Carmel not ready to give up the ghost

Carmel not ready to give up the ghost

Adrian Smith, Contributor, Jakarta

Shaken and stirred by her own experience of being shackled,
British-born Carmel Budiardjo has spent a good part of her life
campaigning for human rights in Indonesia.

Born in 1925, she remains firmly at the helm of the
organization she established 48 years later, Tapol (Political
Prisoners), based in Thornton Heath, just south of London.

Her life was defined during turbulent times. Caught up in
events beyond her control, she found herself on the wrong side of
the Indonesian authorities in 1968.

"At the time I was not thinking of campaigning on human
rights," she said from her London office.

"I was involved in a left-wing organization. There was no
basis for my arrest. But Soeharto took it upon himself to arrest
and, in some cases, kill people who belonged to this or that
organization, and I just happened to be a member of one of those
to whom he took a dislike."

The left-wing organization in question happened to be the
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to which Carmel, married to an
Indonesian, was a translator and an economic adviser, though not
an official member.

Over the years the PKI has been accused of everything under
the sun, including the failed coup attempt in 1965.

Such collective paranoia led to persecution and Carmel's
affiliation made her a prime target for the finger-pointers. Her
crime was considered tantamount to treason.

She spent the next three years behind bars.

"I don't feel bitter about the time I spent in prison. In
fact, I have a lot of pleasant memories. I shared life with a lot
of very good people. However, it did bring home just what the
military were capable of."

And it is the military's role in modern Indonesian society
that continues to perturb Carmel.

"I am extremely concerned that so many Indonesians just don't
realize that one of the greatest problems today is to get the
military out of politics and into the barracks so that they can
focus simply on external defense."

Her jail sentence might have come to an end but her long-term
struggle had only just begun.

"Events happened and they weighed on me to do certain things.
It was the way in which I was held and what I learnt of other
people that made me determined, once I was released, to go home
and start campaigning."

Upon her return to England, she established Tapol, which today
has a team of five and is funded by a hotchpotch of different
sources, some church-based, others secular.

As much online as they are frontline, most of their time these
days is spent lobbying governments, monitoring and circulating
cries in the dark from independent human rights monitors and
NGOs. Their currency is information: The variety that most of us
wouldn't normally get to hear.

Times have changed, and Tapol with it.

The initial focus was on freeing political prisoners claimed
to have been linked to the PKI coup attempt. But, by the end of
1979, most of those prisoners had been released, and most other
political convicts were finally freed early on in the Wahid
administration.

So, their mandate expanded to pursue those further up the
political food chain.

As far as Tapol was concerned, the Indonesian Military and
political elite were not going to be let out of the woods, though
it is under the wooded cover of Indonesia's remote regions where
Tapol receives most accounts of serious human rights violations,
"in West Papua, then later when East Timor was invaded and more
recently in Aceh".

As a starting point, Tapol has called for legal reform.

"We have sent each administration our agenda for human rights.
This includes many aspects of Indonesian law that really need to
be revised, such as discrimination against the 1965 people, which
is still in force, and the Criminal Code, which still includes
political activities as crimes."

And the result?

"None of what we have demanded so far has been implemented."

Could it be that the great steps, which could have been taken
immediately following the downfall of Soeharto, were never fully
grasped?

"Yes, even Wahid's administration was 15 months of wasted
time. He had the best of intentions but went about it in the
worst of all ways."

Needless to say, Tapol is kept busy. Two places, in
particular, are the focus of its attention at the moment, Aceh
and Papua.

The problem with human rights violations is that it implicates
so many people and interests, and some of those lie far away
beyond the nation's borders.

"We have been calling for an embargo on arms sales to
Indonesia for many years now. We are concerned about the
deliveries of spare parts for armored personnel carriers because,
for example, the British government now say that they don't sell
them to Indonesia anymore, but they do because they supply spare
parts, which to us is the same thing because it keeps these
vehicles in operation."

While international efforts may prove less successful on
individual domestic incidents, Carmel believes complaints made by
foreign governments are considered more legitimate when it comes
to the failure of institutional efforts to try perpetrators of
crime.

Though she has spent most of her life outside the country,
Carmel believes reform is most effective from within.

"The most effective pressure for this kind of thing has to
come from the human rights community in Indonesia. But, as far as
I can see, there is no real push among Indonesians for reform.
Even the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) has
been accused of being a forum for impunity. It has done nothing
on a number of recent issues."

It is not all doom and gloom though.

"At the grass roots and among some NGOs there are a lot of
good initiatives going on but they are not coming from the
political elite or the military. I was very impressed with
campaigns that the farmers of North Sumatra have been waging,
trying to get the old land reform law of 1960 back onto the
agenda. These are people doing amazing work under difficult
conditions."

Carmel returns less often than she likes to Indonesia, though
she is still in regular contact with friends and Indonesian
relatives from her former marriage. These days it is because of
physical limitations, but before it was for different reasons.
For almost 30 years she was banned from entering the country. It
was only in April 2000 that she discovered she had been taken off
the blacklist.

For Carmel, campaigning for human rights has not been a
profession, but a vocation borne of personal experience. At 76,
she is not yet ready to give up the ghost.

With her steadfast commitment to human rights in Indonesia
spanning nearly three decades, Carmel has become something of an
institution. And, as far as she is concerned, that's the way it
will stay.

"I have never considered for a moment that I should resign or
retire. There are many people who look to me for information or
inspiration, so I guess I will just go on until I drop dead."