Asian Studies Series. Canberra: ANU Press, 2023. US$50.00, paper. ISBN 9781760465834.
Perhaps the largest problem with truth commissions lies in the implementation. They hand in their report to government, hold a ceremony, make recommendations, and then close their doors, leaving follow-up to others. That follow-up can be poor. Canada’s Truth and Reconcilation Commission (TRC), for instance, has implemented only a fraction of its calls to action.
Aceh cuts another path: after a decade of campaigning for a truth commission, civil society was able to convince the government of the autonomous Indonesian province to create a commission—and to make it a permanent body. Few, if any, commissions in the world are permanent. This makes Aceh vital for the study of truth processes and post-conflict peacebuilding, and shows the importance of both the book Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity, and the resistance to impunity itself.
Jess Melvin, Sri Lestari Wahyuningroem, and Annie Pohlman have edited the book and collaborated on many of its chapters, along with a dozen other Indonesian researchers and Australian Indonesianists. Many worked on Aceh’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (known by its Acehnese and Indonesian acronym as KKR) or in civil society efforts at truth-seeking. Thus, the volume combines academic and practitioner perspectives, the ideal approach to this sort of collaborative research. Not surprisingly, Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity centres civil society’s role. The agreement between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) ending the insurgency that ran from 1976 to 2006 authorized a truth commission. Yet neither party—not the central government nor the former GAM figures who won election to govern Aceh Province—took any real steps to create the promised commission. It was left to civil society groups to campaign for a truth-seeking process and even to provide the expertise that the woefully under-resourced KKR possessed when it was finally set up. Civil society was thus central to what I have called a pre-truth commission phase as well as to the post-commission phase of seeking to implement the commission’s findings—and even to the KKR itself.
The problem in Aceh was what truth and reconciliation scholar John Braithwaite, in his epilogue, calls a “predatory peace” (221), serving elites on both sides but not the people of Aceh—one that is better than no peace, but leaves injustice ignored. Melvin, Wahyuningroem, and Pohlman argue that the peace deal, with truth packaged in, gave way to “a pragmatic forgetting of past abuses for the sake of maintaining the lucrative patronage of Jakarta and Indonesia’s military”—or more simply, the wish “to dig a hole and bury the past” (2, 4). The book’s thesis is that civil society in Aceh broke the logjam and forced the creation of an innovative, creative, and effective truth commission, the KKR. They back this argument with meticulous, fine-grained studies by people who literally know where the bodies are buried, or were willing to take big risks to find out. “Once considered impossible,” they argue, “the KKR Aceh is keeping the flame of transitional justice in Indonesia, however small, alive” (9).
After an extensive introduction, the book consists of seven chapters, each involving a KKR member or activist as a co-author. Chapter 2 outlines the KKR’s creation, mandate, and inner workings, some of them informed by the earlier Timor-Leste Truth Commission (CAVR), providing valuable comparative data and a possible template for truth-seeking elsewhere in Indonesia. Chapter 3 puts civil society at the analytical centre, demonstrating that government followed rather than led. Truth processes were, in one commissioner’s words, “all ideas tried out by civil society before being instituted by the government” (74). Chapter 4 ties truth-seeking to political transition and conflict resolution with theoretical sophistication. The remaining chapters zero in on the particular: chapter 5 on public hearings and witness statements, chapter 6 on mapping of torture, “a routine and systemic crime committed by the Indonesian security forces against Acehnese civilians” (142). Chapter 7 examines attacks by “persons unknown” (usually state agents) in Bener Meriah region, and chapter 8 discusses memorialization, a form of symbolic reparations. Each of them provides a wealth of details and statistics; each of them highlights the leadership of survivor groups, human rights activists, and local people to illustrate oppression by the Indonesian security forces and the GAM rebels to a lesser extent, with bottom-up advocacy and local voices coming to the fore in the truth-seeking process. The picture that emerges is a positive vision of the power of people to make change and move governments even in times of “predatory peace.” These times aim to serve post-conflict elites, but they also create space for civil society advocacy to merge in the cracks and in unexpected spaces.
Still, Indonesia operates in a “context of near-total impunity” (30) despite successes in Aceh, in now-independent Timor-Leste, and even in a joint Indonesian-Timorese “commission of truth and friendship.” It would be interesting to explore what lessons the KKR can offer to break this context elsewhere in Indonesia, whether at the national or local level. Practitioners find these “sensitive” topics challenging to raise—itself a sign that impunity for crimes against humanity in Indonesia’s past remains a massive barrier to advancing human rights. The best prospects to change lie, most likely, where the editors and authors of this book place it in Aceh: with Indonesian civil society.
David Webster
Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke