Ben Anderson and Indonesia

He passed away two weeks ago at the age of 79 in the country he loved so well. Scholar Benedict R. O'G. Anderson became an important part of Indonesia's modern history. One of his best-known academic contributions is his study on the September 30 (G30S) movement titled A Preliminary Analysis of the September Movement, or better known as the Cornell Paper. Along with a number of academics at Cornell University in the United States, among them Ruth McVey, Anderson concluded that the incident was not a coup by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) but an internal conflict within the Indonesian Army.

The paper was published on January 1, 1966, just three months after the bloody incident, and it was seen at the time to have been a hurried piece of work. The trials of senior PKI executives had just begun at the time. Later, it was revealed that the conflict within the Army was just one cause of the G30S movement, and the Cornell Paper could not have been totally mistaken.