In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling
itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six
generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander.
The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it
was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad
Suharto, drove the movement's partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the
crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of
Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as
a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno's powers and
installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of
thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade
the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern
Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year
dictatorship.
Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth
century's worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement
has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it?
What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And
what was the movement's connection to international Cold War
politics? In "Pretext for Mass Murder," John Roosa draws on a
wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the
mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto's
repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical
investigation.
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