Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – A new Bill is set to unravel a dark side of Indonesian history, allowing cases of human-rights violations to be reopened for the sake of national reconciliation.

The Bill provides a legal basis for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It will be empowered to probe both recent cases of abuse as well as cases that go as far back as 1965, when hundreds of thousands of communist sympathisers were persecuted or killed in the backlash of an abortive coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party.

A member of the drafting team, Mr Ifdhal Kasim, told The Straits Times: "The purpose of the commission is to prevent a national disintegration caused by incidents and tragedies in the past, perpetrated by the state, by digging up the truth behind those incidents." The human-rights campaigner said there were at least 15 cases that "stick in Indonesians' memories".

They had caused years of political tension and had polarised the nation. Those cases included military operations in Aceh and Papua that had claimed the lives of thousands of civilians.

Similarly, the persecution of Muslim activists in the 1980s, targeted assassinations of ex-convicts and petty criminals by the government in the 1980s and sexual assaults on at least 100 ethnic Chinese women during riots in May 1998.

According to the draft legislation, the nine-member commission would investigate abuse and report to the president.

It will have the power to subpoena (legally require) perpetrators to testify and also to recommend presidential pardons for those who confess and publicly apologise for their misdeeds.

Victims and their families are entitled to compensation, which can be in the form of money, rehabilitation or facilities such as scholarships or loans. The government could also channel money into building monuments to the victims of abuse.

Among those likely to resist the Bill is President Megawati Sukarnoputri. She has delayed passing it to Parliament for debate since it was delivered to her office six months ago by a team of government officials and human-rights activists.

Palace aides said the issue of compensation for victims had been a problem. They said the amount of money envisaged could pose a burden on the state budget.

Analysts also believe the government is reluctant to establish a commission because it wants to protect the Indonesian military, which has been blamed for most of the human-rights abuses.

"Former president Habibie and president Abdurrahman Wahid agreed to a drafting of the Bill in 1999 and 2000 because of overwhelming public demand for a mechanism to account for past rights abuses," said an official who is also a member of the drafting team. "Under Megawati and with the shift in the political climate towards conservatism again, it might be hard to push through."

Conservative Muslim factions in Parliament are also not happy that the commission would include victims of a 1965 backlash on communists. "The Muslim fundamentalist groups cannot accept the idea that communist sympathisers and their families, who had been victimised for decades, would be rehabilitated," said Mr Ifdhal.

But the Megawati administration can hardly avoid establishing the commission – it is guaranteed in a decree issued by the National Assembly in 2000. The decree stipulates that cases that cannot be resolved by ad hoc human-rights tribunals should be resolved by a commission hearing.

Ad-hoc tribunals can hear only human-rights cases committed after 2000, except for the 1999 East Timor turmoil and the 1984 massacre of Muslim activists by the military in Tanjung Priok in Jakarta.