Aceh's war survivors: Their questions won't go away
Publication Date : 26-04-2013
"The children never cease asking for their parents and siblings. Families continue to dig up mass graves in the search for their relatives for years."
This description came from Murtala, a resident in Indonesia's North Aceh who set up an organisation for war survivors like himself. He was addressing the launch of a report here last Thursday on human rights abuses during armed violence in Aceh, compiled by Amnesty International. A coalition of NGOs are demanding a tribunal for rights abuses in the country's northernmost province.
Also last week, Aceh's legislative council began to hold hearings ahead of the planned drafting of a bylaw on the provincial Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. Councilors said the process had been stalled since the Constitutional Court annulled a law on the truth and reconciliation body in 2006.
Legal technicalities are one problem in addressing the needs of Aceh's people - who have experienced barely a decade of peace since the colonial wars, rebellions against Jakarta, and South Asia's devastating tsunami and earthquake in 2004, which left some 150,000 dead and missing in Aceh.
The urgency to rebuild lives and infrastructure suppressed questions, such as what happened to family members who disappeared during the conflict, or how to heal the scars of war. But as Murtala said, the need to know what happened and how to come to terms with the losses still weigh heavy on people's minds. Thus, the council's efforts to encourage open discourse on how to go about addressing such needs must be supported.
The nation's leaders need to overcome hurdles expected in Jakarta and in Aceh - as debating human rights abuses inevitably touch the nerves of influential groups linked to alleged perpetrators, or which include the abusers themselves. Demands for a truth and reconciliation commission and a human rights tribunal in Aceh would raise fears among such groups of similar demands elsewhere in Indonesia - including the victims and survivors of the 1965 upheaval.
We have often seen vehement reaction against the notion of digging up past atrocities and bringing those accountable to a human rights court, or to a forum where victims could face alleged perpetrators in public. It comes therefore as no surprise that we have yet to see renewed deliberation on the law on the truth and reconciliation commission.
The absence of this law will be problematic; as the international peace agreement signed in Helsinki, Finland, on Aug. 15, 2005, stated that such a commission "would be established for Aceh by the Indonesian Commission for Truth and Reconciliation". But legal constraints would be minor compared to how victims and survivors feel their losses should be addressed and how to act on them.
Allegations of human rights abuses are potentially divisive in Aceh, as former combatants of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) also stand accused of such violations. Aspiring contenders for direct elections in Aceh have been wary of offending former fighters with discontented followers. Despite campaign promises from various aspiring regents, governors and councilors, the issue of justice in the Helsinki agreement has seen the least concrete follow-up.
Aceh councilors say establishing a truth and reconciliation commission could still refer to the Helsinki MoU and the Law on Aceh's governance. But don't expect support from Jakarta's lawmakers, for they would indignantly recall being sidestepped by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his then vice president Jusuf Kalla, in bringing enemies to the negotiating table following the tsunami.
Any mention of a human rights court risks equal resentment from the Indonesian Military (TNI) and police, who lost many of their own in the fighting. Recent incidents involving soldiers in attacks and murder of civilians raised the unresolved issue of the reformasi era on what to do with soldiers involved in crimes - let alone those involved in arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killings, torture and the rape of civilians.
The result: the remaining legacy of impunity, as evident time and again in the brazen, continuous incidents of soldiers taking the law into their own hands - most recently the March 23, attack and killing of detainees in the Cebongan Penitentiary in Sleman, Yogyakarta, by members of the Army's Special Forces (Kopassus), and the April 20, South Jakarta attack on the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
Indonesia's rare experiences with human rights courts have raised questions of credibility - the ad hoc court trying rights violations in Timor Leste ended in the acquittal of all military defendants. The only experience nearing a truth and reconciliation commission has been the Indonesia-Timor Leste Commission on Truth and Friendship. Though controversial regarding the degree of how far the commission weighed truth over friendship, it was a first step nonetheless in the nation's willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing.
In spite of all the odds, the Acehnese are determined to get on with their lives. Their elected leaders in Aceh and Jakarta must at least ensure openness and safety in proposing ways to redress the material and nonmaterial losses of civilians caught in the cross fire.
The author is a staff writer with The Jakarta Post.
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