A wreath is on display during the 600th Kamisan protest in front of the State Palace in Jakarta on Sept. 5, 2019. (Robbyansyah / Shutterstock.com)

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post's print edition on June 2, 2018, with the title "Landmark rights meeting ends without solutions".

Marguerite Afra Sapiie

The Jakarta Post 

Jakarta / Sat, June 2, 2018

A recent landmark meeting between President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and survivors and families of past human rights abuses has met with frustration, as the meeting did not result in concrete solutions to the unresolved past atrocities. 

For the first time since he took office in 2014, Jokowi hosted on Thursday a meeting with a group of 20 survivors and families of the victims of past human rights abuses who regularly participate in a weekly protest known as Kamisan.

In the one-hour dialogue at the Presidential Palace, they demanded that Jokowi publicly admit the government’s involvement in at least seven cases of gross human rights violations in the past, including the 1965 communist purge and the 1998 riots. 

Maria Sanu, the mother of 16-year-old Stevanus Sanu, who died during the May 1998 riots, said she was disappointed with the meeting she believed “did not make any progress at all.” 

After the meeting, Maria and some of Jokowi’s other guests such as Maria Katarina Sumarsih, whose son Bernardus Realino Norma Irmawan died during the Semanggi tragedy in Jakarta in 1998, joined the Kamisan in front of the Presidential Palace that day, which has been held every Thursday since 2007. 

The group has grown weary of long being ignored by Jokowi. 

Maria said that in the meeting they handed over to Jokowi the recommendations for the government to resolve the cases, along with supporting documents on seven unresolved cases, which have been probed by the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM). 

“The President said he still needed time to study the documents we have given to him,” Maria said. “We hope that Komnas HAM’s cases can be followed up in an investigation by the Attorney General.” 

Government-sanctioned Komnas HAM has concluded its preliminary findings in the seven cases but the Attorney General’s Office has repeatedly refused to follow up the cases on the grounds that the Komnas HAM dossiers were insufficient. 

While some activists still pinned their hopes on Jokowi, others grouped under the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) accused Thursday’s meeting as merely lip service paid ahead of his reelection bid next year. 

Presidential spokesperson Johan Budi rebuffed the concern that the meeting was politicized, saying that the President had wanted to meet with Kamisan participants last year but the plan was postponed. 

Thursday’s meeting with Kamisan participants happened a day after a meeting between Jokowi, legal experts and human rights activists on Wednesday at the Presidential Palace, during which Amnesty International Indonesia director Usman Hamid told Jokowi that the President had never met with Kamisan participants.

Jokowi pledged in his presidential campaign that the government would be more present in solving human rights violations. But skepticism came almost immediately after Jokowi became the president-elect, particularly when he decided to name former intelligence top brass Hendropriyono as an advisor to a team to help Jokowi form his administration following the 2014 election. 

Hendropriyono is alleged to have played a role in the murder of Munir Said Thalib, a prominent human rights campaigner who co-founded Kontras. 

Munir’s widow Suciwati was among those who refused to meet Jokowi on Thursday. Suciwati, who lives in Malang, East Java, instead, went to the Kamisan event in front of the Palace that day. 

She said she once again lost her trust in Jokowi when he appointed Wiranto, a senior politician of the Hanura Party, which backs Jokowi’s presidency, and a retired military general who has been implicated in the Semanggi and Trisakti shootings, as Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs minister in mid-2016. 

Wiranto himself, whose office is in charge of leading the efforts to settle past abuse cases, did not attend Thursday’s meeting as he had to run other errands. 

“For me, the promise [to resolve rights abuses] was doomed to be broken when he appointed an alleged human rights abuser as his aide,” Suciwati said. “And I don’t see any results from [Thursday’s] meeting. It’s like giving a blank check to Jokowi to legitimize that he still cares, but with zero implementation.”