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| Two men await certain death – October 1965 |
After a three-year investigation and testimonies from 349 witnesses,
Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) has declared
that the systematic prosecution of alleged members of the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI) when former president Suharto and the military
seized power in 1965 constituted gross human rights violations. It urged
that the military officers involved be brought to trial.
Speaking at a press conference on July 23, Nur Kholis, the head of
the investigative team into what is officially described as a coup
attempt by the PKI, said that state officials under the Operational
Command for the Restoration of Security and Order (Kopkamtib) who served
from 1965 to 1967 and between 1977 and 1978 should be tried for crimes
including murder, extermination, slavery, eviction or forced eviction,
deprivation of freedom, torture and mass rape. Kholis said that his team
had handed over the 850-page report to the Attorney General’s Office
(AGO) and “hoped that the AGO would follow up the report”.
Kholis said that military officials had deliberately targeted
innocent civilians during the operations, which occurred nationwide.
“Many of the victims had nothing to do with the communist party or its
subordinates. The military officials made it look like those people were
linked to the party”, he was quoted as saying by the Jakarta Post.
Anti-communist purge
On the night of September 30, 1965, a group of middle-ranking
military officers kidnapped and killed six generals they accused of
organising a coup against Indonesia’s leftist President Sukarno. Blaming
the incident on the PKI provided the pretext for sections of the
military, led by Major General Suharto, to mount a bloody
counter-revolution in which as many as 1 million communists and
left-wing sympathisers were killed. Hundreds of thousands of others were
imprisoned for years without trial.
According to newspaper reports at the time, Western governments,
particularly the US, were delighted with the turn of events in
Indonesia, with a cable by Secretary of State Dean Rusk expressing
support for the “campaign against the communists” and assuring Suharto
that the “US government [is] generally sympathetic with, and admiring
of, what the army is doing”. The US also supplied Suharto’s forces with
money and weapons to conduct the anti-communist purge as the CIA ticked
off names from a list of key party leaders and figures which it had
provided to Suharto several months before.
Formal apology
Nur Kholis said that the team demanded that the government issue a
formal apology to victims and their families. The apology should be
followed by rehabilitation, reparation and compensation. The Institute
for the Study of the 1965-1966 Massacres (YPKP) said that while Suharto
was the person most responsible for the crimes, the fact that he had
died should not deter the AGO from investigating the case, noting that
many other perpetrators remained alive. Although Kholis declined to
provide names, YPKP chairperson Bedjo Untung told Kompas
newspaper that in legal terms it was very clear who was responsible. The
release documents of prisoners incarcerated over the 1965 affair, he
said, cite the names of Indonesian military commanders from the
subdistrict (koramil), district (kodim) and regional (kodam) military commands.
Former PKI members and others accused of involvement in the alleged
coup suffered decades of stigmatisation and discrimination. People
linked to the PKI were not allowed to become civil servants, military or
police officers, teachers, preachers or legislators. Their IDs were
labelled with “ET” (ex-political prisoner) making them vulnerable to
harassment and extortion by government officials; finding work was
nearly impossible because they had to produce a letter stating they had
no affiliation with communism.
Following a landmark Constitutional Court ruling in 2004, former PKI
members were allowed to contest elections, and in 2006 the government
deleted the ET label on IDs. However, a 1966 decree on the dissolution
of the PKI and prohibitions on Marxist, Leninist and communist teachings
remain in force. Public events related to 1965 and the PKI are
routinely harassed and attacked with impunity by the police and
military-backed Islamic thugs.
Mysterious shootings
Komnas HAM also released the findings of an investigation into a
spate of killings in the early 1980s of hundreds of petty criminals
throughout the country. The report said that the military and the
police, with their territorial commands, were most responsible.
Speaking at a press conference on July 24, Komnas HAM commissioner
Yoseph Adi Prasetyo said they had found proof of crimes against
humanity. “The team found evidence of gross violations of human rights
in the mysterious shootings that took place between 1982 and 1985. This
campaign was carried out by state security personnel and was widespread
across the country”, Prasetyo said. “The killings followed certain
patterns, such as the thumbs of the victims being tied together behind
their backs, the bodies were wrapped in sacks and Rp10,000 [US$1.06] was
left on top of the bodies for funeral costs.”
The so-called petrus or mysterious shootings started in August
1982 under the command of Kopkamtib chief Admiral Soedomo, who died in
June this year. Code named “Operation Sickle”, the operation targeted
repeat offenders, local gangs, unemployed youths and others considered
sources of violent crime. Some were targeted simply because they had
tattoos, considered the mark of criminals. In March 1983, General Benny
Moerdani who died in August 2004, replaced Soedomo as Kopkamtib
commander and took over the operation.
In its report, Komnas HAM said that the military and police drew up
lists of targeted individuals, which were then distributed to community
leaders. Some were kidnapped and detained at military facilities and
others were executed in front of their families. The commission said
that corpses were found across Java and Sumatra, including Jakarta,
Yogyakarta, Bantul, Semarang, Medan, Palembang, Magelang, Solo, Cilacap,
Malang and Mojokerto, with the possibility that killings also occurred
in Bandung, Makassar, Pontianak, Banyuwangi and Bali.
In his 1988 autobiography, Suharto acknowledged that he sanctioned
the killings, referring to them as “shock therapy”. No official figures
were ever reported for the number killed.
Waiting for justice
Despite the landmark ruling, the AGO was quick to pour cold water on
any possible follow-up. Attorney General Basrief Arief — whose
appointment last year was slammed by anti-corruption and rights
activists as supporting the status quo — said he welcomed the
investigation, but warned that reviving a case that happened nearly 50
years ago was no simple matter. Arief said he would “wait and see”"
before conducting his own investigation. “It is [Komnas HAM’s] job to
conduct an investigation. Once it is over, of course, they will hand it
over to us”, he told the July 25 Jakarta Globe. Komnas HAM has only investigative powers and must rely on the police and AGO to prosecute cases.
The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras)
questioned the AGO’s commitment to investigating past human rights
crimes, particularly those that occurred under Suharto’s New Order
dictatorship. “There are five cases of gross human rights violation
which never got investigated [by the AGO]”, Kontras anti-impunity
division chief Yati Andriani told the Globe.
Last month, the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsam)
released a report in which it said the handling of human rights cases
had stagnated. “In general, there have been no significant developments
related to past cases of human rights abuses”, said Elsam executive
director Indriaswati D. Saptaningrum. “None of the cases investigated by
Komnas HAM, such as the Trisakti shootings, Semanggi I and II, the May
1998 riots, Talangsari 1989 and the 1997-98 missing person cases, were
brought to an ad hoc human rights court.”
Presidential apology
In April it was announced that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
would make an apology to families and victims of past human rights
abuses, including those who perished in 1965, the Tanjung Priok massacre
in 1984 and the May riots. Presidential Advisory Council member Albert
Hasibuan said on April 25 that the council was preparing a draft speech
for Yudhoyono and that the council was devising a mechanism to
compensate victims. Hasibuan said that Yudhoyono would make the apology
before his term ended in 2014 because he wanted the gesture to be his
“legacy”.
Victims and their families expressed scepticism. Sixty-year-old Maria
Catarina Sumarsih, the mother of a student killed in the 1998 shooting
of student protesters in Semanggi, said that saying “sorry” was not
enough and that the government must first acknowledge the gross human
rights violations that happened in the past. “What concerns us is that
no concrete actions will be taken as a follow-up to the public apology”,
she told the Post on April 26.
A previous apology was made by former president B.J. Habibie, who
also called for a thorough investigation of past rights abuses. However,
no action was taken. President Abdurrahman Wahid made a similar gesture
and agreed to rehabilitate the victims of rights abuses, although,
again, without serious follow-up.
Empty promises
Yudhoyono — whose now deceased father-in-law, Lieutenant General
Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, was the commander of the army’s special forces RPKAD
(now Kopassus) that spearheaded the campaign of mass murder and terror
in 1965 and once boasted that 2 million were killed “and we did a good
job” — has ordered the AGO to follow up the report.
“What Komnas HAM has reported will be studied by the attorney
general, who is expected to report to me and other relevant parties. We
want a good, just, factual, smart and constructive settlement”,
Yudhoyono told a press conference on July 25. Speaking afterwards, Arief
said he would “probe” the Komnas HAM findings and promised to share the
results with the public. “We call this kind of probe a
‘pre-prosecution’. The investigation will decide whether or not there
will be enough evidence [to bring the case to court]”, Basrief
explained.
But if Yudhoyono’s previous pledges are anything to go by, his statement is little more than empty rhetoric.
Shortly after being elected president in 2004, Yudhoyono promised the
public that he would personally ensure a thorough investigation into
the murder of Indonesia’s foremost human rights activist, Munir, who was
poisoned on a Garuda airlines flight to Amsterdam in September 2004. He
even described the murder as a “test case for the nation” and
established an officially sanctioned fact-finding team. In its final
report submitted to Yudhoyono in June 2005, the team found evidence that
Munir’s death was a “well-planned conspiracy” and named a number of
Garuda executives and State Intelligence Agency officials who should be
investigated. A former Garuda pilot and Garuda executive were sentenced
over the case, but those behind the murder have never been brought to
justice.
In September 2009 the House of Representatives made a number of
recommendations to Yudhoyono on the abduction and disappearance of 13
activists in 1997-98 by the army’s Kopassus. These included that the
president establish an ad hoc human rights court, that the president
along with all government institutions and related parties attempt to
find activists declared missing by Komnas HAM, that the government
rehabilitate and provide compensation to the families of the victims and
that the government immediately ratify the United Nations Convention
Against Forced Disappearances. Three years on, Yudhoyono has yet to
respond to, let alone act on, any of these recommendations.
[For the latest news and information on Indonesia visit the Asia Pacific Solidarity Network website at www.asia-pacific-solidarity.net/.]
Direct Action — August 1, 2012
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