In July, the national human rights body issued its report after four years of investigations – that the witch hunt and widespread abuse and killings in the 1960s entailed a gross violation of human rights.
This recognition is a first-ever result of a state body – and nothing can change this fact. Even if the Attorney General's Office (AGO) on Saturday said it had returned the report to the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), requesting it provide more evidence and revise the report within 30 days. The commission had said the AGO's rejection of the report was a setback in the nation's human rights record.
However, on technically legal terms, the AGO's reaction was far from surprising. The commission had collected whatever testimonies it could verify, and came up with hundreds of samples from various areas across the country, several of which were never raised in the public arena – without the pretension that it could get all testimonies from a single region.
The commission acknowledged its difficulties in compiling testimonies from those who were brave enough to speak up, though all identities were disguised, and after some 40 years it was also naturally hard to determine whether sources were correct in their recollections.
On purely legal terms, citizens did not really expect the judiciary to follow up on the report, not only because of a lack of necessary evidence and the fact that many witnesses and suspected perpetrators have died but also mainly because the issue is so divisive.
What would be news is if President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono acknowledged the grievances of survivors and family members of hundreds of thousands of people, and restored the good names of these people who have borne a lifetime of stigma.
This stigma continued to punish survivors and their families well beyond the 1960s; family members found it difficult to continue studies or gain income, let alone credit. They split apart for the sake of safety; many men detained at Buru Island came home to find their wives had remarried.
Yet, no national leader has followed up on the gesture of then president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, who apologized for the involvement of the youth group of his organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama, in the killings of suspected communists. The current Ansor youth group leaders pointed out that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) also killed many of its members; thus a state apology is not necessary, they say.
A further stumbling block in efforts to seek non-legal settlements is that the law on a truth and reconciliation commission, planned to provide a mechanism to settle past grievances, was annulled by the Constitutional Court on technicalities.
The Komnas HAM report is a major landmark, considering the fact that school history books barely mention the bloodshed, only focusing on the eve of Oct. 1, 1965, the date of the alleged aborted coup.
True, at this time, further follow-up on the report is constrained by much of the vocal resistance against recognition of what really happened beyond the official version. The President has maintained his silence, treading ever more cautiously ahead of 2014, when he may want to handpick his successor.
What he might not realize is that many would applaud his boldness if he were to take up Komnas HAM's recommendation and at least issue a state apology to all victims and survivors of the political power game, in which so many lives were lost and wasted in arbitrary detention.