In Indonesia, the massacre of approximately one million unarmed civilians in 1965-66 has been depicted as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising against people believed to be communist party members or associates. Dr Jess Melvin has used documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency’s archives in Banda Aceh to shatter the official propaganda account of the mass killings and prove the military’s agency behind the events. Her book, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, tells the story of the 3,000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise the “Indonesian genocide files,” along with the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitness of the genocide in Aceh.
Date: 27 June 2018
Time: 1-2pm, UNSW Law School
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About the Speaker
Jess Melvin completed her PhD, ‘Mechanics of Mass Murder: How the Indonesian Military Initiated and Implemented the Indonesian Genocide, the Case of Aceh’ at the University of Melbourne in 2015. She was Rice Faculty Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies and Postdoctoral Associate in Genocide Studies at Yale University in 2016-2017. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate with the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney. Dr Melvin is the author of The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (Routledge, 2018).
Melissa Crouch 