The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

loss.5 And the Third World? Of course, the country I spent the most time on was Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country, founder of the Third World movement (and still home to the Non-Aligned Movement, which has its offices in Jakarta). Often, when I interviewed survivors of the violence in 1965, they assumed I would want to ask them about the torture. What it was like to be beaten, to be starved, to be called a witch or a devil, to lose all contact with your family. To be gang-raped and thrown into the corner of a cell afterward, as if you were nothing. This was not usually what I wanted to talk about. To the extent that journalists or academics have ever spent much time asking survivors to tell their stories, they have already asked them this. Too often exclusively this, with the underlying assumption that it was only the excesses of the repression that were the problem, that if they had just arrested two million people, then proved in a court of law that those people were really communists, and executed half of them, that would have been OK. Personally, I was happy to let the survivors just sketch the worst parts of their stories in quick terms, if it became clear that going through those moments again would retraumatize them. Unfortunately, though, I did have to ask a question, in two parts, that often proved extremely difficult for them to answer. It took me a long time to perfect the wording of this query in Bahasa Indonesia, so as to make myself very, ve...