Half-Hearted Transparency

Veritas numquam statim se ostendit—truth never reveals itself immediately. In every public event, especially those involving violence against civilians, what appears on the surface is often merely a fragment of a far more complex reality. The public frequently receives incomplete narratives yet is compelled to form premature judgements. Amid the flow of conflicting information, caution is an absolute prerequisite: every emerging piece of fact does not necessarily reflect the full face of justice.

This phenomenon is starkly reflected in the case of violence against KontraS activist Andrie Yunus. The official statement from the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) articulating a commitment to transparency essentially reflects an institutional effort to maintain accountability. However, in the discourse of democracy, procedural transparency does not automatically equate to substantive openness.

The information conveyed to the public sphere still leaves many significant gaps, from the construction of motives, the precision of the chronology, to the probability of involvement by unidentified other actors. In such conditions, the public does not confront a final truth, but rather a gradual process of revelation: reality presents itself as something unfinished, continually evolving, and open to diverse interpretations.

This dynamic is not an anomaly but a repetition of a structural pattern. Every institution with security authority fundamentally holds control over the production and distribution of information. This control, on one hand, preserves the integrity of investigations, but on the other, creates a distance between what the institution knows and what the public can access. Consequently, public understanding is often the result of selected, oversimplified, or delayed information.

This framework can be explained through the concept of information asymmetry introduced by George Akerlof: the imbalance in access to information between two parties shapes how each perceives and responds to a situation. In the context of this case, state institutions have full access to the investigative process and internal dynamics that cannot be entirely opened to the public, while society receives only parts that have undergone a certain selection process. This imbalance is not always intentional ‘cover-up’, but a structural consequence of how the system operates, and its impact remains real: the public continuously builds interpretations based on incomplete information.

This issue also touches on a deeper dimension: the relationship between knowledge and power. Referencing Foucault, knowledge is never neutral; it is always connected to power structures that determine what can be said and what is considered truth. The official narrative of state institutions thus occupies a dominant position in shaping public understanding, often regarded as the representation of truth itself.

However, beyond the mainstream flow, there is also the production of alternative knowledge that is no less important. The involvement of the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence brings a perspective that seeks to read events from the viewpoint of victims and civil society. Here, truth is no longer singular; it becomes an arena of contestation. The official narrative confronts critical narratives, each carrying its own claims, data, and interpretations. The meeting of these two streams shows that ‘facts’ never stand alone but exist in a negotiation process influenced by imbalanced and unequal power relations.

In such situations, the greatest challenge is not merely determining who is right or wrong, but understanding how truth is formed. The public needs to realise that every piece of information is part of a process involving selection, framing, and certain interests. Without this awareness, the public is easily trapped in premature conclusions.

However, excessive scepticism is also not a solution, as it can lead to total distrust. What is needed is a more reflective and critical position: reading events is not enough by merely gathering facts, but also questioning how those facts appear, who delivers them, in what context, and what information might not yet have emerged. In the context of democracy, the public’s ability to read information critically is part of the mechanism of control over power itself.

This case reminds us that transparency is not an end goal but a process that is continually tested, and not measured merely by how much information is opened, but by how far that information enables the public to understand reality more fully. Amid complex power relations and uneven knowledge distribution, truth will always appear in partial forms. Our task as a society is to nurture vigilance: not rushing to conclusions, not easily satisfied with one narrative, and continually opening space for other possible meanings.

Vigilance does not mean fear, and criticality does not mean cynicism. As long as there are caring citizens, active civil society, steadfast media guarding information, and institutions willing to be corrected, there is always an opportunity to ensure that truth does not stop at the strongest version but is continually tested in a healthy public space. It is there that hope is nurtured: that efforts to understand reality more fully remain possible to strive for, today and into the future.