Rusman, Samarinda – Nearly forty years after his arrest, Ismary Musran, 74, remains confounded by how his family's once tranquil life in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, was forever altered by bloody incidents that transpired 1,243 kilometers away on the night of Sept. 30, 1965.
Twenty days after the night of the murders of several Army generals in Jakarta, which was blamed on the now-banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), Ismary was on routine duty as the village nightwatchman.
At 3:00 a.m., a truckload of soldiers swooped into his village and violently threw Ismary, a PKI member and oil company labor union organizer, into the truck.
All the raucous commotion caused his wife, Soekarni, and their four young children to be jolted from their slumber.
Trying to comfort her 14-month old baby, Soekarni soon felt frightened after discovering that several soldiers had descended into her home.
Soekarni, who was 22 at the time, said that she never felt so helpless in her life, shocked by the sight of soldiers searching her home and her husband being taken away, while at the same time trying to comfort her children.
"The atmosphere was terrifying at the time. I was in total despair," said Soekarni, who is now 62.
The next day things got worse for Soekarni as officers came to arrest her because she was a member of the Indonesian Women's Movement (Gerwani) that was affiliated to the PKI.
She was eventually let go after nine days of intense interrogation. However, she still felt a sense of hopelessness as she had not heard any news of her husband.
Soekarni's fears turned were well-founded, with Ismary remaining in detention for twenty more years, being in a constant state of legal limbo and undergoing 13 separate trials.
Ismary said that upon his detention Army interrogators immediately tried to find a way to implicate him for an arson attack on a candle factory in Balikpapan, which he said occurred while he was in Surabaya, East Java.
He said he pleaded to his interrogators not to let his status as a member of the PKI influence their judgments, saying over and over again that he had nothing to do with the bloody incidents in Jakarta.
However, he said that the interrogators were determined to implicate him and ignored all of his protestations of innocence and dismissed any evidence that would clear him.
During interrogations, Ismary said, he was tortured, his back constantly beaten with a bar and his legs suffering blows from the heels of Army boots.
He was finally sentenced to 20 years in jail in 1985, after undergoing 13 trials in 20 years. A few months after his conviction, he was released from prison.
After being released, he was reunited with Soekarni and his four children. They relocated to their current home, which remains without electricity, in the remote village of Argosari in East Kalimantan.
The village – Argosari means "place of exile" – is referred to as the "PKI village" by local people because all of its initial settlers were former PKI detainees.
Soon after being reunited with his family, however, Ismary started to understand just how much life had changed since they were living together in Balikpapan.
Their home, located four kilometers from the nearest neighbors, was often vandalized, with mud being thrown at it and insulting graffiti sprayed on its walls. Their children were frequently taunted and harassed at school.
Soekarni, now a grandmother of 16 grandchildren, says that to this day she still harbors fears that an angry mob will attack their house and kill her and her family.
Despite all this, Ismary said that things had improved slightly since the downfall of Soeharto's New Order regime in 1998.
Nowadays, he said, he was able to hold weekly discussions with other ex-political detainees about their grievances and suffering in a forum called the Association of New Order Victims. "All of us share a life of exile and rejection, all because of false accusations that have never been proven," he said.