Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2016
In 2001, using violent junctures in the life of a seventy-year-old Indonesian as a metaphor for the whole nation, Benedict Anderson summarized the history of violence in Indonesia in a poignant manner:
A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of … Dutch colonial rule …; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanese military regime, which regularly practiced torture in private and executions in public …; on the eve of adulthood, four years (1945–49) of popular struggle for national liberation … at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives; as a young mother or father … the cataclysm of 1965–66, when at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as two million people … were slaughtered by the military; in the middle age, the New Order police-state, and its bloody attempt to annex East Timor, which cost over 200,000 East Timorese lives …; in old age, the spread of armed resistance in … Aceh and West Papua, the savage riots of May 1998 … and … the outbreak of ruthless internecine confessional warfare in the long peaceful Moluccas. (Anderson 2001, 9–10)