A half-century after the massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists and sympathisers, Indonesia has shown little interest in reckoning with the event.
An investigation by the National Human Rights Commission, calling for the prosecution of military leaders, was rejected, and efforts to establish a truth and reconciliation commission have failed. School history texts ignore or whitewash the killings. A 2012 documentary about them won an Oscar nomination, but was not shown in theatres in Indonesia for fear it would be rejected by government censors.
There is one notable exception: the city of Palu, a picturesque provincial capital of some 300,000 people that hugs a horseshoe-shaped bay on the island of Sulawesi. Three years ago, the Mayor here did something that surprised everyone, including himself: He apologised for the killings, becoming one of the few Indonesian officials to do so and, historians say, the first to do it officially, on behalf of his government.
“As a human, as a Mayor who has responsibility, I have to apologise,” Mayor Rusdy Mastura said in a video he recorded later. “Why is it difficult to apologise? Why is it difficult to sacrifice to admit that there were maybe mistakes among actions that we took? Now we are to forgive each other.”
Since then, this feisty establishment politician has become an unlikely human rights advocate, and his relaxed seaside city has become the unexpected wellspring of efforts to grapple with one of the bloodiest episodes of the Cold War. Mr. Mastura had been invited to a gathering of former prisoners of Indonesia’s dictatorship and family members of victims of the massacres.
One of the event’s organisers, Nurlaela A.K. Lamasituju, sensed an opening. “Is there anything you want to say to the victims’ families?” she asked. Mr. Mastura fumbled a bit, and then apologised.
The victims and their relatives, he explained in a recent interview, “they did not know anything. But they have to live in conditions that make them have no future, especially their kids, because of political differences. This moved me. That’s when I apologised.”
Once he did, local activists seized on it, and Mr. Mastura soon took up his newfound position with gusto.
Two years ago, when a provincial government ministry recognised Palu for promoting human rights, Palu issued its own declaration, designating itself as a “City of Human Rights Consciousness” with a broad mandate to help victims.
Last year, Mr. Mastura signed a local regulation officially recognising human rights abuse victims in the city. The regulation, the first of its kind in Indonesia, set up a system to verify victims and their living relatives and prioritise them for city services. So far, the programme has identified 485 local victims of the 1965-66 anti-Communist actions. Now some officials and advocates, including the National Commission on Human Rights, are looking to Palu as a nationwide model.
— New York Times News Service
