The Army and the Indonesian Genocide

"""This book is a breakthrough for the study of the mass murder of 1965-66. Melvin has uncovered much new evidence and has leveraged the case-study of the province of Aceh to reveal hidden aspects of the national-level decision-making. She presents an original argument on why the mass murder should be understood as a genocide. Her book is not an ordinary contribution to the field of Indonesian history -- it is a game-changer."" John Roosa, University of British Columbia, Canada ""It seems impossible to overstate the significance of Jess Melvin’s monumental, heartbreaking work. Not only does she make a devastating argument that Indonesia’s mass killings constitute genocide under international law, she took a simple yet fateful step in the history of scholarship on Indonesia: she walked into a military archive and asked for their records. That nobody had done this before attests to the formidable courage it required. She analyzes thousands of pages of hitherto secret documents with patient attention to detail and unflinching moral clarity. The result transforms our understanding of Indonesian history, identity, and politics. Beautifully written, endlessly important, Jess Melvin has authored one of the great studies of genocide, anywhere. Period."" Joshua Oppenheimer, Academy Award nominated director, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Denmark ""Melvin’s book is a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding of the Indonesian killings of 1965-66. She taps new archival sources to demonstrate powerfully that the Indonesian military was deeply engaged in planning and carrying out the murder of Indonesian communists. In the process, the military manipulated domestic and international public opinion to conceal its role in political genocide."" Robert Cribb, Australian National University, Australia ""[A]n importance far beyond Indonesian studies...[it] revises our definition of genocide, draws conclusions about the close links between militarism and mass violence, and reminds us forcefully of the nefarious interventions of western powers at cold war turning points."" The Guardian ""Melvin’s astonishing discovery [from the government archive in Banda Aceh] forms the core of her groundbreaking book [...] Melvin's book will forever alter the telling of what happened next. [...] The documents Melvin uses to explain how the army planned and organized the killings shatter the official narrative that has prevailed for more than fifty years and continues to be taught to Indonesian schoolchildren today."" Margaret Scott, New York Review of Books ""Jess Melvin’s book provides a strong factual account of the role of the military in establishing a chain of command connecting the military leadership in Jakarta with that of the province of Aceh. [...] The depth of Melvin’s work in unravelling the military chain of command in the mass killings conducted in Aceh is a strong contribution to our understanding of the history of 1965–1966 and also very beneficial for further efforts to challenge state impunity regarding Indonesia’s violent past."" Ratna Saptari, University of Leiden, Bijdragen ""It is rare that a book makes a big splash in Indonesian studies, even rarer when that book is the author’s first. Jess Melvin’s The army and the Indonesian genocide: Mechanics of mass murder has made such a splash, and I have been very pleased to watch the water sluice out, pouring over the Indonesian military’s lies of the last five decades and, indeed, dampening much of the scholarship written about 1965 in the process. Melvin’s book—which draws on the military’s own records to prove that the army incited and carried out the killings and mass detentions—confirms once and for all what survivors of this violence have been saying for decades: local civilians often participated in the killings, but it was the army that drove them. Meticulous in her detailing, Melvin devotes the majority of her book to laying out the chronology of the army’s ‘eradication campaign’ against the communists."" Annie Pohlman, The University of Queensland, Australia, Bijdragen"