Moments of Proximity: Former Political Prisoners, Postmemory and Justice in Indonesia

Abstract

This article builds upon recent anthropological engagements with postconflict transitional justice processes, suggesting that ethnography can illuminate the ways in which these processes involve the negotiation of both physical and symbolic space, and intergenerational, postmemorial identities and relationships. This is demonstrated through my fieldwork observations of a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by eks-tapol (former political prisoners) in Indonesia against current and former heads of state. Tracing the symbolic resonances and the sometimes confrontational relationships brought into play around the court case, the article examines how a significant aspect of the ways in which victims of state violence situate themselves after the violence has ceased involves locating themselves, other citizens and state actors in intergenerational relationships.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• justice
• former political prisoners
• postmemory
• intergenerational memory
• human rights
• ethnography
• anthropology

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank the former political prisoners, relatives of former political prisoners, and other activists who took the time to speak with me in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. In shaping and writing this paper, the comments and suggestions of Nancy Florida, Webb Keane, Karen Siegel and the late Bernard Bate, as well as two anonymous reviewers for Asian Studies Review, have been of great help. All errors and shortcomings are, of course, my own.

Notes

1. For more on the post-Suharto phenomenon of “paid demonstrations” (demo bayaran), see Lee (2016, pp. 76–78).

2. As Lev (2000, p. 329) states, “the demand for an independent judiciary in part responds to the reality that Indonesian courts are politically bound, their judges civil servants like any other with responsibility for implementing the will of the regime… [T]he political significance of courts lies in their symbolic link to the suprapolitical idea of ‘impersonal’ law and their separability from political authority and potential as a means of confining it”.

3. In a 1971 speech, Suharto stated: “Thousands fell victim in the provinces because the people acted on their own, and because of nasty prejudices between social groups that had been nurtured for years by very narrow political practices” (quoted in Roosa, 2006, p. 24).

4. For example, in December 2004, the human rights group Fopperham organised a public exhibit of photographs from Buru Island. A similar exhibit in April 2006 sponsored by the group Syarikat featured photos taken in the 1960s and 70s at the Plantungan women’s prison in Central Java; women featured in the photographs were present at the opening to describe their experiences to an audience consisting mostly of university and high school students.

5. The events described in this article serve as a sometimes-unacknowledged precursor to the international release of two documentary films by director Joshua Oppenheimer – The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) – which examine the killings of 1965–66 from the perspectives of the perpetrators and victims’ families. These films demonstrate the persistence in present-day Indonesia of the impunity that the eks-tapol were challenging through their 2005 lawsuit and have brought international attention to the mass killings of 1965–66. Yet, while these films may make a crucial contribution to rethinking the killings and their aftermath, any assertion of their novelty serves to undervalue the complexities of prior and ongoing attempts by eks-tapol to bring attention to their plight. For discussion of The Act of Killing, see the “Roundtable” collection of articles by Cribb et al. (2014).

6. As of my 2005–07 fieldwork, some of the more odious restrictions on eks-tapol (such as the mandatory santiaji indoctrinations and the prohibition against them or their descendants becoming legislative candidates) had been lifted. Yet, many still faced restrictions on their freedom of movement (e.g. needing special permission in order to change residences) and employment.

7. The Lembaga Bantuan Hukum’s document detailing the class-action lawsuit lists seven categories of eks-tapol plaintiffs: 1) those who lost or were forced out of jobs post-1965 because of their alleged affiliation with the PKI; 2) those who had been civil servants in 1965, and have yet to receive their pensions; 3) those who were deemed guilty by association with the PKI (“tidak bersih lingkungan”, or “from an unclean environment”), which was the basis for much of the discrimination against relatives of eks-tapol; 4) veterans of the Indonesian revolution who did not receive their benefits; 5) those whose land, homes or property were destroyed or seized by the military; 6) those who were unable to continue their education after being accused of direct or indirect affiliation with the PKI; 7) writers and artists whose creative work was curtailed, banned or destroyed post-1965.

8. All interviews were conducted in Indonesian, and the English translations are my own.

9. Siegel (2006, p. 159) makes the argument that during the New Order, Indonesians found recognition by the state to be “reassuring, because it means that one does not make up a part of those who the state, in its omniscience, finds menacing”.

10. This dynamic is reminiscent of what Argenti and Schramm (2012, p. 23) refer to as the “performative memory” associated with intergenerational transmission of memories of violence, which is “set apart from everyday life, collectivized, often conservatively nurtured, and self-consciously entrusted by one generation to the next by means of initiation, apprenticeship and other rites of passage”.

11. The English word and italicisation are found in the original document.

12. Lubis (1993, pp. 48–85) explains that in the nationalist struggle against the Dutch, “rights” most often referred to political independence and collective social and economic rights. In 1945, as Indonesia was approaching independence, Sukarno argued that there was no need to include “citizens’ rights” in the Constitution, because such rights were already implicit within the “family principle” upon which the state was based. Other members of the constitutional committee argued that such guarantees of citizens’ rights were necessary to avoid an authoritarian state. The resulting compromise contained provisions on citizens’ rights that could be restricted if the state saw fit. See Lev (2000), Eldridge (2002) and Herbert (2008) for legal approaches to human rights in the New Order and post-New Order periods.

13. In the years since the class action lawsuit, the eks-tapol have been forced to contend with an upsurge in intimidation and attacks by civilian and paramilitary “anti-communist” groups.

14. To avoid inadvertently causing difficulty for the eks-tapol I knew, I did not ask their neighbours about these relationships and do not have the ethnographic evidence to corroborate or refute this assertion.

15. https://medium.com/ingat-65