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Editorial: After 45 years, the backlash
For most Indonesians it is hard to imagine life, as we know it, could be otherwise
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or most Indonesians it is hard to imagine life, as we know it, could be otherwise. One might be studying or working far from home, but we try to keep in touch, jumping at the latest gadgets offering a better connection to loved ones.
But talk to someone whose family member was a suspected supporter or member of the banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which was blamed for the alleged failed coup of Sept. 30, 1965, and one wanders into alien territory. Here are family members who for a long time never sought out their relatives, even when they were in dire need — in stark contrast to the common instinct of most Indonesians.
“We would endanger them, and ourselves,” says one woman whose father was among those who vanished in late 1965, and who raised five children largely on her own.
Many children of suspected PKI members lost their jobs during the authoritarian New Order regime, adding to the hardship of an unfinished education. The PKI stigma had led to students being expelled from schools or being taunted until they stopped attending class. Community and state stigmas also meant they were unable to acquire bank loans.
Survivors who were jailed without trial and the families of those who were killed or missing faced a change of heart after Soeharto was forced to quit the presidency. Identity cards of former convicts were no longer marked, and there was promise of “reconciliation” and rehabilitation. The late president Abdurrahman Wahid even apologized for the role of the youth of the largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, in the massacre around 1965 in Java and other areas. A few survivors and their children and grandchildren found their voices, talking in public and publishing books — and they faced a backlash.
It is this backlash that has meant that the promise of reconciliation and rehabilitation of our wronged citizens has remained unmet. Their anger comes from fears that suddenly “the communists” will return.
Although many were imprisoned for decades without trial, a large portion of society still believes the single version of events according to the past military regime. The public now has access to more than one version of the story, revealing a power struggle in which common people were pitted against one another.
But the powerful propaganda, supported wholeheartedly by the media, reinforced the fact that thousands of “non communists” indeed lost loved ones in the butchering of fellow neighbors — to the extent that in this day of many freedoms, when it comes to the issue of G30S, the acronym used for the alleged failed coup leading to the program, there remains a “them” and “us”, with only analysts caring about the shady gray areas of political intrigue.
Today, we’re told there will be a new bill on the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation that should address unresolved gross human rights violations, such as those involving the largely silent victims of 1965.
The 2004 law on the issue was annulled by the Constitutional Court, with little progress since then. Perhaps politicians see nothing to be gained from championing the likes of orang PKI.
They would have everything to gain from the current, simplistic association of “PKI people” with atheists, as they look to the prospect of millions of votes. It is up to the collective voice of more rational citizens who would like to complete the slow wiping clean of the slate that is our nation, if indeed we want “to build a culture which respects human rights”, as the introduction to the annulled law said.
