Indonesia, Like Other Countries, Is Having Trouble Coming to Terms with History
The bronze patina on Ratna Sarumpaet's face shines in the soft light. Her hands sculpt abstracts in the air around her as she speaks, her eyes light up with determination as she enunciates each point.
“Are you not worried about a possible reaction?” I ask her. We are discussing her latest play Dalam Kegelapan Panjang (In the Long Darkness), a production this internationally reputed Indonesian playwright wrote about the fate of hundreds of thousands of her compatriots butchered in an anti-Leftist bloodbath in 1965-6 that followed the September 30, 1965 events in Jakarta. A putsch by elements of the Indonesian military was attributed to the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) by the rightists elements that subsequently prevailed. These rightists were led by the head of the Army Strategic Reserve Command (KOSTRAD) General Suharto, who was positioned in Jakarta very close to the presidential palace then occupied by Indonesia's founding father Sukarno.
Ratna replies firmly, "It is my duty as a writer. Spiritually and morally we must confront our history. We must stop telling lies to our people." This remains a very difficult position to hold in public in Indonesia. I remind her that Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia's ousted fourth president popularly known as Gus Dur, had tried early in his tenure to proclaim the need to be honest about the trauma of the 1965-66 bloodbath and had drawn immediate fire; he made a dignified withdrawal, recognizing that he had little political support. The ex-president, courageous though he had been to raise the issue, was also mindful that his very own NU, the country's largest Muslim organization, had been implicated in the butchery, particularly in East and Central Java where the slaughter of PKI members and supporters, alleged sympathizers, trade unionists and peasant organizers, had reached fever pitch.
I express my concern to Ratna that groups connected to the Suharto regime and to the military such as Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth) and FKPPI, which recruits the sons and daughters of military men, both serving and retired, would react violently to the play. The former prove my point just a few weeks later with an attack on the Jakarta offices of KONTRAS, the Committee for the Disappeared and the Victims of Violence. "I am ready for that kind of thing," she responds.
I conducted that interview in 2003. A year or so later Munir, leader of KONTRAS, was murdered on an Amsterdam-bound plane. A Dutch autopsy found very high levels of arsenic in his blood. BIN, the National Intelligence Bureau, has subsequently been implicated.
The issue of the discrimination suffered by the millions of children of PKI members which Ratna Sarumpaet sought to highlight in her play remains unresolved. Equally, the long struggle of the many PKI and other dissident elements to have full civic rights restored continues. Earlier this year a group of survivors, many over 70, took their case to court yet again with no satisfactory outcome. A mob including members of the Islamic Defence Front (FPI), a fundamentalist group that has been instrumental in the enforced closure of some 23 churches in and around the West Java capital, Bandung in the past year took up a minatory presence outside the court as the plaintiffs entered. Most famous amongst those seeking restitution is the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, several times reportedly short listed for the Nobel Literature Prize. Pram, who suffered incarceration under the Dutch as well as Sukarno and Suharto, has vowed to continue the battle.
The issue of the so-called Gestapo "coup" of September 30 remains a lacuna in Indonesia. Many of the players have passed away including Latief, who, it is alleged, was in the would-be coup makers circle and tipped Suharto off.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be set up along the lines of Guatemala's and South Africa's. It is however moot whether the issue of the PKI's alleged role in the September 30 events will reach this forum. Other issues such as the Army's bloody role in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua as well as the killings of students at Jakarta universities in 1998 and the woman labour activist Marsinah are much more likely to take up the agenda. Suharto meanwhile continues to escape trial for corruption during his 32-year tenure, his doctors pleading infirmity, although this has not prevented him from turning out to vote in elections apparently moving with ease.
Equally, it seems unlikely that the United States, whose embassy is known to have supplied the rightist military with a list of names “to be dealt with,” will cooperate fully with the commission in dealing with the 1965-66 events.
The skeletons of that dire period in Indonesia's history continue to rattle in the cupboard.