Victims of 1960s communist purges in Indonesia still wait for an apology
Atrocities against suspected communists in Indonesia in the 1960s are finally being addressed, but it is a painfully slow process
At 72, Sri Sulistyawati still remembers the day when two Indonesian soldiers placed a wooden plank across her belly and used her body as a see-saw, before she fainted from the pain.
Her tale is a lost footnote in one of the last century's bloodiest atrocities, when between 500,000 and two million suspected communists were killed in purges in 1965 and 1966 under Suharto, a general who was toppled in 1998.
After being swept under the carpet for nearly 50 years, those atrocities were this year acknowledged for the first time by the government's own human rights body, providing some solace to victims whose pain and disgrace have gone ignored for decades.
In an unprecedented move, Indonesia's official human rights body Komnas HAM said in July that it had found evidence of widespread gross human rights violations nationwide during the purges. The report, based on a three-year inquiry and the testimony of 349 witnesses, urged that military officers be tried for crimes including murder, extermination, slavery, forced eviction, torture and mass rape.
The report demanded the government issue an apology and compensate victims and families - a move it said it intended to make despite resistance from retired military commanders and the nation's largest Muslim body.
Sri lives in a two-storey nursing home in Jakarta with a dozen other survivors, mostly women aged between 70 to 90. "They tied my arms and legs with a rope and dragged me on the ground with my face down for a kilometre to a military post," said Sri, whose crime was being a journalist for a newspaper that backed the country's first president, Sukarno.
"Two soldiers put a wooden plank on my belly, then got on each end and used my body as a see-saw," she remembered. "I fainted from the unbearable pain and had internal bleeding."