Galuh Wandita, Jakarta – Back in 2005, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made a pledge to rehabilitate former political prisoners from the 1965 purges. It was a welcomed promise, a sip of water in a desert of denial and discrimination.
However, seven years have passed and little progress has been made. A law on the National Truth Commission was annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2006, and the promise for some kind of presidential committee or apology continues to be resurrected and then abandoned. Many of the victims who took the pledge to heart have passed. Some have lost hope, while others hold on.
In 2008, the National Commission on Human Rights undertook an investigation into the 1965 atrocities. The inquiry has taken more than four years to complete, and the long-awaited results of this inquiry have continued to be postponed. Growing more skeptical, victims continue to wait for a finding confirming what they know to be true - that these massive crimes constitute a systematic pattern of abuse, reaching the threshold of crimes against humanity.
These are big words, describing a complicated legal concept. The essence of it is that the killings of more than 500,000 people and the illegal detention and torture of another 1 million people in 1965 were not individual, unrelated or random acts. At that time, these crimes happened everywhere, every day and on a large scale.
The crimes were connected to one another, planned and discussed somewhere, and carried out by a lot of people with a lot of resources. Somehow the targets of these crimes were not seen as human beings.
During the 32 years of Soeharto's rule, school children were made to watch a movie that depicted a particular version of those events. Scholars were not allowed to research these events and books were banned. There are still a dozen or more regulations that discriminate against these victims and their children.
In a way, Indonesia is a new democracy in its adolescent years. And yet, a sign of our growing maturity will be our capacity to deal with the legacy of these past violations. When horrific stories are not given any space in our public consciousness, they fester and spill into the next generation.
In Indonesia, there is a growing movement dedicated to "fighting forgetting". Civil society and organizations set up by the victims are, piece by piece, collecting thousands of stories of repression that have been denied.
Take, for example, the story of Pak Rahim, a former political detainee from the 1965 purges. He is about 70 years old now, having survived more than a decade in a prison in Central Sulawesi, during which he and hundreds of others were tortured and forced into slavery.
In 2006, he joined a victims' self-help group in Palu, and single-handedly collected almost 400 stories from his fellow former detainees. The group, Victim's Solidarity Palu (SKPHAM Palu) has now collected more than 1,000 stories (in only four districts!) and the stories are mind-boggling.
The group documented 13 public infrastructure sites (buildings, dams, roads, and parks) built by slave labor. The prisoners were unpaid and given only one meal a day. This forced labor started in 1966 and lasted for 13 years until 1983. I bet a shiny penny that these development projects were funded by the state and someone somewhere pocketed the money.
On March 24, 2012, the group organized an event to mark the international day on victims' right to truth, where victims talked about their experiences. Among the invitees was the mayor of Palu. At the end of the event, the mayor recounted how he, as a 15 year-old member of the boy scouts, rounded up and beat up people during this time. He then apologized.
He said, "Now, we cannot repeat these crimes. At the time, the state was like that. I didn't know anything. We were conditioned to detain a lot people, to kill them. It was a massive provocation only because of different ideologies. I can only say I am sorry, on a personal basis and in the name of the government of the city of Palu. I ask for your forgiveness."
We only wish that our leaders would take heed of this example.
It takes a lot of hate to commit crimes on a massive scale. The hatred and confusion are still strong in the psyche of this nation. And yet, the official reluctance to deal with this problem is debilitating.
How do we move on as a nation, as a people, when the skeletons in our closet are so firmly tucked away? When will we be able to face our own gulag, when a nation turned on its own citizens, when the rules that make us a civilized culture were violated with a voracious appetite for blood?
At the end of the day, these difficult truths are hard to stare at, to understand and to swallow. And yet is a bitter pill that we need for our survival. The truth holds our future.
The first step is to know what happened. The inquiry by the rights commission is a small step. Collecting only some 300 testimonies is a mere drop in the bucket.
When crimes against humanity are committed, they cannot be wished away. International human rights obligations dictate that victims have the right to truth, justice and reparations. These rights are not diminished by time, and these crimes have no statute of limitation due to their severity. The great orator Martin Luther King Jr. said that "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."
We wait for a sign of hope in this long journey for truth.
[The writer, a co-convener of Indonesia's civil society Coalition for Justice and Truth (KKPK), is a senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice, and director of Asia Justice and Rights.]