A
JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE OF MARS
Mars
Noersmono has a story he’s determined to tell. It’s deeply disturbing - a tale
of horror and courage, despair and resilience.
Although
primarily about Indonesia’s
bloody and brutal past, it’s also a sober warning against authoritarian
governments everywhere that ignore the rule of law and create civilian panic
against mythical monsters to justify violence and maintain power.
The
illegality and human suffering is strong enough, but this is also a
first-person account of a nation’s shame.
In
September 1965 a coup was allegedly staged in Jakarta by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI),
which was supporting founding President Soekarno. Six generals and a lieutenant were murdered.
No uprising followed.
General Soeharto, who was to become the nation’s second president, took
control with his authoritarian Orde Baru (New Order)
administration. This was to last 32
years.
The PKI was banned and in October 1965 the slaughter started
– not of invading foreigners or armed revolutionaries – but unarmed ordinary
citizens who had been peacefully (“though not uncritically,” said Noersmono)
supporting their left-leaning president’s anti-colonial rhetoric. An estimated
half-million died, their bodies thrown in rivers and mass graves.
The regime change was much welcomed by Western governments
aware of the killings but failed to protest.
Official documents only recently released in the US and Australia
showed diplomats were reporting events back to their bases in Washington,
London and Canberra.
In 1965 the Cold War was at its height. US and other troops, including Australians,
were fighting a losing war in Vietnam
to stop the southward spread of Communism; the abrupt and dramatic lurch to the
right in Indonesian politics was seen as an end to the Red Tide.
In mid 1966 the Australian Prime
Minister Harold Holt reportedly told the Australian-American Association in New York that ‘with 500,000 to one million Communist sympathisers
knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’
The US Central Intelligence Agency was less callous. In 1968
a secret report claimed the killings ‘rank as one of the worst mass murders of
the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass
murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early
1950s.’
Thousands of others were arrested and jailed. They were never charged or given the chance
to plead in court. Nor were they told what crimes they’d allegedly
committed.
The brightest, perceived by Soeharto to be the most
threatening, were not violent men but academics, teachers, writers and artists,
the people essential to build a new society. They were exiled to remote Buru Island,
2,700 kilometers northeast of Jakarta.
Among the 12,000 was Noersmono.
He’s now added his
voice to the call for justice with Bertahan Hidup di Pulau Buru (A
prisoner’s life on Buru Island), which he started after Soeharto fell late
last century and Indonesia
became democratic.
Writing
was the easy part. Noersmono spent 15
years searching for a publisher prepared to face the wrath of the government
and the many powerful forces determined to stop revelations of their
involvement, or their relatives’ role in the massacres. These include the army,
the police and religious organizations.
Only
Bandung
publisher Ultimus was prepared to take the risks – but few copies get
onto mainstream bookshop shelves.
“I
wrote the book because I want the younger generation to understand the truth,
and pay respect to those who did not survive,” Noersmono said. “We are asking
for recognition before we all die – is that too much?
“Writing
has also lifted the burden I’ve been carrying for so long, and that’s a
relief. My dreams are now not so bad.”
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| Mars with children and grandchildren |
For
a moment the frail 79-year old broke down: “It’s only the second time I’ve
cried – the first was in Yogyakarta (Central Java)
when I was telling students my story.
“It
has taken so long for me to get to this point because I’ve been afraid to be
wrong. The brutality of Buru destroyed our confidence. We feared something bad would happen if we
spoke out. We were totally powerless.”
Noersmono’s account is not a pity-me tract in
a cheap printing, but a well-written and detailed 358-page history of the vile
years, the torture, how the men lived, worked and found ways to adapt.
It
includes pictures of the prisoners drawn by the author who among his many
talents is also a fine draughtsman. Only a few blurred and grainy photos have
survived; most prison buildings on the island have been torn down, so
Noersmono’s sketches are invaluable.
Now
back on Buru after spending the past few years with relatives in the East Java
city of Malang,
he has started sketching again in the hope that his pictures can be exhibited
to keep the story alive.
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| Cemetery of those who died on Buru |
Noersmono’s
journey to jail started when he was 25, an undergraduate in his final year of
engineering at Bandung’s prestigious Institute of Technology. Before heading to the West Java capital he’d
studied art in Jakarta
and had taken units in architecture.
His
father had been educated in a Dutch Catholic school and was the head of the
nation’s Post and Telecommunications Service. Though staunch nationalists the
family often spoke Dutch in their large Jakarta
home. They also owned a brickworks.
Noersmono
was the youngest of four and expected to manage the company after graduating.
Next above was the only girl, then two boys.
“It
was a happy family,” Noersmono said. “We were always talking about
politics. During the campaign against
the Dutch after Soekarno’s 1945 Proclamation of Independence my father sent
secret coded messages to the revolutionaries fighting in Surabaya.”
Like
students worldwide, Noersmono was involved in discussion groups. The most popular was Consentrasi Gerakan
Mahasiswa Indonesia (CGMI Indonesian Student Organization). It held a congress in Jakarta in late September 1965.
Noersmono
was attending just before the coup took place.
“It was a frightening and chaotic time,” he said. “We didn’t know what was happening.”
But
eldest brother Zochar, who worked as a translator on Chinese texts and was a
leader in the CGMI, had a tip-off or premonition. He fled to the Dutch Embassy with his young
wife and was flown out of the country, first to China
and then the Netherlands
where he became a pharmacist.
On
17 October two members of the local militia came to the family house. “We knew them, they were neighbors,” said
Noersmono. “They were reasonably polite
and asked us to follow them to an office, but we heard of shootings so were
getting nervous.
“A few days later my
parents and I were arrested. The CGMI was banned. My Dad was to spend 18 years in prison, my
mother three. My sister and brother fled
Jakarta and
weren’t caught.”
After spells in Jakarta
jails, in 1970 Noersmono and 500 others were shipped to Buru
on a five-day voyage. They were never
told where they were heading; by then they’d heard of the genocide, so were in
great fear.
The government line has always been that the killings were
spontaneous reactions by outraged pious peasants who hated the godless Marxists
and could not be stopped.
This story has now been well buried by overseas academics
like Australian Dr Jess Melvin – who state categorically that the slaughter was
carefully organized by the army.
Her certainty is based on original documents she was given
in Aceh - by the military.
It has long been suspected that the papers exist, but the
young doctoral student trounced all senior academics just by asking at an army
office. Her book about the find, The
Army and the Indonesian Genocide, published last year, has rocked
historians in Indonesia
and overseas.
The genocide was engineered through a secret police unit
with the Orwellian title Kopkamtib (Komando Operasi Pemulihan
Keamanan dan Ketertiban - Operational Command for the
Restoration of Security and Order.)
The men swinging the machetes and firing the rifles supplied
by Kopkamtib weren’t all Muslims – Christians were also involved,
particularly on Flores and islands further
east.
The killings are often described as ‘executions’, which
sounds swift, legal even. But many
prisoners were viciously tortured, with women being mutilated and raped. How
could such things happen in a culture of respect and conservative values?
Some participants look back with guilt and regret; others
justify their actions by saying the times were so turbulent issues were black
and white – for us or against us. Soeharto’s propaganda unit had created an
environment dense with hate. It coined
the ominous term Gestapu for the coup and wrongly claimed the generals’
bodies had been mutilated. .
Once on Buru the men, who
had already been stripped of their civil rights, suffered further indignities.
Noersmono’s shirt was stenciled number 493.
With a few basic tools they were ordered by armed guards to clear the
forest and build their barracks.
“For the first two months we had nowhere to live except the open air,” he said. “We lived on rice porridge and whatever protein we could catch or gather.”
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| Behind Mars is the site of his former house |
“For the first two months we had nowhere to live except the open air,” he said. “We lived on rice porridge and whatever protein we could catch or gather.”
The prisoners were labeled tapol, an acronym for tahanan
politik – political prisoner and held for up to 13 years.
The tapol
have never been compensated for wrongful imprisonment. Their plight has still
to be officially recognised. Present President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, who
originally pledged to open discussions, visited Buru
in 2015 but used the opportunity to urge farmers to improve rice yields.
He said there’d be no inquiry.
Noersmono’s son Dwinura agreed – though with bitterness. “This is not South Africa,” he said. “There’s no Nelson Mandela driving the airing
of history.
“I’m
proud of our father and we want his good name restored. He didn’t hurt anyone
or steal anything – so what did he do to end in prison? I want recognition of the wrongs done to so
many who committed no crimes. The army
stole Dad’s land in Jakarta; there’s been no compensation. There’ll be no
reconciliation, no national apology as in other countries like Australia. This is Indonesia.”
Dwinura
and his two brothers were born on Buru in the
1980s after his father married the daughter of another tapol and stayed
on the island after release. About 200
others also remained.
“There
was nothing left for us back in Java,” Noersmono said. “Our ID cards included
the code ET identifying us as ex tapol.
This ensured we were shunned by employers, friends, and neighbors – and
sometimes by relatives who feared guilt by association.”
The tapol
were only partly free; they were kept under surveillance, had to report
regularly to the police and were denied property rights and work in the public
service.
Once
the camps were closed the Orde Baru government started a transmigration
program moving poor farming families from overcrowded Java to Buru
where they were given land to grow crops.
The newcomers took over the jungle clearings opened up by the
tapol, accessing their homes on roads cut into the interior by the
former prisoners who received nothing.
Noersmono
became a contractor using the skills he’d learned at university and built his
own house. He also designed and
supervised the construction of a Rehoboth Presbyterian Church named after a
pioneering chapel established in West Virginia (US) in 1786.
The Buru church was fire-bombed by Muslim mobs during the
1999 nation-wide ethnic and religious riots following the fall of Soeharto the
previous year. Funds have now been
raised for its renovation which is already underway.
The prison camps were closed in 1980 after pressure from
overseas governments hearing of the abuses.
Change was also hastened following the publishing of The Buru Quartet.
The novels, banned till recently in Indonesia, are
by the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer who was held for 13 years on the island. Although forbidden to write and denied pens
and paper ‘Pram’ still managed to produce his fiction set in the Dutch East Indies at the start of the 20th
century. The books are about a young
man named Minke and his growing awareness of colonization; nowhere is ‘Indonesia’
mentioned.
Pramoedya
died in 2006 and is the only Indonesian writer ever nominated for a Nobel
Prize. He was sent to Buru
for having ‘Marxist-Leninist thoughts’ and denied writing materials.
He composed and memorized his works and kept
them fresh by reading aloud to fellow tapol at night. When he
eventually got access to paper friends helped smuggle the manuscripts to Java
where they were printed in clandestine workshops.
The Buru Quartet was also secretly translated into
English by Australian diplomat Max
Lane and became internationally famous. Pram kept
writing once back in Java; his later
books further exposed Indonesia’s
dirty war against dissenters.
Buru should be a
journalist’s heaven. The isolated Indonesian island, 13 times larger than Singapore but
with less than 200,000 residents, bristles with stories of tragedy and
inspiration, saturated with politics.
The custodians of the tales are keen to speak, have their photos taken
and give their real names.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” said Diro Oetomo. “I want the
world to know.” He also stayed on Buru, married and opened a shop. The man would be a tobacco company’s pin-up
boy, a heavy smoker all his life, but still fit at 83.
“We made cigarettes from papaya leaves and lit them by
rubbing dry sticks together to make fire.
I’m whispering because walls have ears.
After you’ve gone someone will come round and ask what I’ve said.
“Did we ever hope for release? Never.
All we thought about was when and how we would die.”
Hundreds
perished of starvation or killed themselves, usually by hanging or drinking pesticides. After a particularly brutal guard Pelda
Panita Umar was murdered in 1972 by a tapol,
42 were killed in retaliation, said Noersmono.
There’s a memorial to Umar but no recognition of the tapol.
In
the Savana Village cemetery are 150 graves. A few
have headstones but most are unmarked mounds.
More than 300 names of the dead were collected by Pramoedya and
published privately but many more remain unknown.
Despite almost two decades of democracy and the abandonment
of oppressive rules governing the ET’s rights, intimidation persists. It’s no
longer “the pointed finger as powerful as a pistol” as Oetomo said, but it’s
still sinister and it starts at the island’s Namlea airport.
This is served by a 30-minute daily flight from the regional
capital Ambon to the east and capital of the Maluku Province. These islands, long plundered by the Dutch
for cloves, sit just under the equator.
They have long and bloody histories going back centuries,
but today are peaceful and part of the Republic. This is not a special zone governed by
regulations which don’t apply in the rest of the nation.
However the terminal has more than airline staff; it’s thick
with police, soldiers and Intel (intelligence service) plain-clothes
officers. They ignore Asians but focus
on white-skin arrivals, questioning motives, gathering documents, reporting
back to their superiors and distressing the visitors’ local hosts in their
private homes.
In this intimidating environment it takes courage to be seen
with reporters. The ETs no longer care
but their families do. No parents want their children teased at school for
having big black combat boots on the porch.
The Red Bogeyman still stalks the land.
During this year’s Presidential election campaign Widodo’s rivals
suggested with no proof that his late father Widjiatno Notomiharjo had been a
PKI member.
In Indonesia
discussion groups about Buru and the genocide
have been closed down by the police.
US-born British director Joshua Oppenheimer’s films about the genocide, The
Act of Killing and The Look of Silence have been shown openly abroad
and won awards. In Indonesia
they’ve only been screened covertly.While Indonesian authorities try to keep Pandora’s box well locked, arguing that release will inflame community tensions, the story has already escaped, largely helped by activists. They took Indonesia to the International People's Tribunal at The Hague, which found Indonesia ‘responsible for, and guilty of, crimes against humanity’.
The verdict was flicked away by the government. Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu reportedly responded: ‘Why listen to foreigners? Foreigners should listen to Indonesia’. Which is what the Tribunal had been doing.
Locally Komnas HAM (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia), the National Commission on Human Rights, doggedly persists in publishing reports and reminding politicians that the stain on the nation remains, but most scholarship comes from overseas.
Last year Canadian Geoffrey Robinson published a potent
account of the time titled The Killing Season. The Financial Times ranked it as ‘one
of the best books of history in 2018.’
The author describes Buru
as a ‘concentration camp’ and ‘penal colony’; The New York Times called
it ‘Soeharto’s Gulag’. The government’s terms were ‘resettlement project’ for ‘political
rehabilitation.’
Robinson, now a professor at UCLA (University
of California, Los
Angeles), was a student of the late Benedict
Anderson and Ruth McVey at Cornell
University. They were the first to question the
Indonesian army’s account of the coup and killings.
Their analysis, which came to be
known as the Cornell Paper, was discredited by the Indonesian Government
and its authors banned. Which ensured
their views got an even wider audience.
Robinson has maintained his
mentors’ fire: ‘I am still sickened and outraged –all the more so
because the crimes committed have been all but forgotten and those responsible
have not yet been brought to justice.’
Attempts were made
in 2015 (the 50th anniversary of the coup) by academics, journalists
and the victims’ families to ventilate the history and begin a process of
reconciliation. That has largely not
happened.
On the same year
police threatened to close down the internationally-famous annual Ubud Writers’
and Readers’ Festival in Bali if it promoted
books about the coup and genocide.
Participants were outraged, the foreign organizers modified their
program to appease, but discussion continued.
“I
still don’t know why I was arrested,’ Noersmono said. ‘You ask them. Was I a Communist? I don’t understand Communism – are you
talking Russian, Chinese or Indonesian?”
Noersmono
is a Protestant. He says his faith
helped him through the ordeals. Another factor may have been his lively mind
observing and recording everything, and his curiosity in local technology, like
crude stills to make eucalyptus oil.
“There
was no support from Indonesian congregations,” he said. “We were not executed because the churches
overseas were concerned with the human rights abuses and broadcast our plight.
Gradually curbs were relaxed.”
Eventually the men’s families were allowed onto the island.
Once
free Noersmono married Nursilah, 59, whose father was a tapol “If I hadn’t been sent to Buru
I would not have met my beloved,” he said.
“I’ve always tried to be cheerful and see the
positive. But I cannot forgive Soeharto
- not just for what he did to us, but for the way he destroyed the spirit and
character of our nation that had been built up by Soekarno.
“As
historians say – if we don’t know our past we are doomed to repeat the
mistakes. I have seven grandchildren. I never want this to ever happen again to
them or my country –or the people of any other nation.”
(First published in The Diplomat, 7 May 2019:
https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/to-buru-island-a-journey-to-the-dark-side-of-indonesias-past/
https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/to-buru-island-a-journey-to-the-dark-side-of-indonesias-past/
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