Abstract
Why should criminologists care about mass killings that occurred 50 years ago in what westerners may consider an insignificant country in an obscure corner of the globe?
We should care because these stories from Indonesia can help us understand the causes of mass sexual violence more generally. Until recently, sexual violence during genocide and other atrocities was dismissed as an unfortunate, but inevitable by-product of mass conflict. A turning point came in 1998, when the first-ever conviction of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) recognized sexual violence as integral to the destruction of a group. The ICTR described sexual violence as:
one of the worst ways of inflicting harm on the victim as he or she suffers both bodily and mental harm …. [During the Rwandan genocide] acts of rape and sexual violence … were committed solely against Tutsi women, many of whom were subjected to the worst public humiliation, mutilated, and raped several times, often in public, … and often by more than one assailant. These rapes resulted in physical and psychological destruction of Tutsi women, their families and their communities. Sexual violence was an integral part of the process of destruction … of the Tutsi group as a whole.
Sexual violence during conflicts in the former Yugoslavia also encouraged acceptance of the concept of genocidal rape. However, our understandings of the ways in which sexual violence can be used to destroy a group remain superficial because we have so few in-depth studies; we do not know how often it occurred in the past, or in what forms. Pohlman’s new book provides a richly detailed analysis of “the gendered and gendering effects of violence against women and girls in a situation of genocidal violence” (p. 4) in Indonesia in the mid-1960s.
Far from being insignificant or obscure, Indonesia was the fifth most populous country in the world, with the largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union and China—the Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI. Tensions between the PKI and the conservatives who dominated the military erupted just after 30 September 1965, when mid-level army officers attempted a coup against top generals. Although the circumstances were murky, the result was clear: six generals and an adjutant had been killed and dropped down a well. Within 24 hours Major General Suharto took control and blamed the attempted coup on the PKI. Some think that Suharto may have had advance notice of the coup (Roosa, 2002), which, if so, gave him time to plot his countercoup. In any case, even if the secret coup attempt had been instigated by the PKI, as Suharto claimed, few Communists could have been involved—certainly not every PKI member in the entire nation. Suharto, calling for a national cleansing of Communists, unleashed a bloodbath that, when the violence started to die down in February 1966, left up to 500,000 Communists and alleged Communists dead and a million more jailed as political criminals (Roosa, 2006).
Rage against Communist women was a key aspect of the conservatives’ framing of the PKI as a mortal threat to the country. At the time, Indonesian women’s roles were changing; to the conservatives who led the genocide, 1 these changes symbolized growth in social disorder (Gerlach, 2010). Communist women had organized the Indonesian Women’s Movement, or Gerwani, a group that included about 20 percent of the country’s women. Suharto and his allies became obsessed with the sexuality of Gerwani women, claiming that, at the time of the attempted coup, the generals had been tortured and their genitals mutilated by Gerwani members who had danced naked at the scene of the crime. Even though the official post mortem on the generals’ bodies proved that they had not been tortured (Cribb, 2001), and even though there was no other evidence for the charge, Suharto repeated the claim time and again, creating a new, sexually deviant identity for Gerwani women. This propaganda gave other Indonesians a motive for sexual violence, both during the genocide and afterwards, when tens of thousands of women were either killed or detained as political prisoners. “They destroyed us, our lives, our morals were trampled on, for many, many years”, reported one anguished informant. “They tortured us, the women PKI, with sexual abuse …. As women, we became worthless …. With the sexual abuse, they wanted us dead, dead!” (p. 71). Sexual violence, Pohlman concludes, was “part of a larger and intentional strategy to eradicate the Left” (p. 64). Suharto’s authoritarian, patriarchal regime lasted for more than three decades.
Annie Pohlman, who teaches at the University of Queensland, Australia, began interviewing victims of this violence in 2002, ending up with about 150 testimonies which she supplemented by interviewing the women’s family members and using interviews conducted by non-governmental organizations. She locates her interviews in the “particular form of testimonial genre, testimonio”, explaining that:
This genre is more commonly identified with testimony-based reporting on human rights abuses in Latin America, however, the methodological and political issues brought to the fore in testimonio made it a fitting choice for my research …. In particular, these issues relate to the core characteristics of testimonio, which are that these testimonies are given within a situation of political urgency; that they are driven by a commitment to bear witness to atrocities; and, lastly, that they are told in order to seek redress for these abuses.
Pohlman’s study provides a model for feminist research on individuals’ experiences of sexual violence during mass conflict while at the same time using these experiences to identify broader patterns and conclusions about gender and genocide. It does so without essentializing women’s experiences and without reducing them to the victims’ sexuality or “patterns of gendered vulnerability” (p. 4). Throughout, Pohlman stresses women’s agency, showing how they “resisted, acquiesced, collaborated, negotiated, survived, or did not survive” (p. 13).
Aside from its introductory and concluding chapters, the book is mainly organized around types of sexual violence, giving us a full display for comparison with other mass conflicts. Thus one chapter is devoted to outright killings, others to sexual violence against women held in detention, sexual assaults during the killings, mutilation, humiliation through strip-searching and other means, and sexual slavery. Pohlman situates her analyses within the context of feminist and other theoretical literature on power, violence, and social control. The book is tightly organized and clearly written, making it ideal for use in courses on atrocity crimes, violence, and feminist criminology and feminist methodologies. It is, however, painful to read due to the extreme forms of violence that it documents. Those of us who enjoy the Asian dish of chicken or beef satay will be put off by this account:
(T)he lives of one family ended in a “Communist satay” …. The bodies of the whole family were skewered with a length of bamboo, entering from the anus and exiting at the throat, just like a satay, and then taken about for everyone to see.
In the mutilation chapter, Pohlman tells how both men and women had their sexual organs (for women, including breasts) severed from their bodies and then displayed alongside their heads. “In some of the secondary accounts about this violence”, Pohlman coolly remarks, “it is unclear as to whether mutilations were perpetrated … pre- or post-mortem” (p. 121).
Pohlman does not compare the patterns of sexual violence she found during the Indonesian case with those of parallel cases such as Armenia, Darfur, Guatemala, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, although she does occasionally make analogies—for example, to mutilations during US lynchings. But her central purpose is not comparative; it is descriptive and analytical. She offers data that others can use for comparative purposes—a huge and invaluable undertaking for the next steps in the study of genocidal violence.