Vaudine England, Jakarta – The remains of 24 former communists slaughtered during the massacre of 1966-67 have been recovered from a mass grave in a Javanese forest.

The finds in Wonosobo, Central Java, were made at the instigation of the offspring of men and women who disappeared on March 3, 1966, amid the mass purges of alleged communists which brought former president Suharto to power.

Relatives and fellow former communists say such finds must become part of a formal investigation by the National Human Rights Commission (Komnasham), but rights officials say any probe of the mid-1960s murders must be a political decision and that Indonesia may not be ready for this yet.

"The major difficulty with investigating the 1965-66 killings is that these are something we might not be able to chew when we bite," said H. S. Dillon, a member of Komnasham. "We have to decide what we can and cannot do. Of course there were gross rights violations at that time, but any investigation would have to be cleared through Parliament."

Mr Dillon said Parliament's ruling in August against applying human rights laws retroactively was a deliberate ploy by Suharto-backed lawmakers and others afraid of the past to forbid a full exposure of the murders of at least 300,000 Indonesians. Some say the death toll is closer to one million.

The mass blood-letting, led by the army but carried out by former neighbours and residents in Java and Bali, was used to justify later decades of military-backed rule. Any re-examination of the events of 1965 was forbidden by the Suharto government and large chunks of an entire generation have been unable to trace relatives or avoid discrimination on the grounds of alleged communism – until now.

The Indonesian Institute for the Study of the 1965-66 Massacre, formed by former political detainees and alleged communists alongside archivists and activists, led the efforts to unearth the remains in Situkup forest near Wonosobo. Forensic scientists say it will take 10 days to unravel the skeletons and remnants into identifiable groups.

A lawyer for the group, Esther Indahyani Jusuf, told the Jakarta Post the probe was in response to requests by 20 residents who had not seen either one or both of their parents since 1966.

"The name 'Sudjijem' was engraved on a wedding ring on a finger bone we found among the skeletons, along with the date 26th of June, 1965," she said, adding that the newly married woman must have been about 24 when she was killed.