August 27, 2000
Indonesians Differ on Penalties for the Past
By SETH MYDANS
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 20 --
For Pramoedya Ananta Toer, forgiveness is cowardice. Principle is
absolute. The only way to deal with
the crimes of the past is to look them
in the face, seize the culprits and
punish them.
"I've experienced it all," Mr. Pramoedya, the nation's most prominent
writer and one of its moral touchstones, said in an interview the
other day. "I've been beaten, hit,
tortured, humiliated. There cannot be forgiveness. I cannot reconcile
with bandits."
Mr. Pramoedya spent 11 years as
a political prisoner during the harsh
rule of President Suharto, which ended more than two years ago. Mr.
Pramoedya's books were banned
and his archives and library destroyed. Now, he said, the time for an
accounting has come. "I hold to the
principle that all criminals of every
kind must be put on trial," he said.
But now that Mr. Suharto is gone
and speech is free, society is filled
with a clamor of voices, and Mr.
Pramoedya's is just one of them.
While his anger has added fuel to a
national debate over the abuses perpetrated during Indonesia's three
decades of authoritarian rule, the
question his critics raise is just how
much strength and energy does this
unsteady nation have to reopen old
wounds and reignite old enmities?
As Indonesia struggles to rebuild
itself, the debate over the role of the
past has been overshadowed by the
urgent issues of the moment -- the
continuing political power of Mr. Suharto's army, the rise of separatist
movements, the rebuilding of political institutions, the crisis of the
economy, the threat of social unrest.
These are issues, his critics say,
that Mr. Pramoedya is not taking
into account.
Unlike South Africa when apartheid ended, Indonesia made no clean
break with its past. There was no
winning side in its struggle with history. Many of the abusers from the
past are still powerful and many of
the abuses continue today.
"Yes, some penalties will have to
be imposed, but how far these penalties go and who will suffer them is an
issue we still have to debate," said
Smita Notosusanto, a leading democratic advocate. "That's the difficult
part. If we go along totally with Pramoedya, we will have to sacrifice too
much of our future in order to settle
the past."
A number of judicial investigations have been opened, notably involving
military abuses in East Timor last year and against a separatist movement
in Aceh. But they are
moving slowly, hampered by politics
and the continuing power of the chief culprit, Indonesia's army.
Last week, Parliament passed a
constitutional amendment enshrining the principles of human rights
but absolving any past abusers from
prosecution. That protection, quietly
inserted at the apparent insistence of
the military, has drawn loud public criticism. It remains unclear how
much effect it will have on any prosecutions under criminal law.
At the same time, historians and
researchers have begun learning the
truth about past abuses, largely hidden in Mr. Suharto's time. These
began with the massacres of hundreds of thousands of suspected
Communists in the mid-1960's, at the
time Mr. Suharto came to power. The
abuses continued as he used the military to suppress opponents and
maintain order throughout this
broad and constantly feuding nation.
With historical research only beginning, a number of government
and private groups are exploring
models like the truth commissions in
South Africa and the trials in South
Korea where two former presidents
were convicted of abuses and then pardoned.
But the challenge is more complicated in Indonesia, said Jonathan
Simon, an American scholar who is
helping develop democratic institutions here.
"You have to be in a very strong
and secure political position before
you begin doing this kind of thing,"
he said. "In South Africa you had a
liberation movement that overthrew
a previous regime and started fresh
from a new point. What you have
here in Indonesia is a mixture of the
old and new governments, a mixture
of reform and nonreform forces. It is
not us and them the way it was in
South Africa."
He added: "My sense is that they
are having enormous difficulty in
confronting the past, partly for cultural reasons. It is not necessarily in
the nature of Indonesian society and
culture to dig up past aspects that
have been shameful and blameful
and negative and horrible in a lot of
ways."
Hermawan Sulistyo, director of
the Research Institute for Democracy and Peace, a private policy group,
has been researching the massacres
of 1965 and 1966 and sees a danger in
confronting people with past traumas.
He said that in Bali, which was
devastated during those massacres,
a private group has begun exploring
local killings and confronting people
with their own history. This action
has served only to open fresh wounds
and revive past traumas, without bringing any resolution, he said.
"When you open things up, what
you get is only political revenge and
political vendetta behind what seems
like a legal process," he said. "The
problem in Indonesia now is that
many of the incidents, many of the
abuses, are opened up with more
political baggage than legal baggage."
On the other hand, he said, Indonesia is not yet ready for reconciliation.
"How can you reconcile with
abusers when you still have the old
machinery in power?"
As historians and researchers
work to learn the truth about the
abuses that were hidden in Mr. Suharto's time, Mr. Pramoedya's principal
critic in the debate is Goenawan Mohamad, a writer who is
one of Indonesia's leading journalists.
"Pramoedya looks at forgiving as
eliminating the crime or the guilt,"
he said. "To me, forgiving is acknowledgment of the guilt, and
acknowledgment is important if you
want to be humble to deal with the
future."
Like Mr. Pramoedya, he said the
most important thing now is to open
a window into the past and to learn
from it, but he said compromises
must be made for the sake of national stability.
"There needs to be a public discussion, a debate, a consciousness-raising
session to acknowledge that Indonesians are capable of committing
such atrocities," Mr. Goenawan said.
"And from that basis we can hope to
avoid this kind of thing the next time
around."
The first step, he said, is to allow
the victims of past abuses to step
forward and be heard.
"It is time for the country to listen
to the victims," he said. "But maybe
it cannot be the time for us to deal in
a rigorous way with justice. It will
have to be very selective justice and,
of course, selective justice is not
exactly justice."