‘I can’t remember how many I killed. . .’: Child soldiers and memory work in YouTube

Introduction

‘I can’t remember how many I killed. . . aged 10’ is the title of a documentary video posted in BBC News’ YouTube channel in April 2018, featuring two former child soldiers in Maluku, Eastern Indonesia, and their story from mutual hatred and war to friendship and peace. The video is part of a trend, in which digital technologies and growing digital connectivity increasingly influence how people remember and work with their pasts (Keightley and Schlesinger, 2014) – in this case, a violent conflict mainly fought out between Muslims and Christians (1999–2004). As the way conflicts are remembered is crucial for the prevention of future violence and the maintenance of peace (Björkdahl et al., 2017), these emerging digital memoryscapes require close scrutiny as they unfold locally, nationally and transnationally. The analysis of the video and how different audiences engage with it suggests that while memory work may aid peacebuilding among people who share experience in and knowledge about a specific local cultural and political setting, on a transnational level, such videos may provide space to reinforce difference and stereotypes, including Islamophobia, and thus counter their intended reconciliatory tone.

This study conceptualises memoryscapes as fluid, multimodal and interconnected sites and spaces where remembering takes place (cf. Appadurai, 1996; Basu, 2007) and looks into memoryscapes with roots in Eastern Indonesia, thus going beyond the Eurocentric bias ¹ in memory studies (Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 21). Indonesia is at the forefront of social media users globally and YouTube is the most used platform (https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-indonesia, 15 March 2022). Skyrocketing social media use in Indonesia went hand in hand with broader media freedom granted after the end of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, where the arts and digital media have become means to work with the recent and more distant violent past. The BBC video is available in English and Indonesian, thus inviting different sets of audiences. Both versions have millions of views and generated thousands of comments. The video not only reveals the intimate experiences of the two main characters but is also heavily laden with references to the war and culture in Maluku. Analysing and comparing the video and the English and Indonesian commentaries, this article investigates how conflict memory travels (Erll, 2011), how it is translated, interpreted and received in transcultural spheres and among different audiences (Kennedy, 2014; Laanes, 2021), thus shaping a transcultural memory that focusses ‘on those aspects of remembering and forgetting which are located between, across, and beyond the boundaries of national cultures’ (Erll, 2010: 311). It thus addresses the lack of memory reception studies (Popescu and Schult, 2020: 142) and explores how different contextualisation affects memory activism and work and their limits (Gutman, 2017b; Kantola, 2013). Although scholarly debate has paid close attention to how media and art were instrumental in raising international awareness about child soldiers, research on how decontextualised child soldier memories as portrayed in a specific social media genre are received differently in different regions and among different audiences is still missing.

I have been following developments in Maluku for more than two decades. Taken aback that one of the most violent conflicts of the post-Suharto era broke out in Maluku in 1999, I first analysed the role of media and, in particular, the Internet in the conflict. Later, I studied the role of culture and traditional alliance systems in the peace process and, finally, the role of a variety of media, including social media, in the struggle for a more just and peaceful future (e.g. Bräuchler, 2013, 2015, 2019). My long-term engagement with the area equips me with the necessary skills to ‘read’ the video clip and relate it to other modes of remembering and peacebuilding in Maluku and beyond. In this article, I first provide some background information on the Moluccan conflict and memory politics in Indonesia more generally. I then outline how new media and digital technologies have changed the ways child soldiers remember and are remembered and analyse the BBC video and the memory work it portrays. This is followed by an analysis of the video commentary. I have read all comments and responses (4093 for the English version, 3130 for the Indonesian, as of May 2021), organised and analysed them according to the main themes and narratives found, and compared the two versions. I here focus on the main strands of the debates. All comments were anonymised to protect the posters’ identity, and no direct quotes were provided. I have thus analysed this memoryscape on the levels of representation and interaction (Makhortykh, 2020: 150), not looking into underlying YouTube algorithms, except when referring to comment/response ratings as nonverbal interaction.

The Moluccan conflict and memory politics

With a population less than 1.5 million in 2009, Maluku Province in Eastern Indonesia covers several hundred islands. The archipelago became famous as the ‘Spice Islands’, the source of nutmeg and clove that attracted early traders and colonial powers, who also brought Islam and Christianity. But Maluku is also special in another sense. With an approximately half Christian, half Muslim population, Maluku was praised for interreligious harmony in a majority Muslim country until 1998. It thus took most observers by surprise, when the archipelago provided the scene for one of the most protracted conflicts that broke out shortly after the step-down of Indonesia’s authoritarian president Suharto (1966–1998). Large-scale violence erupted in January 1999, went on for almost 4 years and resulted in thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of displaced people and an ideologically and physically segregated society. Although initially it looked as if Christian Ambonese mainly targeted migrant Muslims, religion soon became the principal identity marker in the conflict. The destruction of houses of worship, the involvement of radical jihadists from Java and strategically spread rumours turned religion into the main dividing line. Newly freed print media, the Internet and emerging digital and mobile technologies played a crucial role in these dynamics (Bräuchler, 2003, 2013; Spyer, 2022; Van Klinken, 2007: 96).

The conflict’s depiction as religious war was in line with predominant discourses on the rise of religious fundamentalisms worldwide and a national scenario, where interreligious violence erupted in many places. Such framing of the conflict, however, disregards the complexity of conflict dynamics and the less visible structural and historical violence that was crucial for the emergence of the fighting, such as economic inequalities, the politicisation of religion, the taking sides of security forces, and colonial and neo-colonial exploitation of natural resources and destruction of traditional alliance systems. Ever since the arrival of the colonial powers in Maluku, religion has become a politicised subject (Bräuchler, 2014). Although Moluccans had developed means to maintain harmony and keep their society integrated, developments such as the Islamisation of politics from Indonesia’s centre from the late 1980s and 1990s challenged this, including governmental transmigration programmes leading to demographic imbalances (bringing increasing numbers of Muslims from other parts of Indonesia into the area) and the issue of senior civil service appointments, where Christians saw their colonial privilege to occupy these positions challenged. In the upcoming financial crisis, it further increased hidden tensions and competition in a precarious job market. On top of that, in the democratisation process and election campaigns following Suharto’s step-down, religion became closely entangled with party politics (Van Klinken, 2007: 93–96). As Van Klinken (2007: 104) argues, the Moluccan case ‘illustrates how political competition within a state-dependent society (what he calls ‘bureaucratic colonization’ (p. 90)) can turn into religious warfare at moments of democratic transition if the state is weak’, as was the case in Maluku (p. 91). The central government, however, mainly blamed Moluccans themselves for the recent violence and mainly set on increasing deployments of troops.

Only in 2002, did peace talks in Malino (Sulawesi) result in a peace agreement that put an official end to the violence, but results were mixed and violence continued to occasionally flare up in the years after. The report of an independent national fact-finding commission that was sent to Maluku as part of the Malino peace agreement was never published, and masterminds behind the conflict were never named, let alone called to court (see also Van Klinken, 2007: 89). But there were hundreds of initiatives by a multitude of actors to provide emergency relief and programmes, trainings and workshops to facilitate the rebuilding of bridges between the two religious communities. Many of these peace interventions failed. Exhausted by the long-lasting violence and disillusioned by the idleness and incapacity of the government, Moluccans developed a narrative that would allow for the reintegration of society and the restoration of social relationships with their neighbours, which is crucial for their livelihoods. They knew that most of them took part in the communal violence, one way or the other, but they also knew that they had been living in harmony before. In fact, from the very beginning of the conflict, there were voices from various strands of society, including religious figures, reminding people of Moluccan traditions of brotherhood (basudara) that were in place long before the arrival of world religions.

The unifying narrative that most Moluccans can identify with was that outside provocateurs triggered the unrests and used religion to turn Moluccans against each other. Moluccans drew on local resources and institutions, cultural capital and social ties to reconcile, a process that was legitimised by decentralisation policies in Indonesia, post 2001, that allow for the restoration of local political structures that had fallen victim to former president Suharto’s unification policies (Bräuchler, 2019). Through intense local efforts and prominent peace activists, investing in the reinvention of Moluccan culture, interfaith dialogue and the youth, the area has become a role model in Indonesia for successful peacebuilding (e.g. Bräuchler, 2015, 2019). This success diverts from the fact that tensions are still running high, that there are no ongoing official efforts to address the past violence, that survivors have so far been predominantly silent about their traumatic conflict experience and that young people grew up in a segregated society, which asks for continuous efforts to engage with the past and work for peace in everyday life. Major international NGOs addressed the need for treatment of what they called trauma and stress. Moluccans adopted that language, which contributed to the way trauma manifested itself as an important transcultural memory trope and to the reinterpretation of local culture (Bubandt, 2008). However, all NGOs withdrew shortly after the conflict was declared over, ignoring the long timescale needed for communities dealing with the legacies of past violence and injustice (Kent, 2019: 195–196).

In 2009, the Indonesian president travelled to Maluku’s capital Ambon to inaugurate a World Peace Gong as a sign that peace has been restored and the place is safe again for tourists and investors. Although the gong is an attraction for domestic and foreign tourists, many locals see it as a symbol of elitism, not reflecting the conflict memory of ordinary Moluccans (Bräuchler, 2015). This resonates with the regional government’s preference to remember the conflict as a black spot in history over which grass has grown and to promote Maluku for economic investment and tourism. Even within society, Van Klinken has perceived a strong refusal to speak about the unrests of 1999 in public, which is feared to disrupt Maluku’s fragile social harmony. According to Van Klinken (2014), if people only talk in private about the violent past, this can reinforce (former) conflict lines and create a hypocritical society.

The government’s memory approach in Maluku resonates with more general official memory politics in Indonesia that mainly circle around the alleged communist coup in 1965/1966, when some high-ranking military generals were murdered, which resulted in one of the largest mass killings of the twentieth century. The new regime took great care to inscribe a uniform interpretation of the events into public memory ‘through control over textbooks, media and publishing, arts institutes, museums, monuments, public ceremonies, and national symbols’ (Zurbuchen, 2005: 4–5). However, memories of survivors of 1965/1966 were and still are passed on through storytelling (Setiawan, 2018), silence (Dwyer, 2009) and tales of the ghostly (Leong, 2021). Even after Suharto’s step-down, there is no open conversation about the events, people’s memory is still silenced, books are still burned, critical films are prevented from screening, communism is still banned and victims are still stigmatised (McGregor, 2016). However, the liberation of media in the post-Suharto era also opened up new spaces for memory work, online, in more conventional media such as books, and through arts (Kent, 2019; Kolimon et al., 2015; Leksana, 2019: 78–79; Marching and Nicholls, 2017; Sulistiyanto and Setyadi, 2009; Wardana and Hutabarat, 2012), also reaching international audiences through their use of transcultural memory tropes (Kennedy, 2017). The YouTube video discussed in this article is a good example of this more general trend in Indonesian memoryscapes.

What is important for the analysis of Moluccan memory work is that people remember conflict and historical injustices as well as a harmonious past where shared tradition united them all (Bräuchler, 2015). This past and these traditions provide them with repertoires of how to live harmoniously with the other religious group (Kusumaningrum, 2015: 97). There is the positive memory of Moluccan brotherhood, and there is the memory of hope that these shared traditions and their reinvention are able to mend the wounds and restore peace (cf. Reading and Katriel, 2015; Rigney, 2018). There is also a lot of hope in and among the youth. As mentioned above, Moluccan peace activists have worked to mobilise young people for social justice and peace: those who experienced the conflict and those who grew up in its segregated aftermath. They mobilise them through arts that don’t know religious boundaries such as a collection of personal conflict stories, including narratives how members of the warring parties were helping each other despite enforced polarisation; poetry volumes engaging with the conflict, Moluccan culture and continuing social injustice; theatre groups, art walks and mural festivals; music and graffiti sessions; and social media engagement (e.g. Berry et al., 2013; Bräuchler, 2019, 2022; Manuputty et al., 2017). All this is deeply ingrained in the video’s message that shows that both arts and social media are now used to remember the violence and invites others to join the memory work – in this case a YouTube audience whom is invited to participate through rating and commenting.

Memory, media and child soldiers

Memory is a dynamic and selective process in which individuals and groups try to make sense of the past to cater for needs and allow for action in the present. Halbwachs (1980 [1950]) describes remembering as a social process, in which a collective memory provides the social frameworks for individual recollection. Memory represents the past in different ways, for instance, as historical memory in condensed and schematic ways or as more personal memory with more detail, nuances and continuity (Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]: 52). ‘Memory has power’, as Assmann and Shortt (2012a: xi) add, ‘when people come together in political life and transform representations of the past into matters of urgent importance in the present’ through selection and reinterpretation. It is not the past itself, but dynamic ‘representations of past events that are created, circulated and received within a specific cultural frame and political constellation’, in other words a specific context (Assmann and Shortt, 2012b: 3–4, an emphasis in the original), through media (Erll and Rigney, 2009: 4).

Digital media enormously changed memory landscapes with their vast speed, reach and interactive potential, the blurring of boundaries between the public and the private, individual and collective, local and global, and the ease of access for many. Our memories are increasingly connected, newly ordered and ‘distributed across complex networks of digital media and technologies’ (Hoskins, 2011: 23–24). Digital technologies are used for official memorialisation such as national commemoration ceremonies or the Indonesian state’s continuing anti-communist agenda with regard to the 1965/1966 massacres. But they also enable marginalised or suppressed groups to challenge hegemonic memory regimes and create multidirectionality, counter-memories, new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice (Rothberg, 2009: 5), as has happened with the memories of 1965/1966 survivors in Indonesia, indigenous people speaking up against past and ongoing physical and structural violence they have been experiencing, or with our YouTube video. The Internet and social media provide local groups space to connect to global memory work and its critical engagement with the past (Simon and Zucker, 2020: 13), work through a traumatic past, share memories, produce empathy and invite both survivors and those living elsewhere or born after the violence to work with that memory (Hirsch, 2008; Landsberg, 2004; Wessels, 2017).

News and popular media, documentaries, humanitarian websites and other media have paid increasing attention to the phenomenon of child soldiers, who are mostly presented in oversimplified ways, speaking to a Western humanitarianism and related universalising notions of childhood. Reducing child soldiers to victims of war, monstrous perpetrators or heroes, these depictions are largely silent about the individual child behind these simplifications and the complex social, cultural and political contexts that the child soldiers emerged from (Denov, 2012; Martins, 2011; Rosen and Rosen, 2012). They are decontextualised in the sense that their specific background or their own accounts ‘are not allowed to disrupt the careful moral bookkeeping [of that universal rhetoric] . . . Abstracted from context . . . we are given a generic account of “child soldiers” in which the appalling experience of one individual stands for all’ (Hart, 2006: 6). It is part of that account that young people are forced to become child soldiers, which deprives them of their agency and ignores that many join voluntarily, to defend themselves and their families or for other reasons. International regulations define children to be girls and boys under the age of 18 whose use in armed hostilities is illegal, with the recruitment of children under 15 being a war crime. However, youth is a transient and contested concept, defined differently in different cultural contexts, if at all (Oezerdem and Podder, 2015). Such context is not only crucial to understand child soldiers’ diverse backgrounds, motivations and reintegration options, but also for how memory is produced, received and worked with. This context is also crucial for the reintegration of former child soldiers, a major issue in many post-conflict settings (Annan et al., 2009: 639; Oezerdem and Podder, 2015), something that is visualised and verbalised in our YouTube video.

Although a lot of these trends are reinforced through social media, these digital platforms also have the potential to diversify and ‘democratise’ that memory space (Knudsen and Stage, 2012) and allow for diverging opinions and representations of the past. YouTube, for instance, is used for a wide variety of motivations: to replicate the image of child soldiers as abused victims, to mobilise against the child abuser (e.g. the Kony 2012 Campaign), to recruit child soldiers (e.g. ongoing ISIS methods), to tell about the difficulties of reintegration (e.g. in Sierra Leone or Nepal), to give agency and voice to these children, and to engage in memory work. Martins (2011: 444) also pointed out how ‘child soldier representations from the North and the South’ differ, with the ones from ‘the South’ usually reflecting much better the complexity of the child soldier phenomenon. Nevertheless, she is silent about how decontextualised child soldier memories as portrayed in a specific social media genre are received differently in ‘the North’ and ‘the South’ or, in our case, among English- and Indonesian-speaking audiences. ²

Hynd (2021) and Berents (2019) have worked with child soldiers’ memoirs that render the agency of children in conflict and its aftermath and their advocacy visible and accessible to a broader public. Their analyses of how child soldiers decide to present the past help to better understand the memory work we find in our BBC video and other social media. For these young authors, Hynd found writing about their trauma and the horrors of war is a coping mechanism to restore their humanity and their identity and ease the feeling of guilt. Some want to show the world that there is a way out, the possibility to rehabilitate and reintegrate, others reinvent themselves as campaigners for children still caught in conflict. However, these child-soldiers-turned-authors are not necessarily representative of other child soldiers as they are literate, benefitted from some kind of humanitarian support and often have experience living outside their home region. They have learned to express themselves in ways that an international (often Western) audience expects and understands, for instance, including a phase of ‘innocence disrupted by war, violence, and trauma, then humanitarian salvation and recovery, with a corresponding disavowal of violence’ (Hynd, 2021: 80). ‘Trauma’ is key in these memoirs, the discourses and campaigns around them and in transcultural memory ecologies more generally (Hynd, 2021: 87–88). The authors of these memoirs and the child soldiers featuring in the BBC video creatively engage in memory work and activism, which is crucial to make memory work for peace (Gutman, 2017a), to restore social relations and heal trauma (Mercer, 2015). It allows for transformation and the transmission of positivity and hope, the commitment to certain cultural values or the memory of human agency and resilience (Rigney, 2018: 368; Reading and Katriel, 2015: 10). It also enables a prospective memory that envisions a socially more just and shared future (Welzer, 2010: 23).

‘I can’t remember how many I killed . . .’

Like Hynd’s former child soldiers, the main characters of our BBC video, Ronald and Iskandar, are ‘unusual’ young people. Ronald was 10 and Iskandar 13 years old when their lives and families got severely affected by the conflict and they decided to join the fighting. Their experiences severely traumatised them, and whereas they were praised for their courage during the conflict, they were avoided by people in their communities once it was over. Influential local peace activists like Pastor Jacky Manuputty and Imam Abidin Wakano were mobilising the youth for peace. They approached the two children, worked to establish relationships of trust and invited them to participate in a number of trauma healing workshops in and outside of Indonesia from 2006. They also involved them in an interreligious initiative called Peace Provocateurs to prevent rumours, anticipate further violence and engage in creative arts for broader social justice. Early on in the process, Ronald discovered dance as a means to deal with his traumatic experiences, to connect to young people from different religious backgrounds and to teach and help others to overcome their trauma, in Maluku and beyond. As Manuputty (2018) explained, it was important to make them leaders in peace to restore their respect and self-esteem. Ronald and Iskandar were also invited to popular national TV shows and video projects, including the one produced for BBC News, which acknowledges their agency, gives them a voice in a public space and at the same time diversifies memoryscapes and representational repertoires around the Moluccan violence and its aftermath.

The video is 7:19 minutes long and the subtitle’s focus on peace agency (see below) clearly wants to raise hope (EN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSI_IqZW-14; ID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVIPRZanYBg). The video is filmed at different locations in Ambon City and the story is narrated by the two former child soldiers (aged 29 and 32 at the time of the filming) and the occasional overlaid text for explanations, with subtitles added in the English version. It starts with Ronald saying that he cannot remember how many he killed: ‘I remember, but it was too many to count’. We read that ‘These men were child fighters in Indonesia’s bloodiest religious conflict . . .’ and get to see some conflict footage from 1999 with heavy shooting in the streets of Ambon. The two young men introduce themselves as former child soldier commanders, speaking from separate locations, with engaged and stern voices. The narration is interrupted by a narrator, who briefly talks about the background of the conflict and how communities of Christian and Muslims set about destroying each other, visualised through 1999 footage showing destroyed property and people fleeing in overcrowded ships.

Then Ronald performs a prayer song he would sing before going out to kill: ‘Jesus, my saviour’. He sits in an empty church, in front of a large image of Jesus, which reminds the informed viewer of visuals used during and after the conflict, including paintings of oversized Christ pictures on Ambon’s walls, to mark territory and, as Spyer (2022: 56) argues, as ‘spectacular assertions of aggression and exclusion’. With Ronald transitioning into a prayer position and, later, Iskander moving around a destroyed neighbourhood, they tell how they decided to join the fighting to protect their families and communities, to take revenge and to fight a holy war. It was a matter of killing or being killed. They explain what weapons they used and how they killed, until a peace deal was reached in 2002, which left them traumatised, deprived of their childhood, haunted by their violent memories, and their communities physically divided. Later, both of them walk, separately, through destroyed neighbourhoods with burned down buildings, gloomy and dark, with staccato music. The way they tell their story is quite emotional and at one point Ronald almost starts to cry.

In 2006, they met at a trauma healing workshop, full of suspicion, says Iskandar, starting to fight on the spot, which the organisers managed to prevent. The narration and the images of the young men are intersected with drawings, aiming to recreate the workshop situation. We read: ‘They spent days taking turns to tell their stories . . . and sharing their deepest fears and feeling’. Iskandar explains how they wrote about their anger, their hatred, their desire for revenge and then burned the paper, realising that they had all faced the same problems. Ronald: ‘That’s when we realised we have to communicate better’. Iskandar narrates how they all started to cry when Ronald said ‘I love you all’, restoring their brotherhood and trust, where one needs to protect the other. This is underlined by a video section where we see them both starting to talk to each other and shaking hands, against the background of Ambon bay and a clouded night sky. Then we learn about Ronald’s passion for dance and watch a performance. He tells us how he invites others to join him, and this way finds new Muslim friends. As he explains: ‘Through art we are showing that before we killed, but now we are building a new Ambon through art’. We then get to see an example, a dance and music session with Ronald and friends. With both walking on a beautiful beach on Ambon Island, we learn how Iskandar has found peace in nature. They are aware that the peace is still fragile, that no one won the conflict and that their generation is the island’s future. By telling their stories, they hope, the next generation will learn and the video ends with a song for the ancestors, sung by an influential Ambonese peace activist at the beach.

The video propelled intimate experiences, thoughts and reflections onto a global stage, to create empathy among those who did not participate in the violence. The narrative puts an emphasis on the children’s agency as victims of war, but also as fighters, peacebuilders and campaigners, which highlights ‘the rupture and recovery in their moral values’ (Hynd, 2021: 91). The video shows how these narratives are individual reflections and part of larger memory construction processes required to envision a peaceful future. The two main characters restore relationships through their memory work and draw on and connect religious, cultural and arts communities. In their activism, they employ global memory tropes such as universal childhood, trauma (framed as such by the video’s narrator) and the crucial role of communication, as well as local cultural tradition and notions of brotherhood. We, as audience, witness how memory is performed through culture and arts and how that opens up space for the postmemory generation and produces lessons for the future. More generally have the arts and artists been described as important memory agents (Rigney, 2021; Shefik, 2018: 319) as they allow for the embodiment, performance and transformation of memory as a multisensual, spatial experience (Till, 2008). Dancing a traumatic past, for instance, can have cathartic effects as it helps to share, reflect on and re-enact the violent event, but also express its mastery (Argenti and Schramm, 2010: 20). Sound and music can give voice to survivors and their children and also express the unspeakable and invisible, thus initiating healing and reconciliation (Bao, 2013; Kaiser, 2005; Meyers and Zandberg, 2002). Film and prose are used as interventions to counter top-down hegemonic memory narratives and make alternative voices heard (Nguyen, 2016). Artistic performances create new sites of memorability, translating memories into transmissible experience, supplementing existing memories with imaginative power, connecting individual and collective and shifting boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Rigney, 2021).

Through the mediatisation and digitalisation of such performative memory, digital technologies offer new possibilities for intervention in memory politics (Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 12). But there is also a cost, as posters give up control over their own memories (Hoskins, 2016). Whether alternative memories become monumental depends on one’s digital access and skills, networks and platform algorithms, which makes digital memories vulnerable (Jacobsen, 2020; Maj and Riha, 2009). YouTube users need to have an account to rate and post videos and comments, which makes rating and commenting a more active engagement. However, the visibility of the comment is also subject to YouTube’s algorithmic logic (Smale, 2020). The better uploaders prepare their video through good title, tags and description, the more comments, likes and visibility it gets. Big news portals like CNN, Al-Jazeera and BBC are ‘powerful uploaders’ (Smit et al., 2017: 299) that have an enormous influence on the memory ecology of a specific event (Smale, 2020: 201). This is particularly relevant for contexts like Indonesia with strict governmental memory regimes in place.

Memory work in YouTube

The English version of the video had 1,884,918 views and 4093 comments/replies at the time of analysis (3 May 2021), the Indonesian version had 2,504,891 views and 3130 comments/replies. Although the most dense discussions took place in April/May 2018 in both versions (EN: 3695 comments, ID: 473 comments), there were much less, but steady comments afterwards in the English version, and many more in the Indonesian: June–December 2018 (525), 2019 (800), 2020 (906), 2021 (111, until 3.5.). In the commentary to the English version (EC), most posts were in English, only a few in Indonesian. The video’s catchy title ‘I can’t remember how many I killed. . . aged 10’ contrasts with the subtitles more reconciliatory tone (‘A Muslim and a Christian bond as they work together to build peace on the Indonesian island of Ambon’) and resonates with the EC’s strong focus on interreligious conflict. In contrast, the Indonesian commentary (IC) speaks much better to the memory framework set out in the video (trauma, childhood, creativity, culture, peace), which finds also expression in the Indonesian title: ‘Mantan tentara anak Muslim dan Kristen Ambon yang jadi duta damai’ (Former Ambonese Muslim and Christian child soldiers who became peace ambassadors). Posters in the IC use both Indonesian and Ambonese Malay, the vernacular of Central Maluku.

The EC audience seems to be divided about how to categorise and memorialise the former child soldiers, some being touched by their fate and the video’s beautiful message of love and peace, others denouncing them as monsters, idiots, psychopaths, animals or criminals that should be put into prison. Some describe them as puppets of religion and elders who turned them into killing machines, others ascribe them agency and also responsibility for what they did, acting against both law and the core principles of religion. In both versions, we find posters who blame BBC to spread fake news and hate which could potentially retrigger violence and to give these people a platform for their propaganda. In the IC, however, the majority seems to be supportive of the BBC initiative and the two young men, some of them asking for permission to repost the video on their YouTube channel. Attempts to make fun of children going to war with self-made weapons or of a jihadi making friends with a kafir (infidel) trigger hefty reactions. In both versions, there are attempts to compare the war in Maluku and the child soldiers’ role with a computer game (EC) and with clan fights in an action anime series (Naruto and Sasuke being main characters; IC), which could be an indication of the posters’ age group.

However, what is obvious in the commentaries is that posters’ engagement goes far beyond the individual child soldiers and the transformative potential this video and related memory work might have for them. Rather, in the EC, the majority of comments engages with what the posters consider to be the main problem in the Moluccan violence and beyond: religion. The biggest issue is blaming the other’s religion for what happened in Maluku and the world at large. Some extensively quote verses of the Quran or the Old Testament that incite followers to violent action against the disbelievers, whereas others argue against a literal and for a contextual interpretation of the Scriptures that do not ask people to kill. Such diverging interpretations trigger abusive language, wild mutual insults and long debates, including historical explanations, asking users to read the whole books, not only cherry-picking verses. Many offences are explicitly directed against Islam, and even peaceful postings like the one promoting love for a better world (the post with the most likes: 2257) trigger extensive Islam-bashing, reducing it to a religion of war and forced conversion, that promotes false idols and hate, trouble and terrorism – occasionally reaffirmed by ‘DEUS VULT!’, the rallying cry of the crusades. Many commenters suggest the solution would be to get rid of religion; others think depoliticisation and proper interpretation of religion would help to teach love, care, peace and not killing. A comment concerned with the child soldiers’ lost childhood expresses gratitude that s/he was born in the UK, received 1207 likes and triggered a debate about the Islamisation of Western societies and that the video depicts the future scenario for Europe, also linking it to the recent so-called refugee crisis and the perceived rise of crime in Europe. This is countered by voices trying to mediate and remind that Indonesia is now peaceful, that Islam is only a tiny minority in Europe or Europe has its own problems (e.g. Northern Ireland). Far fewer posters blame and abuse Christianity. As various contributors remark, the ‘religious war’ of Maluku is continued online through hate speech and the posters have learned nothing. Only one commenter promoted the arts as a unifying force (one of the few Indonesian comments), another one bemoans the lack of communication resulting in a lack of mutual understanding and conflict, as addressed in the video.

In contrast, the most prominent theme in the IC is the celebration of Indonesianhood and Moluccan brotherhood. Posters promote unity and diversity in a peaceful Indonesia that they have all fought for in the past. They warn of the instrumentalisation of religion, in Maluku and current politics in Indonesia’s centre, and write about their own friendly interactions with ‘the religious other’. We occasionally hear ‘NKRI harga mati!’ (Indonesian unity or death; the battle cry of the nationalist movement) and we find many expressions of solidarity from all over Indonesia, from Aceh in the West to Papua in the East. People frequently post Moluccan slogans and words emphasising tolerance, brotherhood, close social relations and cultural ties, such as ale rasa beta rasa (I feel what you feel), katong satu gandong (we are from the same womb), basudara (brotherhood), pela and gandong (traditional alliance systems). These brothers and sisters, they comment, have let themselves be played off against each other by outside provocateurs, which shall never happen again. Various posters remind us that the ancestors have taught us that no one can win a quarrel as both sides suffer (menang jadi arang kalah jadi abu). Some posters reflect on how this video brings back their own war memories and makes them cry, how their families and friends suffered, how they remembered the meaning of pela gandong and that Christians and Muslims in Maluku are brothers and sisters. Some of these comments get dozens of replies and likes, one even gets 1520. In the EC, in contrast, the video’s references to Moluccan culture only play a minor and rather ambivalent role. A few praise the culture of brotherhood and accuse religion of making brothers kill each other; others raise accusations of primitivism, separatism and tribalism in Indonesia as a developing country or misinterpret male friendship as gay love.

In both versions, there are hardly any attempts to engage in proper conflict analysis. In the EC, the conflict is mainly reduced to a religious war; in the IC, the majority seems to agree that no religion teaches to kill or hate other religions. There is no detailed engagement with religious teachings and sources as in the EC, with one exception, where a poster outs himself as a non-Indonesian expert on religion. He delves into the historical relation between Muslims and Christians, neither of them promoting violence or war, and receives plenty of encouragement for this. In reaction to a comment asking brothers and sisters to unite peacefully (701 likes), a round of mutual insults between alleged Christians and Muslims emerges, but the conflict is soon settled. There is some Islam-bashing in the IC, mainly triggered by what some users identified as a fake account. A good number of posters explicitly mention the danger of provocative comments on social media. They warn that users should not let themselves be provoked by unqualified comments or dislikes of peaceful messages, which can also result from bots. As if to illustrate this, two comments were blown up by a fake account, one of them accusing Christians of being pig bastards and eaters, which then triggered endless shouting at this account. However, that thread does not render the commentary as such more aggressive.

Whereas all these debates are part of the emerging memoryscapes around the video in particular, and the Moluccan conflict more broadly, there is also some explicit reference to the notion of memory in both versions, but the kind of memory work or critical engagement with the past differs. In the EC, we find those who want to move on and forget and those who are strong about the need to remember and learn from past mistakes, but many relate it mainly to sociohistorical contexts in Europe. Whereas some wonder why BBC has to bring this up again years after the war, others underline the lessons we can learn from history for a better future, to not end in a multigenerational vicious circle as has happened in places like Northern Ireland. According to these EC contributors, it can teach us lessons about forgiveness, communication, the beauty of difference, the instrumentalisation of religion, but also about Indonesia. Some commenters who seem to be based in Indonesia had no idea that this was going on in their country blaming themselves, their young age, history education, teachers and schools or government censorship; a few others share their own traumatic conflict experience. This category hosts the most comments in Indonesian. As indicated before, posters in the IC are mostly supportive of the BBC video and its main characters, considering it to be ‘very cool’ (keren sekali). After they had witnessed the media’s instrumental role in fuelling the conflict, this restores their faith in journalism, encouraging BBC to do similar videos for other conflict spots in Indonesia or turn this video into a film. Moluccans among the posters (or those who explicitly out themselves as such) are aware of remaining tensions in Maluku and the large majority of the commenters seems to be convinced that we need to remember to prevent violence and division in the future and that the video is promoting reconciliation and peace. To make peace with ourselves and our brothers, one poster suggests, we need to reflect on and acknowledge our bitter experiences, also referring to one of the books I mentioned above (Manuputty et al., 2014, 2017).

Discussion: transcultural memory and local culture

The video and its commentaries are products of connectivity which allows for mobility, travel and multidirectional and transcultural memory work. Universal concepts such as the child soldier, childhood or trauma play important roles in the video as well as creativity and art that are internationally acknowledged facilitators of peace and a critical engagement with the past. But how to explain the diverging engagement of the Indonesian- and English-speaking audiences with the BBC YouTube video?

The close interlinkage of memory and travel is key to connective memory and leads to ‘mnemonic dynamics unfolding across and beyond boundaries’, resulting in what Erll (2011) calls ‘transcultural memory’. Transcultural memorial forms such as the child soldier or trauma, Islamic radicalism or the healing arts mediate between individual and cultural memories and are ‘the condensation of complex and confusing traces of the past’ (Erll, 2011: 13). At the same time, Laanes (2021: 45) asks what is gained and what is lost in this translation of local memories into global memory language, for instance, through homogenisation or dehistoricisation. These translations are necessarily selective and, in the case of large online news portals and ‘global memory entrepreneurs’ (Selimovic, 2013: 339), such as BBC, making local ‘authentic’ memories comprehensible and recognisable for a global audience is also a matter of professionalisation and commercialisation (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2019). Memory in our video aims to resonate with local cultures and realities, but also with global mnemonic forms. These transcultural frames of memory are ‘contested, contingent, and both politically and ethically ambiguous’ (Bond et al., 2017: 6). Translations may also fail when cultural experiences or the extreme lived reality of child soldiers cannot produce resonance and empathy among a distant audience.

The video and its commentaries provide important insights into how people intend to remember the Moluccan conflict – those involved and affected, and those distant and postmemory – and into the challenges of translating local memories and memory work. The video and the commentaries show that the way an individual remembers, or learns to remember and deal with trauma, is guided by personal experience as well as by various social frameworks, including transcultural mnemonics, national narratives and politics and local cultural elements. Memory is at the same time individual, relational and collective (Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]). The connectivity and the interlinkage of these different spheres makes emerging memory debates relational. Challenges in translation and the relationality of memory result in quite different debates in the English and Indonesian versions of the video commentary. A large part of the English audience is probably missing the relevant social, cultural and political background of Maluku or Indonesia. The missing context limited their potential to endeavour in a critical engagement with the past (i.e. memory work), at least the kind of memory work that is relevant for peacebuilding in Maluku. Certain messages of the video, including the promotion of brotherhood and the importance of culture and arts were sidelined, with religion receiving the main attention: whether and why religion legitimises the use of violence. This seems to feed into or being informed by a broader global and populist rhetoric about Islamic radicalisation or the bloody borders of Islam (Huntington, 1996) that shapes transcultural memory of events like 9/11 or the Moluccan conflict. However, this does not go unchallenged, even in the English commentary.

When Indonesians or Moluccans discuss among themselves in the IC, the focus shifts to values ingrained in their shared culture, including the notion of brotherhood (basudara), which is central to Moluccan culture and peacebuilding (Bräuchler, 2015) – values challenged by contemporary polarising politics in Indonesia. The majority of Indonesian commentators seem to acknowledge the traumatic memory of the conflict but also embrace memories of hope and positive memories of a harmonious past that many are familiar with. In this space, the interrelatedness of individual and collective memory allows for individual change to bring about positive collective change and for positive collective memories to have positive impact on individual developments. Rather than the often observed downwards spiral of online hate speech, this can ideally ‘provoke peace’ (Institute for Interfaith Dialogue in Indonesia (Interfidei), 2012) and generate an upwards spiral of hopeful memory, based on difference and culture. Going beyond the Moluccan context, many comments in the Indonesian version emphasise that ‘we are all one’ (satu), which is particularly important given the increasing polarisation around elections in contemporary Indonesia and the increasing radicalisation of religion. The focus seems to be on collective healing and the mending of society of which the individual is an integral part.

The analysis of the YouTube video and its commentaries highlights how social, cultural and political context is important for how people engage with a specific past and memory. It is important to examine how conflicts are remembered to prevent future violence, but it is equally important to look into who is remembering what and why and what different kinds of memory processes or work this triggers, depending on the different contexts memory agents and their audiences are in. In our case, there were clear signs that memory work can contribute to peacebuilding, in particular among people who share a background in or knowledge about a specific cultural and political setting or people with whom the reconciliatory tone of the video resonates. However, on a transnational level or in ideologically biased circles, such videos may provide space to reinforce difference and stereotypes, in this case a derogatory view of Indonesia, Islam or religion more generally. The openness and potential virality of social media can thus contribute to a constructive engagement with conflict memory and the acceleration of peace. However, it can also lead to the continuation or retriggering of violence on different scales, one way or the other.

Concluding note

In this article, I focussed on how two former child soldiers remember the Moluccan violence and how they have decided to share those memories in a YouTube video. They narrate how they remember the conflict and their involvement in both violence and peacebuilding. However, the article is not only about the child soldiers but also about what happens with their memories when exposed to a broader Indonesian and global audience. I was interested to see how these audiences receive those memories, which can also take us in other directions as has happened in the commentaries of the analysed video. The analysis of these memoryscapes shows that it is not necessarily about those who have shared their memories, but about what those memories trigger in the people engaging or working with them. Context plays an important role here.

Through connective and transcultural memory and through the translation of local memories into global memory tropes and vice versa, remembering a conflict has become a multi-scalar, multi-sited, multi-temporal and multi-stakeholder process. As this article shows, such settings ask for more in-depth analysis of the contextualisation of memory projects, both online and offline, including the various power relations involved and algorithmic hegemonies of digital platforms that influence and co-shape emerging memoryscapes and memory work. It also asks for more in-depth studies of the reception of memory. The connectivity and travelling of memory requires a stronger focus not only on content or multidirectionality but also on the dynamics involved in the translation, adoption, renegotiation and diversification of memory. As Kantola (2013: 103) argues,

public renegotiation of memories can help . . . prevent the recurrence of violence and vicious circles of revenge. It can help individual people come to terms with their pasts and continue their lives with lesser burdens. [But] . . . Even then, it is important to consider whose lives are being made easier and how.

In future research, we need to explore the memory of hope and its positive potential in more detail and comparative ways, but we also need to investigate to what extent such memory is connective, inclusive and embraced by the postmemory generation and how a distant audience rejects or adopts it as their prosthetic memory (Landsberg, 2004). This could provide lessons on the way to a more ‘just memory’ (Nguyen, 2016).