Infrastructures of Impunity: New Order Violence in Indonesia

Infrastructures of Impunity

New Order Violence in Indonesia

Elizabeth F. Drexler

Southeast Asia Program Publications

an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Jacob

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations and Terms

Note on Names, Spelling, and Translation

Introduction: Truth and Infrastructures of Impunity

1. Building the Foundation for Impunity

2. The Forgotten Mysterious Killings

3. Resist Forgetting

4. Narrating What Is Known

5. Law without Justice

6. The Red Thread

Conclusion: Infrastructures of Impunity beyond Indonesia

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

My interest in transitional justice for New Order violence began in 1998 when I was swept into the postauthoritarian euphoria with students, journalists, activists, and many others. The struggle for justice has been long, and I admire the individuals who have persisted. Over many years, countless people have provided myriad forms of invaluable assistance to my process of research and writing. I am grateful to all the individuals who talked to me, some for hours at a time and many repeatedly, during interviews and conversations over more than two decades.

I appreciate the time, ideas, support, and friendship extended by Suraya, Yati, Marsillam, Sumarsih, Suciwati, and Usman. Aghniadi answered numerous questions and tracked down many media references. A number of organizations generously contributed to my research: KontraS, JSKK, Amnesty Indonesia, ELSAM, the KKPK, LBH Jakarta, the IPT, YLBHI, AJAR, Komnas HAM, and Komnas Perempuan. I appreciate the opportunity to attend Sehama, Kalabahu, Rabuan, Kamisan, and countless discussions and meetings over the years. I cannot name all the individuals who have assisted me in Indonesia, but I would like to thank Agnes, Artidjo, Arsil, Atnike, Ayash, Baskara, Bedjo, Bivitri, Dolo, Fai, Febriana, Galuh, Haris, Hariwi, Ichsan, Ifdhal, Indri, Jati, Lexy, Martin, Nani, Ndari, Nezar, Ninies, Nursyahbani, Pak Kus, Pak Oki, Pak Putu, Pretty, Prodita, Puri, Putri, Robert, Roro, Sandyawan, Stanley, Tumiso, Uci, and many others. Alan Feinstein and John McGlynn also provided support and insights.

Beyond Indonesia, the friends and colleagues who have contributed to this project in different ways over its long development are too numerous to name, but I especially thank Dave Akin, Chris Duncan, Steve Esquith, Elaine Gerber, Bob Hefner, Yazier Henry, Alex Hinton, Doreen Lee, Mara Leichtman, Sharon Lowery, Deborah Margolis, Al McCoy, Mary McCoy, Eric Montgomery, Elisabeth Ida Mulyani, Kerth O’Brien, Sebastian Pompe, Geoffrey Robinson, John Roosa, Helen Veit, and Saskia Wieringa. Conversations with John H. Davis Jr. helped me to articulate the contribution of the infrastructure of impunity beyond Indonesia. I am grateful to Melissa Charenko, Jamie Davidson, Tyrell Haberkorn, Ed Murphy, and Dave Sheridan for reading parts of this manuscript and providing insightful commentary. I especially appreciate the generous and thoughtful comments provided by three anonymous reviewers who read the entire manuscript with great care.

I am grateful to a number of institutions that invited me to present earlier versions of this work, and to audiences who offered valuable feedback, in Indonesia: Atma Jaya; University of Indonesia, Depok; Universitas Pelita Harapan; Sanata Dharma, Yogyakarta; Universitas Islam Negri Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta; and, in the US, the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the University of Notre Dame; Rutgers University, Newark; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

I thank the Indonesian Ministry of Research, the Institute of Sciences, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Indonesia, AMINEF, and the American Institute for Indonesian Studies for facilitating my research in Indonesia. I am grateful to Suraya Afiff, Yosef Djakababa, and Suzie Sudarman for their sponsorship. This research was funded by an AIFIS Henry Luce Fellowship Grant, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, and, at Michigan State University, awards from the Dr. Delia Koo Faculty Endowment and Muslim Studies Program. Support for writing was provided by a Michigan State University Frank and Adelaide Kussy Scholarship for Study of the Holocaust and Its Legacy and for Study of Genocide, as well as the Dr. Delia Koo Faculty Endowment. I appreciate the support provided by the Department of Anthropology, especially in funding Jarad Whitney Cornett’s outstanding research assistance in the final stages of completing this book.

Peter Agree’s friendship and wisdom have been constant and indispensable over the long course of this project. I appreciate Pamela Haig’s skillful edits and excavations. I was fortunate to work with my editor, Sarah Grossman, her colleagues Jacqulyn Teoh, Karen Hwa, and Eric Levy, and other members of the Cornell team on the publication of this book.

No words can properly express the depth of my love and gratitude for my family, especially my son, Jacob, who was resourceful and adventurous during the years we lived in Indonesia as well as the pandemic years spent writing and homeschooling. His love, hugs, and humor make everything possible and worthwhile. My husband Nazaruddin’s enduring confidence in me has been a source of strength over many years and miles. My mother and father and my brother have provided invaluable love, support, and encouragement. Thank you all for believing in me and this project.

Portions of chapter 6 have appeared previously in Impunity and Transitional Justice in Indonesia: Aksi Kamisan’s Circular Time, International Journal of Transitional Justice 16, no. 3 (2022) 298–313.

I am grateful to John McGlynn and the Lontar Foundation for permission to reprint portions of Home appearing in chapter 1 and The Mysterious Marksman appearing in chapter 2.

Abbreviations and Terms

Note on Names, Spelling, and Translation

I refer to individuals by their nickname, first name, or only name, as is common practice in Indonesia. Following anthropological conventions, I have used nicknames, initials or pseudonyms or not named individuals to protect their identities. I have used modern Indonesian spellings—for example u instead of oe (Sukarno rather than Soekarno)—with the exception of cases where I am quoting or citing other sources that use old spellings. All translations from Indonesian are my own unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

Truth and Infrastructures of Impunity

This book is about the creation and persistence of impunity for a Cold War genocide (1965–66) and subsequent state violence, direct and indirect, in the name of development and stability in Indonesia. This impunity persists in the realms of law, culture, and common sense, and involves the dehumanization and eradication of (suspected) political opponents and an intricate bureaucracy developed to stigmatize their family members over multiple generations and secure the silence and complicity of others. It involves many forms of violence, complicity, and complacency, and produces subsequent generations that both know and unknow about past state violence.

Through these themes, I explore why truth telling and factual revelation have not succeeded in redressing human rights violations. Infrastructures of Impunity critiques a foundational belief that the documentation of history and past state crimes prevents their recurrence. After periods of state violence and authoritarianism, transitional justice interventions are often initiated to develop the rule of law and support transitions to democracy. They may include institutions such as truth commissions, tribunals, and policies such as lustration or purges, amnesties, and days of remembrance, designed to support incoming successor states as they address the crimes of previous repressive regimes.¹ Transitional justice advocates have produced a wealth of documentation about past cases and yet have had very little success in achieving accountability for state crimes or changing public perceptions of the past. Human rights and justice projects in Indonesia have drawn on survivor testimony, documentation, and truth seeking in a global posttruth era. Meanwhile, those in power use historical narratives that have an enduring affective hold, and this affective resonance disrupts activist history and truth-seeking projects. Thus, the lack of success of these efforts is not a failure of the transitional justice advocates; rather, it is an indication of the power of affective and infrastructural forces that support impunity in the present.

An important theme of human rights work is the power of stories about the past, but in the case of Indonesia we see that past propaganda has a long half-life. Finding, using, and making effective the truth about the past is a long and circuitous process in which documents and evidence are important but are also subverted by the very institutions and processes that promise to authorize their validity and make them consequential. These are all elements of what I call an infrastructure of impunity. And the truths bend to that infrastructure more than the infrastructure bends to the truths.

The key protagonists in this story are those who struggled for justice and against impunity, and those who perform small acts of consistency, creativity, and repetition that subvert the infrastructure. Since the mid-2010s, activists of the millennial generation have engaged the power of affect and micro or experiential truths to reconsider the violent past.

In 1966, General Suharto and his New Order regime took power in Indonesia. The New Order made its version of history enduring and affectively powerful into the present. Official Indonesian school histories, films, and policies say that Suharto took power after a supposed coup attempt by suspected members of the PKI, the then-legal Communist Party of Indonesia. These histories mention only in passing the killings of a million or more suspected members or supporters of the PKI, and they omit the New Order’s widespread violations of human rights, repression of political dissent, stigmatization, systematic propaganda, and campaigns of terror, which followed these inaugural killings for more than three decades. The genocide and associated bureaucratic efforts to eradicate the Left were abetted by the United States and other countries during the global Cold War.² The New Order regime remained in power for over thirty years, creating rich dividends for US corporations through resource extraction, the creation of a class of oligarchs, and a widespread system of corruption. It delivered significant development and modernization to a tactically depoliticized population.

The euphoria that marked the end of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order in 1998 was followed by notable reforms: passage of human rights legislation and the establishment of new institutions and policies that promised to address authoritarian-era violence and corruption. Early efforts led by those with direct experience of New Order repression focused on documenting violations and violence, gathering testimonies, organizing victims, raising awareness, straightening history, and advocating for human rights tribunals and other legal forms of justice. Although the country has not had an official transitional justice process, and though some say political reform has allowed Indonesians to successfully forget Suharto-era authoritarian violence and move on, Indonesian NGOs since 1998 have launched numerous campaigns against unresolved cases of violence. Technical and political ruses have been used to prevent evidence from entering the court, and there has been little moral outrage in public discourse, where past state (authoritarian) narratives remain affectively and politically powerful. State institutions, especially the police, have failed to protect victims from nonstate groups that extend patterns of extrajudicial violence into the present. The military’s territorial command has remained a feature of everyday life everywhere. Military and political elites and cronies still dominate the political field, and the infrastructure of impunity has continued to shield perpetrators, institutions, practices, and especially cronies and beneficiaries from accountability.

In 2014, Joko Widodo, commonly referred to as Jokowi, was elected Indonesia’s first president who did not belong to a prominent political family or a have a military background. Jokowi campaigned on his status as someone unburdened by the past, and on a vision that included addressing past human rights violations.³ He successfully attracted the votes and enthusiasm of youth. Despite decades of human rights documentation, however, Jokowi’s vision and voters’ apparent support for it, even when augmented by public truth telling, did not lead to resolution or accountability.

Many responses to state violence, including international human rights advocacy and transitional justice practices, are founded on the premises that exposing violations compels the world to stop them; that acknowledgement and truth telling are healing for survivors; that documentation and truth telling promote justice; that ending impunity with the prosecution of individual criminal perpetrators prevents the recurrence of state violence; and that political transitions, reconciliation, and the public legitimacy of institutions depend on settling the historical accounts. Key to all of these strategies is the importance of investigating, documenting, and making public the truth of state violence. In the literature on transitional justice, scholars and practitioners have advocated for different kinds and forms of knowledge and truth, but their perceived importance, and especially their relationship to law and to the international community, is a vital assumption in many strategies.

The urgency and imperative to witness has become a widespread, almost universal response to atrocity. For instance, scholars and literary figures have pointed to the Holocaust’s effort to erase its own witnesses.⁴ Military dictatorships have used tactics such as disappearances to terrorize critics and their families and often incorporate the prospect of oblivion into torture.⁵ The pattern of disappearances have given rise to strong demands for information by family members and human rights workers. Governments have often masked state repression with the rhetoric of national security. The literary scholar and translator Marguerite Feitlowitz analyzes Argentina’s dirty war to demonstrate that language was used in public to obscure intentions, actions, and meanings; to inspire trust, both at home and abroad; to seal … complicity; and to sow paralyzing terror and confusion.⁶ She notes that even if one doesn’t agree, the language—to some extent—gets internalized.⁷ In clandestine contexts, language became a form of torture.⁸ Disappearances, state denials, and doublespeak all create conditions in which revelation of the truth and an end to deniability are seen as imperative in and of themselves. At the same time, state denials often find the power to endure even after the facts have been exposed and corrected.

In transitional justice, the power of truth telling relies on the attachment of forensic facts to meaningful terms, and especially to legal norms. This advocacy work holds that there are universal human rights that apply to all individuals, and that the international community has a responsibility to protect them.⁹ Documented acts can be measured against universal standards and norms that have been violated. The lawyer and legal scholar Ruti Teitel points out that demands cast in rights language become claims that cannot otherwise be rationalized away in the domestic scheme, such as in terms of war or national security.¹⁰ Revelation of truth has the promise to reverse the official doublespeak and propaganda that justify state violence.

Some forms of speaking truth to power, particularly those advanced during the Cold War, rely on local actors smuggling irrefutable evidence of state violence out of the local context to be publicized by international networks, in hopes of ending the secrecy in which state abuse occurs and is thereafter obfuscated. Transnational organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and networks of local human rights defenders have circulated urgent actions and coordinated letter-writing and media campaigns in the name of individuals whose human rights have been violated, in order to pressure state officials to release them or update family members on their whereabouts. In other cases, such as the long-running effort to counter the Indonesian government’s denials about atrocities committed in occupied East Timor, activists have sought to end military aid and arms sales by the United States to repressive governments. Some of these campaigns have succeeded. Governments do release certain prisoners after public outcry, and arms sales and military aid are occasionally suspended. The idea of truth telling, however, promises much more than these specific outcomes—and perhaps because of these successes.

In his analysis of how human rights naming and shaming works, Thomas Keenan writes about the presumption of human rights advocates that in the absence of a functioning legal apparatus, representation works as an informal mechanism: the exposure of silenced or hidden violations enforces compliance with shared norms and laws through shaming perpetrators.¹¹ This belief in the power of truth to enforce, and even create, norms shapes the institutions and practice of transitional justice. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, truth commissions were the most prominent institutionalization of truth seeking.¹² Advocates of criminal justice tended to see the truth commission as a vehicle for amnesty and a process that would replace the pursuit of legal justice, and that stood almost in opposition to justice.¹³ For example, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which operated from 1995 to 2002, was empowered to provide amnesty in exchange for truth. In some cases, state perpetrators have advocated for truth commissions to avoid accountability. Because of this, analysts worried that there was a trade-off between truth and justice.¹⁴ Since 2009, this concern is no longer as prominent and has been replaced by ideas of complementarity.¹⁵

Scholars have highlighted intersections between truth and justice strategies. For example, legal studies scholar Jamie Rowen argues, the quasi-judicial nature of truth commissions are central to their appeal.¹⁶ Narratives about the past that are authorized through commissions can undermine past justifications and logics that made individuals tolerant of or complicit with state repression. Such narratives can drive further accountability (that is, criminal processes) or can serve as a form of historical justice.¹⁷ In terms of historical justice, following Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem, legal scholars have debated the limitations of the trial for generating larger truths about historical violence.¹⁸ And yet others see trials as sites for the social construction of knowledge that play an important role in collective memory.¹⁹ Ruti Teitel emphasizes the importance of legal rituals, including both trials and hearings, to enable the production of histories that perform critical undoings that respond to prior repression.²⁰ For some Indonesian activists I spoke with, a judicial process was necessary to authorize information that had been documented or to demand the release of state files believed to contain relevant information that would presumably facilitate such undoings.

Despite the promises of transitional justice, scholars and practitioners have critiqued its processes and results. The political theorist Bronwyn Leebaw argues that the truth produced in transitional justice institutions is legalistic, depoliticized, polarizing, and unable to appreciate acts of resistance and ambiguous gray zones.²¹ Zinaida Miller points out the shortcoming that transitional justice, like human rights, focuses on violations of civil and political rights while failing to address social and economic rights or structural violence.²²

In addition to the critiques of political theorists, anthropologists have analyzed ethnographically how transitional justice principles and institutions are localized.²³ They have challenged assumptions about the nature of the truth captured in these institutions by paying particular attention to issues of gender and gendered violence, the complex political and social dynamics associated with collective memory after violence, issues of public secrecy, and the nature of silence and social forgetting, as well as past contexts of collaboration and betrayal.²⁴ Work with survivors has also challenged assumptions that providing testimony in a transitional institution is therapeutic.²⁵ Taken together, this anthropological work demonstrates that transitional justice interventions are falling far short of the promised results. The anthropologist Alex Hinton has pointed to a justice facade that masks power and the complexities of everyday experience.²⁶ And yet, the desire for justice through formal transitional rituals persists among various groups in societies that have experienced violence.

Despite these institutions designed to produce truth and justice, scholars and advocates have shown that impunity persists. To end impunity, specifically, these advocates demand individual criminal prosecutions for perpetrators of human rights violations and more serious crimes, arguing that prosecutions deter future abuses, promote the rule of law, restore the confidence of citizens in government, guarantee respect for human rights, and ensure justice for victims of atrocious crimes.²⁷

The historian of human rights Samuel Moyn notes that ending impunity draws on the intuitive concept that there is a class of infractions for which there must be zero tolerance, and which nation-states have internationalized as punishable when domestic justice fails.²⁸ Moyn and other scholars have noted that the current movement to end impunity through the International Criminal Court (ICC) prioritizes one definition of justice—individual criminal accountability—and excludes others: most notably, structural, racial, economic, and collective justice.²⁹ Many scholars have pointed out that claims about the utility of international tribunals and ending impunity are rarely articulated or evaluated.³⁰

In addition to marginalizing other visions of justice, the mobilization of international institutions, such as the ICC, designed to combat impunity have reinforced a structure of global governance premised on exploitation and inequality, according to the legal theorist Vasuki Nesiah. Nesiah suggests that anti-impunity efforts have provided impunity for the more powerful in some cases or obscured systemic injustices and the repeated failures of international justice processes.³¹ This critique of the global movement against impunity focuses primarily on cases the ICC has pursued, but the powerful rhetoric of ending impunity circulates internationally and informs justice campaigns even in countries that are not signatories to the International Criminal Court.

The historian and political scientist Tyrell Haberkorn analyzes prolonged impunity in Thailand, a country that, like Indonesia, has not been a focus of the ICC. She examines how impunity, defined not simply as the lack of justice but as the failure to see something as a crime, is normalized and takes place in plain sight. Concludes Haberkorn, The public nature of impunity makes it pedagogical for both state perpetrators and citizens.³² Likewise, I explore how victims, family members, and activists in Indonesia persistently demand justice (most often defined in legal terms) despite repeated failures to achieve it, and consider whether these failed attempts at accountability implicitly teach seekers of justice about the power of the state and its control over law, and thereby extend impunity into the present. At the same time, I argue that even where impunity is blatant, there is a value in repeatedly naming it as impunity—as a crime and a deviation rather than as a defense of nationalist ideals.

International campaigns and institutions tend to construe justice as prosecution for discrete events with clear perpetrators, but this definition does not adequately capture cases of prolonged and widespread impunity that occur in the aftermath of sustained state violence. In Indonesia, for example, the genocide not only occurred over the years of killings but was extended over a half century through new incidents and types of violence abetted by the infrastructure of impunity.

Indonesians often talk about a red thread that connects many factors into one unit that produces particular effects. It is a common expression that I heard from activists during the authoritarian period to suggest how disparate elements worked together and could be understood with a single narrative, but I heard it in other ordinary contexts as well. Anthropological analysis of infrastructure helps us understand and untangle the red threads of social and political life in Indonesia. Brian Larkin describes infrastructures as built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space… . They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.³³ Infrastructures also make promises for the future. They mobilize affect and the senses of desire, pride, and frustration, feelings which can be deeply political.³⁴ Like the red thread, an infrastructure is both material and immaterial.

Other scholars have described how particular kinds of infrastructure include and exclude individuals, which produces direct as well as indirect violence, abjection, and abandonment.³⁵ The anthropologists Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill write that infrastructure is not just a material embodiment of violence (structural or otherwise), but often its instrumental medium.³⁶ In the case of Indonesia, the violence of impunity has not simply continued, but has grown. The anthropologist James Ferguson argues that infrastructural violence eludes efforts to specify individual perpetrators because the harms come from large-scale systems that incorporate human and nonhuman elements. Infrastructures, Ferguson observes, can also naturalize, make invisible, or make to seem inevitable massive inequalities.³⁷ As such, infrastructure is a particularly useful concept for examining how impunity extends, repeats, and grows in Indonesia, beyond the agency (or prosecution) of discrete, identifiable perpetrators. The infrastructure of impunity circulates throughout the entire archipelago through the army’s territorial command, bureaucracy, laws, law enforcement, media, and culture. This infrastructure is built out of a variety of elements: bureaucratic, military, legal, political, educational, social, and affective. Although some of these elements are occasionally dormant and others have been used at different times and in different cases, they can be described as a unified entity whose elements, both singly and in concert, help explain and account for the persistence of impunity. The infrastructure transforms over time. Violations of civil and political rights over multiple generations are transformed into structural violence and economic deprivation. The logic and bureaucratic mechanisms for enacting stigmatization and exclusion remain available to be applied to other groups and individuals, thus shaping how resources and rights flow through society and keeping alive the affective force of propaganda.

Bureaucracy is an important element of the infrastructure of impunity. The civilian bureaucracy is shadowed by the army’s territorial command and its ubiquitous posts.³⁸ In addition to depriving citizens of legal rights, stigmatization as enacted through bureaucracy deprives individuals of public services and excludes them from social belonging, and has far-reaching economic and social consequences. The bureaucracy creates a ubiquitous system where one’s rights as a citizen can always be revoked. The logic of association means that an individual’s status can always change and thus must be maintained by constant vigilance, especially by avoiding contamination through association with a stigmatized group.

Violence that is implemented through bureaucracies is often analyzed in terms of Weberian models that emphasize flawed operations or procedures, or bad agents. In their analysis of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Steven Caton and Bernardo Zacka argue that the Weberian model is insufficient and that the system is better understood as one that institutionalizes arbitrariness.³⁹ By their logic, accountability processes that rely on written records of procedures or documentation of individual acts that violate clear norms and procedures follow Weberian models and are not well suited to understanding this kind of bureaucratic violence. Pervasive and prolonged impunity allows for improvisation and arbitrariness; indeed, this is a key element of the infrastructure and how it extends. For example, local power holders (civilian and military) are able to inflict myriad forms of dehumanization, exclusion, and exploitation on former political prisoners and their families, while in other cases, violence is perpetrated by criminal groups that are both linked to and disavowed by the security apparatus. In their analysis of the Brazilian police forces, sociologist Martha Huggins and her team analyze the creation of a climate that powerfully structures not only the business of state violence but also social accounting of it.⁴⁰ Understanding violence and impunity through an infrastructure that has dynamic, intersecting elements sheds new light on the conditions that enable both the perpetration of violence and the subsequent evasion of accountability for it.

The historian Jess Melvin’s work demonstrates the Indonesian Army’s intention in 1965–66 to annihilate leftists, including but not limited to actual and suspected members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI), a then-legal political party. This intention was expressed in the creation of institutions, offices, and declarations ordering the mandatory involvement of civilians in the army’s campaign to exterminate other civilians.⁴¹ Melvin describes in careful detail the mechanics of mass murder, diagramming the institutions, documents, and policies enacted by the army to orchestrate the killings. The army’s territorial command that shadowed the civilian bureaucracy was critical. The historian John Roosa explains that by building its own bureaucracy and firmly latching it onto the civilian bureaucracy, the army mangled the lines of jurisdictional authority within the state. The army was free to intervene in the work of all other state officials while remaining outside the control of any other department. It is important to understand the scale of this apparatus: in addition to army officials who were assigned to civilian posts, approximately a third of the army’s troops were stationed in [the territorial command structure]. Roosa further notes that in the army’s logic, the task of ‘managing’ Indonesian society was a necessary corollary of the army’s duty to defend society from external attacks.⁴² The territorial command provided a formal structure, but its powers were outside the law.

Melvin shows how the existing territorial command was put to a new use to carry out the killing and ensure that all of the other elements of the state complied. Melvin’s work in Aceh is one of the few cases where extensive documentation has been uncovered. Other authors describe a less structured but no less damaging system of winks and nods whereby criminal gangs were engaged by the military and its proxies to commit the killings.⁴³ To both orchestrate the genocide and create impunity for it, a system of institutions, laws, policies, and bureaucracies was created or adapted.

The bureaucracy shaped the daily lives of communities across the archipelago. The mobilization of individuals as intelligence informants or as perpetrators of direct and indirect violence extended the bureaucracy beyond the military posts and the institutions and policies of the state. A climate of impunity structured both the killings and the social and legal accounting of them; the perpetuation of impunity created both a climate and a bureaucracy that repeated and compounded this socially and legally accepted form of dehumanization. The system of detention and discrimination and the ways in which stigmatization spread through families was regulated by official policies that ensured that political prisoners and their relatives would be denied access to basic rights as citizens and consigned to a space of civil death.⁴⁴ In Indonesia, impunity happens blatantly in public, but also in slow motion, over generations.

Infrastructure can be spectacular, like modernist construction projects, but also nearly invisible and noticeable only when it breaks.⁴⁵ Likewise, the infrastructure of impunity has also acquired mundane and ubiquitous forms as individuals have attempted to navigate Indonesia’s bureaucracy and the army’s omnipresent territorial command, which structures everyday life down to the most minute practices and the level of neighborhood governance. The territorial command posts are a key component of this bureaucracy and an omnipresent part of life across the archipelago, always there should one fail to be vigilant. Impunity’s infrastructure has assumed nearly invisible, or all-pervasive, forms as families reinforce stigmatization in the most private and intimate realms. While impunity does occur in plain sight, the infrastructure also includes unseen elements that have extended impunity over time, all but intractably.

And in Indonesia, law itself became part of this clandestine infrastructure.⁴⁶ It appeared to be a route to resolution and justice but has often functioned to extend impunity. The law’s capacity to secure, extend, and perpetuate impunity depends on its superficial appearance as the opposite—a site of transparency and consistency in the service of accountability and justice. For instance, trials for partial and minor elements of large-scale campaigns of violence can provide immunity against future trials in the name of due process. Certain laws and policies have dehumanized particular citizens and subjected them to civil death, while the system of law has continued to function and has created the appearance, and experience, for other citizens that the rule of law functions and that they are law-abiding citizens rather than complicit beneficiaries. Invisible yet ordinary forms of human rights violations, enabled by subtle everyday laws, institutional cultures, and practices that dehumanize