Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965-1970 (Pohlman, 2022)

=== [PDF page 1] === chapter 8 Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 Annie Pohlman Abstract Between 1965 and approximately 1970, a system of mass political detention evolved in Indonesia to hold hundreds of thousands of ‘suspected communists’. Those accused of supporting the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were rounded up in waves of mass arrests and detained unlawfully in a vast network of prisons, military facilities, confiscated buildings and other ad hoc detention centres set up to hold the growing political prisoner population. Most detainees were interrogated and tortured, particularly during the early periods of their incarceration. Places of interrogation were kept separate from places of detention, sometimes as a separate room or rooms within a larger detention centre, sometimes as a separate facility to which detainees were brought for interrogation. The separation of spaces for detention and interrogation developed first for practical reasons, in view of the large number of suspects being processed by the military authorities. Over time, however, the spaces for torture and interrogation came to define for those authorities the purpose of the purge. Keywords Indonesian Communist Party – political prisoners – torture – interrogation – detention camps 1 The Devil’s House [We were captured] by a group of uniformed military soldiers at our hideout and then we were taken to Gunung Sahari Road, to a former Chinese school which it seems had now been made into a detention and interrogation centre. The moment I arrived, I knew straight away why this place, which had once been a school for children, was now known as a ‘devil’s house’ amongst the detainees. At that place, evidently the interrogators’ job was to interrogate the detainees, and they behaved like devils with no humanity at all. I was © Annie Pohlman, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004512573_009 === [PDF page 2] === 138 Pohlman put into a small cell where the walls were mottled with blood. I heard the screams, the howling in pain coming from the interrogation room. [It was] my friend Lami, who was interrogated first, and then it was my turn.1 The late Ibu Sudjinah described the former school located on Gunung Sahari Road III in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, as a ‘devil’s house (rumah setan)’. In her autobiography, Tossed Down by the Rising Waves, she names a number of these devil’s houses: both those in which she was imprisoned and those described to her by fellow political detainees. The friend she mentions was Ibu Sulami, a fellow leader of the communist-aligned women’s organisation, Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement). Whilst in hiding over the previous eighteen months, Sudjinah and Sulami – along with some of their other comrades from Gerwani and other communist organisations – had published a clandestine pamphlet denouncing the military government which had taken over the country in late 1965, the ‘New Order’ regime (1965–1998). They were captured on the same day in mid-February 1967 and taken together to the Gunung Sahari interrogation centre. Both were tortured by military personnel over several days before being moved to another detention facility. Sudjinah spent sixteen years as a political prisoner, and was finally released in 1983; Sulami was released in 1984. Sujinah and Sulami were amongst the hundreds of thousands of Indonesians rounded up by the Indonesian Army between late 1965 and approximately 1970; estimates for the number of political prisoners range from 500,000 to 1.5 million.2 These arrests began in the days following an attempted coup on 1 October 1965, a coup which the Indonesian Army used as a pretext to seize control of the state.3 The Army blamed the coup on its main political rival, 1 Sudjinah, Terempas Gelombang Pasang (Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2003), p. 20, emphasis in original. All translations are mine. Ibu is a polite honorific for an adult woman in Indonesian; Pak applies to a man. I wish to thank Jess Melvin, Robert Cribb and Catherine Pohlman for their keen insights and feedback which helped to improve this paper. 2 See Greg Fealy, ‘The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic Versus Foreign Policy, 1975–1979,’ Monash Asia Institute, Working Paper No. 94 (Clayton, Vic.: Monash University Press, 1995), pp. 42–44. One of the highest estimates was given by the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs in 1985, at 1,479,000 (quoted in Amnesty International, ‘Statement of Amnesty International’s Concerns in Indonesia’, AI Index: ASA 21/033/1985, 30 August 1985, p. 3. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ASA210331985ENGLISH.PDF). 3 On this coup, see John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). On the military’s takeover, see Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (New York: Routledge, 2018). === [PDF page 3] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 139 the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), and then mobilised its forces to wipe out the PKI’s mass support base: with the help of co-opted civilian militias, the military killed an estimated half a million communists between late 1965 and early 1966.4 During the months that followed the coup, a system of mass political detention evolved in Indonesia to hold the rising number of detained ‘suspected communists’. Those accused of supporting the PKI were rounded up in waves of mass arrests and detained under executive order in a vast network of prisons, military facilities, confiscated buildings and other ad hoc detention centres set up to hold the growing political prisoner population. A categorisation system soon developed within this political detention structure, defining detainees in terms of their perceived involvement in the PKI – ranging from party leaders through to the families and associates of local cadres – which determined whether detainees spent months, years or even decades incarcerated.5 (See also the chapter by Setiawan in this volume.) The majority of detainees were interrogated, particularly during the early periods of their detention, and most interrogations involved torture.6 map 8.1 Java and Bali 4 On the estimates of the number of people killed, see Robert Cribb, ‘Introduction: Problems in the Historiography of the Killings in Indonesia’, in Robert Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali (Clayton, Vic.: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990), pp. 11–14. 5 On the broader detention camp system, and the orders issued regarding these mass detentions, see Douglas Kammen and Faizah Zakaria, ‘Detention in Mass Violence: Policy and Practice in Indonesia, 1965–1968’, Critical Asian Studies, 44, no. 3 (2012), pp. 441–466. 6 On the likely frequency of torture within interrogations at this time, see John Roosa, ‘The Truths of Torture: Victims’ Memories and State Histories in Indonesia’, Indonesia, 85 (April 2008), p. 32. === [PDF page 4] === 140 Pohlman In this chapter I focus on the places where these interrogations took place. I draw on the testimonies of a handful of survivors to describe a few of these torture centres and to explore the experiences of moving between spaces of interrogation/torture and detention within the concentration camp system. From these limited and often partial accounts, it seems, first, that these places of interrogation were often separate from places of detention. The torture centres could be a separate room or rooms within a larger detention centre or a separate facility to which detainees were brought for interrogation, such as the Gunung Sahari centre described by Sudjinah. Second, the separation of interrogation spaces from detention appears to have served – at least in the perceptions of those who passed through these places – a range of functions, from seemingly logistical and practical uses through to being a means of inflicting harm on detainees. Finally, the separation of interrogation and detention spaces appears to have developed rapidly, certainly within a couple of months following the coup, with the designation of specific and specialised torture/ interrogation centres happening within this period. The separation of interrogation spaces within the broader detention system also reveals a number of paradoxes about the purpose of this camp system and, critically, about the role of interrogation and torture in the camps. The first paradox lies in the function of the detention camp system itself as both a mechanism that allegedly ‘protected’ communists and, conversely, as an integral means of eliminating the PKI. Army authorities used the euphemistic language of ‘securing (mengamankan)’ PKI members in the camps as a way to protect them from the mobs of supposedly enraged civilians who wanted to lynch them, while at the same time creating the vast concentration camp system for the ‘sake of keamanan or “public” security’; that is, to protect the public from those in the camps.7 Through a widespread propaganda campaign demonising the PKI that began in early October 1965, the army legitimised the mass repression of communists; these camps were the structures created to hold people now deemed to be dangerous enemies.8 As Vannessa Hearman has shown in her study of East Java, however, these camps ‘were not the safe 7 Benedict Anderson, ‘The 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and Its Legacy’, Counterpunch, 24 January 2014, https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/24/the-1965-massacre-in-indonesia -and-its-legacy/. As Jess Melvin shows in the case of Aceh, although there were civilian-led pogroms in some places, this violence was incited and supported by the army. See Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide, pp. 162–240. Cf. Mark Winward, ‘Capture from Below: Civil-Military Relations during Indonesia’s Anticommunist Violence, 1965–66’, Indonesia, 106 8 See Saskia E. Wieringa and Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia: Imagined Evil (London: Routledge, 2019). === [PDF page 5] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 141 havens that detainees were promised when they were captured, when many of their captors had said they were being “taken to safety” (diamankan)’.9 Rather, as Hearman and others have shown, the camps were the primary source of victims killed in mass executions and therefore played a key role in the extermination campaign against the PKI; the majority of those killed were ‘borrowed (dibon)’ from the camps, driven in trucks to remote sites, and executed by teams of military and civilian militias.10 (See also the Melvin chapter in this volume.) This paradox goes to the heart of the army’s strategy to eliminate its main rival but also to present itself as the legitimate successor state; the army was allegedly restoring order, and rounding up and ‘securing’ the enemies of the people. The second paradox lies in the function of torture within the camp system, and its integral role in the extermination campaign against the PKI. It also is intimately connected to the army’s claimed legitimacy. As I explore in this chapter, on the one hand, torture in interrogations was an essential part of the camp system, yet on the other, interrogations were deliberately kept separate within this system. The interrogations were essential because they delivered the ‘evidence’ needed to justify the destruction of the PKI. Building on Elaine Scarry’s concept of fiction masquerading as motive for torture, John Roosa has rightly argued that ‘the Indonesian Army, in attacking the PKI, began with a fantasy [that the PKI had committed the coup and was attempting to take over the country], tortured its prisoners during interrogations to make them confirm that fantasy, and then used the information derived from torture sessions as … actionable intelligence’.11 This chapter focuses on this second paradox. To attempt to understand why interrogations were demarcated in places separate from detention – when these interrogations were so essential for justifying the camp system itself – I draw on survivors’ testimonies about their experiences of being rounded up, interrogated, and ‘classified’ within the camp system. These testimonies give us some insight into these practices which developed rapidly within a few months of the 1 October coup, but they do not resolve the paradox of separating interrogations from detention. In this discussion, I speculate about how existing police/military police interrogation procedures may have influenced 9 Vannessa Hearman, Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2018), p. 90. 10 See Rinto Tri Hasworo, ‘Penangkapan dan Pembunuhan di Jawa Tengah Setelah G-30-S’, in John Roosa, Ayu Ratih and Hilmar Farid (eds), Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami Pengalaman Korban 65 (Jakarta: ELSAM, ISSI and TRuK, 2004), pp. 25–60. 11 Roosa, ‘The Truths of Torture’, p. 34. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 28–29. === [PDF page 6] === 142 Pohlman the designation of specific spaces for interrogation and torture. In this sense, I would argue that the mimicry of those procedures may have served to reinforce the semblance of legitimacy for those participating in the interrogation and torture of so many. I also contend that the drive to begin the system of mass interrogations was fundamental to the development and expansion of the detention system, the prisoner classification system, and the mass killings of detainees. Lastly, in the conclusion, I argue that these processes took on a self-sustaining logic, which drove the hasty expansion of the camp system to hold hundreds of thousands. In order to contextualise this discussion of torture centres following 1965, I must note first that violence was endemic within the detention camp system, and much of it amounted to torture or other forms of ill-treatment. Torture involves the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on the victim, not only as part of interrogation, but also as a way to punish, coerce or intimidate. Many arbitrary punishments used outside the interrogation rooms against detainees were also torture.12 Other forms of violence within the camp system were ill-treatment, such as severe malnutrition and other forms of deprivation, forced labour, and indeed, seemingly endless forms of humiliation used by guards against detainees.13 While the focus in this chapter is on torture, which was an integral part of interrogations and the spaces where they were conducted, it is critical to note that torture and violence were in no way limited to interrogations. 2 Creating Places for Interrogation and Torture Devil’s house was the name that Sudjinah used to denote a torture camp. As a senior leader of a communist organisation, she needed skill, careful planning and some luck to evade capture for nearly a year and a half. While building and maintaining their underground network, Sudjinah and her comrades heard chilling stories about those who had been rounded up and taken to these torture centres. As she explained, ‘everyone who entered these devil’s houses, 12 On contemporary differentiations between what is considered torture and ill-treatment, see Manfred Nowark and Elizabeth McArthur, The United Nations Convention Against Torture: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 77–79. 13 On the many forms of violence perpetrated against detainees within the detention camp system, and how these forms amounted to torture and ill-treatment, see Annie Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66 (Abingdon: Routledge, === [PDF page 7] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 143 none could ever escape the torture meted out by those devils wearing human faces. Many only left those places because death came for them’.14 By the time Sudjinah and Sulami were captured in early 1967, distinct interrogation facilities were well-established, separate from the main detention centres. The Gunung Sahari centre was but one of several in the capital, though other cities also had designated torture centres within their larger detention networks. In Jakarta, there were several such places. Aside from Gunung Sahari, other notorious centres included Gang Buntu and the former Infico film studio on Rawa Kemiri Road in Kebayoran Lama; Tanah Abang Street; Kramat V Street; and, as many survivors have noted with grim irony, the building on Latuharhari Street which later became the office of Indonesia’s National Commission for Human Rights (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, Komnas HAM). Within the Jakarta network were also numerous military command posts – particularly the Regional and District Military Command centres (Komando Daerah Militer, KODAM, and Komando Distrikt Militer, KODIM) – and buildings near them which were transformed into interrogation centres, such as the KODIM 0505 in East Jakarta; the military barracks at Air Mancur; the ‘Lidikus’ centre (a contraction of ‘penyelidikan khusus’ or ‘special investigation’) next to the KODAM V Jaya at Lapangan Banteng near the city’s central Merdeka square; the centre on Budi Kemuliaan street in front of KODIM 0501 in central Jakarta; and the KODAM/military police post on Guntur Street in Cimanggis. Across Indonesia, other places designated for interrogations also tended to be located in cities, as central hubs for interrogation within the district’s detention network. Examples of these include a house on Melati Street in Denpasar, Bali; a former Chinese school on Gandhi Street in Medan, North Sumatra; two former schools in Malang, East Java, one on Sawahan Street, the other on Nusakambangan Street; and the Jefferson library in Yogyakarta, amongst many others.15 Places that were turned into centres specifically for interrogation and torture sat within the much larger detention network. This broader network was rapidly and haphazardly formed, as mass arrests began at an intense pace from early October 1965 and stretched into 1966. Further waves of arrests continued until 1970, most of them the outcome of ‘cleansing’ operations in specific 14 Sudjinah, Terempas, pp. 27–28. 15 On these centres, see, for example, Margiyono and Kurniawan Tri Yunanto, Neraka Rezim Soeharto: Misteri Tempat Penyiksaan Orde Baru (Jakarta: SPASI and VHRBOOK, 2007); ‘Liputuan Khusus: Pengakuan Algojo’, Tempo, 1–7 October 2012, pp. 50–125; John Roosa, Ayu Ratih and Hilmar Farid (eds), Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami Pen galaman Korban 65, Esai-Esai Sejarah Lisan (Jakarta: ELSAM, TRuK and ISSI, 2004); Carmel Budiardjo, Surviving Indonesia’s Gulag (London: Cassell, 1996). === [PDF page 8] === 144 Pohlman government departments, or military operations aimed at wiping out clandestine PKI networks.16 Faizah Zakaria and Douglas Kammen have compared the timing of these arrests with the release of Indonesian Army policies regarding the arrest, detention and then categorisation of the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. They show that, within six weeks of the 1 October coup, the detainee classification system had been established under the authority of the newly formed command, Kopkamtib (Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order).17 The classification system began in November 1965 with a three-tier system. Category A were supposedly ‘hard core Communists who played a major role [in the coup]’,18 and it was mainly these prisoners who were later brought to trial and who spent the longest periods in detention. Category B were ‘those people who played a secondary role in the coup’ and who spent usually more than a decade in detention without trial, and Category C were ‘fellow travellers’ who spent comparatively shorter periods in detention.19 These classifications were further refined at later times; for example, the Cs were subdivided into C1, C2 and C3 based on their perceived level of affiliation or activity within the PKI or its associated organisations; and, after most of the C detainees were released by the early 1970s, further classifications of ‘X’ and even ‘Y’ were introduced to denote those not yet placed as an ‘A’ or a ‘B’.20 Whatever the changing designations over time, critically, Zakaria and Kammen argue that the introduction of the classification system by mid-November ‘fuelled’ the mass arrests. As they argue, this system ‘implicated millions of people who did not take part in the [coup, and] this not only justified widespread arrests, it encouraged them’.21 However the mass arrests were driven, hundreds of thousands were rounded up, generating a prisoner population that existing detention facilities could not contain.22 Regular prisons were quickly overwhelmed, as were the military 16 For example, the ‘Kalong’ Operation in 1968 and the eradication of the PKI base in South Blitar in East Java: see Justus M. van der Kroef, ‘Indonesian Communism since the 1965 Coup’ Pacific Affairs, 43, no. 1 (1970), pp. 34–60; Hearman, Unmarked Graves, pp. 138–170. 17 Kammen and Zakaria, ‘Detention in Mass Violence’, pp. 443–446. 18 Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia, Stockholm, The Intolerable Tolerance: A Short Review of the Collapse of the Indonesian Communist Party and the Birth of the New Order in Indonesia (Stockholm: Brod, 1972), pp. 41–42. 19 Ibid., pp. 42, 43. 20 See, for example, Fealy, The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners, pp. 10–21; TAPOL, Indonesia: The Prison State (London: TAPOL, 1976); David Jenkins, ‘Accounting for Human Errors’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 105 (27 July 1979), pp. 35–36. 21 Kammen and Zakaria, ‘Detention in Mass Violence’, p. 448. 22 On the timing and numbers for when political prisoners were detained, see Fealy, The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners, pp. 44–46; Justus M. van der Kroef, ‘Indonesia’s Political Prisoners’, Pacific Affairs, 49 (1976), pp. 625–647. === [PDF page 9] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 145 command posts, and so both government and civilian buildings were commandeered and used across the archipelago to house the growing number of political prisoners. Across the country, many actors were involved in the rounding up, detention and interrogation of political prisoners. Overwhelmingly, these were men from the army, and from other branches of the defence forces. Those from the police and military police were also frequently involved, as well as civilians, most of them drawn from the various anti-PKI groups which also assisted the army in carrying out mass executions of detainees.23 While there were some cases of localised massacres of whole families and communities thought to be ‘PKI bases’,24 the majority of those killed were taken from the detainee population; in other words, those executed were first captured for their (real or perceived) support of the PKI and usually spent at least some time in detention before their deaths. Further, many in detention also died from starvation, torture, untreated illness and disease, and forced labour.25 The network of detention centres which evolved at this time therefore played a pivotal role in the widespread and systematic abuse of communists and their supporters.26 3 The Separation of Spaces for Detention and Torture When thinking about the jails where political prisoners were held, I compare them to terminals and bus stops along a route. These were the places that I stopped at: the army/military police post on Guntur Street, the military barracks near Air Mancur, the former Chinese school at Pintu Besi, the People’s University (UNRA) boarding lodge on Kernolong Road 23 On the make-up of military and civilian perpetrators, see, for example, Galuh Wandita, Indria Fernida and Karen Campbell-Nelson, ‘Mass Torture in 1965–66: A Continuing Legacy’, in Saskia Wieringa, Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman (eds), The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 61–64. 24 See M.R. Siregar, Tragedi Manusia dan Kemanusiaan: Kasus Indonesia, Sebuah Holokaus yang Diterima Sesudah Perang Dunia Kedua (The Hague: TAPOL, 1993), pp. 226–32; Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, p. 31. 25 On the abuses within detention, see Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66, pp. 47–62. 26 For discussions of how this period of mass violence transformed Indonesia’s polity and whether the violence should therefore be seen as either crimes against humanity or genocide (or both), see Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman, ‘A Case for Genocide: Indonesia, 1965–1966’, in Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman (eds), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 29–52; Helen Jarvis and Saskia E. Wieringa, ‘The Indonesian Massacres as Genocide’, in Wieringa, Melvin and Pohlman (eds), The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide, pp. 215–236. === [PDF page 10] === 146 Pohlman and the Lidikus (the place that was used for interrogations on Lapangan Banteng Street), and also the former film studio complex in Kebayoran Lama. [… My] terminal in Jakarta was Salemba prison.27 Pak Munadi’s story of being moved from one detention centre to another, to another, is one repeated by most political prisoners. Most of those who survived recall being taken to at least a few different places within their first years of detention, often from one overcrowded facility where the detainees were starving to another. Pak Munadi recounts his experience of hunger and overcrowding in detail in his narrative. Although there is considerable variation in the experiences of those detained in different regions, and differences between rural and urban areas, the general pattern of movement from facility to facility continued into the late 1960s. The moves to and from places of interrogation are often clearly marked in the testimonies of survivors, especially because of the violence they experienced in those places. For the majority of detainees, interrogations began within the first days and weeks of their incarceration. While prisoners continued to experience other forms of violence in detention, interrogations tended to stop after this initial period. Some were interrogated once and a very small minority not at all. Most were interrogated on multiple occasions over days or weeks, sometimes months. In almost all cases, detainees experienced torture and ill-treatment as part of the interrogations.28 The general pattern which emerges from survivor testimonies again shows that individuals were captured, taken into detention, then interrogated multiple times at one or more places, then moved again into another detention facility.29 These places where detainees were interrogated and tortured are described as either a specific room or rooms within a larger detention facility, or a separate facility altogether. In this sense, interrogations happened in spaces that were, in some way, separate from spaces of detention. To illustrate this separation, I give two examples, one a police barracks in West Sumatra, the other the interrogation centre on Gandhi Street in Medan, North Sumatra. 27 Munadi, ‘Yang Tak Terlupakan, Jakarta, 1999’, Edi Cahyono’s Experience, 1999, accessed 12 December 2018, https://vdocuments.mx/munadi-yang-tak-terlupakan.html. 28 Roosa comes to the same conclusion: see ‘The Truths of Torture’, p. 34. 29 The same pattern holds true for those who were released (or, on very rare occasions, escaped); if rearrested, they would again go through the cycle of multiple interrogations. One example is that of the Pak ‘HB’, whose transcript I examine in more detail in Annie Pohlman, ‘Sexual Violence as Torture: Crimes Against Humanity during the 1965–66 Killings in Indonesia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 19, no. 4 (2017), pp. 583–586. === [PDF page 11] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 147 Ibu Tati was arrested in her village in West Sumatra along with several of her family members in late October 1965 and taken to a local police barracks. As she recalled, ‘All of my family! My mother, my younger sister, me, Pak _ [my husband], everyone went in! Imprisoned! The accommodation [detention facility …] was at the subdistrict level [….] In the village there was a place just for that. Set aside for imprisonment. It was guarded by some civilian guards as well’.30 As she further explained, this place was a police barracks, and hundreds of suspected members of the PKI from the local area were detained there for months where they all ‘went crazy (gila)’ from the lack of food and the filthy, overcrowded conditions. Ibu Tati explained that it was a two-storey building; she and the other women and some small children were the minority and were kept in one of the downstairs rooms, separate from the men, who were held in multiple rooms also downstairs. The police and guards mainly used the rooms upstairs, where some of them slept. Upstairs was also the room where detainees were taken one by one to be tortured. As Ibu Tati explained, each person would be ‘called’ and ‘the lock would open on the [cell door … and that person would be] dragged upstairs to the room’. There, members of the local police would work in groups of two or three to interrogate and torture their victims. Ibu Tati recalled how each person would be tortured: They beat everyone, tortured everyone to confess…. [These people] were just farmers! People who didn’t know anything! [… In] that room, [we] were ordered to admit to things, like the G30S [the coup], gouging out eyes. [… The police] beat us and said we’d gouged out eyes, they said that we’d [taken part in] G30S, cut off genitals, all sorts of things.31 How would people around here know about that? ‘How many times did what’s-his-name, Aidit [the national leader of the PKI], come to your house?’ they’d ask. We didn’t even understand what Aidit meant [she laughs]. Who’s Aidit? Just a picture in a book, like Sukarno. […] Of course none of this mattered. What was important was that they could blame things on those who were innocent. Ibu Tati recalled that she and the other women in her cell could hear the screams and crying coming from the interrogation room. When the guards 30 Interview with Ibu Tati (a pseudonym) by the author and Yenny Narny, West Sumatra, September 2005. 31 The accusations correspond directly with the military’s propaganda about the alleged events during the 30 September coup. === [PDF page 12] === 148 Pohlman walked past the door of their cell, she explained how they would all ‘go silent’ in the hopes that their cell door was not going to be opened, and one of them dragged upstairs. The police barracks which Ibu Tati described were an example of a detention facility containing a specific room set aside for interrogations. This room, she explained, was the only place where interrogations were performed, though many other forms of violence were perpetrated against the detainees in their cells and around the barracks. Ibu Tati spent some months at the police barracks before being moved on to another detention facility in town, and then to another in another town. In total, she spent thirteen years in detention. For many of those captured in larger urban settings, interrogations often happened in separate facilities. Of the ‘stops’ along his route to Salemba prison, Pak Munadi mentions a handful of such facilities in Jakarta, including the Lidikus and film studio interrogation centres. One such centre was the former Chinese school on Gandhi Street in Medan. Pak S was one man who was taken to Gandhi Street and who spoke about his own and others’ experiences of torture whilst held there. He described the former school as an old Dutch-style building, with two storeys, a large open centre section, and rooms along three sides, leading from corridors. There was a main centre staircase and, as was the style in some Indies buildings, below the ground floor were pools of water meant to help cool the building; some prisoners were forced to stand in these pools for days on end as a form of torture.32 The political prisoners were kept locked in the rooms off the corridors and in the central space on both levels; all the detention spaces were severely overcrowded. The interrogation team worked in rooms on both levels at the front of the building near the road. A member of the PKI’s youth wing, Pemuda Rakyat, Pak S was arrested from his village outside Medan and taken to the Gandhi Street centre. There, he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured. He explained that the upstairs room was where the main interrogator, a man from the army who went by the name John Martin, would torture prisoners each evening for hours. He also explained that the whole building could hear the screams from the interrogation room. Once a prisoner had ‘confessed’, he would be taken downstairs. There Martin’s ‘team’ would record a statement – Pak S was told to write his out on paper – and then, ‘once the interrogation team was finished with you’, the prisoner was moved on to another detention facility. Pak S spent more than six months at Gandhi Street before being moved to the nearby Suka Mulia prison. 32 Conversation with Pak ‘S’, not recorded, together with the author, Sri Lestari Wahyun ingroem, Adi Rukun and his wife, Ita, and Quadi Azam, North Sumatra, 23 November 2018. From the description, it seems that the pools of water were at least chest-deep. === [PDF page 13] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 149 The Gandhi Street centre, as one of the facilities primarily used for interrogation, was one location often described in the testimonies of survivors as a place where they experienced great cruelty. Further, in many testimonies, that cruelty was often attributed to particular interrogators. Over time, individual perpetrators became infamous within this network of specialised interrogation centres. Stories of these perpetrators depict them as men creative in their methods of torture, capable of inflicting agonising violence on their victims. John Martin from the Gandhi Street centre was one such torturer, but others include those at the various Jakarta centres. In particular, interrogators who were part of investigation teams under the army’s ‘Kalong Operation’ (Operation Bat)33 became infamous, and the centres where they worked were spoken about with dread; as we have seen, Sudjinah talked of them as ‘devil’s houses’. The Kalong Operation was headed by a Major Suroso, but those on the interrogation team included a Lieutenant Bob, a man named Atjep, and another named Burhan Komalasakti. Burhan had, in fact, been a member of the PKI’s central committee, but later became one of the most feared interrogators of the period. Pak Munadi, for example, explained that Burhan was known as a sadist even against his own friends. He never hesitated to order his men to whip a prisoner to shreds with a stingray tail, to electrocute him again and again on the floor, or to simply beat him to death. He loved his role, and would show it when he would laugh out loud when the person being tortured would moan or beg.34 Whether a prisoner was taken from a detention camp to an interrogation centre, or from a cell to an interrogation room, the memory of being moved into that interrogation space is frequently marked in testimonies. Ibu Tati, for example, spoke in her narrative of how the women and small children ‘being kept together’ in their cell was ‘safer’, comparing this to the terror they all felt when the door to their cell was opened. Although the cell was overcrowded and unsanitary, and the prisoners were ‘dirty and unable to get clean, [… because we were] pressed up against each other’, the cell seemed to offer a sense of security. The door opening meant that ‘one of us’ would be taken for 33 See van der Kroef, ‘Indonesian Communism,’ pp. 43–44. According to one former political prisoner, Tan Swie Ling, the Kalong headquarters moved from Budi Kemuliaan street, where it had been until at least December 1966, when he was taken there, to the former school at Gunung Sahari, where he was taken in 1968: see Tan Swie Ling, G30S 1965, Perang Dingin dan Kehancuran Nasionalisme: Pemikiran Cina Jelata Korban Orba (Depok: Komunitas Bambu, 2010), p. 21. 34 Munadi, ‘Yang Tak Terlupakan’, pp. 5–6. === [PDF page 14] === 150 Pohlman interrogation. To be ‘called’ and taken from that cell meant that you were likely going to experience some form of violence. This dread was reinforced by the fact that they could ‘hear the screams’ from the interrogation room, and ‘saw what had happened’ to their fellow detainees when they were returned to the cell. Ibu Tati, as with many other survivors recalling their time in detention, contrasts the spaces of the cell and the interrogation room; the interrogation room meant being ‘alone … naked and beaten’ at the hands of torturers, while the cell meant some measure of safety, even if they were ‘horribly all together’. Ibu Tati herself noted the terrible irony of this comparison; nowhere was ever ‘truly safe’ in detention. No camp was ever the place of protection or safety claimed by the military authorities. Overall, according to the narratives of survivors, the separation of detention and interrogation spaces seems to have served a number of functions. First, the designation of spaces specifically for interrogations had logistical and functional purposes. I speculate that the soldiers and police who began these interrogations in October 1965 may have modelled them on their existing practices; procedurally within police functions, interrogations are part of investigations. The police had been a separate institution during the early years of the Indonesian state but in 1960 were formally incorporated as part of the armed forces, though they remained a civilian force. During the killings, the army subordinated the police within the military’s administrative and command structure, where it remained until 2000.35 Criminal procedure in the 1960s instructed that a suspect should be detained and then taken for a process of interrogation as part a preliminary investigation.36 In this way, existing investigatory procedures may have served as a model for the military and police forces tasked with dealing with those being brought into detention. The semblance of procedural instruction may even have reinforced the belief by those carrying out interrogation after interrogation that they were acting in compliance with a regulatory framework, even if those interrogations had devolved into repetitive acts of torture against the hundreds or thousands who came before them. 35 See David Jensen, ‘The Central Role of the Police in Networked Security in Indonesia: A Case Study of Yogyakarta’, unpublished PhD diss., Australian National University, 2010, pp. 42–43. 36 Criminal procedure at the time was governed by the former Dutch colonial H.I.R (Herziene Indonesisch Reglement, Revised Regulation for Indonesians), Regulation concerning police work and civil and criminal procedure (1941). See Daniel S. Lev, ‘The Politics of Judicial Development in Indonesia,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 7, no. 2 (1965), pp. 173–199. === [PDF page 15] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 151 Within this system of mimicking existing procedures, it makes further sense that these interrogations would be organised in as systematic a way as possible, especially considering the very high numbers of people being brought into detention. Logistically, therefore, it is possible to see how an almost conveyer-belt procedure could have developed very quickly to try to cope with these numbers. In some testimonies, you hear stories of men waiting in a long line to enter the interrogation room, each man moving up the queue to be tortured in turn.37 As Roosa described it, this was a system of ‘assembly-line interrogations’, like a conveyer belt passing through a machine, though these were individuals moving one by one into a room where terrible violence was perpetrated against them.38 Second, I would also speculate that there was an instrumentalist function to these interrogation rooms and centres, as they were often purposefully used by the men running the facilities to terrorise the detainees. Some survivors have spoken explicitly of the dread that movement to an interrogation facility inspired, partly based on the terrible anticipation of what would happen. That anticipation was part of the torment deliberately inflicted upon them. Being forced to listen to, or watch, other people being tortured, and knowing that it could and would happen to them too, was purposefully used as a way to inflict fear on victims. One woman, Ibu Siti, described how she and her young child (who had been detained with her) were forced to sit in the interrogation room and watch repeated sessions of torture. The interrogators at that camp called it ‘required viewing’ (‘wajib menonton’) and she explained that it was used to terrify and intimidate the detainees. Further, Ibu Siti continued, the interrogators would force her into the interrogation room every night because they knew the effect it had upon her and her child, and derived what she described as enjoyment from that knowledge.39 4 Conclusion: The Paradox of Mass Interrogation In this chapter, I have focussed on the spaces of interrogation and torture, and their separation within the wider detention network. In considering the 37 In his book of sketches of life as a political prisoner, Gumelar Demokrasno draws one such line of detainees waiting to be interrogated. See A. Gumelar Demokrasno, Dari Kalong Sampai Pulau Buru: Kisah Tapol dalam Sketsa (Yogyakarta: Pusat Sejarah dan Etika Politik, Universitas Sanata Dharma, 2006), pp. 10–14. 38 Roosa, ‘The Truths of Torture’, p. 42. 39 See Haryo Sasongko, Korupsi Sejarah dan Kisah Derita Akar Rumput (Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2005), pp. 60–64. === [PDF page 16] === 152 Pohlman role and function of the ‘devil’s houses’, as Sudjinah called them, though, a central paradox emerges: if this system of interrogation and torture was so critical to justifying the camp system – and the eradication of the PKI – why demarcate interrogation from detention? From survivor testimonies and extant military orders, we know that the army created the prisoner classification system and had begun interrogating and torturing detainees en masse by mid-November 1965. Within the broader network of detention centres – which was being rapidly created in those first few months after the coup – I contend that the designation of specific spaces for interrogation developed in advance of the categorisation system in mid-November. I base this contention on the reported experiences of those arrested in October of that year, and the likelihood that the security services in charge of these arrests mimicked their regular procedures, with interrogation the main plank of investigations. If anything, the designation of interrogation spaces was an antecedent for these policies; with large numbers of people being brought into detention, the perceived need to question them for information drove a set of practices (arrest, interrogation, then classification) which developed into the systematic torture of hundreds of thousands of people. The army needed places to do this violent work, and on a very large scale. The creation of places for systematic interrogations was therefore necessary, and was needed quickly. More than a search for information, however, was the drive to eliminate the enemy, the PKI. Roosa has shown that the army needed the interrogations, the evidence of the ‘fantasy’ of a dangerous (and guilty) PKI, in order to justify the destruction of the party.40 He further explains that the army ‘threw the dragnet as widely as possible, catching and torturing anyone whose name they obtained, the interrogators imagined hundreds of thousands of people to be clandestine operatives … The very lack of material evidence to confirm such assumptions became evidence of how deviously clever the enemies were in concealing their plotting’.41 There were, therefore, both functionalist and intentional elements in the rapid creation of this system of mass interrogation and torture.42 From a functionalist standpoint, the army needed places where it could quickly and methodically interrogate very high numbers of people. From an intentionalist 40 Roosa, ‘The Truths of Torture’, p. 34. 41 Ibid., p. 43. 42 While these terms have become mostly associated with the debate that began in the 1960s in the field of Holocaust studies, I am more interested in the arguments themselves. For a discussion of the ideological-intentionalist and structural-functionalist approaches, and their arguments, see A.D. Moses, ‘Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and his Critics’, History and Theory, 37, no. 2 (1998), pp. 194–219. === [PDF page 17] === Torture Camps in Indonesia, 1965–1970 153 perspective, these camps were a crucial part of wiping out the PKI and its supporters; without this overriding aim, such a comprehensive and systematic eradication of the left in Indonesia would not have been possible. To try to understand the paradox of separating interrogation and detention spaces, we need to look at the entire system of rounding up, interrogating, and classifying detainees – some of whom were then executed en masse, others categorised into the differing ‘levels’ of involvement – all of which were necessary to build and maintain the fantasy. While only speculative, I would argue that this mass system may have begun as a mimicry of the security services’ established procedures of investigation and, through replicating the forms of those procedures, they created a self-sustaining logic (and process) that justified the eradication of enemies. The prisoners were interrogated and admitted their guilt, and this, in turn, necessitated either their direct elimination or continued incarceration. This process became so successful that it both necessitated and justified its continued expansion on a mass scale. 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