This article examines the impact of a new sustained focus in Indonesian human rights activism on connecting historical experiences of violence to ongoing impunity, in order to assess what forms of memory activism are effective in breaking a justice impasse. It does so by using the much more successful case of Argentinian human rights activism for justice for the 1976–83 repression as a point of comparison.

Since the end of the Suharto New Order regime and Indonesia’s transition to democracy in 1998, the country has struggled to address past serious human rights violations, in particular the 1965–66 anti-communist violence. Half a million members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) and its mass organizations were killed and hundreds of thousands were detained, most without trial.

This article makes the case that the anticommunist violence of 1965–66 in Indonesia was neither inevitable nor spontaneous, but was encouraged, facilitated, directed and shaped by the Indonesian army leadership. It develops that argument in three parts. It shows first how the temporal and geographical variations in the pattern of mass killing corresponded closely to the varied political postures and capacities of army commanders in different locales, and how the mass violence everywhere depended on the army’s substantial logistical assets.

1965 Today: Living with the Indonesian Massacres: against that backdrop, this special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research explores the many ways in which Indonesians are “living” with the Indonesian massacres. It examines the violent events themselves, the way people try to make sense of them today, and their enduring legacies in and beyond Indonesia. It brings together a selection of papers presented at the international conference “‘1965’ Today: Living with the Indonesian Massacres,” organized in Amsterdam, 1–2 October 2015.