WikiLeaks Copycat Reveals Indonesia's Bloody Secrets
Tuesday, 21 December 2010 16:08
Stefan Simanowitz
Massacre witness Nyoman Ramin in front of his village's mass grave. Photo by
Stefan Simanowitz
On Friday, December 10th
IndoLeaks, Indonesia’s very own version of WikiLeaks, went live. Over
the following weeks the site has posted some sensitive documents
including a conversation between former President Suharto and former US
President Gerald Ford as well as four autopsy reports of the victims of
the infamous 1965 coup attempt. At the time, descriptions of the
sadistic torture to which six top military generals had allegedly been
subjected were widely reported and these reports played a large part in
stirring up resentment against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) who
was blamed for the failed coup. The following months saw a violent
anti-communist backlash in which mobs and militias engaged in
large-scale killing, notably in Java, Bali, Lombok and Sumatra. An
estimated half a million people were massacred, their bodies buried in
unmarked graves or tossed into the sea.
Debate
as to whether the coup might have been staged or manipulated with
support of the West has rumbled on for decades and these leaked autopsy
documents challenge the official version of what happened to the
generals. The reports, signed by five doctors, suggest that the victims’
bodies were ridden with bullets but had not been mutilated. While the
authenticity of these documents has yet to be verified, the appearance
of IndoLeaks has led to speculation that more documents may emerge to
throw light on this darkest periods of Indonesia’s history when, in the
wake of the coup attempt the then head of the Army's Strategic Reserve,
General Suharto, took control and presided over what the a CIA report
described as “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.”
Details
of the massacres and the extent to which Western governments were
complicit in allowing them to occur have never been openly aired.
Declassified intelligence documents have shown that in 1965 the United
States gave Suharto lists of suspected communist who were subsequently
killed. A CIA memorandum claims that in 1962 Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan and President Kennedy agreed “to liquidate President Sukarno.”
In Indonesia all public discussion of the killings was forbidden and
this period of Indonesia's history was carefully rewritten. Even today,
twelve years after Suharto was deposed and forty years since the
massacres, Indonesia is still struggling to come to terms with this
bloody period. There has been no official acknowledgment of the
killings. No one has been brought to account and no redress or
restitution has been offered to the victims and their families.
Sixty-five
year old Nyoman Ramin was just twenty years old when soldiers marched
into his village in Bali with 42 prisoners – men aged between about
twenty and fifty. “The men were made to sit right here with their hands
tied and their legs dangling down into the grave” he tells me indicating
a patch of grass beside the road in the picturesque Balinese village of
Petulu. “I was watching from over there in front of the temple” says
Ramin. “A solider walked slowly around behind the prisoners shooting
each of them in the back of the head. Some of them were crying and I
remember one older man had a heart attack and fell into the grave even
before the soldier got to him.”
Ramin's
story is far from uncommon. Between October 1965 and March 1966
suspected members or sympathizers of the PKI were rounded-up and taken
from one village to another by soldiers or local militias where they
were shot or butchered with machetes. As with Petulu, the graves were
often dug in the local cemetery with a member of each family in the
village – commonly young men like Nyoman Ramin – ordered to dig the
graves and watch the executions. Those who refused to help identify
people on the lists and take part in the killings risked being branded
communists themselves. In those six months an estimated 80,000 people,
roughly 5 percent of Bali's population, were killed. "On Java we had to
urge people to kill communists but on Bali we had to stop them” one of
Suharto’s generals is reported to have said.
In
2004 legislation was passed with a view to establishing a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate, compensate, and resolve
many human rights violations that occurred during Suharto's regime. But
in 2006 Indonesia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the law was
unconstitutional and although another draft law has been prepared by the
Justice and Human Rights
Ministry, there seems little political will to enact this law.
While
Indonesia has made significant progress in its transition to democracy
since the downfall of Suharto, boasting a free press as well as a body
of new human rights legislation, its failure to address the bloodiest
aspects of its recent past are problematic. For a country emerging from a
period of authoritarianism, establishing transitional justice
mechanisms is an important part of the nation-building and
post-conflict recovery process. The country's increasingly active
censors are particularly sensitive about films that attempt to tackle
this period and in 2007 new history textbooks which discussed the
massacres and challenged the established view that the PKI were behind
the 1965 coup were confiscated by the Attorney General. Many young
Indonesians are ignorant about what happened in 1965 and those
generations who bore witness to it are rapidly disappearing.
“Indonesians have a funny view of history,” Dr Nono Makarim former
editor-in-chief of the Harian Karmi
newspaper tells me. “It is a cyclical view, like stories in the shadow
puppet theatre. Indeed, there is no interest in the past.” But with
IndoLeaks and WikiLeaks both revealing new details of the Suharto period
and a Freedom of Information Act recently enacted it is likely that
Indonesians will have to start coming to terms with some of the less
savory aspects of their past. Details of the role played by America and
Britain in that past will not make for very pretty reading.
Stefan Simanowitz is a writer, journalist and human rights campaigner. He
recently returned from Indonesia.
http://towardfreedom.com/asia/2227-wikileaks-copycat-reveals-indonesias-bloody-secrets
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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