In Indonesia, for the first time, military officers are being tried for human rights abuses during the regime of former President Suharto. The leader of Indonesia's special force, Kopassus, and 13 other officers have been accused of involvement in a massacre of political protestors in 1984.
Witnesses giving evidence at the trial have now demanded police protection, saying they have been receiving death threats from Kopassus troops.
Presenter/Interviewer: Tricia Fitzgerald Speakers: Usman Harmid, Director of the Indonesian human rights group KONTRAS; Doctor Greg Barton, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Deakin University.
Fitzgerald: More than 30 Muslim protestors were shot dead at Tanjung Priok port, a slum district in north Jakarta almost 20 years ago.
The killings took place during a major confrontation between former President Suharto's military and Islamic groups, a conflict which even today casts a shadow over Indonesian politics. The massacre occurred after a soldier wearing boots entered a mosque in Tanjung Priok to tear down anti- government posters.
Greg Barton an expert on Islamic studies at Deakin University says that incident sparked a huge Muslim street protest.
Barton: A protest of around three-thousand people was met by live fire from Kopassus troops, about 32 Kopassus troops opened fire on a crowd of several thousand, killing several dozen. Witnesses at the time reported army trucks driving away with bodies, whether living or dead it's not clear thrown in the back.
Fitzgerald: Human rights groups are not optimistic that this trial will be a fair one.
The case is being tried in the special ad hoc human rights courts, and the results of those courts so far have been disappointing with no-one yet jailed after the first round of hearings on killings by the militias and the military in East Timor in 1999.
But for the families and friends of the victims of Tanjung Priok, getting their day in court after 20 years is a breakthrough. Usman Harmid the director of the Kontras group, which supports the victims of violence, says many of the witnesses were locked up after the massacre for crimes against the state.
Harmid: But then many of them had been released and now after the fall of Suharto they are demanding accountability for the crimes in Tanjung Priok to be brought to justice, and now it's the first time for them to have or to see those responsible to sit in the court.
Fitzgerald: This trial is a landmark one, it's the first time the killings carried out by the military under Suharto have come to trial.
In an unprecedented development, Major General Sriyanto, the head of Indonesia's notorious Kopassus Special Forces, is being tried. Also in the dock with him is Jakarta's former police chief, two military commanders and ten lower ranking officers.
But today's Kopassus chief was a lower ranking soldier back in 1984. And Mr Usman says just like in the East Timor trials senior commanders responsible at the time of Tanjung Priok are not being prosecuted. He believes former President Suharto himself should be appearing at these trials.
Harmid: The victims and the families and the ? armed forces were there. The court is full of troops and the soldiers in the court and the victims and the families would not go inside the court because of the presence of hundreds of troops in the court. And some of them were threatening the victims, they said that they want to kill the victims; they want to kill the activists themselves who are accompanying the victims and relatives.
Fitzgerald: Foreign governments like Australia and the US will want to see how the Kopassus chief fares in this trial ... he's already been barred entry into Australia because of the charges against him, and trials are making political waves in the lead up to next years national and presidential elections in Indonesia, with many political leaders now keen to show their allegiance to Islamic groups.
The case is reminding today's political leaders that it may not be smart to crack down hard on Islamic groups. Some of the Muslims who escaped the Tanjung Priok massacre, people like Abu Bakar Bashir, have gone on to form today's extremist Islamic groups, like Jemaah Islamiyah. Greg Barton believes the Tanjung Priok case explains why the Indonesian government is reluctant to crack down on Islamic extremists today.
Barton: This marks for many people a sense of the darkest days of the Suharto period when the military would choose a target; make a spectacle of the target and a warning for others. Consequently it's not surprising that people are fearful that that sort of pattern should be repeated, and given that the military is not repentant about its role in the Tanjung Priok massacre, it's for this reason that the memory of Tanjung Priok does cast a long shadow.