1,300 still 'missing' since 1965
1,300 still 'missing' since 1965
Tony Hotland, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Nurhasanah, 48, could not hold back the tears welling up her eyes
as she shared the story of her son who disappeared more than six
years ago during the May 1998 riots, one of the more tragic
events in Indonesian history.
"Yadin was only 22 and he wasn't an activist. He just went to
look at rioters looting supermarkets and staging rallies on the
streets. It was just three days before he was supposed to go to
Singapore to start work, but Yadin never came home," she said on
Monday.
Justice never arrived, she lamented, although Indonesia has
sworn in four new presidents since 1998, the year when the 32-
year-old dictatorship of former president Soeharto succumbed to
constant demonstrations across the nation and resigned.
Yadin might have been no activist, but staring at crowds and
demonstrators demanding democracy was apparently enough reason
for him to vanish without a trace.
More than 1,300 people are documented to have disappeared
between 1965 to 2003 in Indonesia, according to the Commission on
Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), founded by the
late human rights campaigner, Munir.
Most of these people disappeared due to their political
beliefs and activities that were different from and considered
threatening to those in power.
Major cases include the 1965 tragedy in Pemalang, East Java,
where more than 100 people disappeared after being accused of
being communists, the 1989 Talang Sari massacre in Lampung when
more than 200 disappeared, and in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam where
more than 1,000 have disappeared during the prolonged military
operations there.
"The government must be responsible for these cases of forced
disappearance. This crime has long been used by previous regimes
to curb freedom of speech and extend their control and sustain
their power.
"For a start, the government must acknowledge this issue and
vow to reveal the whereabouts of these people. Then, they must
beef up efforts to find out which state agents were involved or
provided consent in these criminal cases," Kontras coordinator
Usman Hamid told The Jakarta Post.
He emphasized that unless the government acknowledged and
expressed its will on this issue, Kontras and the public would
remain pessimistic that the truth would ever be revealed.
"We have evidence, people who were kidnapped and managed to
come back and share their stories. But the government takes them
for granted. Even the government-sanctioned Commission on Human
Rights has been half-hearted in using their full power to seek
justice for these people," Usman said.
Also on Monday, 40 families of disappeared people from various
parts of Asia began a five-day meeting here to share experiences
in dealing with grief and loss, as well as to gather ideas on how
to seek justice.
They were joined by the Asian Federation Against Involuntary
Disappearances (AFAD), which was chaired by Munir until he was
allegedly murdered on Sept. 7 by arsenic poisoning.
AFAD Secretary General Mary Aileen D. Bacalso said most of
reports of disappearances submitted to the United Nations (UN)
working group on human rights came from Asia.
"We are currently seeking to draft a treaty that is expected
to prevent forced disappearance from reoccurring in the future
and to ensure that cases in the past will be resolved. We'll
bring it to the UN and try to get countries, especially Asian, to
ratify the treaty," she said.
On a national scale, said Bacalso, AFAD members would try to
pursue the enactment of laws that would criminalize forced
disappearance, considering that such cases were rarely tried.
"Even if they are tried, forced disappearance is treated as a
common crime, while in fact it's a distinctive crime," she said.