Tony Hotland, Jakarta – Nurhasanah, 48, could not hold back the tears welling up her eyes as she shared the story of her son who disappeared more than six years ago during the May 1998 riots, one of the more tragic events in Indonesian history.
"Yadin was only 22 and he wasn't an activist. He just went to look at rioters looting supermarkets and staging rallies on the streets. It was just three days before he was supposed to go to Singapore to start work, but Yadin never came home," she said on Monday.
Justice never arrived, she lamented, although Indonesia has sworn in four new presidents since 1998, the year when the 32-year-old dictatorship of former president Soeharto succumbed to constant demonstrations across the nation and resigned.
Yadin might have been no activist, but staring at crowds and demonstrators demanding democracy was apparently enough reason for him to vanish without a trace.
More than 1,300 people are documented to have disappeared between 1965 to 2003 in Indonesia, according to the Commission on Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), founded by the late human rights campaigner, Munir.
Most of these people disappeared due to their political beliefs and activities that were different from and considered threatening to those in power.
Major cases include the 1965 tragedy in Pemalang, East Java, where more than 100 people disappeared after being accused of being communists, the 1989 Talang Sari massacre in Lampung when more than 200 disappeared, and in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam where more than 1,000 have disappeared during the prolonged military operations there.
"The government must be responsible for these cases of forced disappearance. This crime has long been used by previous regimes to curb freedom of speech and extend their control and sustain their power.
"For a start, the government must acknowledge this issue and vow to reveal the whereabouts of these people. Then, they must beef up efforts to find out which state agents were involved or provided consent in these criminal cases," Kontras coordinator Usman Hamid told The Jakarta Post.
He emphasized that unless the government acknowledged and expressed its will on this issue, Kontras and the public would remain pessimistic that the truth would ever be revealed.
"We have evidence, people who were kidnapped and managed to come back and share their stories. But the government takes them for granted. Even the government-sanctioned Commission on Human Rights has been half-hearted in using their full power to seek justice for these people," Usman said.
Also on Monday, 40 families of disappeared people from various parts of Asia began a five-day meeting here to share experiences in dealing with grief and loss, as well as to gather ideas on how to seek justice.
They were joined by the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), which was chaired by Munir until he was allegedly murdered on September 7 by arsenic poisoning.
AFAD Secretary General Mary Aileen D. Bacalso said most of reports of disappearances submitted to the United Nations (UN) working group on human rights came from Asia.
"We are currently seeking to draft a treaty that is expected to prevent forced disappearance from reoccurring in the future and to ensure that cases in the past will be resolved. We'll bring it to the UN and try to get countries, especially Asian, to ratify the treaty," she said.
On a national scale, said Bacalso, AFAD members would try to pursue the enactment of laws that would criminalize forced disappearance, considering that such cases were rarely tried.
"Even if they are tried, forced disappearance is treated as a common crime, while in fact it's a distinctive crime," she said.