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Digital community Ingat65 remembers 1965
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Family members of 1965 massacre victims pour flowers over a grave to pray for the departed spirit. (KOMPAS/*)
M
ost people born after 1965 only learn about the 1965 tragedy through school textbooks and the G30S/PKI movie that many historians deem a propaganda tool of the New Order regime. Therefore, many remain clueless about the reality of the communist purge in the dark past of our country.
A digital storytelling movement that goes by the name of Ingat65 (which translates to “Remember65”) sets out to raise concern among young people for the 1965 tragedy.
The movement, according to Ingat65 chief editor Prodita Sabarini, aims to provide a platform for young people and their family members to collectively remember the purge and do something about the findings.
"Hopefully in the end we can show that there's a lot of support to create justice for the victims," Prodita told The Jakarta Post after a discussion on remembering the 1965 tragedy during the ASEAN Literary Festival 2016 in Taman Ismail Marzuki in Central Jakarta on Friday.
Prodita explained that the movement had begun after she had talked to many people who were pessimistic about young people’s poor knowledge of the dark past. Unfortunately, many did not know what to do, she added.
The objective of Ingat65 is to the spread of knowledge on the tragedy, as the government remains reluctant to establish transparency on what really happened. “That's what the movement is all about," she went on.
Ingat65, which can be accessed at medium.com/ingat-65 has been running since March 24 with two stories related to the anticommunist purge published every week to shed light on long-forgotten facts.
“We want to make the stories a permanent archive in order to move them forward and make them [a part of collective] memory. We've been told to forget about it, but in fact we are now remembering it," Prodita said.
Ingat65 editor and podcast producer Febriana Firdaus only found out from her mother’s bedtime stories when she was fourteen years old that her grandfather had been a Communist Party member and suffered in the anticommunist purge.
"After that day, I began to dig deeper into my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories, and also in literature. My grandmother said the family never found out about my grandfather's fate," she said, adding that the country itself remained silent on what had happened.
Similarly, Puri Lestari, the granddaughter of Sutoyo Siswomiharjo -- an Indonesian general who was kidnapped and murdered in 1965 --, said it had taken a long time for her to find out the truth about her family history.
“My parents never told me about it, and I just found out by myself when I began to read Pramoedya Ananta Toer's short stories, Cerita dari Blora (Story from Blora), during my early university years. My father told me that it was a communist book. I knew then that Pram was once part of LEKRA (the cultural wing of the Communist Party)," she explained.
She added that by sharing the stories she hoped young people could move on and not be emotional about the 1965 tragedy. She added that to demand a government apology for the tragedy was “contradictory”.
"It seems like we are putting ourselves in the position of ‘you are wrong, I am right’. In my opinion, it is strange to demand an apology," she said.
The ASEAN Literary Festival 2016 also features three more events related to the 1965 tragedy: a panel discussion on exile stories, the launching of a book on 1965 victims and a monolog called Nyanyi Sunyi Kembang-Kembang Genjer on Saturday. (bbn)
