ASIA/INDONESIA - "Memori Genosida": Jesuit publishes book on genocide in Indonesia

Yogyakarta (Agenzia Fides) - "We often see human rights violations or political violence only in a local or national context, as if abuses or mass murders were only the concern of a particular local or national government. From a human perspective, however, any case of human rights violations or massive political violence is a problem for all of us as human beings. Regardless of when and where these episodes occur, the victims were or are people like us. Their suffering is also our suffering. Any injustice to them is also an injustice to us. Because of this, we need to work together to find a solution. And we must work together to prevent these events from happening again". Indonesian Jesuit Father Baskara T. Warday, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (PUSDEMA) at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta (Indonesia), told Agenzia Fides. The priest recently published the book “Memori Genosida” (Memory of the Genocide). Previously, in 2017, he had participated in an initiative organized by UNESCO at the Holocaust Memorial Museum of the United States, with the aim of promoting knowledge about the Holocaust but, more generally, on the themes of memory and the tragic experience of the genocide that concerns many countries around the world. The now published book "Memori Genosida" emerged from this experience. In it, Father Baskara refers primarily to the serious bloody events in Indonesia in 1965, when the government of Sukarno was overthrown, from whose ashes the "Orde Baru" (New Order) under General Suharto emerged.
From 1965 to 1966, the Indonesian army and its allies massacred hundreds of thousands of people they referred to as "communists" while many Western governments remained silent. Prior to its destruction in 1965, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was the third largest Communist Party in the world. But that year hundreds of thousands of its members and supporters were murdered in one of the great crimes of the 20th century. The priest recalls the events in Indonesia in the second half of the 1960s: "If we read the literature on the Holocaust, we will also learn to see the violence of 1965 in comparison with other similar cases in the world. In particular, let us remember that both the victims and the perpetrators of this terrible event were people like us. We also want to learn from reading this how to deal with a post-war situation. And of course - concludes the Jesuit - "we also want to learn how to prevent the recurrence of similar violence and mass murder". (MG-PA) (Agenzia Fides, 28/4/2021)

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