On Bali, the Holiday Vibe Masks Memories of a Massacre
Sixty years ago, half a million Indonesians were killed in anti-Communist purges. On Bali, resorts and clubs were built atop mass graves.
By Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono
Photographs by Nyimas Laula
Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono reported from the island of Bali, where they interviewed dozens of people.
When the hotels and beach clubs were built to lure tourists to this beautiful, haunted isle, the bones emerged, white and smooth.
On one stretch of palm-fringed coast on the Indonesian island of Bali, construction for a five-star resort in the 1990s unearthed enough bones to fill half a pickup truck, said the Hindu priest called in to exorcise the ghosts. A couple doors down, on a plot that would become the island’s sleekest night spot, two skulls stared up from the soil, unnerving the construction workers. Even a few years ago, “on the shores of paradise,” as the latest beach club’s slogan goes, human remains turned up where a pool and bamboo architecture (touted as “eco-conscious”) would go.
Beginning 60 years ago this month, anti-communist massacres in Indonesia claimed the lives of at least half a million people — one of the worst blood baths of the 20th century, and one of the most overlooked. Militias dressed in black, neighbors with a grudge, relatives ordered to kill or be killed, they all took part in the stabbing and slicing, the strangling and shooting.
“There are many bones in Bali that we want to forget.”
Wayan Badra, 73, a Hindu priest called in to exorcise the ghosts.
The season of slaughter came to Bali with the December monsoons. Of anywhere in the archipelago nation of Indonesia, the island that is now synonymous with sybaritic holidays suffered the greatest concentration of deaths. Historians estimate that somewhere between 80,0000 to 100,000 Balinese were killed between December 1965 and the first few months of 1966. Many bodies were dumped on the coast, by rain-soaked cemeteries and beaches still untouched by the travel industry.
“There are many bones in Bali that we want to forget,” said Wayan Badra, the Hindu priest.
Memories of the 1965 and 1966 massacres remain submerged today, not only overseas, but also in Indonesia. The amnesia is particularly strong in Bali, where reminders of the killings could ruin the vacation vibe. Indeed, the development of mass tourism on the island was a deliberate strategy by the Suharto dictatorship that took power in 1966 to resuscitate an economy shattered by the mass killings, historians say.
“I’m not anti-tourism, but at the same time we have to acknowledge that tourism has buried our history, our trauma,” said Ngurah Termana, whose grandfather was killed in the anti-leftist purges. “We don’t talk about the killings because tourism depends on Bali being a place of harmony, peace, yoga.”
Traditionally, Balinese have tended to look toward the sacred volcanoes inland, rather than out to the sea. Terraced rice paddies climb toward the mountains. The ocean was for sending cremated ashes into the afterlife in preparation for reincarnation. Even today, many Balinese do not know how to swim. It was only the advent of foreign vacationers that shifted the focus to the island’s surf and black sand beaches.
Ketut Suerja, 61, was a baby when the black-clad militia came for his father, who ran a bicycle repair shop. Houses in their coastal community, Kerobokan, were burned. His father’s cousin, a teacher, was killed, too.
“If I dwell on the past, I will never be able to get beyond it. I don’t want to carry that rage inside me.”
Ketut Suerja, 61, ended up in an orphanage after his father was killed by the militia.
A decade or so later, members of the family came together for a Hindu cremation ceremony. The family had been told that the men’s bodies had been thrown into a mass grave in marshes and mangroves, near a coastal cemetery for lepers and those too poor to afford cremation rites. Mr. Suerja’s relatives had no bones, so they took a handful of soil from the cemetery, hoping it would be enough to release the men’s souls for reincarnation.
Mr. Suerja ended up in an orphanage. When he contemplated joining the police, he said, village officials told him he didn’t stand a chance. Families of victims were barred from government jobs in Mr. Suharto’s New Order regime, and some ended up in the tourism industry that worked to quiet memories of the massacres.
The same stigma did not apply to members of the militias that once terrorized Bali. The official reason for the mass killings was that Communists had tried to foment a coup on Sept. 30, 1965, by kidnapping and then killing six army generals. (The attack was never conclusively determined to be part of any broader plot by the Indonesian Communist Party, known by the acronym P.K.I.)
Made Reda admits to having belonged to the militia, in order, he said, to guard his village against infiltrators. He boasted to his friends that the purges were necessary, but he said he had never killed anyone himself. Now 80, Mr. Reda holds a privileged position as the neighborhood guardian of the intricate canal network that irrigates the island and, as Balinese believe, nourishes the water spirits.
“Communists are godless. It was good to eradicate them.”
Made Reda, 80, belonged to the militia and now holds a privileged position as a neighborhood guardian of the island's canal network.
“Communists are godless,” he said. “It was good to eradicate them.”
Mr. Suerja, who went on to repair copy machines, has never told his children how his father was killed. He has no photos of him.
“If I dwell on the past, I will never be able to get beyond it,” Mr. Suerja said. “I don’t want to carry that rage inside me.”
After months of bloodletting, Mr. Suharto, an army general, went on to rule Indonesia as a strongman for 32 years. (The chaos that birthed his decades as president has been memorialized in two films, “The Year of Living Dangerously” and, more recently, the documentary “The Act of Killing.”) His kleptocratic tenure, as well as the anti-leftist purges that brought him to power, were tacitly backed by the Americans and other Western powers, who were worried about the P.K.I., the third largest Communist party in the world, declassified diplomatic cables show.
Communism found particularly fertile ground in Bali, the only Hindu-majority island in a largely Muslim nation, where a calcified caste system gave little hope for class mobility and land access. Still, most of those who were killed by the death squads were not card-carrying Communists. Ethnic Chinese were targeted, as were intellectuals.
The scar tissue from those years is not only embedded in Bali’s coast. At an outdoor market in Denpasar, the provincial capital, Made Wangi sells lemongrass, turmeric and bananas, along with floral offerings. Her father was dragged away 60 years ago for having worked for a Chinese boss. He never returned. Ms. Wangi doesn’t know much more.
“My mother said he was killed because he was ‘red,’” she said. “I don’t know the truth.”
“My mother said he was killed because he was ‘red.’ I don’t know the truth.”
Made Wangi, whose father was dragged away 60 years ago and never returned.
A square in Denpasar honors the final, suicidal stand made in the early 1900s by the Balinese against Dutch colonialists. In the same square 60 years ago, thousands of Balinese were paraded before they were killed. The P.K.I. office in Denpasar was turned into a detention center, where thousands were tortured, human rights groups say.
Today, Mr. Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, a retired general who was once the subject of American travel sanctions for his own human rights abuses, is the elected president of Indonesia. In November, Mr. Suharto, who was deposed in 1998, was honored by the current president as a “national hero.”
Late last month, at a ceremony in Kerobokan, a column of women balanced fruit baskets on their heads, offerings to the gods. Men pounded on drums, gongs and xylophones, the island’s soundtrack. The festival was capped by a contest to judge the finest penjor, a curved bamboo pole laden with carved and woven leaves, a symbol of a tropical abundance.
Agung Putu Atmaja, a retired public prosecutor, mingled with other officials presiding over the ceremony, all dressed in fine batik. He knew of the death squads of six decades ago, the men with their long swords. He also said he knew where the bodies had been buried before the land was turned over for beach clubs playing chillaxing beats.
“Balinese are scared to talk about any of this,” he said. “I’m afraid, too.”
A heron flew past, its wings white like bones — an omen, some Balinese say, of souls trapped between worlds.
Hannah Beech is a Times reporter based in Bangkok who has been covering Asia for more than 25 years. She focuses on in-depth and investigative stories.
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