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by Catriona Mitchell

Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, Roger Paget has been studying Bali for six decades and lecturing around the archipelago for fifty years. Last week, he spoke out about the events in Indonesia in 1965 for the very first time. And he was there.

His reticence has been due, he said, to a “taboo of intimidation” that has kept him silenced.

At an intimate lecture at the Maya Hotel, organized by Rotary Club Bali Ubud Sunset, Paget talked about the events he witnessed first-hand; he was living in Jakarta with his family when the violence broke out, and he refers to the events that followed as “human depravity times a thousand or more.”

Paget was present at ‘Crocodile Hole’ amid camera crews, when the bodies of the six murdered generals were discovered, mutilated and sexually assaulted – an event that immediately made the headlines across Indonesia. The discovery, he said, was as devastating to the nation as the Bali bombing in 2002. Indonesians were forced to ask themselves, “but we’re a peace-loving nation… aren’t we?”

Of all the South East Asian countries, Indonesia had had the most peaceful history of independence up until that point. Even a major rebellion designed to overthrow Sukarno’s government had not resulted in major executions or even mass imprisonment. This is what made the events of ’65–‘66 all the more shocking.

What followed was a carefully constructed “process of disinformation” designed to turn sentiment against Indonesian Communists. However, as Roger said, few PKI members of his acquaintance had seemed to command more than a smattering of party dogma; their passion was much closer to pragmatic, popularly rooted and locally-based project development. They dedicated their time, for example, to the building of schools, the cultivation of rice fields, and the provision of health clinics in villages.

They had no weapons. The crime they were accused of, then, was the crime of atheism: something along the lines of “we have to crush these people who have no god.”

Within the next few weeks the surge began in Central and East Java, spreading later to Bali “almost as an after-thought”. Amongst others, students in Jakarta were recruited to do the killing – students who still lived with their parents and who had never even been to a village or seen a farmer.

Paget was also present in Bali in January 1966 when the massacres took place on the island, having travelled over on his scooter. “I was here, and in a sense I’ve never recovered”, he said. “You may accommodate, but you don’t recover.”

Numbers killed in Bali alone probably ran into the hundreds of thousands – at a time when Bali’s population was well under two million.

Paget has read almost all the information that’s been made available about the massacres since. He described the records of the court-cases as “bull” and “pseudo-legal patter.”

Enormously scarred by all that he witnessed, Paget got rid of his 10,000 pages of notes eight years ago. This is an action that his scholarly side now regrets, but he’s otherwise grateful for: it’s helped him to release memories of the past, and to heal.