Politics of justice and reconciliation in post-Suharto Indonesia

This article examines the politics of justice and reconciliation in post-Suharto Indonesia with particular focus on the unprecedented pressures on the government to deal with past human rights abuses. Present Indonesian experience illustrates the complexity of dealing with past abuses and needs to be examined in the context of the constraints and possibilities negotiated by new democracies when dealing with past abuses. In a comparative sense the Indonesian case is not new in the sense that other new democracies have also faced this kind of situation. The case study of the Tanjung Priok killings in 1984 that will be presented here demonstrates the need to develop a strategy which combines the elements of prosecution and reconciliation in post-Suharto Indonesia.