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Indonesia rules out criminal inquiry of anti-communist purges
New York Times - April 19, 2016
Luhut B. Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, who delivered the opening remarks at the symposium, said the government would, over time, try to answer definitively how hundreds of thousands were killed in state-sponsored violence from 1965 to 1966.
"We'll see what happens after this," Mr. Luhut said after the two-day symposium began in Jakarta, the capital. "We'll study further on what we should do. But the spirit of the government of Indonesia we're basically going to solve the whole thing," he said.
Mr. Luhut, a retired army general, ruled out an apology by the present government to hundreds of thousands of purge survivors who were imprisoned for years without trial or to the descendants of victims whom the state ostracized. But he said the government would be open to official complaints.
"Perhaps its wording would be 'remorse for past events, which were a dark history for this nation, and which we hope will not ever happen again,' " he said of a possible response. "We're still looking for the exact wording."
An acknowledgment would confirm what historians have called one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century.
The purges were carried out by soldiers and military-backed civilian, paramilitary and religious groups. Half a million people or more, many of whom had no connection to Communism, are estimated to have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of others were held in detention for years.
The violence, occurring as the Cold War was escalating in Southeast Asia, was set off by a failed uprising within the Indonesian armed forces. An officer-led group kidnapped and killed six army generals beginning on the night of Sept. 30, 1965.
Within days, top commanders had quashed the uprising, which they called an attempted coup orchestrated by the then-powerful Indonesian Communist Party in collaboration with rogue military personnel. In the purges that followed, the victims included intellectuals, ethnic Chinese Indonesians and countless others.
The symposium this week is the first time that a public discussion of the atrocities has been endorsed by the government, which for decades maintained that the bloodshed was justified to save Indonesia from a Communist takeover and which violently suppressed challenges to that narrative.
In 2012, the National Commission on Human Rights, which is independent of the government and organized the current symposium, released a report declaring the purges a gross violation of human rights and demanding a criminal investigation. But neither the government at the time nor that of President Joko Widodo, who assumed office in 2014, has followed up.
Although the main military and civilian architects of the violence are probably all dead, the purges, which led to the removal in 1967 of the country's founding president, Sukarno, remain a highly delicate issue.
Hundreds of police officers backed by armored personnel carriers were on standby outside the hotel in central Jakarta where the symposium opened, in anticipation of possible protests by Islamic groups and paramilitary units that took part in the massacres. No protesters appeared, however.
The 1965-66 events have been extensively researched and documented in reports that contravene the official government narrative that the violence was justified and that those who took part were national heroes.
Sintong Panjaitan, a retired army general who was a young officer during the massacres, also spoke at the symposium and added fuel to the debate by challenging claims that 500,000 or more people were killed. He suggested the number was as low as 80,000. "Where is the evidence?" Mr. Sintong asked.
Joshua Oppenheimer, an American film director, has produced two documentaries about the period that were both nominated for Academy Awards. The fear of reprisals for the films has been strong enough that his Indonesian co-director and crew have remained anonymous out of concerns for their safety.
Mr. Oppenheimer said by phone from Europe on Monday that he supported the symposium's aims, but he warned that Indonesia could not achieve national reconciliation without a truthful accounting of what happened, whether that occurred this week or years from now.
"It would be sort of a tragedy if the government went from one grotesque lie to some slightly less misleading lie, by dismissing the number of victims and saying we should all move forward," Mr. Oppenheimer said. "I think that would deny people any sort of closure and undermine the value of those victims' lives."
Some Indonesian human rights groups declined to participate in the symposium, for fear that it would give the government a quick way to end debate rather than lead to a genuine truth and reconciliation process.
One of the silent protesters is Effendy Saleh, 78, who spent 15 years in prison beginning in 1965 because he was a labor union activist whose group, the military claimed, was affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party. He was never put on trial and denies any wrongdoing.
"Reconciliation means the 1965 survivors can be accepted and viewed as ordinary citizens," he said. "If people know you as being a '1965 person,' you have nothing."
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/world/asia/indonesia-anti-communist-purge-symposium.html.
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