Afina Nurul Faizah
The 1965 – 66 Indonesian Genocide and Indonesian Exiles | The Collective Memories of Statelessness among Indonesian Exiles in Budapest and Prague
Abstract There was no exact number to predict how many Indonesian exiles who managed to return to Indonesia after the fall of the New Order regime in 1998. Most of these exiles were intellectuals who were granted a scholarship by the beginning of 1960 to study abroad, mostly in Soviet countries, in the hope to return to Indonesia to develop the country to fulfill Soekarno’s dream to de-Javanize Indonesia. He perceived the goal to be necessary as Java island was built as the center of the development agenda during colonialism. His plan was then ruined by the purge conducted by Soeharto in October 1965. The coup, followed with a massacre, resulted in death for at least half a million Indonesians. It also impacted the well-being of Indonesian intellectuals who studied abroad. They could not return to Indonesia unless they declared the condemnation of Soekarno and his ideology. The New Order regime, led by Soeharto, did not allow these intellectuals to return to Indonesia. This thesis will explain the collective memories of the Indonesian intellectual exiles in Central and East Europe managed to keep about the Indonesian coup, genocide, and other political turbulence. The collective memories of these exiles hold a possible confrontation with the stance of historical amnesia in the country; one of the impacts of the New Order regime. Keywords: Indonesia, genocide, 1965, New Order, collective memory, postmemory generation, exiles, historical amnesia
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