| Abstrak/Abstract |
Reconciliation over the 1965 Tragedy remains a no-show in Indonesia even after the country’s fifteen years transition to democracy. This article explains the complexity of reconciliation project in post-politicide setting by exploring the politics of memory—how the different and, sometimes, conflicting layers of narratives inform, support, or even provide a basis for both perpetrators’ and survivors’ act of remembrance, therefore shaping their perceptions and expectations towards reconciliation. Literature research on the perpetrators’ account of the past and in-depth interviews with several survivors in Jakarta, Solo, and Klaten indicate that the perpetrators’ dominant narrative cannot be treated as a mere “fabricated propaganda”, while the survivors’ stories are actually more plural than previously imagined. It is actually the tendency to generalize the perpetrators’ and survivors’ accounts of the violent past (thus polarizing them) that might have impeded reconciliation. By drawing inspiration from Maddison and Diprose’s concept of agonistic dialogue (2017), this article furthermore argues that reconciliation perhaps should be firstly understood as a “re-negotiation” of how we remember (and forget) our violent past. Hence reconciliation is not a singular and linear process. Instead it should be seen as a political journey which, at times, can be a contested and negotiated one. |
