The 1965–66 genocide of communists and left-wing sympathisers in Indonesia happened over fifty years ago. Millions of people were murdered and imprisoned; many were sent to a small island called Buru. However, writings about and by the political prisoners on this island are still few and far between.
Besides the present volume by Hersri Setiawan, the only other book written by an ex-political prisoner that I know of is Pramoedya Ananta Toer's The mute's soliloquy, which was first published over three decades ago in 1988. Indeed, the cronies of the New Order regime remain powerful in Indonesia, and thus many survivors are still hesitant to speak up.
Although both Pramoedya and Hersri narrate their experiences on Buru Island around the same period (Pramoedya was sent there a few years before Hersri), Hersri's book does not overlap with Pramoedya's, as he tells different stories and talks about different people from a different perspective. Thus, Hersri's book is very valuable in this nearly silent discourse of the 1965 genocide, especially from the remote island of Buru.
Born in Yogyakarta in 1936, Hersri came to love literature and became a member of Consentrasi Gerakan Mahasiswa Indonesia (CGMI, Indonesian Student Movement Concentration). Later, he left CGMI and joined Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, Institute for the People's Culture), a literary and social organisation associated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
Hersri worked as a representative of Indonesian writers at the Asia-Africa Writers Bureau in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 1961 to 1965. He returned to Jakarta on 24 August 1965, and had to face the rising tensions there. Days after the news that six army generals and one aide were kidnapped and killed on 30 September 1965, the army accused the PKI as the perpetrators. The mass murder and mass imprisonment of communists and left-wing sympathisers followed.
At the time, Hersri was staying with his younger brother, a navy colonel, in south Jakarta. He was not arrested until 1969. From that year, Hersri was detained as a prisoner in Cilandak, Salemba and Tangerang for two years without trial. In 1971, he was sent with 850 other prisoners to Buru, a small island in eastern Indonesia. After arriving at the transit camp on the island, they were divided into two: the first group of 500 (including Hersri) was placed in Unit XIV and the rest were placed in Unit XV. The Buru Camp housed 22 units of political prisoners, and its official name was the Rehabilitation Installation.
Despite this ‘positive’ official name, Hersri's memoir gives readers insights into how the prisoners suffered severe torture, malnourishment, forced labour and humiliation. When a prisoner was caught making a mistake or offending a guard, all of the prisoners in the unit would be punished.
Inspite of this, the prisoners had their own ways of surviving torture and even facing death. Hersri faced his torture by practising the Javanese attitude of Sumeleh, which means not to surrender but to accept, as well as to be aware and calm. On Buru, Hersri and his friends managed to build a small garden in the middle of the forest, hidden by banana trees. From the crops, Hersri and his friends could gain additional food.
However, the memoir reveals that conflicts did not arise only between prisoners and guards, but also amongst the prisoners themselves. Differences in ages, ideologies as well as hopes, often made these prisoners disagree and even suspect one another. This suspicion was heightened by the authorities’ strategy of placing spies amongst these prisoners.
When two of his fellow inmates, Heru Santoso and Bonar Siregar, managed to escape, all the prisoners were punished and Hersri was interrogated. The guards accused him of having knowledge about Heru's escape. When Hersri denied this accusation, one of them put a cricket in one of his ears. This cricket plus other forms of torture caused Hersri to be deaf in his left ear. The escape of these two inmates also became a topic of debate amongst the political prisoners. Some praised their escape as a courageous act, others condemned it as irresponsible towards other prisoners.
Nevertheless, Hersri also makes fun of the guards by portraying how ridiculous and naïve many of them were. The guards, for instance, were superstitious. When they could not find the two fugitives for a while, they assumed that Heru and Siregar were hidden by the spirits.
Hersri was released in 1978, surviving nine years of imprisonment, seven of which were on Buru Island. In 1981, he married Dutch-born Jitske Mulder and lived in Jakarta before moving to the Netherlands. The couple had a daughter, Ken Setiawan, who wrote a touching introduction to this book, explaining how her parents decided to move to the Netherlands not because of fear of repression but for their daughter's future. Mulder died of cancer in 1989, and Hersri moved back to Indonesia in 2004. Ken Setiawan remembers how her father used to tell her about his experiences on Buru; some were very upsetting, but others were more light-hearted. Indeed, these are the impressions I have from reading this memoir: it is not just a story of sadness but also of strength, of perseverance, and of finding happiness and comedy in the midst of tragedy. Thanks to the painstaking work by a well-known translator, Jennifer Lindsay, this book is now available in the English language.
