¹ Seno Gumira Ajidarma, Ketika Jurnalisme Dibungkam Sastra Harus Bicara (Yayasan Bentang Budaya, 1997). See also Seno Gumira Ajidarma's collection of short stories, including a powerful account of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste, Saksi Mata [Eyewitness] (Yayasan Bentang Budaya, 2002).

² Amongst many sources on the 1965 coup and mass killings, see John Roosa, “The State of Knowledge about an Open Secret: Indonesia's Mass Disappearances of 1965–66,” The Journal of Asia Studies 75, no. 2 (2016): 281–97; John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Douglas Kammen and Kate McGregor, eds., The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–68 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2012); Robert Cribb, ed., The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali (Clayton, AU: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990) and most recently Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

³ Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs (Vancouver, B.C.) 58 no. 2 (Summer 1985): 239-64.; Peter Dale Scott, “Still Uninvestigated After 50 Years: Did the U.S. Help Incite the 1965 Indonesia Massacre?”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 31, No. 2, August 3, 2015; Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford University Press, 2008); Alfred W. McCory, In the Shadows of the American Century. The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, (New York: Haymarket Books, 2017); Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, eds., 1965: Indonesia and the World / Indonesia dan Dunia (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1965).

⁴ English translations by Max Lane were published by Penguin in the 1990s as This Earth of Mankind; Child of All Nations; Footsteps; and House of Glass.

⁵ Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound (New Directions, 2015)

⁶ For a recent overview, see Baskara T. Wardaya, “Cracks in the Wall: Indonesia and Narratives of the 1965 Mass Violence,” in David Webster, ed., Flowers in the Wall: Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Melanesia (University of Calgary Press, 2017).

⁷ The figure of 100,000 comes from Chega! The Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation Timor-Leste. On the history of the occupation, see, among others, James Dunn, East Timor: A Rough Passage to Independence (Double Bay, AU: Longueville, 2004); Geoffrey S. Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Clinton Fernandes, The Independence of East Timor: Multidimensional Perspectives—Occupation, Resistance and International Political Activism (Eastborne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2011).

⁸ The Indonesian original circulated widely on Facebook and is available here.

⁹ In the “dark affair of 30 September 1965,” a group of junior army officers kidnapped leading generals. The army command under general Suharto struck back and seized power, blaming the abduction on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and accusing the PKI of carrying out lurid acts on the dead generals at Lubang Buaya, near Jakarta.

¹⁰ Dom Boaventura was a Timorese fighter who resisted Portuguese colonial rule. Nicolau Lobato was the leader of Fretilin, the political party that declared Timorese independence in 1975, until his death in 1978 fighting against Indonesian colonial rule. Indonesia colonized Timor-Leste for 24 years, from 1975 to 1999. Human rights violations during Indonesian rule amounted to crimes against humanity, a subsequent truth commission found. In September 1999, the Timorese voted for independence in a UN-supervised referendum. The garuda is a mythical bird that is the Indonesian national symbol.

¹¹ Indonesia has a pantheon of “national heroes” (pahlawan nasional) recognized as key figures in its nationalist movement. hey include Diponegoro and Imam Bonjol, who opposed Dutch colonial rule over Indonesia. General Suharto was the leader of the 1965 coup and Indonesian president from 1966 to 1998. Pancasila (the five principles) was Indonesia's official national ideology.

¹² Wiji Thukul, the “people's poet,” was “disappeared” after writing a series of anti-regime poems in Indonesia. Munir Said Thalib was a human rights activist and Right Livelihood Award laureate. On board a flight to the Netherlands in 2004 he was poisoned with arsenic. His killer has been linked to Indonesian State Intelligence agents. The land of Cendrawasih (the bird of paradise) refers to West Papua, a former Dutch colony taken over by Indonesia in the 1960s where independence sentiment remains strong and human rights violations remain common. In the Santa Cruz massacre of 12 November 1991 Indonesian soldiers opened fire on Timorese independence protesters, killing some 250 people.

¹³ When General Suharto took power in the 1960s, he declared the creation of a “New Order” (Orde Baru) in contrast to what he called the “Old Order” under President Sukarno 1945-65). He governed under the New Order name until 1998, since which time his successors have presided over a new period dubbed “reform” (reformasi).

¹⁴ Lubang Buaya is the “crocodile hole” in Jakarta where G30S members took six generals that they had kidnapped and killed them. Indonesian curriculum on the G30S stressed the suffering of the generals and the alleged dancing by Communist women at the site as being especially horrific. The opening lines of Jendral recall the imagery taught in Indonesian schools.

¹⁵ Student organizing had to be carried out clandestinely under the New Order. As more Timorese students came to universities in Java, they formed clandestine organizations such as Renetil (the National Resistance of Timorese Youth) and others.

¹⁶ Indonesia annexed West Papua in the 1960s (taking over administration in 1963 and formally integrating it in 1969) and has faced a Papuan independence movement ever since.

¹⁷ Pancasila, the five principles, are the Indonesian state ideology. The principles are generally rendered as nationalism, internationalism, social justice, democracy and belief in one God.

¹⁸ Senyap (Silence) is the Indonesian-language release of director Joshua Oppenheimer's film “The Look of Silence” (2014) about the perpetrators of the 1965-66 killings in Indonesia.