John Mcbeth: Is Indonesia Finally Coming to Terms with Its Communist Rebel Past?

John Mcbeth, in the Singapore Straits Times (4-13-05):

TENS of thousands of surviving political prisoners, who were jailed without trial for unproven links to the outlawed Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), may be about to get their civil and legal rights fully restored. But it will probably take the death of an older generation before Indonesia rids itself of a mindset which cost the lives of 500,000 people in the horrific bloodletting of 1965-66 and also created an underclass which is still being discriminated against today.

According to official figures, as many as 1.7 million Indonesians were imprisoned following a purported abortive communist coup in September 1965. That number included 12,000 prisoners and dependants exiled in 1969-79 to the remote Banda Sea island of Buru. Many died from malnutrition and disease - their suffering chronicled by acclaimed author and fellow prisoner Pramoedya Ananta Toer in The Mute's Soliloquy.

In the cluttered office of his modest home in a busy east Jakarta area, Mr Pramoedya's former publisher Joesoef Izak, 76, talks bitterly about the discrimination that still lingers 40 years on. What bothers the publisher is not so much the after-affects of his own incarceration in Jakarta's Salemba Jail, but the way the stigma has haunted his 46-year-old son.

A foreign-trained sociologist, the younger Izak has had to find employment with a Western embassy because Indonesian institutions would not give him a job.

Sons and daughters of other prominent prisoners continue to receive the same treatment.

'We are the underdogs of society,' says Mr Izak, a former newspaper editor whose leftist ideals fell far short of what the PKI required for membership.

'I'm not pessimistic (about rehabilitation), but I know it will be a long hard struggle. In daily life there has been a gradual change, but the ruling structure doesn't change. Perhaps it's some kind of inertia. If they had any brains, they would realise it isn't worth having this attitude any more.'

The Suharto government had finally removed 'ET' - the initials for ex-tapols, or political detainees - from identity cards in the mid-1990s. It was a move that many thought would lead to their early rehabilitation. But the military and the bureaucracy refused to bury the past. While all Indonesians over 60 get their identity cards for life, the ex-prisoners still have to renew theirs every three years....