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Massacre survivors demand memorial ‘to prevent memory from fading’
Syahar Banu, a daughter of Aminatun Najariah who was sent to jail 35 years ago after the Tanjung Priok massacre took place, had not been born at that time
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span>Syahar Banu, a daughter of Aminatun Najariah who was sent to jail 35 years ago after the Tanjung Priok massacre took place, had not been born at that time.
However, the impact of that tragedy resonates decades afterward and affects the lives of many, including Banu.
“Growing up, I had to see my mother go through recurring stages of depression,” Banu told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of a press conference held to mark the 35th year since the massacre at Amnesty International Indonesia’s office in Central Jakarta on Thursday.
“When night fell, she often got panicky and screamed at the top of her lungs. She said she still hears the voices of people being physically tortured that she used to hear when she was in jail,” she added.
Banu said that Aminatun was arrested along with her brother Abdul Basir and then sent to jail without undergoing legal proceedings. Aminatun spent three months in detention and claimed that, according to Banu, she was not treated decently as a woman.
When the arrest was made, the officers confiscated Aminatun’s baking equipment she used to make snacks that she sold for a living. Banu said, as her mother told her, the items were seized as evidence of an act of rebellion against the state.
“Up until now, we’re still wondering what a woman would do with a blender as an act of rebellion against the country,” Banu said.
The Tanjung Priok massacre involved a series of events that peaked on Sept. 12, 1984. That day, soldiers opened fire at people protesting in the North Jakarta neighborhood against a New Order policy of imposing Pancasila as the sole national ideology.
The National Commission on Human Rights recorded a total of 78 casualties: 23 deaths and 55 injured people.
The case made it to an ad hoc human rights court in 2001, under the administration of then-president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid. The court found 12 military personnel guilty and ordered the state to provide the victims with compensation, restitution and rehabilitation.
The defendants appealed and in 2006 and the Supreme Court decided to set them free.
During the conference, Dimas Bagus Arya from the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), on behalf of the Tanjung Priok massacre’s victims and families, read out two main demands for both the central government and the city administration.
“We are calling on, first, the Jakarta administration to build a monument to memorialize the tragedy and, second, President Joko ["Jokowi"] Widodo to initiate a mechanism for the recovery of the victims and the victims’ families,” he said.
“There’s an urge for a monument to prevent the collective memory about the tragedy from fading and also to help us always learn from it with a hope it would prevent similar abuses from happening again,” he said.
Puri Kencana Putri from Amnesty International Indonesia said the current administration had yet to pay enough attention to past human rights violation cases.
She recalled the last time President Jokowi invited representatives of Kamisan protesters to meet him in the State Palace on May 31, 2018.
Kamisan is a silent protest that has been held every Thursday since Jan. 18, 2007, by the Victims Solidarity Network for Justice (JSKK), calling on the government to take action to resolve cases of past human rights violations.
“That day, the President, who was accompanied by Presidential Chief of Staff Moeldoko and State Secretary Pratikno, conveyed their commitment to take care of past human rights cases, including Tanjung Priok,” Puri said.
“But nothing has been done to follow up on the meeting."
