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ItemRemembering Suffering and Survival: Sites of Memory on Buru(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)Survivors and their families have remembered the events of 1965 and the related suffering of persons targeted in the violence in complex ways. In the absence of state recognition of the suffering of victims of 1965, survivors and families have had to pass on their memories in personal ways making their own meanings of these sites of terror within families and communities of former political prisoners. This chapter considers this process in terms of memories of imprisonment on the remote eastern Indonesian island of Buru.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableChinese Indonesian women break the silence of mass rapes in May ‘98(The Conversation Media Group, 2018)
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ItemOn the Periphery: Human Rights, Australia and Indonesia(Hart Publishing, 2018)the government led by Prime Minister Ben Chifley intended to remain loyal to its ally, the Netherlands, which was expected to reclaim control over its colonial possession. On the other hand, Chifley’s government understood the aspirations of Indonesian nationalists, and gradually—as this section will show—had to consider its relationship with a new neighbour. Meanwhile, Indonesia was focused on securing independence and sought international support for its claims. Human rights were not on the agenda of either Australia or Indonesia. Their absence is explained in part by the relative novelty at the time of human rights as a concept in international relations—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would only be adopted three years later, in 1948. More importantly, Australia and Indonesia were each occupied with more pressing issues.
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ItemBetween Law, Politics and Memory: The Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and Justice for Past Human Rights Crimes(University of Melbourne Law School, 2018)Since the 1998 fall of authoritarianism, one of the most controversial questions in Indonesia has been what to do with the country’s legacy of human rights violations. Various justice measures developed at the national level, whether judicial or non- judicial in nature, have been largely unsuccessful in establishing the truth about past crimes, holding perpetrators to account, or providing redress to those who were victimised. This article seeks to explain why justice for past human rights crimes remains elusive in contemporary Indonesia, using the 2012 report of the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) on the 1965-66 mass violence as a case study. The article will use critical discourse analysis to examine this report and responses towards it, to establish what factors explain the stagnation of human rights reform in this area. This article will argue that while the lack of reform is commonly attributed to the influence of powerful political actors and the broader context of a weak legal system, critical discourse analysis shows that an equally important factor is the role of historical memory and how this influences reform trajectories. This has implications for the way human rights are socialised, and requires these discourses to move beyond the ambit of the law.