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4 - Culture, killings, and criticism in the years of living dangerously: Bali and Baliology

from Part I - Social polities: history in individuals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2009

Tracy C. Davis
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
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Summary

In the last days of 1965 and the first three months of 1966, between 80,000 and 100,000 people were killed in Bali, Indonesia. Many of these were artists and teachers associated, however loosely, with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Since many of the bodies were mutilated and dumped into mass graves or rivers - preventing cremation and possibly rebirth - we will probably never know a more exact number. In 1965 80,000 people constituted 5 to 7 percent of Bali's population: approximately the same percentages for those lost, a few years later, in the killing fields of Cambodia. In Cambodia, though, it took four years and a deal of organizational planning for the Khmer Rouge to effect such carnage; in Bali it took under four months. In all, 500,000 to a million people perished in Indonesia. The American CIA (which supplied information to the Indonesian army) stated in an intelligence report of 1968, “In terms of the numbers killed the . . . massacres in Indonesia ranks as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century . . . far more significant than many other events that have received much more attention.” No place had a higher percentage of dead than Bali.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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