Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity: Aceh’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

Geudong is just one of many hundreds of sites across Aceh where state-led atrocities were perpetrated. Most have never been investigated and, in the rare cases that have, not one person has been called -let alone been heldto account for his crimes.The memorial, despite its significance to Aceh's survivor community, was bulldozed so that a stage could be hastily constructed for a politician to stand on for a few minutes to announce a poorly-funded, non-transparent package of compensation measures that will, in all likelihood, reach very few survivors.These 'non-judicial resolution' measures announced by Joko Widodo are, sadly, just the latest proof of how meaningless the promises have been by successive Indonesian administrations since the end of the military regime in 1998 to deal with past human rights abuses. These latest measures have nothing to do with dealing with the past in any meaningful sense; they offer very little truth, certainly no justice, and only meagre scraps of compensation to very few of Indonesia's many victims.At best, they are an outgoing President's last-ditch attempt to make good on his word that he would investigate these crimes and, at worst, they are a deliberate move to bury any further efforts for truth-telling and justice. Certainly, these latest measures will do nothing to redress Indonesia's entrenched culture of impunity.xi PREFACE As we highlight in this volume, it has been through their commitment and labour that the first genuine attempts to investigate past wrongs and to commemorate Aceh's many victims of human rights abuses have been made. Thus, even in Indonesia's seemingly impenetrable culture of impunity for abuses, and the Indonesian government's apparent determination to dig a hole and bury the past, survivors and their advocates find ways to endure and to work, slowly but surely, towards truth and justice.