Rizky Amelia & Markus Junianto Sihaloho – Rights activists have lashed out at the Attorney General's Office for refusing to follow up on landmark findings of gross human rights violations during the 1965-1966 anti-communist purge, accusing prosecutors of shirking their duty.
Haris Azhar, coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said on Thursday that the AGO had no legitimate grounds to reject the report submitted to it by the National Commission for Human Rights (Komnas HAM).
"Their actions are a shirking of their duty as law enforcement agency. This is simply a way of freezing any inquiry into gross rights abuses," he said.
The AGO revealed last week that it would not conduct an investigation into the Komnas HAM report about the purge, in which up to 1.5 million people may have been killed, because the report failed to satisfy the requirements needed to launch a formal investigation.
"The evidence Komnas HAM gathered was insufficient to justify an official legal investigation," Attorney General Basrief Arief said last Friday.
Haris said the AGO had been repeating the same excuse for the past 10 years to justify its refusal to investigate a host of other rights abuse cases.
He said the cases included the anti-Chinese rapes and looting of May 1998, the shooting of student protesters at Jakarta's Trisakti University in the same month, and the killing of more student protesters in November 1998 and September 1999 in the Semanggi area of South Jakarta.
"This refusal [to investigate rights abuse cases] has gotten stronger and stronger, in line with the growing apathy shown by the president and the House of Representatives toward these cases," Haris said. "Meanwhile, the victims and their families have been left in legal limbo."
He said he had never heard of the AGO attempting to bring closure to any of the cases, including by seeking input from either the president or the House.
"It's time for the president to re-evaluate the way the AGO has been dealing with these cases since 2002, so that we can arrive at a solution for properly addressing past rights abuse cases," he said.
The AGO's refusal to launch a probe into the purge against suspected Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and sympathizers has been linked by rights activists to political moves from influential groups such Nahdlatul Ulama, the Golkar Party and the military to block efforts to shed light on the episode.
If the AGO had accepted Komnas HAM's report, it would have been obliged to launch an official investigation and propose that the House set up a human rights tribunal on the issue.
Djoko Suyanto, the coordinating minister for politics, legal, and security affairs, previously said that the military's action during the 1965-66 period was justified by law because the aim was to salvage the state and the nation from falling into the hands of subversives.
"If you want to look at the events of 1965, you need to use a pair of 1965 lenses, not 2012 lenses," he said.
Golkar, which was swept into power along with strongman Suharto on the back of the supposed communist threat, has also written off the importance of addressing what many have called the darkest period in the country's history.
Golkar deputy secretary general Leo Nababan previously said that the House would not be interested in acting on Komnas HAM's report because the PKI case had long been closed.
He said the government had done the right thing by restoring the political rights of the family members of former PKI members and that any further gesture of humanitarian action would be overkill.
"What else do they want? It's enough," Leo said earlier this year. "Forces loyal to Pancasila [the state ideology], including GP Ansor [the youth wing of the NU], will stand up against such a maneuver," he added.
He said that the violence used at the time was justified because Indonesia was at risk of falling under communist rule.
House Deputy Speaker Priyo Budi Santoso, from Golkar, has also opposed the idea of setting up a special ad hoc court to deal with the past killings, saying the country should put the past behind it.
"Opening old historical [wounds] will not solve anything," he said in July, in response to the Komnas HAM report that was issued earlier that month. He was promptly reported by Kontras and other groups to the House Ethics Council over his statement, but no action has been taken against him.