Concrete actions sought over Indonesia’s rights abuses

President Jokowi Widodo should go beyond offering an apology and take measures to deliver justice to victims

An Indonesian Catholic mother, who lost a son in a deadly crackdown, has joined rights activists asking President Jokowi Widodo to go beyond offering an apology and take concrete measures to deliver justice to victims of human rights violations.

Maria Catarina Sumarsih, 70, said that the president’s statement expressing regret was just imagery and not a step forward as termed by many parties. Her son Benardinus Irawan was killed during a student protest in 1998.
 
“The President’s statement was only limited to imagery as if he had paid off election promises, but in reality, President Jokowi is a protector of alleged perpetrators of gross human rights violations,” Sumarsih told UCA News referring to Widodo’s statement on Jan.  11 over past mass human rights violations, including a violent anti-communist purge in the 1960s and the killing and disappearance of student protesters in the late 1990s.

Widodo said in a speech at the State Palace in Jakarta that as the leader of the country, he admits “that gross human rights violations have happened in several incidents and I regret they happened very much.”

“I have sympathy and empathy for the victims and their families,” he said, adding that the government was trying to rehabilitate the victims’ rights without negating the judicial resolution, though without specifying how it would do that.

The president mentioned a total of twelve cases, including the murder and abduction of dozens of student protesters and activists during mass street rallies in 1998 that brought down the three decades of the dictatorship of Suharto. One of the victims is Irawan, who was a student at Atma Jaya Catholic University.

Sumarsih, who has been organizing protests in front of the state palace every Thursday since 2007, said: “Severe past human rights violations need not be regretted but must be accounted for in the ad hoc Human Rights Court according to the mechanism stipulated in Law No. 26 of 2000 on Human Rights Courts. ”

“Regret from the president on behalf of the state is not needed. What is important is to deter the perpetrators by trying them in court,” she told UCA News.

“The government’s seriousness so that gross human rights violations will not occur again in the future is very doubtful because there is no deterrence for the perpetrators,” she added.

In line with Sumarsih, Fatia Maulidiyanti, coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Disappearances also said that a statement of regret “without disclosing the truth is not important” unless there is a clearer follow-up.

Reverend Gomar Gultom from the Union of Churches in Indonesia, an ecumenical Christian forum, hailed Widodo’s statement and called it “a big leap in the process of resolving human rights violations in Indonesia, which for decades has tended to be covered up and even denied.”

He hopes that this confession can be an entry point for further legal proceedings.

“Now it is the duty of all elements of the nation with good will to oversee this process more seriously,” he said.

He stated, as a follow-up to this statement, the government needs to ensure the elimination of various forms of historical material that have existed so far, which can be seen as “a distortion of history and obscuring the facts of human rights violations and memorialization of these gross human rights violations” in the form of a statute, as a warning to the next generation so that it does not happen again.

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