Uncovering the cemeteries of truth

In the face of the powers that be, even remembering is an effort in democratization, writes political analyst Kusnanto Anggoro, senior researcher at the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic International Studies and lecturer at the postgraduate studies program of the University of Indonesia.

JAKARTA (JP): During Soeharto's New Order era, thousands of citizens were persecuted, forced into exile, murdered and tortured. Official lists compiled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported thousands of cases.

This already is a large amount, relative to the post-military regime in South America. The case of East Timor is comparable to that of the Balkans and Rwanda who have their own international tribunals. Aceh would certainly surpass Chechnya, already posing serious trouble to Russia's relations with the West.

Families of victims and survivors continue to seek the truth and draw attention to the numerous atrocities carried out by the past government.

The momentum of this upward cycle is now with the victims and survivors. Commissions of enquiries are burgeoning, initiated by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas Ham).

We already have commissions on alleged atrocities in East Timor and Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta. There are also those working on the cases of violence in Aceh, and the shooting of demonstrators at Trisakti University and around the Semanggi cloverleaf in the heart of the capital.

Many more will follow suit, all sharing in three-in-one objectives: a demand for information about what happened to their loved ones; a need for official acknowledgement; and a quest for justice against those responsible for the atrocities.

For decades, repression took away the rights of victims, their relatives and survivors to speak out, forcing them to withstand their pain themselves.

The commissions reflect a departure from past practices, when all of us became hostages in our own past, looking blithely at the cemeteries of truth and the fallacies of history.

Society no longer seems to be in a collective amnesia. Revealing the truth is indeed necessary for society to come to terms with itself. It is healthy and liberating.

So is rewriting history, a first step to enable society to develop creative and constructive collective memories. Truth and history are forgotten components of nation building, which had in the past relied more on coercion rather than justice and common interests between state and the society.

Endeavors of struggles for justice are not only a matter of urgency. They are also a matter of principle, that "survivors should be relieved, victims must be mourned and perpetrators must be punished". Hideous crimes keep generations in a vicious circle of denial. Ignorance strengthens impunity and inspires and encourages further, worse crimes.

Survivors may not be raising questions, but sleeping dogs do not lie -- past traumas do not simply disappear with the passage of time. Perpetrators may argue, "let's not talk about it and blot this past from history as if nothing had happened", as Brazilian generals did in the early 1980s.

Yet, restoration and healing can only occur through providing the space for the survivors of violence to feel heard and for every detail of traumatic events to be reexperienced.

There will never be a shortcut to bridge the troubled, conflict-ridden and violent past to the hopefully democratic and peaceful future.

Power dynamics and power processes differ from one setting of violence to another. In some cases, private motivations and political concerns are generally interwoven, and these need to be recognized as motivational factors in any violence.

In others, conflicts are intersected by political changes, economic challenges and a range of other forces. Forms of violence are diverse, but not entirely deep-rooted and self- perpetuating.

The problems of Aceh are hardly similar to that of Maluku, Irian Jaya and East Timor. It will be almost impossible to level Gestapu with Lampung and Tanjung Priok.

If there is something in common, that is that the security apparatus has always been center stage. A regime of terror could never have been survived without the armed forces -- either in the communist countries of Eastern Europe, the colonial style of apartheid in South Africa or in military dictatorships of Latin America. Soeharto's Indonesia was hardly an exception.

There was no conflict without the involvement of the military. Sadly, they have been hiding behind legalism, saying that what they did was an unavoidable obligation. The notion of individual responsibility, as required by a human rights tribunal, did not exist.

Therefore, revealing the cemeteries of truth and rewriting history must be contextual and creative. Desirable as it may be, it will be far from simple to think on the logical lines of "to pardon or punish" and "forgetting or remembering".

The challenge is how to find legitimate pardoning and to democratize the process of remembering. Even this minimalist approach could be problematic. The regime of Abdurrahman Wahid is not an outright victor, unlike Germany after the World War II, and, more recently, Ethiopia.

Perpetrators continue to hold significant power in the security forces. Many of them would have liked to see mercy emphasized in the form of a blanket general amnesty.

As such, principles would be all too easily sacrificed in political horse-trading, within the wider context of civil- military relations. We may have to experience the nemesis of transitional justice -- or all the noise will have been for nothing.