Politics: The Hidden Hand of the Story

by Timotius Wibowo
Both Robert Cribb’s and Robert Hefner’s articles on mass killing show how cruel politics can be. When politics came to the stage, it will dominate the innermost part of the people, often in the most subtle way. In Indonesian mass killings, politics had shown its dominance over at least three important aspects of Indonesian people. In those tragedies, politics had been a hidden hand that determined both the opening and the ending of the story.
First, it shows us politics’ dominance over religions. One may say that religion is the best motives of people’s attitude and behavior. However, in fact, religions could easily manipulated by political powers. As well as Pasuruan’s highlanders in Hefner’s research had inaccurate assessment of the situation (p. 215), the people involved in a mass conflict usually never realize the political interests behind it. Political motives are always hidden in religious spirit of war. In my opinion, hidden political agendas could easily penetrate the religious symbols because people’s lack of knowledge on both politics and religions. Such conflicts might be diminished by educating more people on politics, as well as on religions.
Second, the Indonesian mass killings obviously show us the dominance of politics over humanity. In those cases, humanity was sacrificed for political agendas. This fact, in my opinion, is not easy to explain. How could political motives undermine the humanity, which naturally embedded in human beings? Searching an answer for this question, I come to the most ancient motives of human mass conflict: ethnic rivalry. Certainly, I am not so sure with this. In fact, in all of mass killing cases, ethnicity is always intertwined with other motives. In Indonesian mass killing cases, the Chinese ethnic is always the most suffered victims. It will be interesting to discuss this phenomenon.
The last but not least, the narratives of Indonesian mass killings shows us the dominance of politics over “history.” As Cribb observes, the historiography of Indonesian mass killings presents the problems of information, problems of philosophy, and problems of interpretation (p. 2). As explained in the article, these problems raised due to political interests of the ruling regimes. It means that a historiography is never objective, instead polluted with subjective interests of the historiographers. What should we do to diminish such destructive pollutant in our historiography? The stories about Indonesian mass killings proof that this is never an easy task of Indonesian historians.