The online festival, which runs for three weeks from July 12 to Aug. 2, aims to preserve the recollections of people who have survived human rights atrocities, as well as the aspirations of marginalized groups in the country, including the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

            AJAR Indonesia program director Dodi Yuniar said he expected the event to be a platform where young people could connect with each other and discuss the country’s history of impunity and violence in the human rights context.

“This project will be developed further to reach more people. All online materials on the website will be [distributed] directly to survivors, since some of them still do not have internet access,” Dodi said during the festival's opening ceremony on Sunday.

He said that 18 university students from across the archipelago had volunteered to gather survivors' stories in an AJAR-sponsored program.

Among the focal issues of the festival is the 1965-1966 persecution and massacre of hundreds of thousands of alleged sympathizers of the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in nationwide anticommunism operations.

To this day, survivors of the so-called communist purge are still haunted by the atrocities that occurred then, and even more so by the fact that many officials involved in the mass killings have never been brought to justice.

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