A prominent Indonesianist from New York’s Cornell University, Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, or Ben Anderson, died of heart failure early on Sunday at a hospital in Batu, East Java, while visiting the resort city on vacation. He was 79.
Anderson, known for his critical analysis of Indonesia’s social and political affairs and his study of the events that led to the massacre of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s, died at a time of seemingly intensifying efforts by the government to silence a public campaign for an investigation into the tragedy, which claimed a suspected death toll of some 500,000 people.
