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PKS politician wants 'traitors' at IPT 1965 to be prosecuted
Jakarta Globe - November 22, 2015
Aboe Bakar said that the presence of those people at the tribunal was proof of their support for the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which remains banned in Indonesia.
Tribunnews.com, a local website, reported that Aboe Bakar felt a strong need for continued enforcement of the country's anti-communist laws and regulations that hail back to the 1960s.
Indonesia in the mid-1960s was the scene of a campaign of government-sponsored anti-communist purges that left hundreds of thousands and possible over a million people dead.
At the IPT 1965, activists from Indonesia and elsewhere argued that the Indonesian state should be held responsible for the killings and various forms of abuse of survivors and their relatives, including sexual violence and arbitrary detention, in the years that followed.
The massacres were kicked off after a failed coup attempt pinned on the PKI, during which a number of senior Indonesian military leaders were killed.
The tribunal is not an official court and its findings cannot be enforced, but Indonesian officials have expressed their displeasure about the proceedings regardless. Noted Indonesian lawyer and rights activists Todung Mulya Lubis led the prosecution.
Besides the military, some of the fiercest resistance against suspected communists came from Islamic organizations.
"The PKI were rebels, how can they be defended?" Aboe Bakar was quoted as saying by Tribunnews.com. "You can say that they [the activists in The Hague] have resisted the state by acting in violation of the [1966 ban on communism], that's why they can be convicted."
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