Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview (Country Overview‪)‬

In 2001, using violent junctures in the life of a seventy-year-old Indonesian as a metaphor for the whole nation, Benedict Anderson summarized the history of violence in Indonesia in a poignant manner: A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of ... Dutch colonial rule ...; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanese military regime, which regularly practiced torture in private and executions in public ...; on the eve of adulthood, four years (1945-49) of popular struggle for national liberation ... at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives; as a young mother or father ... the cataclysm of 1965-66, when at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as two million people ... were slaughtered by the military; in the middle age, the New Order police-state, and its bloody attempt to annex East Timor, which cost over 200,000 East Timorese lives ...; in old age, the spread of armed resistance in ... Aceh and West Papua, the savage riots of May 1998 ... and ... the outbreak of ruthless internecine confessional warfare in the long peaceful Moluccas. (Anderson 2001, 9-10)