My mum’s family is traditionally Muhammadiyah, staunchly anti-PKI, the banned Indonesian Communist Party. Each year on Eid all through the 1980s and early 1990s, we used to gather in our hometown Bekonang, a small village on the border of Solo and Sukoharjo. Up until the mid-1980s, to get to Bekonang from Solo you had to cross the great Bengawan Solo River on bamboo rafts.
Before the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998, every Eid there was an uncle in the family who would tell the same story over and over again once the big family had arrived, a creepy story about how he had helped capture a PKI man who had gone on the run in 1965. Most of us kids then would sit in rapturous horror as we listened to his story. How this PKI man, who did not believe in God and had wanted to kill the village elders, including my uncle’s dad — our granddad, had escaped capture and how he was finally caught after stopping at a security checkpoint my uncle was manning with his friends in the middle of the night. The man had asked my uncle for a lighter and when my uncle lit his cigarette for him, he recognized his face under the flame, dropped his lighter and ran screaming “PKI! PKI!” to his friends. In my mind then I imagined the PKI man’s face as the face of a murderer. Oily, pockmarked, bristly eyebrows, totally evil. I must’ve gotten the idea from all the Indonesian action B-movies I used to love when I was a kid. This PKI man was evil. PKI was the devil. That was all we used to know. Back then – I wasn’t even ten – I didn’t know about the 1965-1966 mass killings, that it was actually men like my uncle (he never said he actually killed anyone) who were murdering PKI members and sympathizers. It was unthinkable to me then that my pious uncle, who would lead the prayer and deliver the sermon during the Eid prayer on Bekonang’s football field, could associate himself with evil. My uncle used to tell his story with pride, though somewhat incongruously as part of a series of gory fairy tales that he used to tell just before bedtime to scare his nieces and nephews. His story was repeated year after year, always the same story, the same details: the nervous wait at the checkpoint, the PKI man’s bike that had its headlight taken off, the shock-horror when the flame from my uncle’s lighter shone on the PKI man’s face — nothing more, nothing less. The story was an important element of how the myth about the PKI as the incarnation of the devil was slowly built in my family — in itself the typical story of a true Orde Baru family. The coarse propaganda (looking at it now in hindsight) really did work. Back then, even just hearing the word “PKI” sent a shiver through my body. For me then, the effect was the same as if I just heard the words “Dajjal”, “Godzilla”, or “AIDS”. I moved to Australia when I was barely a teenager and grew up there, with my paternal family who turned out to be quite connected with Indonesia’s leftists, and who insisted that I read Pram and Lenin. I did read Pram, but chose Lovecraft over Lenin back then. But even though I was just a teenager, my curiosity was piqued and I slowly discovered about what really happened in 1965-1966: about Suharto’s “Pahlawan Revolusi” propaganda (a word I had just learned then) to cover up the massacres of millions, about the killings of PKI people all over the country, about the Cornell White Paper, about the original autopsy report on the military generals who were killed in the morning of 1 October — those Pahlawan Revolusi (no signs of torture!), etc. etc. What I eventually experienced was a complete paradigm shift (another concept which I had also just learned then). But of course, each time I visited Bekonang on my holidays, my paradigm shift had absolutely no bearing on things. The old stories were repeated. My uncle still recited the same tale, to my younger cousins and to my nieces and nephews. My family was Muhammadiyah and anti-PKI. Period. There was no crack in this neat narrative, until that afternoon, the first Eid after the fall of Suharto. That time, sitting on the steps in front of my grandmother’s house on Bekonang’s main street (a stone’s throw from the local landmark Tugu Bekonang), one of my cousins who was much older than me (my grandmother had 11 children and my mother was born somewhere in the middle of that lineup) said, out of the blue, half absentmindedly, half addressing me, and in Javanese, “Grandmother used to stop the PKI people on their way to be slaughtered, to take a break, right here on this terrace.” “What? Really?” I said. “Yes, she would give them hot sweet tea and mercurochrome for their wounds. She used to run a small drugstore.” “Really? She wasn’t afraid?” “She wasn’t. Sometimes she told me to give them the tea. The mercurochrome, she used to do that herself.” My cousin said she had once said to my grandmother, “I don’t know why you’re helping them, Gran, they’re evil people.” According to my cousin, my grandmother’s cool answer to her question, in the original low Javanese, was: “Uwong-uwong kuwi yo isih uwong, ben do ngerti isih ono sing nggatekke.” (“Those people are still human, I want them to know that someone still cares.”) I was suprised to hear my cousin tell her story. Or perhaps I wasn’t. I’ve read and heard that many people were slaughtered in Bekonang, right on the banks of the Bengawan Solo River. I read of one massacre in one of Martin Aleida’s “witness lit” stories, which was set in Mojo Village and Laban Village on the banks of Bengawan Solo — location names that I used to think were fictional, like Ahmad Tohari’s “Dukuh Paruk”, but turned out to be real. But my cousin’s story also shook me up a bit, because before the fall of Suharto, this story was never told, never even alluded to — now it felt to me my grandmother, who had raised me as well, was a totally different person. Everyone, including me, had always thought that my soft-spoken, quiet grandmother was also anti-PKI, especially because her husband belonged to the Masyumi — PKI’s nemesis — and was once jailed apparently after a dispute with the communists. That afternoon, cracks started to appear in my family’s Orde Baru narrative. Curious, I asked my mum to see whether my cousin’s story was true. My mum is also very Islamic, and often told me, teary-eyed, how she had to bring food to my grandfather in jail, remember, sent to prison just because he was a Masyumi. But she enthusiastically confirmed that my cousin’s story was indeed true. Her story was the same, with a few different details. In her story, my grandmother did not serve hot sweet tea to the PKI prisoners, but water in three big clay jugs that she left on the terrace, and refilled after they were empty. Also, that my grandmother would only help the prisoners in the afternoon, when her husband (my grandpa the Masyumi) was still at the office. She also said that the prisoners were not always marched on foot past our house, but were often piled in a truck and dropped off at the house right next to my grandfather’s house, which was converted into a military base, while waiting for other prisoners to come. Sometimes they would be kept there overnight, sometimes longer. Once their captors thought there were enough prisoners to be killed then they would be sent in the same trucks to the killing field. My mum told me not all of the victims were slaughtered on the banks of the Bengawan Solo, some were executed in the rubber forests near Polokarto. Once, my mum also asked why my grandmother had decided to help these people, who were already on their way to death. Her answer, my mum told me, was, “I feel sorry for them, they must be thirsty. When you see a thirsty person, you have to offer them drink, give them water.” My grandmother never actually told my mum or my cousin what was going to happen to those prisoners — but my mum and my cousin found out on their own. My mum said she had been to the banks of the Bengawan Solo. She said what stuck in her mind was not the bodies that were floating on the water, but their smell. Until now, these stories never got told in front of the whole family. But different family members, mostly aunts, would tell me in details their own versions if I ask them individually. And somehow, for no apparent reason, except maybe that now Suharto is gone, my uncle had also stopped telling his legendary story. Maybe one day I will ask him as well about how my grandmother had helped the people he used to say he helped to kill. Mikael Johani #1965setiaphari #living1965
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