The Trajectories of Transitional Justice

As a visiting guest scholar at CSEAS from 2020-2021, my main task has been to focus on completing a manuscript for research begun on my first visit to CSEAS from 2013-2014.  At that time, over a series of trips to Indonesia and research in Kyoto, I started a project exploring the dynamics of transitional justice in Indonesia.

Transitional justice, the ‘righting’ of past wrongs, is the set of institutions, policies, and practices designed to deal with atrocities and major human rights violations in the process, anticipation, or aftermath of regime change or violent conflict.  Typically, mechanisms include trials, truth commissions, reparations, apologies, and purges. It has an array of goals such as providing accountability and redress for victims, societal reconciliation, and political, economic, and legal reform.

Indonesia’s New Order regime was bookended by violence, emerging out of mass killings in 1965-1966 and ending amidst street protests and urban riots in 1998.  In between, the authoritarian state engaged in varieties of repression and violence targeting perceived enemies: communists and alleged communists, Islamic groups, “criminal elements,” separatists, student and labor activists, political parties and democracy advocates. As Indonesia democratized in the late 1990s, calls to hold perpetrators accountable for past violence emerged from civil society groups including victims and survivors both at home and abroad.  On the one hand, the country did make concrete moves towards transitional justice including passing legislation to establish courts and commissions to address the past.  At the same time, those very initiatives often failed to secure the larger goals of transitional justice such as accountability or societal reconciliation. Why then, has Indonesia adopted and implemented key transitional justice initiatives but ultimately failed to carry many of those measures out?

I find that opponents could not always reject key reforms around human rights and transitional justice outright but they turned to other ways to shape, slow, and undermine its process.  These included practiced tactics such as intimidation and coercion, but also institutional strategies such as pruning, defanging, coopting and vetoing that together resulted in the severe weakening of official transitional justice measures.

At the same time, activists and advocates of transitional justice sought to deploy alternative forms of transitional justice sited outside of official state spaces.  These forms mimic their more official state-centered counterparts but they are also more than just second or third-best alternatives. They represent new arenas of contestation that challenge and reshape official narratives of the past.  They go beyond simply targeting the state, and appeal to broader publics reminding us that transitional justice is as much a project of discourse and narrative as much as it is about accountability and reconciliation.

Three trajectories of official justice initiatives and three corresponding alternative approaches are notable. Legalist transitional justice focused on bringing accused perpetrators before criminal courts, human rights courts, and military tribunals.  In Indonesia, one-by-one, the judicial routes to justice faded.  Many cases failed to reach trial, but even when they did, they failed to result in convictions.  Still, legalism remained an appealing form of justice for many advocates who looked ‘upwards’ to the international level in international and foreign courts and tribunals including a ‘peoples’ tribunal’ to deploy practices and discourses of the law. 

Truth, broadly conceived, included initiatives for fact-finding, human rights investigations, and truth commissions.  However, different understandings of truth ultimately proved irreconcilable leading to the creation of a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission that activists saw as a vehicle for amnesty and impunity. Instead, advocates chose to go ‘around’ the state by engaging in a civil society campaign that NGOs dubbed the “Year of Truth.” This campaign brought together victims and survivors who suffered a variety of different human rights violations as a way to offer an alternative narrative to the past and build solidarity between victims of different events while engaging the mass public

A third set of approaches pursued the politics of contrition including a plan for a presidential national apology akin to those made elsewhere for the treatment of indigenous peoples and other colonial legacies.  But after initial momentum, this initiative too came to naught.  In this case, activists and supporters went ‘downward’ below the state to the local level where a mayor offered a public and official apology for the events of 1965. 

In sum, decades after the fall of the New Order, contestation about the past is ongoing.  This should not surprise us. Other countries are still struggling with legacies of colonialism, authoritarianism, and other forms of violence and marginalization decades and even centuries after the fact.  The study highlights the challenges of addressing and accounting for the past where old narratives and discourses persist, political reform is uneven, and where the variety of injustices in the past can lead as much to fragmentation as it can to unity.  The study highlights both the systemic challenges in post-authoritarian Indonesia as well as the agency of actors who persist in unexpected places.

Ehito Kimura is an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Years of stay at CSEAS: May 2020 to June 2021.