T

he genocide verdict of a people’s tribunal looking into the massacres that took place in Indonesia in the mid-1960s came as a big surprise. When the tribunal was held in The Hague in November, the Indonesian prosecutors only asked for a “crime against humanity” verdict.

But the court, reading the verdict in Cape Town on Wednesday, called it a genocide, and ordered the Indonesian government to acknowledge it, issue an apology and offer compensation to the victims and their relatives.

The Indonesian government’s response was widely predicted. It never recognized the tribunal in the first place, so it does not feel bound by the outcome and will not act on the recommendations.

The massacre took place between 1965 and 1966 in response to military claims of an uprising by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) against then president Sukarno. The military, under then Gen. Soeharto, led the campaign although the killings were carried out mostly by religous groups who found justification in murdering godforsaken communists, their relatives and their sympathizers.

In the absence of any official record, exactly how many people died is the subject of much speculation and debate. Most human rights organziations put it at around 500,000, while government officials at the time gave figures ranging from as few as thousands to 3 million.

The organizers of the The Hague tribunal now plan to file the verdict with the UN, and its acceptance could pave the way for the case to be opened before a formal UN court. Countries with records of atroticites that were classified as genocide immediately come to mind, including the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Rwanda and Serbia. So, while the government may be dismissive of the tribunal’s verdict, it cannot ignore the campaign that will soon be launched at the UN.

Irrespective of what happens next, the tribunal and its verdict are valuable pieces of a mosaic of that period of Indonesia’s modern history, of which the nation knows little. Official archives offer scant information, and they were only the ones approved by Soeharto’s military-backed regime.

We know something horrible occured in those two years, but until recently, there has been very little historical record to tell us what really happened. For more than 30 years until 1998, the Soeharto regime suppressed any attempt to uncover the truth. Instead, through lies, deception and intimidation, the regime imposed its own version of “truth” on the rest of the nation.

The search for other versions began seriously after Soeharto’s departure from the political stage. More volumes of literature, studies, research and documentaries have been produced since then to help shed more light on the tragedy. Recent efforts by remnants of the Soeharto regime to prevent any discussion of the tragedy may have slowed down the process of finding the truth, but they cannot stop and prevent the nation from finding more pieces to build the mosaic.

It is unlikely that Indonesia will ever find the complete truth about what happened in those years, but it should not stop us from making the effort. Many of the eyewitnesses, both perpetrators and victims, have died and took their stories to the grave. More than five decades have passed to erase some of the memories of the survivors, even if they still feel the trauma.

Events in the past year, when the government of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, with apparent widespread public support, rejected demands for an apology to the victims of the atrocities and compensation, indicate that the nation is not ready to face up to the truth.

Indonesia, however, is not alone in this. Many other nations took much longer to admit guilt for their atrocities. Some never did, or did not even make an attempt and continue to conceal the truth.

The Netherlands is only starting to recognize the atrocities it committed in Indonesia in the early years of its independence in 1945-1949. It does not even make any attempt to revise the history of its brutal rule of Indonesia and other parts of the world. The Australian government only came out with a national apology to its aboriginal population in 2008, and in the same year, Canada also apologized to the native Canadians. Japan’s apology for its atrocities in Asia during World War II is seen by some of its neighbors as insincere.

The list goes on. This should not give Indonesia a pretext to avoid or take its time to come to terms with its horrible past.

Indonesia should look at Germany, about the only nation in modern history that quickly faced up to the truth about the horrors of its atroticities during the Holocaust, issued an apology and moved on. In forgoing this historical baggage, Germany has gone on to become one of the world’s greatest nations of today.

The state of Indonesia will come up with its own apology if and when the nation is ready.

When we have a better picture of what really happened in 1965-1966, once the mosaic presents a clearer picture about the atrocities, then perhaps Indonesia as a nation will be big enough to ask the state to say yes, that happened, and yes, we are sorry.

One just wishes it could happen sooner.