P

ardon me for borrowing Harry Potter'€™s movie title for this article. I just cannot help myself. From the voters'€™ enthusiasm to the quick-count drama, to me Indonesia'€™s presidential election this year was magical.

Once the election was over, the magic did not stop. Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo, the newly inaugurated President, made a pledge to champion human rights in the platform he submitted to the General Elections Commission (KPU). After decades of impunity for rights violators, the human rights pledge is somewhat magical for Indonesia.

First, this country had a staggering record of human rights violations during the past authoritarian regime. Jokowi'€™s commitment to human rights enforcement, undoubtedly, has fueled hopes for human rights activists and victims who have been struggling to fight impunity, as Amnesty International has noticed.

Second, Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi'€™s contender, is allegedly a human rights violator, although no charges have been leveled against him. It would be difficult to imagine Prabowo as a president who would enforce human rights laws. It would look like trusting Britney Spears to win tennis at Wimbledon, which is wrong on too many levels.

In his human rights pledge, specifically, Jokowi emphasized putting an end to impunity and processing past human rights violation cases, such as the May 1998 uprising, Tanjung Priok killings in 1984 and the 1965 tragedy.

In his platform, Jokowi also said that the teaching of human rights will be integrated in the school curriculum.

Despite the controversy over Jokowi'€™s appointment of former Army general AM Hendropriyono, who is linked to atrocities in the Lampung village of Talangsari in 1989, as his advisor, the human rights pledge deserves respect.

However, there is one thing that is missing from the human rights pledge of Jokowi and Vice President Jusuf Kalla: the building of a human rights memorial.

Besides solving past human rights cases, building a human rights memorial is necessary to promote social reconstruction, as Judy Barsalou and Victoria Baxter of the United States Institute of Peace wrote in 2007. Sometimes in a society emerging from a traumatic past, there are tendencies to suppress memory in an effort to '€œmove on'€ or '€œput the past behind'€.

Emerging from decades of authoritarian regime, I believe the nation does not want to suffer from another kind of suppression, especially memory supression. Building a memorial, therefore, could be an answer to what Liz Sevcenko, director of the secretariat of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, considers a challenge. How would we educate our people about past human rights violations, if there is no physical form for people to emotionally experience? Through internet memes? Through storytelling?

Storytelling is indeed inefficacious. During the '€œRock the Vote'€ concert , which was part of Jokowi'€™s campaign, rights activists and victims of the 1998 kidnapping, like Rahardjo Waluya Jati, were given a stage to tell their stories to the crowds.

While Rahardjo was telling a very moving story about the tortures and trauma he had to face throughout the kidnapping time, I looked around to see how people reacted.

What I saw were mostly disinterested faces. Nobody can blame them, however, for they might have no psychological and emotional ties with the incidents.

If we continue to fail to draw our people'€™s awareness to past human rights abuses, a campaign like Melawan Lupa (against forgetting) will be reduced to an effort solely to solve the assassination of rights champion Munir and not the greater message behind it: that Munir had died demanding justice for victims of state-sponsored abuses.

And, God forbid, if there is no further action on that matter, I am afraid past human rights abuses will be forgotten forever.

During my visit to South Korea for the Gwangju Asia Forum earlier this year, I had a chance to tour the May 18 memorial, which was dedicated to victims of the May 18 Democratic Uprising of 1980.

The memorial includes a museum showing photographs, blood-stained flags, a hard-hitting film that gives a dramatic account of the old regime'€™s violence and an education center.

When I randomly asked a number of young students who visited the site, they mostly said they did not want those atrocities to reoccur.

The students'€™ answers really gave me optimism that a human rights memorial could educate and reach not only the people but also a young audience. A similar confidence arose when I visited the Berlin Wall Memorial a couple of years ago.

Educating people and drawing their interest to past human rights violations may be very difficult, but it is not impossible. A human rights memorial can be a specific tool for that as it provides truth-telling and documentation on human rights violations, according to Barsalou and Baxter.

Besides, the memorial can serve as a symbolic reparation to honor the victims of violence and restore their reputations, a show of the nation'€™s commitment to human rights values and an attempt to advance educational purposes, including the retelling of history for future generations.

As this year'€™s election did magic, I hope the magic won'€™t stop at the human rights pledge. I really wish Jokowi will eventually exercise his presidential power like a sorcerer'€™s stone: solving what has not been solved.

And who knows, after that, avada kedavra: he builds a human rights memorial.