Article by KITLV researcher Grace Leksana in online journal Inside Indonesia: ‘A complex relationship’.

As Indonesians are moving further from 1965, scholars and activists are starting to raise awareness about the risk of ‘collective forgetting’: a state-induced situation in which the 1965-66 violence against the Left and communists would be largely forgotten. Whereas in national historiography there is still very little room for articulation of this past, Leksana would argue that in the rural areas where most of the violence occurred, memories of violence remain very much alive today.

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Photo: AJAR 2017.