Bali: Paradise vs Memory - the Killing Fields of 1965-66

Two former members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), who wished to remain anonymous for their safety. One was detained extensively; only after his release did he learn that his brother had been executed during the purge.

The Oberoi, Bali. Persistent rumours among residents suggest the hotel was built atop unrecorded graves from the 1965-66 violence.

Terrace of a luxury hotel in Rendang. Elderly residents say the surrounding area was the site of particularly brutal killings during the 1965-66 anti-communist purges.

Local residents collect shells along Masceti Beach, where some community elders allege executions once took place.

The beachfront at the Oberoi. Some in the surrounding community believe the shoreline forms part of a wider, undocumented landscape of killings.

Loungers outside the Bali Beach Hotel. Opened in 1966, the hotel is situated near what historians claim were the burned remains of a village targeted during the anti-communist violence.

Tourists at Masceti Beach, a shore that local accounts describe as having been used as an execution site

Poolside at the Oberoi, set in a landscape where locals speak quietly of unmarked burial sites.

Whilst Bali is renowned for its rice fields, sites like these were described by witnesses as locations where bodies were disposed of during the mass killings.

Bali is celebrated as a paradise: its world-class beaches, stunning rice terraces, vibrant nightlife, luxury resorts, and booming community of digital nomads draw millions of visitors each year. Yet beneath this picturesque surface lies a dark and largely suppressed history.

After a failed coup in Jakarta in 1965, the Indonesian Army accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of orchestrating a nationwide plot to seize power and launched a sweeping anti-communist purge. Over the next six months, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million PKI members and suspected sympathisers were killed across Indonesia. On Bali alone, as many as 100,000 people - around 7 percent of the island’s population - were executed without trial and buried in unmarked graves. Many of these sites now lie beneath the luxury hotels, beaches, and tourist centres that shape Bali’s modern identity. None publicly acknowledge the violence on which they stand.

Drawing on survivor testimony, this series examines the stark contradiction between the global imagination of Bali as an island paradise and the buried history of mass killings that tore through the island in 1965-66. Through portraits of survivors and images of locations linked to the violence, the series aims to reveal a side of Bali rarely recognised and to explore the uneasy tension between paradise and memory.