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No justice in sight for rights abuse victims as president touts reconciliation over prosecution
Jakarta Globe - August 14, 2015
Speaking before the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) in Jakarta on Friday, Joko said his administration was working on setting up a "reconciliation committee for severe rights violations."
"The government is at the moment trying to find the most judicious and noble way to resolve human rights abuse cases," he said.
"The government wants there to be a national reconciliation so that future generations will not have to bear the burdens of history. Our children have to be free to face the wide future."
The president's statement fell far short of calls from human rights groups for an official apology for all past rights abuses, including the 1965-66 anti-communist purge in which up to two million people were summarily killed or disappeared by the military and state-backed militias.
Survivors and families of victims of the military's myriad massacres and other rights abuses over the decades have long demanded that the masterminds, many of whom now occupy positions of power in Joko's administration, be brought to justice for their crimes.
Among the latter is A.M. Hendropriyono, the former intelligence agency chief linked to, though never charged for, the 2004 murder of prominent human rights activist Munir Said Thalib.
Hendropriyono, involved in the military's massacre of 27 civilians in Talangsari, in southern Sumatra, in 1989, is close to Joko's political patron, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri, and served as an adviser to the president-elect when preparing to take office last year.
The current intelligence chief, Sutiyoso, now the chairman of a party in Joko's coalition, also has a checkered record, primarily stemming from his role in overseeing a deadly military raid on an opposition party compound in Jakarta in 1996.
The government's own National Commission for Human Rights, or Komnas HAM, issued a landmark report in 2012 denouncing the anti-communist purge and other incidents as gross human rights violations, and recommended criminal inquiries into the cases.
However, the Attorney General's Office has repeatedly refused to initiate an investigation into any of the cases, saying instead that the perpetrators should be let off the hook for the nation to move forward.
"The option of reconciliation should only be available if the judicial process is technically [unfeasible]," Hendardi, the head of the Setara Institute for Peace and Democracy, said in June.
"The attorney general has not yet done anything [in the way of an investigation], yet already it is choosing the path of reconciliation. Don't try to simplify the problem, don't be lazy and unjust."
He warned that a national reconciliation committee "should not serve to whitewash the perpatrators' [crimes] or provide false satisfaction for the victims. [Such a committee] would be a fraud."
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