Abstract
The article examines both civil society initiatives that seek to address the mass violence of 1965 and 1966 and the state's responses to them. Unlike other political-transition contexts in the world, a transitional justice approach is apparently a formula that state authorities have found difficult to implement nationally for this particular case. The central government has, through its institutions, sporadically responded to some of the calls from civil society groups and has even initiated policy reforms to support such initiatives. Nevertheless, these responses were not sustained and any suggested programmes have always failed to be completed or implemented. Simultaneously, however, NGOs and victims are also voicing their demands at the local level. Many of their initiatives involve not only communities but also local authorities, including in some cases the local governments. In some aspects, these “bottom-up” approaches are more successful than attempts to create change at the national level. Such approaches challenge what Kieran McEvoy refers to as an innate “seductive” quality of transitional justice, but at the same time these approaches do, in fact, aim to “seduce” the state to adopt measures for truth and justice.
Introduction
On 1 October 2010, a group called the Children of the Nation Gathering Forum (FSAB, Forum Silaturahmi Anak Bangsa) organised a meeting facilitated by former Chair of the People's Consultative Assembly Taufik Kiemas. The composition of the meeting was interesting in that it gathered some of the family members of those involved in the 1965 coup attempt, including children of, among others, Sukarno, Suharto, Aidit (who was the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party at the time of the coup) and the six generals killed. Photographs from the meeting were published on the front pages of many national and local newspapers. Those pictures said something about reconciliation. For those who participated in the gathering, it was reconciliation among those involved in past political conflicts. For many victims, however, it was merely a symbolic gathering of children of the old political elites. For politicians, the gathering represented “the Indonesian way of reconciliation”, maintaining harmony and deciding to move on with life. 1 For many Indonesians, it was simply another political stunt in a transitioning Indonesia. Has national reconciliation actually begun to take place?
Taufik Kiemas, quoted in many national and local media outlets reporting on the gathering in 2010. On 25 May 2013, the same gathering was conducted, and the phrase “Indonesian way of reconciliation” was repeated by politicians, including MPs (see, for example, Firdaus 2013).
The answer is no, for two reasons: first, because national reconciliation, whose goal is to reconcile the whole nation which was shattered by hatred and distrust, cannot be limited to elites previously involved in relevant past events; second, and most important, national reconciliation can only happen on the basis of truth and its acknowledgement by the state, followed by concrete measures towards justice and rule of law. These are the aspects lacking in the efforts to address the extended violence that began in 1965 and continued for some years afterward, violence committed against those believed to be members of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI) and its alleged sympathisers. While exact numbers remain unknown, it is believed that millions of people were killed, disappeared, and tortured, including hundreds of thousands that were detained for years without trial.
Since the Reformasi (reform movement) began in 1998, there have been various demands made of the state to deal with this part of Indonesian history, to right the past wrongs by acknowledging the truth of what happened to many of its citizens and to attempt to achieve justice for them. Many hoped that such efforts would eventually lead to national reconciliation between elements in society that were damaged and divided by the atrocity.
However, as evident from other countries’ experiences, addressing mass human rights abuses that occurred under past regimes in the following period of political transition can be problematic. The problem lies in the tension between “the desire to bury the past, in order to avoid provoking the ire of powerful wrongdoers, and the ethical and political demand to confront the crimes of the prior regime” (Hayner 2001: 10). Some scholars are sceptical of the mechanisms used to address past injustice, arguing that they endanger the prospect of democratisation in fledgling democracies. Such mechanisms can be seen as hate campaigns against the old regime and thus make the old regime resentful and unsupportive of the newly established democracy, a state of affairs which Juan Linz describes as “resentment politics” (1978). But others have argued that backward-looking measures may help spur wider reforms, especially when crimes committed by the state's security institutions in the past are acknowledged and examined in order to create the foundations for strong, resilient future democracies.
The field of transitional justice studies has taken shape over the last two decades and refers to how governments and societies deal with legacies of past injustice in countries emerging from conflict or authoritarian regimes to democracy. In its 2004 report, the Office of the United Nations Secretary-General defined transitional justice as
the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society's attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation (2004: 3).
Such concepts are at work in various legal mechanisms at the state level, which include prosecutions, truth-seeking, reconciliation, reparations and institutional reforms in the form of lustration or vetting. These mechanisms have received considerable attention and encouragement in many parts of the world and have been institutionalised as part of the expansion of international law.
Kieran McEvoy argues that the development of this field is marked by a positivistic trend of scholarship and practice mostly along legal lines, suggesting that transitional justice is a standard approach for states to manage the transition that has become a “one-size-fits-all” formula adopted in many post-conflict or post–authoritarian-regime settings (2007: 414). In such understandings, “rule of law” is the condition for justice that brings the certainty, objectivity and rationality needed in times of transition (McEvoy 2007: 411–416). He refers to this legalism as facilitating and promoting a “seductive” quality of transitional justice which compels states to adopt and implement top-down policies to deliver truth and justice. In other words: Legalism is attractive (or: seducing) because it orders the world. But legalism is problematic in the context of transitional justice.
In the case of the mass violence in the 1960s, the state has never been compelled to adopt such measures to come to terms with its past. It is civil society and activists working on human rights issues that have insisted the state settle the case and right its past wrongs by adopting measures for truth and justice. In the early years of Reformasi, state institutions responded to some of these calls and initiated both policies addressing the 1965 tragedy and attempts to promote national reconciliation. However, most of these projects at the central-state level have failed to be completed or implemented.
At the same time, those NGOs have been continuously working with local communities and government at local levels on truth and justice, including reconciliation efforts between victims and perpetrators. Over the last few years, more initiatives have been organised, mainly at the regency level. Some of them succeeded in getting local authorities’ acknowledgements and commitments. Even though these initiatives took place at the local level, NGOs and victims are still striving for the state to adopt truth and justice mechanisms at the national level. They share the expectation that these “small” successes at the local level would then, in McEvoy's sense, “seduce” the government and national political elite to settle the case of past injustice.
In this paper, I will briefly cover some of these initiatives and the responses to them from both civil society and state institutions, as well as discussing how the demands for truth and justice have been articulated, with varying degrees of failure at the national level and moderate success at the local levels, by identifying certain factors that contribute to those outcomes. The civil society groups I refer to here are human rights NGOs and victims’ groups. The first part of the paper will review how the discourse on the mass violence of 1965 was addressed during the early years of political transition. Following that, I will look at the demands made by NGOs and victims at the national level for transitional justice measures to be adopted and implemented by the state. The state responded to such demands by creating its own initiatives or initiating mechanisms for truth and justice through its institutions, but it eventually failed to meet expectations. At the same time, civil society groups are also working at the local levels with both the communities and local authorities. I will examine some of the successes these initiatives have enjoyed, as well as looking at the challenges they have faced. Finally, there have been other attempts by civil society to bridge the gaps between national and local initiatives that I will further review in this paper.
The 1965 Mass Violence in Indonesia's Political Transition
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the tragedy of 1965 was among “the bloodiest anti-communist purges of the twentieth century” (Gerlach 2010: 87). The killings were carried out by the military and by civilians participating in militias whose members were drawn from various political parties and religious groups. The killings took place across Indonesia, with the highest estimated death count on the island of Java. The estimated number of people killed during this purge ranges from 100,000 to more than one million (Cribb 1990: 12).
Many studies have explored in detail historical accounts of this tragedy (Anderson and McVey 1971; Robinson 1995; Roosa 2006). In brief, the tragedy was the result of polarisation between leftist and rightist groups in Indonesia, which for some decades manifested itself in political competition and political polarisation within society. On the night of 30 September 1965, six senior generals and a lieutenant were kidnapped and murdered. Most of those involved in this attempted coup were middle- and low-ranking military officials, and the movement was quickly countered by other elements in the armed forces led by General Suharto. In the wake of the coup, the military successfully manipulated the Indonesian population through an extensive propaganda campaign which blamed the 30th September Movement on the PKI and its associated organisations. The violence that followed against these leftist groups has been called a “coalition of violence”, involving political parties and rightist groups drawn especially from anti-communist religious organisations (Gerlach 2010: 17).
Recent studies have shown that the massive and large-scale violence occurred mainly between early October 1965 and mid-1966. In addition to the killing of approximately half a million people, many more were tortured and kidnapped during this period. Later on, as the killings began to abate, arbitrary arrests and detentions without trial increased, lasting until the 1980s. The numbers of detainees reached more than one million, and these people were held for up to twenty years, depending on their alleged level of involvement with the PKI. 2 Many detainees were tortured and raped during imprisonment.
Tapol (an acronym for Tahanan Politik or “Political Prisoner”), an organisation based in London and founded by Carmel Budiardjo – a former political prisoner herself, reported that at least 1,375,320 persons were imprisoned under Category “C”, made up of those deemed related or sympathetic to the PKI and its activities; 34,587 were listed under Category “B”, those suspected of involvement in the 30 September coup, who were then detained for ten years; and 426 persons comprised Category “A”, those thought to be directly involved in the 30 September coup, who were either imprisoned for life or executed. See Bulletin Tapol No. 80, April 1987, quoted in Budiawan 2004: 1.
For decades during Suharto's regime (1966–1998), Indonesians were told only one official version of the 30th September Movement (referred to then as the “G-30-S/PKI”). The official version of the coup was that it had been planned by the PKI with the aim of taking over the country. They had brutally killed the six generals, who were later enshrined as martyrs of the nation. There were no official stories about the massacres and the mass violence that followed the attempted coup. Through pervasive rhetoric and symbols, including slogans and “heroic monuments”, and also through school curriculums and a state-produced documentary film, Indonesian citizens were taught to hate communism. This tightly controlled discourse was policed by the Indonesian security apparatus, which reacted harshly to any dissenting views. Indonesians lived in fearful silence and suffered a collective amnesia in regards to the massacre. Over the last three decades, the Indonesian state has successfully constructed the discourse of 1965 as “a trope of signifying threat, betrayal, and anti-nationalism” (Zurbuchen 2002: 567). Such discourse became a master narrative that not only secured the regime's legitimacy but also contributed significantly to the hyper-obedience of many Indonesians (Heryanto 1999).
After the beginning of the Reformasi movement, the state's single narrative of 1965 began to be contested by other narratives, particular by stories related to the coup and the violence that followed, commonly referred to as the “Tragedi 1965”. New evidence and documentation has come forward in relation to the coup, and new perspectives have arisen which examine the tragedy not only as a political event per se but also as a case of mass human rights violations.
In the last fifteen years, public discussions about the events during and following the 30 September coup have increased, and the public has begun to acknowledge that millions of Indonesian citizens were killed, disappeared, tortured and detained. Mary Zurbuchen has explained these changes in the post-Suharto era and discussed the various elements in society and the state that have driven these changes. These drivers of change include human rights NGOs and international human rights campaigners, prominent figures, and international acknowledgement of certain ex-political prisoners (commonly referred to as “eks-tapol” or “ETs”), such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Since the end of the New Order, we have seen a flourishing of memoirs and literary publications on and by these ETs, increased coverage from national media, and controversial political decisions made by former President Abdurrahman Wahid (Zurbuchen 2002: 597–573).
As part of the massive “reform” movement across the nation, which has provoked wider discussions about the crimes of the past, many of these new accounts have contested the official narrative of the past, the “New Order” history. Budiawan, for example, has convincingly argued that the main area of contestation is between history and memory – that is, between “the past as narrated institutionally and the past as experienced personally” (Budiawan 2000: 2). Drawing from specific historians working on memory, such as Pierre Nora and Michel de Certeau, he shows that personal memories of both victims and perpetrators, as represented by ETs and some Muslim groups which participated in the killings (such as Nahdlatul Ulama), eventually transform history. Such narratives compete with each other, and thus lead the actors of “Reformasi” to react with ambivalence regarding whether they should associate themselves either with the “true reformists” who promote narratives by the victims, or with the Muslim groups who refuse to accept such narratives because they are cast as perpetrators.
Within this contested landscape of the early post-Reformasi era came the rise of the Law on Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the TRC law) in 2004. This law carried with it the great expectations not only of victims but also of society at large. The law was, however, annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2006. Following this decision, civil society organisations, including victims’ groups, began to seek alternative avenues and methods to achieving meaningful reconciliation. As Bräuchler has concluded, when there is no truth and reconciliation infrastructure, one must look for alternatives and find other ways for the victims to recover and for society to rebuild (Bräuchler 2009: 21).
Making Transitional Justice from above Appealing: Human Rights NGOs’ Initiatives at the National Level
Civil society groups have played a significant role in the democratic transition of Indonesia. As Edward Aspinall notes, after 1998 civil society expanded dramatically in terms of numbers and associational activities (Aspinall 2004: 85). This also reflects the development of the human rights movement, particularly in addressing the 1965 tragedy that occurred during Indonesia's transition. In the years leading up to Suharto's resignation in 1998, it had been these human rights NGOs who had insisted that the truth of the 1965 mass violence be addressed and that the state be accountable to its citizens. NGOs have been organising their works around truth-seeking (documentation and collection of victim's testimonies), public campaigning, advocating for reparations (including legal advocacy for victims’ rights) and getting involved in policy re-forms. 3 Two projects that received responses from state institutions are the drafting of the TRC law led by ELSAM (Lembaga Studi dan Advokasi Masyarakat, the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy) and the class action against the Government of the Republic of Indonesia, the President and former Presidents of the Republic of Indonesia, in order to restore victims’ good names and to annul all policies that stigmatised them, as well as to compensate them monetarily. 4
Some of these NGOs are KontraS (Komisi untuk Orang Hilang dan Korban Tindakan Kekerasan, the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence), ISSI (Insitut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia, Institute of Indonesian Social History), SNB (Solidaritas Nusa Bangsa, Homeland Solidarity), LBH (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum, Legal Aid Institute) and PBHI (Perhimpunan Bantuan Hukum dan Hak Asasi Manusia Indonesia, Indonesian Legal Aid and Human Rights Association).
Lawsuit No. 341/SK/LBH/V/2005, LBH Jakarta, 2005.
In the early years of reform, most of the organisations avoided working with government institutions because they distrusted the new regime and because they much preferred to build solidarity with victims or grass-roots communities, and continued to struggle against injustice by ignoring political representative bodies, including political parties (Priyono, Samadhi, and Tornquist 2007). Such an approach by Indonesian activists had two outcomes, according to A.E. Priyono. First, by focusing only on victims and victims’ empowerment, the issue of past injustice and the need for state accountability became rhetorical – important only symbolically for these particular groups – and failed to create links with the wider population's interests. Second, their working only with the victims and grass-roots communities without collaborating with political institutions undermined the need for institutional and legal reforms (Priyono 2005).
However, other NGOs have taken a different approach when dealing with the state and articulating their interests: to engage, rather than estrange, in regards to formal political processes. Aspinall highlights this as the main feature of civil society groups in the post-Suharto period where they are most likely to seek consensus with the state. He argues that “the primary aims of politics were conceived as pressuring, lobbying, or otherwise influencing the state to achieve desirable policy outcomes” (Aspinall 2004: 75). Some individual politicians, particularly those with a social activism background or those with family ties to the 1965 tragedy, have made their ways to political office within the national legislature. Some of these individuals have been able to use their positions to lobby the government to achieve these NGOs’ objectives. As Haris Azhar, the coordinator of KontraS has said,
Lobbying through personal contacts is more effective. This is because the mechanism is neither (usually) available nor functioning. No wonder there are demonstrations every day, because there are few mechanisms available. Opportunities to lobby are so scarce, so are the lobbyists. 5
Interview, 11 May 2012. All interviews were conducted in Bahasa Indonesia and translated by the author.
Whether an NGO decides to work with state institutions or keep its distance from them, one significant challenge for these NGOs is to continue to raise the issue of past human rights abuses while balancing this goal with more contemporary issues – for example, ending corruption, fighting for social and economic rights and speaking out about environmental damage – that are faced by developing countries in transition such as Indonesia. Moreover, within NGO circles, there is much debate over which issues should be given priority. Activists largely believed that prosecutions were the best way to solve past human rights abuses despite their scepticism that such trials could be fair, given the corrupt and inept legal system in Indonesia (Farid and Simarmata 2004). This stance has been debated by others who argue that truth-seeking (through, for example, a truth commission) is the first step toward justice, while others still have said that there should be a combination of prosecution and truth-seeking to ensure a comprehensive approach to addressing past injustices. ELSAM, for example, has long advocated for the setting up of a truth commission such as the one established in South Africa (Suh 2012: 104–158).
Victims’ Groups
Victims’ organisations and groups, which emerged and developed after Reformasi, were highly involved in most of the initiatives by human rights groups explained above. 6 The participation of these groups has projected a clear message to the wider public for the need to understand victims’ perspectives as well as calling for solidarity. 7 For victims, their involvement in civil society initiatives is necessary. As Bedjo Untung, head of the YPKP, has said,
Victims’ organisations include Yayasan Penelitian Korban Pembunuhan 1965 (Research Foundation for Victims of the 1965–1966 Killings, or, YPKP), Pakorba (Paguyuban Korban Orde Baru, Victims of the New Order Association), Lembaga Penelitian Korban Pembunuhan 1965 (the Research Institute for Victims of the 1965 Tragedy, or, LPKP ‘65), LPK ‘65 (Lembaga Pembela Korban ‘65, the 1965 Victims’ Defence Organisation), LPRKROB (Lembaga Perjuangan Rehabilitasi Korban Rejim Orde Baru, Organisation for the Rehabilitation Struggle for New Order Victims), and KKP HAM ‘65 (Komite Aksi Korban Pelanggaran HAM Peristiwa 1965, the 1965 Human Rights Victims’ Action Committee). Some of these organisations claim to have hundreds of members and branches throughout the country. Some draw more exclusively from the former members of the PKI, but others include non-PKI affiliated figures and/or the family members of victims such as Pakorba or IKOHI (Ikatan Keluarga Orang Hilang, Association of Families of the Disappeared). Short profiles of some of these organisations can be found in Farid and Simarmatra (2004: 36–38).
These are some of the expressions repeatedly used by many NGO activists during interviews with the author.
NGOs have to open widely the space for victims to be involved in all forums available […] because they [the victims] are the ones who experience the injustice (Interview, 15 May 2012).
Victims’ organisations are also actively at work on their own initiatives for truth and justice, including the weekly silent Thursday peace demonstrations, or Kamisan, which take place in front of the Presidential Pal-ace. 8 The YPKP, for example, in the early years of reform, gathered victims’ testimonies in ways that would facilitate the development of a database, as well as exhuming mass graves sites in Java. 9 LPRKROB has documented at least 35 discriminatory regulations established between 1975 and 2006 and made a petition to the President in 2005 to urge for the dismissal of all these regulations (see Mudjayin 2008).
Kamisan, from the word Kamis, meaning Thursday, is a regular silent protest held every Thursday in front of the National Palace, Jakarta. Dressed in black, victims and their advocates gather peacefully and write to the President, urging the state to take responsibility for human rights abuses in Indonesia and to restore the rights of the victims. The protest started on 18 January 2007, inspired by the peaceful protests by mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. The protest was initiated by victims, among them Sumiarsih, whose son, Wawan, was shot dead in the 1998 Trisakti Tragedy, and Suciwati, the widow of Munir, a prominent human rights activist poisoned by members of the Indonesian Intelligence Body (Badan Intelijen Negara, BIN).
Interview with Bedjo Untung, 15 May 2012.
It is interesting to note that most of these victims’ groups consist of ETs. By adopting a human rights framework for addressing narratives and interests, these groups have shown that they are no longer associated with any division in vertically aligned post-Cold War ideological blocs as they were in the past. Human rights became particular norms that have been endorsed in international law, which requires states, as part of the international community, to abide by and implement these norms domestically. NGOs and victims’ groups alike have developed as “norm entrepreneurs”, who aim to ensure that the state implement these norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). International human rights law became the dominant language of global justice which cut across cleavages prevalent during the Cold War. For human rights NGOs and victims’ groups, this is where they found not only their relevant narratives but also the language to express their needs, which they wished to be acknowledged by the state, by society at large, and by the international community. As Sally Engel Merry suggests, these groups – as part of new social movements – find human rights a productive source of ideology and a valuable political resource (Merry 2006).
The State's Failures to Come to Terms with the Past
Even though civil society groups have organised many initiatives addressing the 1965 tragedy, the state has responded to these only sporadically and unsustainably: Only particular government institutions have responded to particular issues brought up by civil society groups, and these responses are unsustainable because they have not been formalised into state policies or judicial measures. There are at least three factors that determine such responses by the government, the first being motivation and leadership on the part of political actors, the second being the degree of institutions’ autonomy from central power. These two factors are closely linked to the third – namely, the collusive nature of elite politics in the period of democratic transition.
Factors relating to motivation and leadership on the part of politicians have demonstrated their importance under each presidency in the post-Suharto era. B. J. Habibie, the interim president after Suharto's resignation, released political prisoners, including those accused of involvement in the 1965 coup. He also initiated the drafting of Law No. 3/1999 on “General Elections”, which included a provision to grant ex-political detainees, including those accused of communist involvement, the right to vote. 10 Budiawan argues that the decision was partly driven by his personal motivation to be acknowledged publicly as the “true reformer” by tolerating the mass hysteria of “de-Suhartoisation” during which he tried to connect himself with the then-rising discourse of human rights (2004: 5).
Describing his tenure as president after Suharto, Habibie writes of his decision to release political prisoners as part of his “Reformasi” agenda, which included the dismissal of Law No. 11/PNPS of 1963 on the “Eradication of Subversive Activities”(see Habibie 2006: 71, 113). Later on, realising that such decisions would invoke controversy about his leadership domestically, he immediately established Law No. 27/1999 on Changes in the Criminal Code related to Crimes against State Security. The law explicitly mentions that communist and socialist teachings and ideologies are a threat to the nation and that a serious criminal charge would apply to those who perform or are involved in these ideological teachings.
Following Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid (known also as Gus Dur) took over the presidency in October 1999 and it was during his short term in office that he made policies around the truths of 1965 and restoring victims’ rights. These included making two presidential decrees disbanding the National Security Agency (Bakorstanas) and the Special Investigation Unit (Litsus), which was significant for ex-political prisoners, detainees and their families, and drafting the Law on Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Wahid also passed Presidential Instruction No. 1/2000, addressing the problems of many Indonesians abroad who had not been able to return home after the 1965 coup by instructing the Minister of Law and Human Rights to take necessary measures to facilitate their return. Unfortunately, by the time his term ended, Minister of Law and Human Rights Yusril Ihza Mahendra, at the time Chair of Crescent Star Party, had not carried out the task. Wahid was long known as an advocate of human rights and pluralism and was also outspoken in advocating for truth and reconciliation for the 1965 tragedy. He was also a long-time leader of the largest Islamic organisation in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). However, most of his initiatives regarding the 1965 tragedy were driven by his personal motivation as someone who had been involved in human rights activities himself, and not institutionalised in his executive leadership or even in his leadership of the NU. 11
This includes his appearance on a national television programme on 14 March 2000, when he referred to the killings of alleged communists committed by members of the NU and expressed his apology for such actions, and encouraged citizens to “open up” the history of 1965 and to talk about other human rights abuses, urging the NU to carry out reconciliation because many of its members had also committed violence.
Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, replaced Wahid after Parliament accused him of corruption, ending his nearly two-year presidential term. Sukarno was marginalised and stripped of power after the 1965 coup, as popular antipathy toward the PKI and the left spread as a result of the military's anti-communist propaganda. When Megawati took the presidency, many people, especially the victims of 1965, expected her to follow up on her predecessor's attempts to bring about truth and justice in the context of the 1965 tragedy. Unfortunately, she chose a safer position for securing her presidency by not addressing the 1965 tragedy. The only attempt she did make was in regard to rewriting the history of what happened during the 30 September coup and afterward by asking the Minister of Education at the time, Malik Fajar, to establish a team of historians to publish a book that would be used for teaching and education. 12 Megawati's administration also made a breakthrough by revising the curriculum for secondary education, which included the removal of “PKI” from the official name of the September coup, previously written as “G-30-S/PKI” or “30th September Movement/PKI” in history books in 2006. However, there was outrage in the face of this new curriculum and the revised history books, which included the burning of thousands of these books and the Attorney General investigating the head of the National Education Curriculum at the time, Diah Harianti, and its previous head, Siskandar, in regards to this issue (Adam 2007). The Ministry of Education under Yudhoyono has reinstated the “PKI” inclusion in the most recent history textbooks.
The team, led by Taufik Abdullah, started their project in 2004 and published the book in three series in 2012 (e.g. Abdullah, Abdurrachman, and Gunawan 2012).
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired army general who has been the President of Indonesia since the 2004 elections, shares Megawati's reluctance to respond to any reconciliation issues, and many of the early initiatives taken by both civil society and state institutions have failed to be implemented. He has also been inconsistent in his policies towards settling cases of past human rights abuses, especially on the 1965 mass violence. When Law No. 27/2004 on the TRC was finally passed, its implementation was very slow. However, when the law was annulled in 2006, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights drafted a new law on the TRC and submitted it to Parliament for further discussion during the parliamentary period from 2010 to 2014. 13 The new draft contains some positive changes, particularly with regard to the exclusion of amnesty provisions (which were the main source of controversy in the previous law). At the time of writing, the draft had been withdrawn from the parliamentary legislation agenda on the President's authority and is currently being held by the Coordinating Ministry for Legal, Political and Security Affairs for an unknown period of time. This also serves to evince the inconsistency of Yudhoyono's leadership as President.
The drafting took more than three years, its authors comprising legal scholars led by Harkrituti Harkrisnowo, the General Director for Law and Human Rights at the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, who is also a senior scholar at the University of Indonesia.
He then decided to go about dealing with the past in his own way. Through his expert staff in legal affairs, Denny Indrayana, Yudhoyono held a meeting in 2010 with the head of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), Ifdhal Kasim, and with a representative of NGOs, Usman Hamid (KontraS), which was followed up with other meetings that were expanded to include civil society groups, including victims’ groups, to discuss possible options, as well as to set up a special unit within the Coordinating Ministry for Legal, Political and Security Affairs to deal with cases of past human rights abuses. Yudhoyono remains reluctant, however, to include the 1965 tragedy within these discussions, as they would necessarily involve descriptions of Sarwo Edhie, the President's late father-in-law, who was in charge of “securing” the nation from communism as the Commander of the Army Paracommando Regiment (RPKAD) during the massacres that followed the coup.
These meetings have never resulted in any concrete programmes or policies for the settlement of cases of past human rights abuses. Instead, in 2011, Yudhoyono assigned one of the members of the President's Advisory Council, Albert Hasibuan, a former Komnas HAM commissioner, to establish a programme for a national apology to victims of past human rights abuses. There was also a series of meetings held to discuss this initiative with scholars, legal experts, researchers, NGO representatives and victims’ groups. It became a major controversy, however, when some sections of society, particularly those from the NU and some political elites, expressed their resistance to the idea of “apology”. For these opposing groups, they rejected the idea that the state should apologise to communists who tried to destroy the nation by carrying out the 30 September coup. But for Hasibuan, Yudhoyono's advisor,
[an] apology to the victims can be an entry point for defining serious crimes and past injustices. This [apology] could be a legacy for Indonesian history […] and, further, we can determine what kinds of reparations are needed for the victims, not necessarily compensation (Interview, 2 May 2012).
This apology, however, is unlikely to be realised. With the strong reactions against it from some influential political leaders and mass organisations, Yudhoyono remains reluctant to finish what he started, especially since it is almost the end of his second and final term and he has competing political agendas in his attempts to ensure victory for his Democrat Party (PD) in the upcoming elections in 2014.
Even though political leaders seem unwilling to implement transitional justice mechanisms, or inconsistent when they do, the more autonomous state institutions have a stronger commitment to having such mechanisms in place. In the area of truth-seeking, the National Commission for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), has made a breakthrough by publishing their national report, which documents the testimonies and life stories of women victims of the mass violence in 1965 and 1966. The report, entitled Gender-based Crimes Against Humanity: Listening to the Voices of Women Survivors of 1965 (2007), was the first report by a state institution which adopted a human rights and women's rights framework, and which focused on the narratives of the victims and the implications of the tragedy. The team collected 122 testimonies from women victims, ranging from those who were members and activists of Gerwani (the Indonesian Women Movement, an organisation accused of being involved in the 30th September Movement), as well as other organisations and individuals. The report shows that women were the subjects of violence, ranging from killings and other types of violence to more specific gender-based forms of violence, perpetrated mostly by Indonesian security forces (Komnas Perempuan 2007).
Within the area of prosecution or judicial mechanism, Komnas HAM investigated the case for more than four years. The report was published in July 2012, and it found that the widespread abuse and killings of the 1960s entailed a gross violation of human rights. 14 The report explicitly states that serious crimes against humanity had been committed against hundreds of thousands of Indonesian citizens since 1965 during the New Order regime, mostly perpetrated by Indonesian state forces, and it also acknowledges the involvement of members of civil society organisations (Komnas HAM 2012).
Acknowledging the widespread violence that took place, the team collected whatever testimonies it could verify, and came up with hundreds of samples from various areas across the country, several of which had never before been raised in public (Interviews with two members of the team, Kabul Supriyadi on 28 March 2012 and Nur Kholis on 28 February 2013).
As was predicted by many human rights activists, and members of Komnas HAM themselves, the Attorney General's Office refused to proceed with its own judicial investigation, and returned the report to Komnas HAM, requesting it provide more evidence and revise the report within thirty days. The President did not respond to the report, treading ever more cautiously ahead of the 2014 elections. Meanwhile, the Coordinating Minister for Legal, Political and Security Affairs explicitly rejected the findings of the report by saying that the killings were necessary in order to save the country from communism (Aritonang 2012a). The report itself, which was published only months after Hasibuan's announcement about his plan for a formal presidential apology, instigated strong reactions against both Komnas HAM's report and the apology. A group of retired generals and active politicians, members of the Golkar party and affiliated organisations such as Pemuda Pancasila, gathered in the Gedung Sate in Bandung and signed a petition against the apology (Sihite 2012). Authorities from within the NU hierarchy and some other Islamic organisations, including the Ansor Youth Movement, also furiously rejected both the report and the planned apology (Aritonang 2012b). The NU did not make any official statements about the issue due to internal differences regarding the organisation's stance on this matter. However, eventually a faction within the PBNU (NU's Main Board) published a “white paper” recently in defence of the NU's position during the atrocity (Abdul Mun'im DZ 2013). This reflects the polarised positions within the NU on the tragedy, as clearly described by McGregor (2009: 214–232).
Other than the truth-seeking and prosecutorial initiatives from state-related institutions, reparations were another transitional justice measure for addressing the tragedy by directly compensating victims. On 14 March 2003, LPRKROB, the Indonesian Association of Legal Aid (PHBI), the Advocacy Team of Indonesian Police Members Victims of the ‘65 Tragedy, and the Communication Forum of Former Dwikora Ministers Victims of Abuse of Supersemar (Forkum Ex Menteri Dwikora) met Bagir Manan, the Chair of the Supreme Court, to seek acknowledgement and reparations for victims. 15 Following the meeting, the Court wrote to the President recommending further action to repair victims’ rights. 16 There has been no response from either Megawati, the president at the time, or her successor, Yudhoyono, nor have any other state officials at the national level acknowledged the Court's recommendation.
Minutes of meeting by Witaryono S. Reksoprodjo, March 2003, personal communication.
See Legal View of the Supreme Court on Victims of the New Order, the Supreme Court, 12 June 2003.
Komnas HAM has also worked with the State Body for Victims and Witness Protection (LPSK) to initiate a programme for reparations to individual victims. Even though this programme was designed for all cases of human rights abuses, victims of 1965 also have the opportunity to access it with a reference letter from Komnas HAM. 17
Interview with Kabul Supriyadi, 28 March 2012.
Most of these transitional justice measures taken by autonomous state institutions were not followed up on or adopted by the central government or the legislatures. Excepting the TRC law and the national apology plan, many initiatives and policies were set up by the executive without necessarily involving NGOs, and took non-conventional transitional approaches to justice. One of the possible explanations for this is that the choices and decisions made to settle the mass violence of 1965 and 1966 were carefully compromised according to the characteristics of power-sharing arrangements among political elites, a phenomenon Dan Slater (2004, 2006) would label “collusive democracy”. In the context of such an arrangement, stability was a condition for political figures to maintain their power by avoiding any opposition among different factions, including the majority factions that oppose the seeking out of truth and justice in the cases from 1965 and 1966.
Pushing for Truth and Justice from Below
Since there has been stagnation at the national level in dealing with issues of truth and justice on the mass violence in the mid-1960s, in the last few years NGOs and victims’ groups alike have undertaken more grass-roots and community-based activities at the local level. In the early years after Reformasi, victims – individually or affiliated with organisations, especially at the local level – were less frequently engaged and less openly active in many NGO initiatives. As Nurlela Karim from SKP-HAM Palu (Solidarity for Victims of Human Rights Violation in Palu) has explained,
In Palu, when I met ETs for the first time, there were LPKP ‘65, LPRKROB, but their activities were mostly “underground” […]. They only met secretly […]. They came to NGO events, joined in advocacy activities on land rights and some other [issues]. By that time they did not speak using a human rights framework […]. We convinced them that if many people tell their stories, then we can see a clear picture of what happened to them (Interview, 8 May 2012).
Survivors of 1965 were apprehensive when joining in many associational activities during those early years of political transition. This was understandable when one considers the fear and trauma brought on by the long period of oppression they and their families suffered throughout the Suharto years. For many of them, however, it was also a period of building solidarity (Farid and Simarmata 2004). Thus, even though the public had begun to acknowledge their experiences, as Zurbuchen warned there are and always were risks associated with evoking personal memories about past traumas – traumas that, in a newly democratising Indonesia, were still often denied due to the continuing general anti-communist stance within society (Zurbuchen 2002: 580–581).
Three aspects explain at least some of the success that NGOs and victims’ groups have had in their initiatives: the strategies used, the backgrounds of the actors, and the institution's affiliation. The strategy commonly used, building inclusivity in mobilising and organising their activities, has proven an effective strategy for NGOs and victims’ groups and has contributed to the positive outcomes of their initiatives. This strategy gained not only public acknowledgement but also support from communities and local authorities and helped facilitate reconciliation efforts between victims and the wider public and local authorities. In Central Sulawesi, young activists from SKP-HAM, together with victims, have managed to collect documents, archives, photos, audio-visual materials, and 1,028 testimonies of victims (SKP-HAM's website 2013). They have also organised several commemorations, the most momentous one having taken place on the International Day for the Right to Truth in March 2012, during which victims gave their testimonies in the presence of various members of the public and state authorities. During this event, the mayor of Palu, Rusdi Mastura, took the opportunity to deliver an apology, on behalf of himself and the local government. 18
See his speech at www.skp-ham.org/76/ketika-walikota-meminta-maaf-kepada-korban/. In an interview with the author on 16 May 2012, Rusdi Mastura expressed his remorse for what he did as a boy scout when he joined in the “safeguarding” mission. They were equipped with sticks, and had to take part in arresting the “communists”, even their own teachers. Mastura himself comes from a Masyumi family background, and in Palu during the 1960s, Masyumi also had conflicts with the PKI.
In most local communities, the positive outcomes of these initiatives are also determined by the background of the actors involved in the reconciliation attempts. The coordinator of SKP-HAM Palu, Nurlela Lamasitudju, comes from a family with strong Islamic ties. Her father is a prominent local ulama who owned his own traditional Islamic school (pesantren). Even though she has never associated her activism with the family's fame and influence, her background gives her an advantage in her activism, especially when meeting and gaining the trust of Islamic leaders.
JPIT SPAB (Jaringan Perempuan Indonesia Timur untuk Studi Perempuan, Agama, dan Budaya, the East Indonesian Women's Network for Study of Women, Religion, and Culture) is another organisation working on truth-seeking and reconciliation in Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT). The organisation consists of women scholars and activists from parts of eastern Indonesia. In 2010 they decided to conduct a research project on women's experiences during the 1965 tragedy. The team consisted mainly of researchers with theology backgrounds, women priests and scholars. Interestingly, while the research focused on understanding women's experiences and stories, it also stressed the need for reconciliation from a theological perspective. The team also posed questions about the involvement and role of the GKS (Gereja Kristian Sumba, Sumba Christian Church) and the GMIT (Gereja Masehi Injili di Timor, Evangelical Christian Church of Timor) in six locales in NTT, and urged these churches to acknowledge and take responsibility for past wrongs (Kolimon and Wetangterah 2012). The research was launched in 2012 by authorities from both churches, whose higher-ups also took the opportunity to offer an apology to the victims.
It is not only the personal background of the organisers that matters. In some regions, an initiative's organisational affiliation is also a central factor in determining its success. Syarikat is a prominent organisation which has worked on grassroots-based reconciliation. Inspired by former President Abdurrahman Wahid's personal apology to victims of the 1965 tragedy in 2000, a group of young activists in the NU founded Syarikat (McGregor 2008: 9). Wahid's statement motivated these activists to begin working with victims of the tragedy to initiate local truth-seeking and reconciliation activities (interview with Rumeskso Setyadi from Syarikat, 10 May 2012). Based in Yogyakarta, the organisation and its network conducts research, collects documentation, and holds silaturahmi (gatherings) as a form of cultural reconciliation, or what they call Eksperimentasi Syarikat (“Syarikat experimentation”), between victims and perpetrators – particularly former perpetrators from the NU – in 18 cities in Yogyakarta and Central Java. These initiatives have contributed quite a bit to the voicing of narratives that run counter to the Suharto regime's official accounts of the tragedy, and have had a positive impact on education about the nation's history (Sulistyanto and Setyadi 2009: 207).
Another group of young NU researchers from the NU's Research and Human Resources Development Institute (Lakpesdam NU) in Yogyakarta created an initiative towards a reparation programme for the survivors. In partnership with the Coordinating Minister for Welfare (Kemenkokesra), the programme specifically addressed the needs of victims in the Gunung Kidul Regency, Yogyakarta. This initiative was a loan scheme through the National Programme for Community Empowerment (PNPM) (Cahyono 2012). However, some groups from within the NU do not support the initiatives of these other, younger NU groups. The older generation within the NU in particular do not support Syarikat's activities, claiming that such initiatives are a kind of “humanity project” which is driven by external influences and which could damage the NU itself (interview with Slamet Effendy Yusuf, 28 November 2012).
Bridging the Gaps? Aiming for Truth and Justice from the State
Civil society initiatives at the local level have both made positive achievements and faced challenges. The achievements have been mainly in terms of truth and reconciliation at the local or community-based level. These initiatives have contributed to a wider discourse on the missing stories of what happened after 30 September 1965 by bringing to light victims’ stories and working towards community reconciliation. Thus, such initiatives are equally important for victims’ agency and restoring their rights. Net Markus, a victim with eight members of her family, including her father, brother and younger sister having been executed in 1965 and 1966, said before her testimony in Kupang:
Only by telling all the truth of what happened can we really be free from the trauma of the past. We deserve the truth about the history of this nation, and a guarantee from the state that these [injustices] will never happen again. 19
See her story in the KKPK's video, made to introduce the concept of testimony hearing to Kupang www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FA6YmuerKI (21 February 2014).
Her last sentence underlines what all of these “bottom-up” approaches for justice by civil society still need: for the state to take formal measures. On reconciliation in Indonesia, Bräuchler (2009) shows convincingly the need to have “alternatives” for meaningful reconciliation at community levels. While these “alternatives” are useful, they are not good enough if they do not lead to the state acknowledging the truth and taking responsibility. Such alternatives have two limitations: One is in terms of coverage, or the wider public's limited access to and knowledge about these activities. Only local people have the opportunity to get involved in such processes, or to gain knowledge from it. The contestation of state discourse within these “alternatives” has become localised, such that larger Indonesian society may see these activities as being only part of local dynamics without necessarily comprehending them as part of a nationwide effort to correct a history of injustice. What is missing is some way to connect all of these local stories with a national approach, which would serve to explain the bigger picture of what happened in the country after 30 September 1965, effectively legitimising these many individual, local stories of suffering. National reconciliation will never occur if such legitimation is absent.
The other challenge of such “alternatives” is their inability to investigate the root causes of 1965 and the systematic violence by state actors. The state with its power has the responsibility to protect its citizens; instead, it violated their rights and freedoms. Failure to meet this responsibility creates a loss of trust and legitimacy across many parts of society. Localising truth-seeking and reconciliation efforts eventually contributes to the state's impunity and to a weak rule of law, two conditions that impede democratic change. Moreover, the state will remain vulnerable to repeating the same mistakes in any subsequent political regime(s).
Realising the need for national-level action, NGOs and victims’ groups attempted to bridge the gaps between the local and the national, making sure those initiatives taking place in local communities can inspire and encourage the central government to adopt similar measures at the national level. Even though both national and local civil society groups work on different aspects with different approaches, these groups share similar objectives: to urge the Indonesian state to both acknowledge the experiences of the victims and take responsibility for restoring justice to these citizens by putting in place relevant measures toward truth and justice in the context of the 1965 tragedy.
There have been some attempts to consolidate these initiatives at both the local and national levels in coalitions. In the area of truth-seeking, there is a coalition, coordinated by KontraS, on human rights documentation called Jaringan Dokumentasi Bersama or Jardokber (Joint Documentation Network) that consists of dozens of NGOs working on documenting the 1965 tragedy. The idea for the coalition emerged from the fact that many organisations and groups have been documenting archives and testimonies of victims. Each of these organisations has their own method and documentation system. Initially there was an attempt to share a database system, applying a standardised human rights documentation method. 20 The attempt was not particularly successful due to the variety of data collection methods and nature of the data collected. Another contributing factor was the limitation of human and financial resources.
There are many database systems for human rights documentation. The most notable ones, also used by Komnas HAM, are WinEvsys and OpenEvsys, which were developed by the Human Rights Information and Documentation System (HURIDOCS). There have been other database systems developed for human rights documentation, including the open source software tool Martus, and customised databases developed for specific contexts, such as dataset by Benetech for the CAVR in Timor-Leste.
Another coalition is the KKPK (Koalisis Keadilan dan Pengungkapan Kebenaran, Coalition for Justice and Truth Seeking). 21 Established in 2008, the coalition consists of more than thirty national and local organisations, including NGOs, victims’ groups, and individuals concerned with issues related to human rights. Initially, KKPK stood for “Working Group for Truth-Seeking”, and was set up by activists and NGOs to advocate for and monitor processes related to the drafting of the Law on Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as certain transitional justice mechanisms for Timor-Leste (the ad hoc tribunal and the establishment of the Commission for Truth and Friendship). Previously led by the former head of Komnas HAM, the late Asmara Nababan, the group was transformed into the new KKPK, led by Kamala Chandrakirana, a former commissioner of Komnas Perempuan. Later, this coalition adopted a more holistic approach in dealing with mass human rights violations by not focusing only on truth-seeking but also on other forms of justice, both retributive and restorative. Interestingly, the KKPK works on the principle of what some of its members have called the “two tracks of justice”, which means working at both national and local, or grass-roots, levels. As Galuh Wandita of Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR), an organisation member of KKPK, explains,
After the Reformasi, many of those coming from civil society groups became political elite […] for better or worse; we can take advantage of it, even though it can also be potentially pampering us because then we won't pay much attention to our networks at the grassroot[s] level. There should be a good collaboration between organisations that works in the grassroot[s] and national advocacy works (Interview, 20 March 2012).
The KKPK does not exclusively work on the issue of the 1965 tragedy – it also monitors other cases of human rights violations. For the KKPK, the mass violence of the mid-1960s is part of a larger picture of abusive power that shares a root cause with other human rights abuses in Indonesia even today. When a state fails to acknowledge and settle these types of cases, it means that impunity remains strong and abuses of power will occur in the future while victims remain second-class citizens in the country.
One of the breakthroughs this coalition made is in the form of its ongoing project, called Tahun Kebenaran or “Year of Truth”. Within a period of approximately one year, from early 2012 to March 2013, the project produced a report on past human rights abuses that shows structural injustices occurring systematically under violent regimes and urges that it is the state's responsibility to settle these issues. This initiative seeks to document one hundred cases of past human rights abuses in Indonesia, ranging from civil rights violations to violations of economic and socio-cultural rights by the state. As part of the Year of Truth, a series of activities was organised called the Dengar Kesaksian (DK), or testimony hearing, which was also intended as an event for the education of the public. The DK activities were inspired by public hearings that have been held at truth and reconciliation commissions around the world and were organised in open spaces so the public could have the chance to listen to the personal histories, or testimonies, of victims, and were widely covered by national and local media. 22 The DK public hearings have involved prominent public figures who facilitate the process as “commissioners” on what is called the “People's Council” (Dewan Warga). Testimony hearings were organised in six locations: Palu, Solo, Kupang, Takengon, Jakarta and Jayapura. In these places, the victims’ testimonies of the 1965 tragedy have gained much attention, especially from local communities. The biggest DK was organised in Jakarta and took place over five days, from 25 to 29 November 2013, during which victims from 1965 read their testimonies and victims of other human rights abuses were also heard. With lots of coverage, mostly from national media, the event encompassed five thematic issues: violence against women, violation of rights to worship, violence by the military, violence against natural resources and the environment, and violence against human rights defenders. In his remarks in Jakarta, Saparinah Sadli, representing the Majelis Warga, emphasised the importance not only of civil society supporting truth and justice and sharing solidarity with victims, but also of continuing to push for the state to adopt truth and justice measures as part of the commitment to true “Reformasi”. 23 However, in the midst of preparing for the big political competition in 2014, another effort to “seduce” the government into taking transitional justice measures is unlikely to get attention from an administration near its potential end under Yudhoyono and the current Parliament.
Some videos on this initiative are on YouTube and have been widely distributed worldwide. See their website at http://kkpk.org/.
See the speech, “Final Reflection of Majelis Warga” at www.kkpk.org.
Conclusion
Mechanisms for settling past injustice as outlined in the literature on transitional justice, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, prosecutions or reparation programmes, are not universal forms that can be equally effective everywhere. This is particularly true in the context of addressing truth and justice in the aftermath of 1965 in Indonesia's political transition, where the power elite within state institutions are still reluctant to adopt and implement measures towards that end. With the nature of collusion in power-sharing among the new political parties, individual and institutional initiatives toward, and responses to, transitional justice have always failed to be carried out. In such a situation, a “bottom-up” approach is needed, one in which past injustices are addressed through initiatives from civil society, including victims’ groups.
As shown in regard to the 1965 tragedy case, civil society and victims’ groups have been advocating for truth and justice as well as reconciliation through national and local/grassroots initiatives. Strategies and individual and institutional factors contributed to some degree of the successes enjoyed by these initiatives. As for the outcomes, there have been some great achievements made by these local initiatives, and they have faced some substantial challenges. The main challenge is to link these “local truths” to national, formal truth and justice mechanisms that seek to right the past wrongs in this country. The main task for NGOs and victims’ groups is to push for transitional justice to work at the national level.