Since May last year, there have been constant calls for a thorough investigation into the wealth of former Indonesian President Suharto and the corruption, collusion and nepotism that characterised his thirty two year rule.

There are also calls, though less prominently reported, for an investigation into Suharto's alleged crimes against humanity, particularly the 1965 massacres that accompanied his rise to power, massacres in which as many as half a million people were killed.

On this edition of Asia Pacific, we bring you a special feature on the work of Ibu Sulami, an Indonesian woman who spent almost twenty years in jail during the Suharto era – and who is now determined to see justice done for the victims of 1965.

Sulami: I knew that people were being arrested in Jakarta. I was on the run at the time, just moving from house to house so I did not see very much of the killings with my own eyes. But sometimes I would be staying somewhere and I could hear someone being arrested in the house next door and it was a very frightening time. And I did hear alot of stories coming in from the provinces and it has become an obsession of mine ever since really, to find out whether these stories were all true and to bring it out into the open.

Mares: Ibu Sulami is 74 years old and lives in a simple house in Tanggerang, an industrial city in West Java, that runs into the urban sprawl of Jakarta. She looks frail, but her memory is sharp and Ibu Sulami has summoned the energy to delve into the most sensitive period in Indonesian history. She has begun systematically investigating the mass killings of late 1965 and early 1966 – killings that loomed large through the Suharto years, even though they were hardly ever discussed. The massacres were an ever present warning of the danger of dissent; the lurking terror that helped ensure obedience to Suharto's New Order regime. Even today, many Indonesians would rather forget that the killings ever took place. But Ibu Sulami is driven by a desire to seek justice for the victims of massacres – particularly for women whose husbands just disappeared, never to return.

Sulami: In 1994 I went to the provinces and talked to the families of a lot of the victims, a lot of the wives especially and they were often waiting still for their husbands to come back. A lot of them have never re-married since that time and they are very anxious to know what happened to their husbands. They wonder, if their husbands are still alive, why have they never come back? Are they in jail or were they killed? And if so who killed them and where are they buried? That sort of knowledge is very important to them.

Mares: On the night of September 30th 1965, there was an attempted coup in Jakarta. Six top Generals were murdered by more junior officers, who then went on to capture radio and telecommunications facilities and declare a revolutionary council. But their coup was short-lived – 44 year old major-general Suharto, commander of the Strategic Reserve or Kostrad – mustered loyal troops to his side and quickly crushed the rebellion. Suharto then gradually sidelined, and eventually replaced, Indonesia's founding President Sukarno.

The coup of September 30th was blamed on the Indonesian communist party, the PKI – and a ruthless military-backed crackdown on the party and its sympathisers followed. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed; hundreds of thousands more were arrested. At the time, Ibu Sulami was the General Secretary of Gerwani – the Indonesian Women's Movement – which had been established in 1950 to fight for equal rights.

Ibu Sulami: I grew up in a village and you know there were so many cases of discrimination between men and women. I joined Gerwani in 1951 because it was fighting for equal rights for women. I was very attracted to Gerwani because I felt it was working to elevate the dignity of women and overcome the inequality and the discrimination against women at the time.

Mares: You say you were concerned about discrimination between men and women – can you give me an example of the things that worried you?

Ibu Sulami: It was really in the area of education that the discrimination was most felt. Boys at that stage could continue with their education as far as their means allowed, but for girls, as long as they could read and right [sic], well that was it. Like me for example. My older brother was able to go to higher education, but my younger sister and I were only able to go to primary school.

Mares: Gerwani established kindergartens and ran courses in midwifery and literacy. The organisation also campaigned for equal rights in marriage and for stronger rape laws. By 1961 Gerwani claimed nine million members and had become increasingly close to the communist party – although the organisation was never formally affiliated with the PKI.

After the coup attempt of September 30th 1965, Gerwani became a key target of Suharto's crackdown on the left. Lies were spread through newspaper and radio reports; they said that Gerwani members had castrated the murdered generals, gouged their eyes out and then danced naked before the chairman of the communist party. I asked Ibu Sulami what she remembered of the night of September thirtieth 1965 and the days that followed.

Ibu Sulami: On that night, I was together with friends at the Gerwani headquarters. And at first nothing happened at all. Then the next morning someone came in and told us about the killing of the six generals and the events at Lubang Buwaya, the so-called Crocodile Hole, where their bodies were allegedly dumped. I was really shocked and surprised, because at the time I was in the middle of organising the fifth congress of Gerwani with lots of delegates gathering in Jakarta.

Nothing happened on the first day, nor the next day or the day after that, but then on the fourth day the Gerwani office was confronted by a group of military who demanded that Gerwani surrender with their weapons – but in truth there were no weapons in the office anyway.

All we had were bamboo musical instruments called anklung. We had lots of them because we were preparing to celebrate the Gerwani's anniversary and we had ready about 500 anklung for people to play in the streets.

The military suggested to the people that the Gerwani office was stacked with huge stores of money, sugar, rice and other things. So the people looted the place, but there was nothing there, just a little bit of food, nothing at all. And the crowd outside were all screaming, there's no money, there's no food, we were being lied to.

Mares: Were there a lot of people outside?

Ibu Sulami: Yes there were lots of people outside and I was afraid to go home. I went from the office to a friend's place where I could spend the night, but I could not take anything with me. And I had to change the place I slept every night, never sleeping in the same place two nights in a row. And I lived like that, as a hunted person, for one and a half years.

Mares: Were you in Jakarta the whole time?

Ibu Sulami: Yes, I was in Jakarta the whole time and when I was arrested it was in Jakarta too. For a while in Jakarta, before I was arrested I was a member of a legitimate organisation a legal organisation, called "Supporters of the Command of President Sukarno". So I was promoting that organisation in Jakarta but after I was arrested that came to an end. Eventually I was arrested during Operation Vampire carried out by the Jakarta military command

Mares: How were you treated when you were arrested?

Ibu Sulami: It was really terrible. I was beaten for about ten days and they kept on interrogating us during that time. I was asked questions again and again and I did not want to answer. They asked whether Gerwani was involved in the killings of the generals. But Gerwani had nothing to do with it, so I kept my silence.

They were also asking whether I knew someone called Sam, who was one of the figures involved in the coup and who was a friend of the leader of the communist party, Brother Aidit. But I'd never met the man, I didn't know him at all so I just couldn't answer the question. They kept beating me up. They'd wake me up at 1 o'clock in the morning to destabilise me, to put my nerves on edge so that I would answer their questions. Many other women were also treated like that.

A lot of the women who were arrested at the time were fourteen, fifteen and sixteen and they weren't even members of Gerwani because under Gerwani's rules you had to be at least seventeen or married to become a member. So there was a lot of mistreatment of people and people were being accused of all sorts of things and I was being told to confess again and again and again, but I didn't.

Mares: What did they want you to confess to?

Ibu Sulami: They wanted me to confess to being the head of Gerwani at the time when the Generals were killed on September 30th 1965 so that they could identify Gerwani as the main organisation behind those killings, but I continually refused to confess to that. There were a lot of confessions from the younger women who were arrested which were then used to put the blame on Gerwani. But nine years later those women retracted their confessions. They said their records of interrogation were false, because they had been tortured and forced to confess. The interrogations eventually got so ferocious that the women were stripped and it was absolutely inhuman what was happening to them at that time.

Mares: What happened to those young women who were arrested with you at the same time, the fourteen and fifteen-year-old girls?

Ibu Sulami: The young girls who were arrested at the time were really very badly treated, they were beaten almost to death in the Guntur military police headquarters in Jakarta. Then there were prostitutes who were forced into saying that these young women had been recruited by Gerwarni to provide sexual services to the 200 or 400 troops who were supporting the coup attempt. But this was a false story put out by Suharto who was trying to discredit these women and Gerwani. It wasn't like that

Mares: Most of the Gerwani women arrested after the events of September 1965 were jailed until 1979. Ibu Sulami remained behind bars another seven years. She spent eight years in jail before she was even brought to trial – then in 1975, she was finally prosecuted and found guilty of slander. Ibu Sulami was released in 1986 and given two years off her sentence, but only on the condition that she report each month to the attorney General's office. So what were her conditions like in prison?

Ibu Sulami: The treatment was awful for the first years while I was in military detention. Later Amnesty International and the Red Cross took up my case and I was then given a blanket and a mattress and conditions got a bit better. But it was still pretty terrible. Prison authorities discriminated against us compared to ordinary criminals. We were given worse food than ordinary criminals; like as if it was tempe or soya bean cake, then we just got boiled tempe, while the other prisoners would get meat and better quality food. It was a deliberate policy to lock us up with ordinary criminals – and I personally shared a cell with ordinary criminals virtually the whole time I was in prison. The idea was to prevent us from communicating with other political prisoners, but this did have a positive side because the ordinary inmates were willing to share their food with us and so we never starved.

The criminal prisoners quite liked us, the political prisoners. A lot of them had problems, for example if they still had an appeal process to go through, then they tended to see us as being able to advise them even though we weren't in fact lawyers. And because we weren't allowed to watch TV like the others, there were times when the three criminal prisoners with whom I shared my cell would be a bit naughty. They would call out and feign sickness so that the cell door would be opened and we would be allowed out to go and watch television. But they would keep a look out for the military guards and if they came there would be a signal, like tapping a bottle for example, so we would all rush back into the cell before we got discovered.

Mares: What did you do to occupy yourself for those twenty years in prison?

Ibu Sulami: When I was under military detention, as an ordinary person I really felt tempted to give up hope sometimes. But I was convinced that I should hang on. What happened was that the other inmates, the criminal prisoners would help us by smuggling me pencils and paper in the evening so that I could write during the night and then in the very early morning they would take them back again and hide them for me in case my cell was searched. And so I was able to keep my brain occupied. During the time I was there I put together a novel, a novella, a collection of short stories and some poems as well and since coming out I've been writing about my prison experiences. They are in the process of being published at the moment..

Mares: Since her release from jail in 1986 Ibu Sulami has slowly begun to investigate the mass killings of 1965 – researching the locations of mass graves and making lists of the names of people killed, the names of people arrested and jailed, the names of people sacked from the jobs or disadvantaged in other ways for decades because of their links, or suspected links to the banned Indonesian communist party.

Ibu Sulami has set up a foundation to carry out the work, staffed mostly by bereaved relatives of the victims of 1965 – and even though Suharto is no longer President, the work remains extremely sensitive, difficult and dangerous. The Indonesian military has no interest in seeing its past crimes uncovered – neither do civilians who were involved in the blood-letting. Even Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission is reluctant to get involved – it is investigating many other massacres and abuses from the Suharto period – but has shied away from cooperating with Ibu Sulami's investigation into the events of 1965. Nevertheless, she continues, undeterred:

Ibu Sulami: We actually started doing a lot of this work before the fall of Suharto, but in a secretive way, a conspiratorial way. We visited a lot of areas, nineteen distrcits in fact, mainly in East and Central Java to look for graves

And we actually found a lot of evidence. It was not just the bones we found, but a lot of eye-witnesses who could talk in detail about the killings that took place in their own villages.

We actually went to a lot of the burial grounds, which were often quite difficult to reach, but we were helped a lot by people who lived near by, who were quite happy to show us where these burial grounds were. They weren't afraid even though Suharto had not yet been toppled from power.

Mares: Some people in Indonesia would argue that this matter is too difficult, that it is now 35 years and to investigate these matters only brings up bad memories, and creates more conflict in society and that it is better just to let these matters be and to try to forget that terrible time in Indonesia's past. What would you say to people who argue that way?

Ibu Sulami: We are determined that we are not going to start raking things over, but the fact remains that so many people were killed and people responsible must be made accountable for that. It is very easy for people who have not suffered a loss to say these matters should be left alone, but for the people who were involved and who suffered the loss of loved ones, they are continually having nightmares and are worrying about what happened. So I think it is very important for them for this matter is continually talked about. There needs to be a lesson for people also. The killing of just one person is already a crime. So how much more terrible is it when more than one person is killed. The murder of hundreds of thousands of people must be talked about and accounted for.

The resolution of this matter is like a struggle for civilisation, to ensure that things like this will not recur in the future. The past is the past but these matters must be resolved for coming generations, for posterity. It's in no one's interest to keep it covered up any longer. There's been a lot of enthusiasm, we've been getting a lot of support from people in the provinces for our efforts and we've been receiving a lot of reports from people who've been gathering information.

Our main aim really is to make people responsible for what happened and if necessary to bring them to trial before an international court of justice.

In discussion of the investigations into former President Suharto this issue has been touched on, but those responsible have said that their job is to deal with the issues of corruption, collusion and nepotism issues and so they say that it would be unethical for them to deal with other matters or to delve into the killings of 1965.

Mares: And what about compensation – is that an issue?

Ibu Sulami: No there are hundreds of thousands of victims and so it is really unrealistic to focus on the compensation issue, that is way down our list. The main issue is really just to find those responsible and make them accountable. And of course the first priority must be to fully restore the rights of all those people who were denied jobs or education or other opportunities because of their alleged links to the communist party.

Mares: When you say you want people to take responsibility, how high or how low do you intend to go with that because the killings were carried out at such a mass level that there could be almost as many killers as victims out there

Ibu Sulami: There was virtually no killing at all before the middle of October 1965, when the special forces under the command of Sarwo Edi entered the villages. Then the killings started and for whatever reason, they wanted to take revenge or whatever, they unleasched [sic] a huge wave of violence against the victims. The military were the catalyst.

There certainly were social conflicts in some areas, where for example there were conflicts over land, but ultimately people would not have dared to take it into their own hands, to commit such acts of violence against their opponents until the military led the way. During the period of 1965 to 1966 there was still a lot of conflict at a high level, Suharto was head of the military but he was not President and he was not acting under the orders of President Sukarno.

He was ursurping President Sukarno's authority and so there was still a struggle going on at the top level of society. The killing of the communists should be seen in that light and it is up to people to really gather that evidence to prove this, because I am sure that the evidence is there in the military archives and so on. It is a matter of uncovering it.