Robert Cribb

Genocide in Indonesia, 1965-1966

Between October, 1965 and March, 1966, approximately 500,000 people were killed in Indonesia. The killings received little internationa l attention at the time and have seldom been studied in detail since then. The number of people killed and the precise circumstances of most deaths remain uncertain, and mistaken opinions on the identity of the victims and the motivations of their killers remain common, even in scholarly literature. One early polemical account of the killings rather implausibly described them as “the second-greatest crime of the century,” but the killings received little attention in comparative literature on mass killings until the 1990s. The aim of this article is to summarize what can be said of the killings from primary and secondary literature and to suggest ways in which the Indonesian massacres can be considered within the broader discipline of genocide studies.

The Politics of Pollution Control in Indonesia

Pollution is a rather recent issue on the political agenda in Indonesia. Concern with some aspects of pollution is known from earlier periods, but its focus tended to be either aesthetic or rather narrowly focused on public health, specifically on protecting the population from infectious diseases by means of public hygiene. Concern with pollution as a distinct phenomenon is a product of the 1970s and after, when Indonesia began to industrialize. It is worth looking at new issues of this kind because they highlight features of the political system in a way that older and more prominent issues do not. Raising a topic such as the correct place of Islam or the possible desirability of federalism for Indonesia, also raises at the same time a horde of malevolent historical ghosts. A new issue, on the other hand, gives social and political forces a chance to realign in novel ways that may foreshadow deeper structural changes. Pollution, I think, is one such issue.

Ethical regulation and humanities research in Australia: Problems and consequences

AbstractThis paper argues that recent ethics research guidelines fit poorly onto the kinds of research undertaken in the humanities, where a research conversation often forms a distinctive method of investigation that has no scientific equivalent The NH&MRC ethics guidelines pay little attention to the issues raised in humanities and social science research. Also, ethics committees are constituted primarily to look at ethical issues that arise from medical and scientific research, causing extra problems for those in the humanities and social sciences.

A genocide that never was: explaining the myth of anti-Chinese massacres in Indonesia, 1965-66

Many publications refer incorrectly to extensive massacres of Chinese in Indonesia in 1965–66. Approximately half a million people were killed in this period, but the victims were overwhelmingly members and associates of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Chinese Indonesians experienced serious harassment but relatively few were killed. The persistence of this myth is attributed to a trope dating back to the seventeenth century which equates the social position of Chinese in Indonesia with that of Jews in Europe and which thus predicts periodic pogroms and attempts at genocide. The myth has survived partly because it inspires a sense of urgency in combating discrimination against Chinese Indonesians, but it encourages a misunderstanding of the causes of intense violence in Indonesia and raises serious moral issues concerning genocide denial by substitution.

Circles of Esteem, Standard Works, and Euphoric Couplets: Dynamics of Academic Life in Indonesian Studies

Abstract Indonesian Studies as a field is strongly influenced by its own social character as a community of competing and cooperating scholars. Outside individual universities, the dominant social form is not the powerful professor, but rather the “circle of esteem,” a cluster of scholars who respect each other, cite each others work, push each others ideas into the academic marketplace, and, occasionally, rise to each others defense. Circles of esteem arise because academic work has less to do with the industrial production of knowledge than with a constant search for novelty, which may arise from new sources or new uses of sources. Although novelty is prized, the value of new work is hard to judge, and it will be more easily accepted when backed by a circle of esteem. There are two effective ways to gain academic prestige outside a circle of esteem. The first is to write a standard work, a conservative strategy to create a work that will become citation fodder for others. The second way is to coin a “euphoric couplet,” which is an unexpected adjective-noun combination encapsulating a previously elusive analytical truth. Euphoric couplets are easy to remember, dissociated from theory, and intriguingly ambiguous.

Orphans of empire: Divided peoples, dilemmas of identity, and old imperial borders in east and southeast Asia

The break-up of empires was the most profound geo-political phenomenon of the twentieth century. In 1900, except in the Western Hemisphere, most of the worlds people lived in polities which readily described themselves as empires. These polities were territorially vast, or at least far-flung, and each of them ruled a multitude of peoples who differed enormously in the usual markers of ethnicity such as language, religion, and culture. Over the course of a century, however, most of these empires disappeared. The territorial empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans fell apart in the aftermath of the First World War, the colonial empires of the Germans, British, Americans, Dutch, French, Belgians, Spanish, and Portuguese gave way to a combination of nationalist and international pressures, the wartime conquests of Germany, Japan, and Italy came to nothing, and finally the Soviet Union fragmented into a multitude of new, independent states at the end of the Cold War. Smaller polities such as Yugoslavia and Ethiopia fractured into still smaller ones.

CONSERVATION IN COLONIAL INDONESIA

Conservationist thinking in colonial Indonesia (Netherlands East Indies) developed in the late nineteenth century from awareness of the importance of birds in controlling agricultural pests. In the early twentieth century, the Netherlands also felt pressure to live up to ‘international obligations’ in nature preservation. Colonial paternalism fuelled fears of the damaging social consequences of the presence of rough bird-of-paradise hunters in West New Guinea. The colonial authorities saw the indigenous peoples of the archipelago as the main offenders in environmental destruction, and this perception fuelled the assumption that ‘natives’ needed firm control. By contrast, ‘responsible’ hunting by members of the colonial middle class and elite was permitted by means of a system of licences. Hunters increasingly advocated creating nature reserves in which wilderness would be closed to the indigenous population to reserve a sustainable population of game for hunters. Pleasure in hunting became associated in the minds of the large European, Indo-European (Eurasian) and to some extent Chinese communities with a profound attachment to the colonial land. This attachment, resembling that of white settlers in Australasia, North America and southern Africa, was the basis for an Indies settler nationalism which repudiated the indigenous peoples’ claims to the archipelago on the grounds that they did not care properly for their environment. This association with settler nationalism weakened the appeal of conservationist ideas in independent Indonesia.

Japanese War criminals: The politics of justice after the Second World War

Beginning in late 1945, the United States, Britain, China, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and later the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and the Peoples Republic of China convened national courts to prosecute Japanese military personnel for war crimes. The defendants included ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had served with the armed forces as Japanese subjects. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried Japanese leaders. While the fairness of these trials has been a focus for decades, Japanese War Criminals instead argues that the most important issues arose outside the courtroom. What was the legal basis for identifying and detaining subjects, determining who should be prosecuted, collecting evidence, and granting clemency after conviction? The answers to these questions helped set the norms for transitional justice in the postwar era and today contribute to strategies for addressing problematic areas of international law. Examining the complex moral, ethical, legal, and political issues surrounding the Allied prosecution project, from the first investigations during the war to the final release of prisoners in 1958, Japanese War Criminals shows how a simple effort to punish the guilty evolved into a multidimensional struggle that muddied the assignment of criminal responsibility for war crimes. Over time, indignation in Japan over Allied military actions, particularly the deployment of the atomic bombs, eclipsed anger over Japanese atrocities, and, among the Western powers, new Cold War imperatives took hold. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the construction of the postwar international order in Asia and to our comprehension of the difficulties of implementing transitional justice.

Developing a quality ranking for history journals in Australia

Abstract In 2010, the Excellence in Research for Australia assessment programme developed a controversial ranking of journals that was used as a proxy for the quality of the articles in those journals. The ranking was later abandoned because of serious practical and principled problems. The demand for ranking continues, however, from researchers and university managers. For Humanities disciplines, ranking has advantages over citation analysis, especially in assessing recent work. This article discusses the emergence of journal ranking in Australia, especially as it has affected the discipline of History, and concludes by outlining how a ranking might responsibly be carried out.

The life and trial of Cho Un-kuk, Korean war criminal

ABSTRACT In 1946, a British military court in Singapore tried a Korean national named Cho Un-kuk for war crimes against Allied prisoners of war on the Thailand–Burma Railway during the Second World War. The evidence against Cho was scanty, but he had been part of a group of Korean guards notorious for brutality towards prisoners. In expedited proceedings relying heavily on affidavit material, Cho was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The trial revealed both Cho’s unexpected transnational background as a dentist in pre-war British India and the complex position of Korean guards on the Railway. Often characterized as universally brutal as a result of their own ill-treatment by the Japanese colonial system, the guards responded in many different ways to the pressures and opportunities of service subordinate to the Japanese military. After sentencing, Cho served time in Singapore and Japan. He left prison a broken man in 1955. Like other Koreans who had been in Japanese military employment, he was spurned by other Koreans as a collaborator. Only in 2006, after his death, was he officially recognized as an unwilling conscript into Japanese service. His case illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing victims and perpetrators in the tangled circumstances of the Second World War.