FAR TOO LITTLE, FAR TOO LATE

 A  genocide howling for an apology gets ‘regrets'

 

Before he left for a brief trip to Sydney, Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo took a stab at reconciliation.  It’s unlikely to succeed.

 

It’s a truism of politics: Leaders whose time  is up sometimes get an itch to tidy up wrongs unmentioned when pitching for power. 

 

The Indonesian Constitution restricts presidents to two five-year terms. So Jokowi will bow off the stage after the election next February.

 

Suddenly he’s remembered that the  unresolved violence of the past impacting millions needs attention. This is what human rights activists have been pushing him and his predecessors to recognise and repair for decades, only to be told to forget and move on.

 

In a speech last month Jokowi acknowledged a dozen ‘human rights violations’ since 1965. The most serious erupted that year when an estimated half-million were hacked or shot in a military-organised purge of real or imagined Communists. 

 

Their mutilated corpses were tossed in rivers and gullies, families fearing retrieval for burial lest being painted Red.

 

As with the Holocaust, there have been deniers. However, a much-awarded young Australian researcher Dr Jess Melvin has conclusively proved the slaughter was a genocide orchestrated by second President and former army general Soeharto.

 

Seventh president Jokowi has spent the past nine years concreting his legacy with much-needed infrastructure projects like toll roads and new rail lines, all leading to the future.

 

The past is painful and tougher to fix. Too many festering sores for too long. Millions of families with relatives who were thought to be on the left have been affected. Even now some victims’ relatives fear talking to journalists lest the guilty seek revenge.

 

Jokowi has announced a ‘programme’ to examine the issues, which at first glance seems an honest bid to settle unfinished business. However close reading shows it will only please the alleged perpetrators. 

 

These include Presidential candidate and disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto, who was allegedly involved in the persecution and disappearance of student dissidents in 1998. He’ll not be fronting any court. There’s also no talk of compensation, only memorials in parks.

 

Coordinating Minister of Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Mahfud MD said ‘the victims' rights would be fulfilled simultaneously by ministries and government agencies involved in the process.

 

‘In the recommendation for a non-judicial resolution, there is no apology from the government to the public because of the incidents; however, the government acknowledges that the incidents did occur, and the government regrets that the incidents occurred,’

 

His conditional statement screams absence of political will;  it maintains the pattern of seeing the sickness but failing to cure.

 

In 1993 the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas-HAM) was set up by the Soeharto government to mollify the UN.

 

Reports on alleged abuses threatened the Republic’s international reputation as a good deal for investors.  Overseas shareholders were getting sensitive and demanding social responsibility.

 

Since then the Commission has produced reports which have jerked awareness though not the levers of power. The Indonesian Law Review commented that Komnas HAM doesn’t have ‘the authority to resolve the problem of gross human rights violations.’ It can’t force corporations to participate in its investigations or be involved in mediation.

 

In a burst of post-Revolusi cleansing the government started a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (KKR) to resolve human rights cases.  It ran for two years before a 2006 court ruled it unconstitutional. There’s been no replacement.

 

State-sanctioned brutality collides with the image of Indonesia as a progressive nation of moderates. An oft-recycled media cliche tags the people as ‘the friendliest and most cheerful in the world’. 

 

This over-worked claim is meaningless in an archipelago of 275 million individuals.  Many are indeed fine folk and a few pure evil - a reality not exclusive to Indonesia.

 

There have been other outrages since the 1965-66 genocide, including the 1982-85 Petrus (mysterious killings), overnight murders of thousands of alleged criminals whose bodies were left in the streets warning others against challenging authority.

 

In 1998 several hundred mainly ethnic Chinese were raped and murdered in the chaos following the fall of Soeharto. Student activists were allegedly arrested and tortured - at least 13  ‘disappeared’ when Prabowo was in command of the troops involved.

 

There were other secret killings and bashings that have never been prosecuted. One of the few Indonesian words absorbed by English reflects these terrors - to run ‘amok’.

 

Jokowi made his pseudo-reconciliation announcement at the site of a demolished torture centre in the province of Aceh. A guerrilla insurgency between 1976 and 2005 took the lives of 15,000 civilians and soldiers as Jakarta failed to forcibly crush the GAM (Free Aceh Movement) separatist movement.

 

Australian academic Dr Damien Kingsbury was closely involved in the Helsinki peace talks which eventually settled the dispute by giving Aceh a degree of autonomy.

 

Amnesty International Executive Director Usman Hamid reportedly stressed that a non-judicial resolution of ignored atrocities ‘must not negate the state's obligation to fulfil the victims' rights to reveal the truth.

 

‘The accountability of the perpetrators is an important part in settling cases of gross human rights abuses.’

 

That won't happen. Many with blood on their khaki have died, but their descendants remain determined to hide the stains. 

 

When announcing his latest attempted fix  the President said the purpose was: ‘To heal the nation's wounds as a consequence of past gross human rights violations that have left behind a heavy burden for the victims and the families of victims. These wounds must be healed quickly so that we can move forward’. 

 

There have been more than 40 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions across the world in the past three decades. The most successful was in South Africa, driven by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.   Jokowi’s latest attempt to heal is not based on telling the truth .

 

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 First published in Pearls & Irritations, 4 July 2023:

https://johnmenadue.com/a-genocide-howling-for-an-apology-gets-regrets/

IF ONLY THE VICTIMS COULD HEAR

   Sorry business should be sooner and sincere

When is a purge a genocide? When a young Australian researcher finds solid   evidence that’s long eluded international scholars, proving the minds of millions     have been poisoned with lies..

Dr Jess Melvin is an award-winning academic at Sydney Uni.  In 2018 she published The Army and the Indonesian Genocide using official Indonesian documents.

Her book - since released in Indonesian - conclusively showed that the mass slaughter across Indonesia of real or imagined Communists in 1965 and 66 was not an impulsive uprising of angry peasants,but government-organised mass murder.

Almost six decades after the mutilated bodies of at least half-a-million were thrown in rivers and shallow graves, relatives and friends of the victims have often been too frightened to speak.  That’s because the official version has become embedded as the one truth ensuring all other accounts are heretical.

Now the deceived may find the courage to condemn as President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has spoken: ‘With a clear mind and earnest heart, I as Indonesia’s head of state admit that gross human rights violations did happen in many occurrences. I have sympathy and empathy for the victims and their families.’

 

The apology follows recommendations made by a team he set up to look into severe cases of human rights violations and suggest non-judicial resolutions. There are 11 others, but the post-coup killings are the worst.  Significantly he included West Papua where a prolonged and poorly reported insurgency continues.

 

In Indonesia the President’s statement has been getting applause, but the clappers forget that 23 years earlier the late fourth president Abdurrahman (Gus Dur) Wahid had already publicly apologized to victims and survivors of the massacres and detentions. 

 

Some background:

During his 1945-1965 rule, founding president Soekarno ran an anti-imperialist ‘Jakarta, Beijing, Pyongyang axis’ policy terrifying the West. When he started Konfrontasi with Malaya as the former British colony moved towards independence, Western strategists feared a second front would weaken the war in Vietnam.

 Not all were on Soekarno’s side.  The military imagined a peasants’ revolt as the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) cracked its knuckles, so aroused the West. General Soeharto ousted Soekarno after the coup, consolidating his position by declaring martial law, banning free media and launched saturation promotion of only one narrative.

A crude film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (Treachery of G30S/PKI) was regularly telecast on the state channel TVRI.  Viewing was compulsory at schools every October, though the graphic scenes would rate it R in the West. 

Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, artists and writers were exiled on remote Buru island for years.  None faced court.

Although the coup is still officially labeled Communist, it was long suspected the military was involved, covertly aided by UK MI5 and US CIA operatives. 

Following the putsch, a massive slaughter of real and imagined reds began.  The army said the killings were spontaneous, driven by the people’s anger at the generals’ deaths.  In reality soldiers were handing lists of suspects to civilian militias, and supplying machetes and guns to the vengeful.

A  secret CIA report claimed the massacres ‘rank as one of the worst  mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s and  the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War.

That didn’t concern Australian PM Harold Holt who told the New York Times:  ‘With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’

In 2017 a US National Security Archive release of Jakarta Embassy papers showed diplomats ‘were documenting tens of thousands of killings by the military, paramilitary groups, and Muslim militias’.

 Most visitors don’t know Bali’s sands are blood-soaked. The death squads were brutally active on the so-called isle of peace and harmony where Australians love to frolic.  Few of the 80,000 victims, including women and children, were active PKI members but targeted in revenge killings often involving land and community disputes.

On the island of Flores, Catholic priests stood back while their parishioners were chopped and shot.

Overseas historians reckoned – but couldn’t prove - the slaughter was engineered by the military. That assumption is now concrete, thanks to  Melvin collecting 3,000 pages of original army documents during a field trip to Aceh.

During the 2014 presidential campaign Widodo promised an investigation into the genocide.  That was wiped from his agenda.  Instead he’s been photographed watching and approving the ghastly film.

In 2012 a Komnas HAM ( the National Commission on Human Rights) report to the Attorney General recommended a full legal investigation to bring the perpetrators to account.  The Attorney General refused, claiming ‘not enough evidence’.

‘This is simply a lie,’  Melvin told this column.  ‘I think it's hard to see the President’s announcement as anything other than a cynical attempt to salvage his legacy ahead of next year's general election.

 

‘He came to power with the promise of resolving Indonesia's past human rights abuses and yet he has done very little in this regard. This latest announcement is further evidence of just how hollow these attempts have been.

 

‘My greatest concern is that the latest charade may actually make the situation more difficult for survivors. Similar promises were made in 2020 to provide ‘urgent assistance’ to civilian conflict victims in the province of Aceh (North Sumatra) but not a single rupiah has been received.  (An  intermittent independence campaign between 1976 and 2005 took an estimated 15,000 lives and displaced thousands.  In 2006 the World Bank gave US $ 20 million to 1,724 ‘conflict affected villages.’)

 

  ‘If Jokowi is serious about salvaging his legacy, he should begin by accepting Komnas HAM's recommendations and launch a judicial investigation into the events of 1965-66. At the same time, he should concentrate of ensuring that promised assistance is actually delivered to human rights victims and their families.’

 

(Some background info first appeared in Pearls & Irritations in 2020).

 First published in Pearls & Irritations, 20 January 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/killing-times-indonesia-grapples-with-legacy-of-government-organised-mass-murder/