Looking silence in the eye : When forgiveness requires atonement

Looking silence in the eye : When forgiveness requires atonement Julia Suryakusuma  ;  The author of Julia’s Jihad

JAKARTA POST, 31 Desember 2014

                                                

                                                                                                                       

If someone caused you unbearable suffering, the actions of which had haunted you for 50 years, would you be able to forgive them? Eric Lomax, aka “The Railway Man” could, and even became friends with his erstwhile tormentor. How did he manage to do that? Lomax (1919-2012) was a British officer during World War II captured by the Japanese during the Fall of Singapore in 1942. He and other prisoners of war were sent to work on the Thai-Burma railroad, aka the Death Railway. When the military police arm of the Japanese Imperial Army, Kempetai, discovered that Lomax had made a radio receiver, he was subjected to beatings, water boarding and kept on the edge of death for weeks. Incredibly, Lomax survived. Lomax wrote of his experience in a book entitled The Railway Man (1995), which in 2013 was made into a film. Amazingly, one of Lomax’s captors and torturers, Nagase Takashi (1918-2011), an interpreter for Kempetai, also wrote a book on his own experiences of the war entitled Crosses and Tigers (1990), which Lomax came across in 1991. He made contact with Takashi, who had suffered deep remorse over the years for the brutal acts he had committed. The two former foes met, in a rare moment of reconciliation portrayed very movingly in the film. Finding peace at long last, Takashi and Lomax became friends for the rest of their lives. 44-year-old Adi Rukun, the protagonist in Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2013 film The Look of Silence, was not as fortunate. His brother Ramli was murdered in the 1965 anticommunist pogrom in Deli Serdang, North Sumatra. In the film, Adi, an ophthalmologist who makes house calls, visits his brother’s killers, now old men, and myopic in their self-righteousness. He examines their eyes — as well as their consciences — while he calmly probes them about their past misdeeds. Unlike Takashi, the self-confessed murderers were entirely unrepentant. Adi’s decision to confront his brother’s executioners — a well-known legislator, a respected elder and a close relative of the family — was a supreme act of courage. It’s an inherently brave thing to be able to face your oppressors, but even more so if they are still in power. This is where the problems lie for Indonesia. While we are 17 years into the Reform Era, our politics, economics and society are pervaded by New Order figures, some of whom are still powerful. This helps to explain Indonesia’s reluctance to acknowledge the 1965 massacres. Lomax and Takashi could tell their own stories, but in the case of Indonesia, it had to be told by a third party. Oppenheimer did just that, from both sides: of the perpetrators in The Act of Killing (2012) and of the survivors in The Look of Silence. When Adi confronts the leader of the Komando Aksi death squad with, “I think you’re trying to avoid your moral responsibility”, he is not only addressing his brother’s killer, but all of us, government and people alike. Think about it: fellow Indonesians were summarily slaughtered for being members of (or even just affiliated with) a legal Indonesian political party.  Upwards of a million people lost their lives like Ramli, and a million more were rounded up and placed in prison camps, without any due process of law. They were given death or long, hard prison sentences without the presentation of evidence or the right to a legal defense. None of these victims had any connection to, or even awareness of, the events of 30 September 1965.  And yet they died horribly or were tossed away into prisons like human garbage.  No country can build a strong legal regime without confronting such past atrocities. It took Lomax and Takashi 50 years to reconcile, because that is how long it took them to find each other. In our case, perpetrators and survivors-cum-victims have been living side by side for almost five decades. Imagine! In all that time, the victims have been hidden in suffering and silence, while the perpetrators have enjoyed impunity, power and even prominence. And we call ourselves a democracy? The New Order’s interpretation of 1965 was the rationale for the oppression of the military-led regime. In 2015, it will be 50 years since the 1965 Indonesian genocide; surely it is time for change. In early December, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo reiterated his presidential campaign promise to address past human rights violations. So how come Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Tedjo Edhi Purdijatno says we should, “forget the past”? Vice President Jusuf Kalla also stated it was unlikely that the government would issue an official apology. Well, what do you expect from a man who was shown in The Act of Killing giving a speech in 2009 at an annual meeting of Pancasila Youth — a paramilitary group involved in the 1965 death squads — saying “We need gangsters to get things done”? Calls to acknowledge the 1965 massacre have recently escalated, not only nationally, but also from outside Indonesia. On Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, US Senator Tom Udall introduced a “Sense of the Senate Resolution” condemning the 1965-1966 atrocities, calling on both the Indonesian and US governments to declassify related documents in US files. It is an open secret that the US government, closely supported by the British and Australian administrations, supported the change of government in 1965 as as part of their struggle against Communism. Udall’s resolution came around the time of the release of a Senate report on the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture program (similar to Kempetai’s torture methods and those of the Indonesian death squads), used against Islamist terrorist suspects after 2011. People like former US vice president and secretary of defense Dick Cheney reject the report, but as White House press secretary Josh Ernest said, “Fessing up […] the willingness to come clean, does a lot to rebuild [the US’] moral authority around the globe.” This is true of all nations, including Indonesia. It really is in our interests to come clean about our human rights abuses, not just those from 1965. Adding a personal note, in the spirit of the New Year, look deep into your heart. Whether you need to apologize, atone or forgive, do it. Pay all your debts, whatever they may be, and clean the slate in 2015. Happy New Year. ●