significant that the Indonesian words korban (victim) and kurban (sacrifice) are both derived from the same Arabic word qurbān, which refers to the sacrifices offered to Allah as part of the observance of Eid al-Adha. The conflating of victimhood and sacrifice evident here is reflected in Indonesia through the commemoration of individuals like the murdered human rights activist Munir as heroic victims. By advancing an understanding of heroism as self-sacrifice and resistance to the state, the promotion of heroic victims within Indonesian civil society offers a rival interpretation of heroism to that conveyed by the state through the officially recognised national heroes.

As a site for contestation between the state and civil society, the recognition of individuals from the past as either heroes and/or victims is a profoundly political act. By focusing on the politics behind the recognition of heroes and victims, the objective of this chapter is to problematise the idea that contestation over history in post-Suharto Indonesia can be understood simply as an effort to meluruskan sejarah (straighten out history), motivated by a Rankean desire to discover the truth of what actually happened (Nordholt et al., 2008). Instead, this chapter will contend that both state and non-state actors in Indonesia have sought to promote particular Indonesian figures as heroes and/or victims in order to advance an interpretation of the past more in line with their political priorities and interests. This contention is the result of a consideration of three key research questions. Firstly, how has the Indonesian state instrumentalised the recognition of national heroes for its own purposes? Secondly, how has the centrality of the state in directing the selection and commemoration of heroes been challenged by civil society in post-authoritarian Indonesia? Finally, how has the hero-enemy binary been challenged by advocates of a new distinction in Indonesian history foregrounding the identities of victim and perpetrator? In order to address these questions, this chapter will draw upon the case studies of the prominent Indonesians, namely, key figure in the anti-Communist massacres of 1965 General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, murdered human rights activist Munir Said Thalib and protagonist of Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent documentary film The Look of Silence Adi Rukun. These case studies have been chosen since the claims of these individuals to the status of hero and/or victim have generated a high degree of debate and controversy in post-Suharto Indonesia.

This chapter is not the first study of the political significance of the selection and recognition of heroes in Indonesia. The most notable previous contribution to this topic has come from the German historian Klaus Schreiner. In his work, Schreiner (1997) outlines the way in which both President Sukarno and President Suharto instrumentalised the concept of the national hero as part of their authoritarian rule. Specifically, Schreiner (1997) argues that the recognition and celebration of national heroes was conceived by the Indonesian state to foster national unity and identity, to promote a politically partisan interpretation of the nation’s past and to act as a propaganda tool for the indoctrination of the young with the views and values of the ruling regime. Writing about Indonesia during the Guided Democracy and New Order years, what Schreiner’s work does not provide is an analysis of the treatment of national heroes in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Thus, this chapter proposes to extend on the work of Schreiner by exploring how the concept of the national hero has been instrumentalised in the increasingly fragmented political environment of post-Suharto Indonesia.

Moving from the state-centric framework for recognising national heroes to the idea of the heroic victim as promoted by elements of Indonesian civil society, this chapter will also engage with the work of the philosopher Diana Meyers. In her article ‘Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of “Impure” Victims’, Meyers (2011) identifies the heroic victim and the pathetic victim as the two dominant victim paradigms emerging from the latter part of the twentieth century. Applying Meyers’ idea of the heroic victim to the case study of the human rights campaigner Munir, this chapter will seek to explore the extent to which elements of Indonesian civil society, as well as the state, have instrumentalised the commemoration of heroic figures from the past.

This chapter will then analyse the politics of recognition around the anti-Communist massacres of 1965–1966 through the lens of competitive victimhood. Foregrounding the contrasting representations of this episode in Indonesia’s past in the films The Look of Silence and Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, this chapter will highlight the ways in which both sides have sought to advance an account of the past which casts themselves as victims. This focus on competitive victimhood is, of course, not intended to suggest an equivalence of suffering on both sides of the events of 1965–1966. Neither is it intended to advance the idea that a state-sponsored historical orthodoxy intended to justify the massacres and the efforts to challenge this orthodoxy and rehabilitate the image of those targeted during the massacres have equal claims to truth. Rather, this chapter highlights the way in which the recognition of the victims of the massacres of 1965–1966 is still contested and how this contestation continues to hamper efforts to achieve reconciliation between the parties involved.

National Heroes Under Sukarno and Suharto

From the selection of the first Pahlawan Kemerdekaan Nasional (National Independence Heroes) in 1959, the practice of officially bestowing the title of hero on prominent figures from Indonesia’s past was perceived as beneficial for the project of promoting national unity. Throughout his political career, Sukarno placed particular emphasis on unifying the secular nationalist, religious and Communist elements of Indonesian society (Legge, 1972). This desire to unify the three NASAKOM (i.e., nationalist, religious and Communist) forces Sukarno believed to represent the three truly revolutionary forces in Indonesia is evident in the figures he chose as heroes to be admired and emulated. Indeed, the recognition as heroes of individuals such as Albertus Sugiyapranata, who combined the identities of pastor and patriot, and Alimin Prawirodirdjo, both a Communist and a nationalist, suggests that Schreiner (1997) is justified in his description of Sukarno’s pantheon of national heroes as a ‘personification of NASAKOM ideology’ (p. 268).

Unifying a diverse Indonesian republic was also a key consideration of Suharto when it came to the selection of national heroes. Sukarno and Suharto, however, conceived of the diversity of Indonesia in very different ways. In contrast to Sukarno’s focus on unifying the diverse streams of thought and ideologies that existed within Indonesia, Suharto’s selection of national heroes was calculated to reflect Indonesia’s ethnic and regional diversity (Schreiner, 1997). As a matter of policy, Suharto’s desire to have the ethnic and regional diversity of Indonesia represented in his pantheon of national heroes can be understood as part of a broader New Order objective emphasising the production of ‘sanitised and authorised versions of cultural difference subservient to national goals’ (Robison, 1997, p. 71). By channelling expressions of regional pride and regional identity through national heroes selected and approved by the state, Suharto was able to achieve his purpose of demobilising potential rival political identities such as those built around regional and ethnic loyalties.

The instrumentalisation of the selection of national heroes during the Guided Democracy and New Order eras is most evident when examining the establishment by both regimes of a binary opposition between national heroes and enemies of the state. As perceived by Sukarno, the forces of neo-imperialism, colonialism and imperialism, or NEKOLIM, constituted ‘a skilful and determined enemy’ (Sukarno, 1970, p. 458), of which Indonesia must be wary. In selecting the heroes of Indonesia, Sukarno therefore emphasised the importance of those who ‘oppose colonialism in Indonesia [and] fight foreign enemies’ (‘Keputusan President Republik Indonesia Nomor 228’). To borrow from the rhetoric of Sukarno, the recognition of national heroes during Guided Democracy was designed to mobilise the forces of NASAKOM in order to combat the forces of NEKOLIM. Likewise for Suharto, the identification of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as the greatest threat to Indonesia prompted him to expunge Communist national heroes from official hero biographies and instead commemorate the Pahlawan Revolusi (Heroes of the Revolution) who—according to the official New Order narrative—had their lives cut short as a result of PKI treachery and cruelty.

Indonesian Heroes Post-Suharto

With the fall of Suharto in 1998, the dominance of the official New Order interpretation of the nation’s past diminished. However, the link between advocacy of particular individuals as national heroes and politically partisan views of Indonesia’s history remained strong. One of the best examples of this link can be found in the debate over the hero candidacy of Sarwo Edhie, a key figure behind the anti-Communist massacres of 1965/1966 whose son-in-law Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was the sixth president of Indonesia. For the organisations complicit in the massacres such as the Islamic movement Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and its youth wing Ansor, the possibility of Sarwo Edhie being recognised as a national hero bolsters the claims of those who conceive of their own organisation’s past deeds as ‘heroic’. It is significant then that both NU and the Ansor Youth Movement were among the groups who first submitted Sarwo Edhie’s name for consideration as a national hero (Adityo et al., 2013). The connection between the way the history of Sarwo Edhie is recorded and the way the role of NU and Ansor in the events of 1965/1966 is understood is clear: if the General who exhorted the people to assist in the eliminating the Communists is made a national hero, then those who answered Sarwo Edhie’s call are themselves recognised as being part of a heroic act.

For those who were imprisoned, tortured or who lost family members during the 1965/1966 massacres, the proposed recognition of Sarwo Edhie as a national hero carries with it the implication that their suffering was deserved. Responding to media reporting that Sarwo Edhie’s had been approved for the title of national hero at each of the regency, provincial and national levels, Soe Tjen Marching—whose father was imprisoned under suspicion of being a Communist sympathiser—initiated a campaign to lobby President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono not to bestow the honour of national hero on his father-in-law Sarwo Edhie. In her petition to Yudhoyono, Soe Tjen Marching argues that national hero status for Sarwo Edhie would not only compound the injustice done to victims of the events of 1965/1966 but would also work to perpetuate the stigmatisation of the victims and their families as tainted by their alleged Communist links (Marching, 2016). By publicly opposing the hero candidacy of Sarwo Edhie in this way, Soe Tjen Marching has challenged the dominant narrative of the violence of 1965/1966 which creates a division between the active ‘heroes’ of the events such as President Suharto and General Sarwo Edhie and the Communist victims of the massacres, who are commonly attributed only a passive role (Cribb, 1991). More than this, Soe Tjen Marching through her own actions demonstrates the agency that victims and their families possess in disputing the leading interpretation of the events of 1965/1966.

The increased contestation of the nation’s past, as evident in the debates over the hero candidacy of New Order figures Suharto and Sarwo Edhie, has been a notable development in the treatment of history in the post-Suharto era. No longer can an analysis of the selection of national heroes focus solely on the political ideas and interests of towering figures such as Sukarno and Suharto. Instead, the motivations of a variety of actors, their desire to secure a favourable account of their own place in Indonesia’s past and the direction they wish the nation to take into the future must all be considered. This contestation over the question of who the proper heroes for the state to honour are does not, however, represent definitive departure from the approach to national heroes witnessed in the years of Guided Democracy and under the New Order regime. In fact, in their assumption of the significant role played by the state’s power to recognise specific individuals in shaping understandings of the past, debates over the claims of Suharto and Sarwo Edhie to the title of national hero remain firmly within the state-centred framework initiated by Sukarno and consolidated by Suharto.

Munir: The Heroic Victim

A greater challenge to the state-centred framework for the selection of heroes can be found in the promotion of heroic victims by elements of Indonesian civil society. Whereas the official rhetoric of Heroes Day in Indonesia holds that ‘acts of service, struggle and sacrifice of heroes are solely for the nation and the state’ (Kementerian Sosial Republik Indonesia, 2016a) human rights NGOs and activists in Indonesia have increasingly forwarded an alternate understanding of heroism. According to this interpretation, heroism is located in self-sacrificial acts of resistance to the state rather than service of the state. A prime example of a heroic victim in post-Suharto Indonesia is the assassinated human rights defender Munir, whose human rights advocacy was silenced when he was poisoned in 2004 and whose death is widely perceived as a testament to the pervasiveness of impunity in Indonesia’s political culture. Recognition of Munir as a ‘Human Rights Hero’ or a ‘Hero of the Disappeared’ on account of his work with the NGO KontraS is in stark contrast to the state’s recognition of national heroes. Intended as a critique of successive Indonesian government’s inability to combat impunity, the celebration of Munir as heroic positions the state not as the author of the message but rather as its intended audience.

While the forms of recognition associated with Indonesian civil society differ significantly from those instituted by the state, the instrumentalisation of the recognition of heroic individuals for strategic purposes is common to both sides. As political scientists McEntire et al. (2015) observe, civil society groups such as human rights organisations are ‘strategic actors’ (p. 407) whose aim is to frame issues in such a way as to maximise its impact in terms of mobilisation. From a strategic perspective, heroic victims are an integral element in many campaigns to mobilise resources and support for a given cause. The prominence of heroic victims such as Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi in the campaigns to end Apartheid in South Africa and to democratise Myanmar is a case in point. In the Indonesian context, the usefulness of having a figure like Munir at the forefront of the mobilisation campaigns is evident in the way his case can be neatly accommodated within two of the dominant frames employed by human rights groups: the motivational and the personal (McEntire et al., 2015).

A prime example of the way the case of Munir has been framed for the purposes of motivation can be found in human rights activists’ promotion of the slogan ‘oppose forgetting’ (Hearman, 2014). Sharing with motivational framing an emphasis on ‘agency’ and ‘efficacy’, the campaign built by human rights groups around the idea of refusing to forget suggests that every Indonesian has the power to challenge the culture of impunity by continuing to remember human rights abuses and their victims (McEntire et al., 2015, p. 407). By highlighting the importance of individual acts of remembering and forgetting, Indonesian human rights campaigners hope to give Indonesians who sympathise with their cause a sense of agency that will motivate them to join the struggle to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice.

While the call to remember Munir’s heroic fight for human rights in Indonesia is an example of motivational framing, the victimhood element of Munir’s story lends itself to the use of personal framing. The power of the personal frame is that it ‘personifies abuse as the story of a single suffering individual who is warranted as representative’ (Brysk, 2013, p. 12). For Indonesian human rights organisations such as KontraS, Munir is a leading example of such a representative figure. A double victim in the sense of, firstly, being poisoned in a politically motivated assassination and, secondly, not having one’s murderers brought to justice, Munir and his case are considered emblematic of impunity and political violence in Indonesia. Indeed, belief in the representative nature of Munir’s case is so strong that a popular rallying-cry in commemorations of the activist reads ‘Justice for Munir, Justice for All’ (Muhaimin, 2014). As a mobilisation strategy, highlighting the personal narrative of the life and death of a well-known figure such as Munir is an attractive option for human rights groups. As Kogut and Ritov (2005) have demonstrated, focusing on the plight of a single, ‘identified’ victim not only elicits a greater emotional response from the wider community but also tends to garner greater financial contributions than campaigns that mobilise support for nameless, ‘statistical’ victims (p. 157). If this holds true in the Indonesian context, one expects spotlighting the plight of Munir to be an effective strategy for KontraS in terms of mobilising both awareness and resources.

The promotion of heroic victims such as Munir as a counter to the national heroes of the state is, of course, only one part of a broader parallel framework for recognising heroism led by elements of Indonesian civil society. Another such example can be found in the bestowing of the Yap Thiam Hien Award to the Indonesian individual or organisation considered to have made the greatest contribution to the advancement of human rights in Indonesia (Yayasan Yap Thiam Hien, 2016). Challenging the statist ideology that underpins the selection of national heroes based on whether the candidate served the interests of the nation and the state to an extraordinary degree, the bestowing of the Yap Thiam Hien award connects heroism with the more universal concept of human rights.

If the Yap Thiam Hien Award is Indonesian civil society’s substitute for recognition as a national hero, then the celebration of Hari Pembela HAM (Human Rights Defenders Day) can be viewed as their answer to Heroes Day. Alongside the internationally recognised Human Rights Day on December 10, the marking of Human Rights Defenders Day on the anniversary of Munir’s assassination gives Indonesian NGOs and activists a platform to promote an alternate account of the relationship between the individual and the state than that forwarded by the government on Heroes Day. According to Indonesian President Joko Widodo, for instance, Heroes Day reminds Indonesians of the importance of the struggle, sacrifice and service of individuals directed at creating an Indonesian state that is ‘sovereign’ and ‘independent’ (‘Pidato Hari Pahlawan’, 2015). Rather than emphasising on what the individual can give to the state, however, Human Rights Defenders Day focuses on what the state has failed to do for its citizens. In particular, the celebration of Human Rights Defenders Day in Indonesia is frequently associated with criticism of the state for its inability or unwillingness to protect human rights activists and to bring those responsible for acts of violence or intimidation to justice (‘Hari HAM sedunia’, 2014).

This contest over defining heroes and heroism should not, however, be seen as a contest between an instrumentalised, state-sponsored version of history and a truthful account of the past offered by human rights organisations. Even if it is for admirable reasons, Indonesia’s human rights organisations instrumentalise the concept of the hero as part of an attempt to advance an account of the past informed by their own interests and values. The rallying-cry ‘oppose forgetting’ (melawan lupa) is therefore not a neutral one directed simply at recovering of the facts of the past but, as Todorov (2001) explains, is rather intended as a ‘defense of a particular selection from among these facts, one that assures its protagonists of maintaining the roles of hero or victim’ (p. 21).

Beyond Heroes: Adi Rukun and the Massacres of 1965–1966

Seeking recognition as a hero for oneself or for a member of one’s group is not the only strategy available to those wanting to frame their role in the nation’s history in a positive light. For instance, one viable alternative to being celebrated as heroic is being recognised as a victim. In the case of the anti-Communist massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia, this point is best articulated by Adi Rukun, whose brother Ramli was killed during the massacres. Contesting the self-identification of the perpetrators of the massacres as heroes who saved the Republic from the grip of Communism, Adi challenges the hero-enemy binary in Indonesian history by affirming: ‘unlike the perpetrators, I do not ask that my older brother, my parents, or the millions of victims be treated as heroes, even though some deserve to be. I just want my family to no longer be described as traitors in the school books’ (O’Falt, 2016). Despite this attempt of Adi Rukun to secure recognition of the victimhood of those who suffered during the 1965–1966 massacres, the competing claims to victimhood surrounding the events of 1965–1966 in Indonesia suggest that the possibility of achieving reconciliation in Indonesia between the victims and perpetrators of violence in the New Order years remains limited.

Given the existence of rival claims to the status of victim, the inability to achieve reconciliation regarding the events of 1965/1966 in post-Suharto Indonesia can be productively understood through the lens of competitive victimhood. The concept of competitive victimhood is most commonly applied to cases such as the Israel-Palestine conflict in which the number of victims on each side is more equal. However, the psychology and politics behind the practice of competitive victimhood, which states that rival groups are inclined to promote a history of the conflict which claims for their ingroup the role of victim, are equally applicable to the Indonesian context (Shnabel et al., 2013). According to the New Order regime’s historical orthodoxy, the identities of the victims and perpetrators of violence were clear: the victims were those who suffered allegedly at the hands of the PKI and the perpetrators were members of the PKI or their affiliated organisations. With the fall of Suharto, however, attempts to identify the victims and the perpetrators of Indonesia’s past have become much more contested.

In recounting the events of G30S and the subsequent massacres, the Indonesian military and those groups targeted by the army in the aftermath of G30S both claim to be the party who suffered and was victimised. According to the historical orthodoxy promoted by the Indonesian military, the victims of 1965 are not the Communists and suspected Communists killed or imprisoned in the aftermath of G30S. Rather, it was the military figures murdered by the September 30 Movement who were remembered in the official military histories as ‘the victims of Communist treachery’ (Pramono & Marinir, 1979, p. 41). This highlighting of the suffering of the generals whose deaths were allegedly masterminded by the PKI over that of the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the anti-Communist massacres which followed is entirely consistent with the practice of competitive victimhood as based on the belief ‘that one’s own group (rather than the adversarial group) is the primary or sole victim of the conflict’ (Adelman et al., 2016, p. 1417). During the militarist New Order regime, the army was able to maintain a hegemonic discourse around the idea of Communist threat and Communist treachery with almost complete success (Heryanto, 1999). With the fall of Suharto allowing the expression of previously suppressed memories and experiences, however, the idea that the generals murdered during Lieutenant Colonel Untung’s attempted coup constitute the primary victims of 1965 has not survived unchallenged.

The competing claims to victimhood held by the army and those linked to the PKI are encapsulated in two contrasting films: Arifin C. Noer’s Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI and Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence. The first of these films conveys the Indonesian military’s perspective on the events of 1965, depicting in over three and a half hours of lurid detail how the abduction, torture and killing of the seven generals were planned and executed by the PKI (Paramaditha, 2013). In keeping with the concept of competitive victimhood, while this film thoroughly illustrates the suffering of the seven military figures killed who serve as representatives of the ingroup (the army), it completely overlooks the suffering of the outgroup (the PKI and its sympathisers) during the subsequent anti-Communist massacres. In contrast, the second of these films, The Look of Silence, is told from the perspective of Adi Rukun as a representative of those suffering from the stigma of real or perceived Communist links. In the opening minutes of this film, attention is drawn to the central justification behind the claim of those who suffered during the anti-Communist massacres to be recognised as the primary victims of 1965/1966: the number of people killed. While seven military figures were killed during the attempted coup of G30S, The Look of Silence informs its viewers that the countercoup led by the military claimed the lives of ‘over one million ‘Communists’. However reasonable this emphasis on the differential of lives lost, The Look of Silence also largely ignores the suffering of the outgroup. The events of G30S are raised briefly, but only in the context of condemning the propaganda taught to Indonesian students. In contrast, the injustice done to the murdered generals is overlooked.

While the films of Noer and Oppenheimer present to contrasting claims to victimhood status on the silver screen, the phenomenon of competitive victimhood in relation to the events of 1965–1966 in Indonesia has also played out in more explicitly political and legal forums. The year 2016, for instance, witnessed the holding of the International People’s Tribunal 1965 (IPT 1965) in the Dutch city of The Hague. While the IPT 1965 concerned itself with legal questions such as whether the massacres of 1965/1966 in Indonesia constituted genocide, its status as an unofficial tribunal established by a transnational network of civil society organisations means that the tribunal is best understood as a ‘moral intervention’ (McGregor & Purdey, 2016). Inspired by other civilian tribunals such as the ‘Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery’ held in Tokyo in December 2000, the IPT 1965 offered the opportunity for victims to testify to their suffering and to challenge the official history of the massacres of 1965/1966 (Sutrisno, 2016). The relationship between staking a claim to victimhood status and advancing an alternate account of the past is highly significant in the Indonesian context. Given that many of the individuals and organisations who benefitted from the violent birth of the New Order remain in positions of power in present-day Indonesia, promoting a rival account of the events of 1965/1966 not only requires the recognition of new victims but also casts many influential actors in Indonesian politics in the role of perpetrator.

Based on an attempt to revisit and reconsider the established narrative of the events of 1965/1966, efforts at the IPT 1965 to achieve recognition for the victims of the massacres have been highly contested. The IPT 1965 and the reconciliation-focused symposium ‘Dissecting the Tragedy of 1965: A Historical Approach’ held in Jakarta in April 2016 were countered by the holding in June 2016 of a national symposium on ‘Securing the Pancasila from the Threat of the Resurgence of Communism and Other Ideologies’. Attracting representatives from forty-nine organisations, including representatives from groups complicit in the massacres of 1965/1966 such as NU, Ansor and Pemuda Pancasila, this symposium recommended that Indonesia take no further steps towards reconciliation beyond allowing for the perceived natural process of reconciliation already occurring among the descendants of those who experienced the violence (Paskalis, 2016). In addition to arguing against the need for further reconciliation, this anti-Communist symposium also reasserted the New Order historical orthodoxy on the victim-perpetrator binary in Indonesian history by suggesting that Indonesian Communists were guilty of ‘a betrayal of Pancasila and the people’ by rebelling against the Republic in times of crisis (Paskalis, 2016).

The competition over claims to victimhood represents a significant obstacle to the achievement of reconciliation in Indonesia. As Noor (2012) et al. observe, it is far too easy and too common in situations where competing claims to victimhood exist for both sides to place the responsibility for commencing steps towards forgiveness and conflict-resolution entirely on the other group. Reducing the prevalence of competitive victimhood and advancing the cause of reconciliation, therefore, require an effort to embrace common victim identity in which both sides to the conflict acknowledge the harm suffered by the other (Shnabel et al., 2013). In the Indonesian context, this means no longer framing the debate over who was victimised the most or who was victimised first but rather framing commemoration and discussion of acts of political violence around the idea that injustices suffered by all sides should be acknowledged and condemned. One advocate of such an approach is Goenawan Mohamad, the founding editor of Tempo magazine. Disputing the claim of those who suffered during the anti-Communist massacres of 1965/1966 to be recognised as the sole victims of New Order political violence, Goenawan Mohamad (2001) argues that no individual or group in Indonesia can justifiably state, ‘the victim, that’s me’ (p. 134).

Achieving reconciliation through a broad-based recognition of a common victim identity is, however, complicated by the desire to appeal to and retain third-party support from those belonging neither to the ingroup nor to the outgroup in the conflict. As Adelman (2016) et al. contend, narratives of competitive victimhood become ‘vehicles of identity and power politics to gain the moral high-ground and attract the attention and support of third-party groups’ (p. 1417). The connection between competitive victimhood and power politics emphasises the extent to which the politics of victimhood in Indonesia have been seen as a zero-sum game. Throughout the New Order regime, in a Cold War world polarised into Communist and anti-Communist camps, key Western powers accepted the historical narrative forwarded by the Indonesian army which privileged their exclusive claim to the status of victim and cast the PKI in the role of perpetrator. More recently, with human rights concerns playing an increasingly prominent part in global politics, the international community has been more receptive of the claims of those targeted during the anti-Communist violence of 1965/1966 to be recognised as the true victims. In this way, the fall of the New Order and the rising prominence of human rights discourses may well have enabled new victim identities around the events of 1965/1966 to emerge and be freely expressed. However, post-Suharto Indonesia has yet to witness the move beyond competitive victimhood required to achieve the goal of reconciliation.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that the recognition of individuals from Indonesia’s past as either heroes or heroic victims has been instrumentalised to advance the interests of both state and non-state actors alike. For the Indonesian state, the selection and celebration of national heroes has been directed at promoting national unity and for establishing an official historical narrative which clearly distinguishes the heroic elements of the population from the enemies of the state. In the context of post-authoritarian Indonesia, the state’s power to bestow the title national hero has also become a site for contestation over the nation’s history from a variety of non-state actors seeking to promote an account of the past which casts themselves and their organisations in a positive light. The existence of such contestation should not, however, give rise to an uncritical acceptance that recent Indonesian historiography is characterised by a ‘straightening out of history’ in which a past distorted in the service of an authoritarian regime is being displaced by a more objective account. Indeed, it is important to remember that the democratisation of history is not the same as its depoliticisation. In fact, with the democratisation process facilitating the expression of counter-narratives from elements of society previously silenced under the New Order regime, the number of actors seeking to forward an interpretation of the nation’s past in accord with their political and strategic priorities is greater than before. As is evident from the case studies of General Sarwo Edhie, Munir and Adi Rukun, the narrative of Indonesia’s past remains a melodrama peopled by heroes, enemies, victims and perpetrators. When recognising heroes and victims in the post-Suharto era, however, Indonesians are no longer required to read from the same script.