[1] I would like to record my gratitude to my friends Ben Abel and Joss Wibisono for very helpful comments and criticisms.

[2] An acronym for Pembela Tanah Air (Defenders of the Motherland), the name expressed the Japanese plan to hitch local nationalism to the defence of the Empire. There is a clear parallel with the almost contemporaneous Japanese creation of the Burma Independence Army to help fight against the British.

[3] The massacres were mainly aimed at the Communists' mass bases, easily identified since the Party had been legal since independence, and actively participated in electoral politics. These bases were, numerically speaking, concentrated in the rural areas of Central and East Java and Bali, and in the plantation belt of North Sumatra. The cities were less severely hit, probably because they were more easily controlled,

[4] 50 Tahun Merdeka dan Problema Tapol/Napol (50 Years of Independence and the Problem of Political Prisoners), published by Masyarakat Indonesia untuk Kemanusiaan, Jakarta 1995, p. 591.

[5] Suharto was soon treated like royalty by the UK, whose arms dealers profited mightily from trade with Indonesia. Australia followed suit, with its eyes on the huge underwater oil fields spotted off the island of Timor.

[6] The psychology behind this astounding accumulation is an interesting puzzle. Suharto's personal tastes were quite simple, and he did not keep an expensive stable of mistresses. He was visibly uncomfortable in foreign countries, and one cannot imagine him settling down with the loot in Los Angeles or the Riviera. He seems to have thought of himself as a good paterfamilias, spoiling his children, especially his eldest daughter and his youngest son ‘Tommy’, who did luxury time in prison (after his father's fall) for arranging the assassination of a Supreme Court judge who annoyed him. In the liberal 1950s, the maverick Sumatran politician Muhammad Yamin cheerfully explained why, as a cabinet minister, he had ordered the purchase of pianos for every school in the country: he wanted comfortable lives for his descendants ‘to the seventh generation’. There is a general belief in Indonesia that even the canny Chinese can rarely stay rich for three generations. Children and grandchildren, used to luxury, and the usual vices, quickly fritter away the family fortune. It is possible that Suharto was thinking how much money would have to be accumulated to fund his own brood's frittering over seven generations.

[7] The regime had officially insisted that these clearly military-style murders were the result of turf wars between gangs. The popular on dit had it that most of these small gangsters were election-enforcers in the pay of General Ali Murtopo, Suharto's longtime personal political spy-chief, who was getting too big for his boots, and was soon exiled as Ambassador to Kuala Lumpur where he died of a stroke.

[8] Under the constitution, such as it was, the presidents of Indonesia were not chosen by popular vote, but by the Supreme People's Consultative Assembly, composed of all members of Parliament, plus a phalanx of representatives of various regions and functional groups, selected by … the president. This was handy for Suharto, who had no talent on the stump. The system was only changed five years ago. The current president, (retired) General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is the first to be directly elected by the Indonesian voters.

[9] Slater has written a theoretically sophisticated and often very amusing account of top-level politics in Indonesia since Suharto: ‘Indonesia's Accountability Trap: Party Cartels and Presidential Power after Democratic Transition’, Indonesia, 78, October 2004.

[10] Their boss, explaining a later visit to the Great Satan at state expense, averred he was only going to see his children, comfortably ensconced in lesser Californian universities. It is also characteristic of these Muslim thugs that they never showed the slightest interest in the plight of the famously devout Achehnese.

[11] This success was possible in part because of the support of the political parties, eager to fill the parliamentary seats vacated by the soldiers.

[12] From the end of the 19th century the colonial regime had tried with mixed success to create a standard orthography for Malay/Indonesian based on Dutch orthographic rules. The Revolutionary government adopted a simplified form of this colonial spelling system by substituting, quite sensibly, ‘u’ for the odd Dutch ‘oe’. A simple example will show what Suharto's New Improved Spelling achieved: ‘I am looking for a special jacket’, once saja tjari djas chusus, became saya cari jas khusus.

[13] Probably, a comparable calculation lay behind his spectacular decree (when still President) that the Chinese New Year, locally known as Imlek, would henceforth be a national holiday. For most of the Suharto period, public celebrations of Imlek were prohibited. It may have surprised Wahid that this decree was hugely successful, not only among the Chinese but especially among young non-Chinese Indonesians. One cannot doubt that here the influence of films from Hong Kong, Taiwan and more recently the PRC, and of advertising, soaps and travelogues on television, has played a big role. What in the 1950s was seen as the cultural expression of an often disliked local ethnic group is now seen as part of a general culture of the spectacle and of tourism. It was common in the old days for wealthy Chinese to hire young and poor non-Chinese to dance the famous lion-dance. The practice has been revived, but in a ‘Mardi Gras’ spirit of festive fun.

[14] Eka, a great admirer of Pramoedya, wrote a first-class academic thesis, since published, on the older writer's complex relationship with ‘socialist realism’. The two novels are Cantik Itu Luka [‘Beautiful’, a Wound] (2002) and Lelaki Harimau [Man Tiger] (2004). The first is a huge, rather unwieldy, surreal recapitulation of the past century of Indonesian history set in a sort of isolated Macondo somewhere on the south coast of Java. The second is a brilliant, tight-knit and frightening village tragedy, also set somewhere on that barren littoral. I understand that both novels are starting to be translated into other languages.