Their memories are those of old men — sometimes wandering, sometimes imprecise — but they clearly remember the fear.
“I was just so scared at that time,” says Karto Wiyono, who survived one of Indonesia’s darkest periods.
It was October 1965, and Wiyono and his neighbor Widji Thukul were farmers in a small village in Central Java.
Two men arrived at their front doors, one in a military uniform, one in civilian clothing. The men asked to come to the local cemetery and dig holes in the ground.
Soldiers arrived escorting a large group of men with their hands tied, the farmers says. They aren’t sure how many prisoners, maybe 200 or more. Then the killing started.
“They pushed them so that they jumped into the hole alive. Then in the hole the soldiers shot at them. Then we as the villagers buried them,” Wiyono says.
The farmers are the only two still alive among the 30 villagers who buried the victims that night. Their fading memories are evidence of mass killings that took place across the country.
Mass atrocities
In the wake of a failed coup in the autumn of 1965, Indonesia’s military launched a systemic campaign to purge communists from the country.
According to multiple eye witness accounts and investigations by human rights groups, mass atrocities followed that Indonesia hid from the world.
Soldiers, police and local militias arrested, tortured and killed members of the communist party and their families, as well as teachers, labor activists and many ethnic Chinese.
No one knows exactly how many people died, but an international tribunal last year estimated death squads killed between 400,000 and 500,000 people. It concluded that the mass killings were a crime against humanity.
Bedjo Untung had to eat mice and snakes to survive during nine years in prison in the 1970s. He believes he was arrested because his father was a member of the teacher’s union, which was seen as allied with the communist party.
Now he leads the Indonesia Institute for the Study of the 1965 Massacre, staging a weekly protest in front of the Presidential Palace. His group wants the government to provide answers about what happened then and to exhume suspected mass graves.
He has compiled a list of 122 possible locations.
Untung shows CNN around a site in central Java where he believes his own father-in-law is buried with 200 others, based on information from eyewitness accounts.
Adjacent to an existing cemetery, the alleged mass grave is now a quiet, overgrown field. Some families have erected symbolic tombs here to honor the missing dead.
“Nobody has courage to open up this one, but I hope this time, the government may open up this place,” Untung says.
Step forward?
For decades, Indonesia’s government blocked public discussion of the events of 1965-66. The military general who led the anti-communist purge, Suharto, ruled the country for more than three decades.
Even after the transition to a civilian government, dredging up the past has been frowned upon. Human Rights Watch has tracked more than 30 meetings on the mass killings that were either banned by the police or attacked by Muslim militias.
Activists claim communists and their families are still banned from joining the military or police, although the government insists such policies are no longer enforced.
However, Indonesian authorities are beginning to open up about the past.
In a major step forward, the government supported a 2016 symposium to discuss the killings. A senior government minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan met with representatives of the victims and their families and listened to their concerns.
Luhut says the government is investigating their claims and considering “having a look” at the alleged mass graves. However, the minister has his doubts about what will be found. He believes only a few thousand died in 1965-66, dismissing the idea that the death toll reached hundreds of thousands.
“The spirit of this basically is to reconcile. Forget the past and move forward,” he tells CNN.
Accountability
Victims also want answers about the true depth of the involvement of Indonesia’s cold war allies, including the United States and Australia.
The United States supported the Suharto regime and provided it with a list of supposed communist sympathizers, although former officials say it was only based on publicly available information.
Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights has called on the United States to release all historical documents that could shed light on the killings.
The Hague tribunal recommended the Indonesian government apologize to victims and their families, investigate the crimes against humanity, and ensure any survivors receive appropriate compensation..
However, within Indonesia, there is no serious talk of putting anyone on trial and no one in power has ever officially apologized.
Authorities are still nervous about even proceeding with exhumations, according to Andreas Harsono, Indonesia Researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Some have called for a truth and reconciliation commission, like in South Africa, but Harsono insists Indonesia’s powerful military only wants half of that deal.
“It is going to be a fake reconciliation without truth telling,” he says.
Untung and the victims he represents waited 50 years for a formal meeting with the government to ask for answers. Six months after he handed over his list of suspected mass graves, he believes the government has made no serious effort to exhume them.
He’s still sending them letters asking for an explanation.
