Justice for 'G30S' detainees

The National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) has asked the President to approve the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission. Based on a law enacted by the House of Representatives last year, the deadline for the setting up of this 21-member Truth and Reconciliation Commission is next month. The commission will be tasked with settling past human rights abuses by state institutions.

Komnas HAM chairman Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara said after a meeting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last week that the government was set to meet the deadline. One critical item on the new commission's agenda will be to rehabilitate, compensate and restore the political rights of former members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), as well as others who were simply accused of being members or supporters of the PKI.

Last October, only a month before he was sworn in as president, Susilo put reconciliation with PKI ex-detainees on top of his agenda. Tens of thousands of former members, activists, sympathizers and associates of the PKI, outlawed by Soeharto's New Order dictatorship, were sent to prison camps across the country, including the notorious Buru Island, an island more than twice the size of Bali in the Maluku archipelago. Most of the prisoners lived in gulag-like conditions and were never put on trial.

The mass incarceration followed the infamous 1965 pogrom in which more than half-a-million Indonesians believed to have links with the party were killed, after an alleged coup d'etat on Sept. 30 of that year was blamed on the PKI. The tragedy, dubbed G30S by the Army, catapulted General Soeharto into power, with the tacit support and assistance of the West against the backdrop of the Cold War. The mass killing that occurred after the alleged coup attempt has been cited as among the worst of the 20th century. What really happened on that fateful night of Sept. 30 remains a mystery. Following Soeharto's downfall in 1998, there has been mounting pressure to completely reevaluate the official version of events surrounding this black historical episode.

Komnas HAM is not alone in urging the government to clear the way for reconciliation with former detainees, 40 years after the events. Two other key institutions, the Supreme Council and the Attorney General's Office, have also tabled the same proposal. It is interesting to note that it was the Attorney General's Office that set up the so-called Buru Island Resettlement Executor Body in late 1960s at the behest of the now-defunct Internal Security Agency that was headed by Soeharto himself.

G30S remains a dark, dirty secret that haunts the nation's psyche to this very day. Past attempts to cast light on the events have proceeded at a snail's pace. Reconciliation attempts with former detainees have been obstinately resisted from certain sectors, in particular the military and bureaucracy who constituted the backbone of the New Order regime.

In 1999, about a year after Soeharto fell from grace, the House passed a law allowing former political prisoners to vote, however retained the ban on their right to be elected to legislatures. In 2001, President Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) made an official apology for the discrimination against former members of the PKI, its affiliates and their families. Gus Dur, however, failed in his attempt to revoke the People's Consultative Assembly decree that bans Marxism/Leninism.

The situation as it stands now is most unsatisfactory, even a touch bizarre. An Indonesian President has apologized, but it is still not clear what really happened on that fateful night of Sept. 30, 1965. It is also not clear who was in the wrong, or who actually committed a crime; the PKI, or the Army. Did the former detainees commit crimes? Perhaps, perhaps not. They were never put on trial.

In the same vein, the government can only compensate someone if it is clear that they did something wrong. Restoring a persons political rights implies that one party was in the right and another in the wrong. Making this judgment will be the immediate challenge for the truth and reconciliation commission.

Complicating the issue is that all the former detainees are aging. The youngest detainees at the time, say 18 years old in 1965, are 58 years old today. By the time they are rehabilitated, most of them will have come to the last years of their lives.

In the end, the government will probably offer almost nothing to former G30S detainees. More urgent, therefore, is to stop the on-going discrimination against former detainees and their relatives. These relatives are younger people who have had to live with mindless prejudice for far too long.

The "clean environment" purge by the New Order regime in the years after 1965 systematically persecuted the children and relatives of G30S detainees. The New Order regime had a peculiar belief in hereditary sin. Relatives of detainees were forced to quit their jobs, denied their pensions, stripped of all benefits, had their land and houses confiscated, were expelled from schools or universities, and were denied the opportunity to express their creativity through the arts.

President Susilo will serve the nation very well if the truth commission can live up to its name; that is, to unveil the truth.