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."