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1965 purge survivor in search of father's grave gets deported, blacklisted
Jakarta Globe - October 18, 2015
Tom Iljas, 77, was one of many Indonesians who were sent by President Soekarno's administration to study abroad but unable to return home after the president was overthrown following the nationwide purge, which killed between 500,000 to one million suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its sympathizers.
Tom was studying at the Peking Institute of Agricultural Mechanization in China between 1960 and 1965. He became stateless for the next 18 years before being accepted as a Swedish citizen.
According to Yulia Evina Bhara, 33, a friend who accompanied him during his travel back home, Tom was trying to visit his mother's grave in the village of Salido in the South Pesisir district, a three hour drive from West Sumatra's capital Padang.
He was also bent on finding the location of his father's burial site, which according to stories told to him, was an unmarked mass grave of suspected PKI sympathizers.
Along with his 81-year-old older sister, who refused to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, and four other family members and acquaintances, Tom set out to Salido last Sunday to locate the mass grave and pray for his long-deceased father.
The group managed to get a rough location of where the mass grave might be from several locals. But the village head refused to grant them permission to visit the area and the group suddenly found themselves surrounded by 20 people who watched their every move and photographed them. Yulia suspected the men to be intelligence officers.
Tom and the others decided to head home after they were barred from entering the supposed site of the mass grave. But en route back to Padang, their vehicle was stopped by plainclothes police officers.
"During the interrogation process, there was no mention of any law being broken, but police continued to assert that the group were making a documentary film in Padang and elsewhere about cruelty to the Indonesian Communist Party," Yulia said in a statement released on Saturday.
Yulia said police intimidated them by yelling and slamming their fists on the table. The interrogation process lasted from 4 p.m. on Sunday until 5 a.m. the following day, she said. Yulia was the last to be interrogated.
Despite seeking help from the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation and the National Commission for Human Rights, Tom was deported back to Sweden on Thursday and placed on the country's blacklist, which means he cannot return to Indonesia.
"Tom Iljas was making a personal pilgrimage, possibly to see the graves of his father and mother for the last time," Yulia said
"His father's grave is one of the mass graves documented by Komnas HAM's investigations of the 1965 killings. And now Tom's spirit has died because his deportation resulted in him being blacklisted. He can never return to Indonesia."
South Pesisir District Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Deni Yuhasdi confirmed to Tempo.co news portal on Saturday that his officers kept Tom and others in custody but argued that "we were only trying to save them from being mobbed by the villagers."
Deni said the men surrounding the group in Salido were locals who were displeased that they were shooting a documentary about the 1965 killings. The officer said that police had no intention of keeping them in custody for so long.
"If immigration officers had come that evening, we would have immediately let them go. But they did not show up until the following day," he said.
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