Ex-PKI detainees forever scarred

Ex-PKI detainees forever scarred

Rusman, The Jakarta Post, Samarinda

Nearly forty years after his arrest, Ismary Musran, 74, remains
confounded by how his family's once tranquil life in Balikpapan,
East Kalimantan, was forever altered by bloody incidents that
transpired 1,243 kilometers away on the night of Sept. 30, 1965.

Twenty days after the night of the murders of several Army
generals in Jakarta, which was blamed on the now-banned
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), Ismary was on routine duty as
the village nightwatchman.

At 3:00 a.m., a truckload of soldiers swooped into his village
and violently threw Ismary, a PKI member and oil company labor
union organizer, into the truck.

All the raucous commotion caused his wife, Soekarni, and their
four young children to be jolted from their slumber.

Trying to comfort her 14-month old baby, Soekarni soon felt
frightened after discovering that several soldiers had descended
into her home.

Soekarni, who was 22 at the time, said that she never felt so
helpless in her life, shocked by the sight of soldiers searching
her home and her husband being taken away, while at the same time
trying to comfort her children.

"The atmosphere was terrifying at the time. I was in total
despair," said Soekarni, who is now 62.

The next day things got worse for Soekarni as officers came to
arrest her because she was a member of the Indonesian Women's
Movement (Gerwani) that was affiliated to the PKI.

She was eventually let go after nine days of intense
interrogation. However, she still felt a sense of hopelessness as
she had not heard any news of her husband.

Soekarni's fears turned were well-founded, with Ismary
remaining in detention for twenty more years, being in a constant
state of legal limbo and undergoing 13 separate trials.

Ismary said that upon his detention Army interrogators
immediately tried to find a way to implicate him for an arson
attack on a candle factory in Balikpapan, which he said occurred
while he was in Surabaya, East Java.

He said he pleaded to his interrogators not to let his status
as a member of the PKI influence their judgments, saying over and
over again that he had nothing to do with the bloody incidents in
Jakarta.

However, he said that the interrogators were determined to
implicate him and ignored all of his protestations of innocence
and dismissed any evidence that would clear him.

During interrogations, Ismary said, he was tortured, his back
constantly beaten with a bar and his legs suffering blows from
the heels of Army boots.

He was finally sentenced to 20 years in jail in 1985, after
undergoing 13 trials in 20 years. A few months after his
conviction, he was released from prison.

After being released, he was reunited with Soekarni and his
four children. They relocated to their current home, which
remains without electricity, in the remote village of Argosari in
East Kalimantan.

The village -- Argosari means "place of exile" -- is referred
to as the "PKI village" by local people because all of its
initial settlers were former PKI detainees.

Soon after being reunited with his family, however, Ismary
started to understand just how much life had changed since they
were living together in Balikpapan.

Their home, located four kilometers from the nearest
neighbors, was often vandalized, with mud being thrown at it and
insulting graffiti sprayed on its walls. Their children were
frequently taunted and harassed at school.

Soekarni, now a grandmother of 16 grandchildren, says that to
this day she still harbors fears that an angry mob will attack
their house and kill her and her family.

Despite all this, Ismary said that things had improved
slightly since the downfall of Soeharto's New Order regime in
1998.

Nowadays, he said, he was able to hold weekly discussions with
other ex-political detainees about their grievances and suffering
in a forum called the Association of New Order Victims.

"All of us share a life of exile and rejection, all because of
false accusations that have never been proven," he said.