The Army and the Indonesian Genocide

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The Army and the Indonesian Genocide

By The Australian Human Rights Institute and The Diplomacy Training Program

Date and time

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM AEST

Location

UNSW Law Staff Common Room

Level 2 Law Building UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia

Description

The Army and the Indonesian Genocide

Dr Jess Melvin

With an introduction by Dr Melissa Crouch, UNSW Law


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.


About Our Guest

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).


Photo: Unsplash

For inquiries about accessibility and dietary requirements, please email humanrights@unsw.edu.au

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