M

y family is a victim of the tragedy of 1965. The revelation came to me 50 years on during a family road trip. And it began with an idle question.

 '€œDo we have any relatives who were personally affected by what happened in 1965?'€ I asked my father out of the blue from the back seat of the car.

Triggered by my friend'€™s planned PhD project on the families of victims of the 1965 communist purge, I fired off the question to pass time amid crowded traffic.

 '€œDo you know that your grandfather was imprisoned for years for helping a PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] member?'€ my father answered casually while driving.

 I was shocked to hear this, and responded with a surprised, '€œReally?'€

 Soon enough, all the stories surrounding my family'€™s hidden past were revealed, and I discovered that my grandfather was a victim of the bloodiest event in Indonesian history.

 Recalling the past, my father told me that his father was arrested after someone accused him of assisting a PKI member. That PKI member happened to be my aunt. My aunt was a member of Gerwani, a women'€™s PKI organization. My grandfather was a soldier who liked to hunt. In addition to helping my aunt, he was also accused of arming rebellious farmers. In actuality, he only asked his friends to guard his rifles while he was away.

 Based on these accusations, he was sent away, for 11 years, to a prison in Central Java, forced to leave his wife and seven children. My grandmother had to struggle to support the family. Eventually, she had to ask her relatives to temporarily adopt some of her children because of financial hardship. When my grandfather was released, he lived with his family for just a few years before he died.

While listening to my father'€™s story, feelings of shock, sadness and anger swept over me. I had not, until that moment, suspected that the barbarity of 1965 had so closely affected my family. I had always considered the event as something foreign; something that belonged to history books and television.

 When I was a little girl, my knowledge of the events of 1965 event revolved primarily around the killings of six generals by the PKI. This understanding, such as it was, led me to a simple conclusion; that communism was bad, and in this confrontation, the army was the good guy.

 The annual display of Pengkhianatan G30S PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI) on national television had also worked to implant such thoughts in my mind. I was traumatized by this movie. A scene showing the daughter of one of the murdered generals covering her own face with her father'€™s blood kept me awake for days.

 This belief-system, encoded into me since I was just a child, crumbled after former president Soeharto stepped down. With the collapse of authoritarian rule, the program of nationwide anti-communist brainwashing that the Soeharto regime had instigated and propped up throughout its period of rule, began to appear brittle and untrustworthy. The program cracked apart, just as its prime benefactor had cracked and fallen.

Thanks to the Internet and other sources, I have also learned that the murder of six generals triggered the extra-judicial killing of roughly 500,000 alleged PKI followers, and the imprisonment of 750,000 others without trial. Yet despite the wave of slaughter that touched so many parts of the archipelago, I had never once thought that my own family might have been among the victims.

 When I raise the issue with my grandmother, she seems markedly calm about it all, arguing that despite the years of suffering she had to endure without her husband, what had happened was all in the past.

 '€œWhere is the justice?'€ I keep asking myself.

The victims of this atrocity are still struggling to obtain justice for the years of mistreatment and discrimination that they have endured.

 A new hope seemed to emerge when President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo pledged to resolve past human rights violations, including the crimes of 1965. The President intimated that such an ambition would become a central part of his administration'€™s agenda. There were even reports that the President had proposed the idea of a formal apology to the victims to break the deadlocked reconciliation process.

However, this hope faded quickly after Jokowi withdrew the plan to make any kind of apology. As someone who voted for our President, I am tremendously disappointed. Our President is not a man of his word.

I feel confused and hopeless. But in this storm, I find some kind of solace in a Facebook group that gathers together the victims of 1965. The group seeks justice by continuously raising the issue with others.

Thus, there is one mission that awaits me: passing on this nation'€™s bitter truth to my children.

But I hope that the conversation with my children about 1965 will begin a little differently from the conversation between me and my father. The conversation will start not with a question, but with a statement. And that statement will be: '€œOur family is a victim of 1965'€.

'€“ Ika Krismantari