"Like the Japanese, Indonesians too have uncomfortable lacunae in their narrative, not least over the anti-communist purges of the 1960s and the systematic massacres of perhaps a million Chinese, but Australians, perhaps, are as ignorant of this as most Indonesians are." (Jack Waterford, ‘Teaching history of our region is also important’, Eureka Street, 22 August 2006)
When Jemma Purdey and I responded to Jack Waterford’s article in the last issue of Eureka Street through the letters section, we said there was no empirical evidence to support the view that there was a kind of 'Chinese Holocaust' in Indonesia in 1965. The victims of the 1965 anti-communist massacre were overwhelmingly Javanese and Balinese, not Chinese; the slaughter was politicide rather than genocide.
In Mr Waterford’s reply, he produced no evidence in support of his claim that there were "systematic massacres of perhaps a million Chinese" in the 1960s. Instead, he said that "reputable historians cannot agree" whether 100,000, 500,000, 1 million or 1.5 million died, let alone on regional sequences of events, and that while he acknowledged that "many ethnic Indonesians were killed", "most of the observers and commentators [he had] read think that Indonesia's Chinese were peculiarly and particularly singled out".
For the last forty years I have specialised in the modern history and politics of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. My book Indonesian Chinese in Crisis (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1983) was a political history of their experience of the violent transition from Sukarno’s Guided Democracy to Suharto’s New Order. After carefully considering the available evidence of anti-Chinese violence in that period, I wrote (pp58-59):
"… it seems safe to conclude that the total number of Chinese killed can scarcely have exceeded about two thousand. The highly exaggerated estimates [of Chinese killed] can perhaps be explained as being the result of faulty logic. It is true that many Indonesians believed that the Chinese had communist sympathies and that anti-Chinese sentiment was prevalent amongst the Indonesian population. It is also true that some hundreds of thousands of suspected communists were killed after the coup attempt. It is possible that some observers have simply proceeded from these premises to conclude that a large proportion of the victims of the killings must have been Chinese."
No reputable historian has challenged my conclusion. Mary Somers Heidhues, another reputable historian who has specialised in the history of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, contributed the