http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20060929.E03&irec=2
Truth-seeking and the possibility of keeping its costs to a minimum
Budiawan, Yogyakarta
The government plans to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to
investigate past human rights violations. However, judging from recent events,
this idea is likely to stay merely an idea.
It seems Indonesia is still not ready, and perhaps will never be ready, to
honestly reassess what happened on Sept. 30, 1965.
The Soeharto regime successfully brainwashed the people about what occurred
during and after the aborted coup attempt and many people still blindly believe
the New Order version of events.
According to this story, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) attempted
unsuccessfully to topple president Sukarno's government. This means that
Sukarno, at the time closely allied to the party, was involved in a coup
attempt to topple himself.
The Attorney General's Office recently questioned a group of historians
responsible for academic efforts to reassess the Sept. 30 incident. Some people
in government and many in society still strongly resist any attempt to
reexamine the facts in Indonesia's history textbooks.
Each time former political prisoners, or the eks-tapol ("1965 affair") people
as they are popularly known, attended at Jakarta court to hear their class
action suit against four former Indonesian presidents -- from Soeharto to
Sukarno's daughter Megawati Soekarnoputri -- they were booed.
A group of young people dressed in religious clothing often demonstrated at the
court and yelled anti-communist slogans such as "beware of the communist
threat" and "there is no place for the revival of communism."
In the closing scenes of Hilton Cordell's 2002 documentary film Shadow Play an
angry-looking group of young men with machetes threaten some old eks-tapol
people, former communists or sympathizers, about to hold a simple funeral
ceremony. The group was planning to bury the exhumed bones of victims of the
1965-1966 communal violence in Wonosobo, Central Java.
Dozens of people, mobilized by those young men, later threw rocks through the
glass door and windows of the house where the coffins holding the remains were
kept. They then dragged out the coffins and burned them, while a policeman
stood watching.
The film does not say whether anyone was physically injured during the attack.
What it does show is the intimidation of people attempting to confront the past
and break the silence.
Truth-seeking is a necessity for some people, but a threat to others. If the
cost of truth-seeking is the revival of past carnage, then perhaps it is better
just to forget? But is it possible to look forward without looking back? Is it
possible to give up the past without confronting it first?
Soeharto came to power using violence and when nationwide protests forced him
to end his 32-year dictatorship, his term also ended with violence.
The New Order frequently acted to repress those it deemed had threatened or
subverted what it called "national political stability". This repression has
also left its scars.
Dealing with the past is, therefore, an ethical imperative, as it serves the
public welfare over the short and long term. But can this nation confront the
past without a return to violence? If some violence is inevitable, is there a
way of minimizing it?
When people on the losing side of a conflict confront the past to rehabilitate
their status as citizens and remove the social and political stigma heaped on
them, this appears to threaten the construction of a "religious self" among
others in society.
Such an idea of identity construction fits what human rights scholars call
"thin" and "thick" conceptions of identity. As Carla Hesse and Robert Post
write, people with "thin" identities are those who are abstract bearers of
universal rights, liberated from the contingencies of particular histories;
while "thick" humanity is understood as people who are historically embedded in
particular cultures and the bearers of specific collective memories. Hesse and
Post contend that each of these two conceptions of identity serve an important
function.
The thin concept of human agency, the authors say, liberates us from the past;
it empowers people to break free from cycles of recrimination. It also offers
us common ground to share with those with whom we have been historically at
war; it empowers us to treat each other civilly even in the absence of empathy.
A thinning out of group identities may therefore be critical in transitional
moments, especially where conflicts have hardened along ethnic or racial, or
religious and ideological lines.
Hesse and Post assert that people ought to create public cultures that are thin
enough to make it possible for people to live with their differences without
recourse to violence. But we must also aspire to create shared narratives and
institutional structures that are thick enough to sustain mutual civility and
respect.
The establishment of such a truth commission is a must. Its primary task is not
to find individual culpability, but rather examine the system as a whole -- the
system that allowed past human rights violations.
If the commission did its job, it could close the book on the nation's
authoritarian and sometimes fractious past, a book which should be opened
occasionally by history students to prevent the past from repeating itself.
The writer lectures on the violence and politics of memory at the Graduate
Program of Religious and Cultural Studies in Sanata Dharma University,
Yogyakarta. He can be reached [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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