We Have Tired of Violence
In 1973, as Augusto Pinochet’s military overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, the walls in Santiago had a chilling graffiti, “Jakarta” – a reference to General Suharto’s bloody right-wing takeover in Indonesia in 1965-66. Thirty years later, Suharto resorted to Latin American-style disappearances to extend his power. Human rights activist Munir Said Thalib looked at how accountability was sought in Chile and Argentina, such as the mothers of “the Disappeared” who gathered weekly in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo.
Regime critics were disappearing in Jakarta early in 1998 as a stacked legislature rubberstamped a seventh five-year term for Suharto. As Matt Easton recounts in this gripping memoir, Munir held daily press conferences, inviting parents to speak about missing students. “Resist forgetting,” he insisted. It got some abductees released – dumped at airports and given tickets to remote places. From their scraps of information, Munir worked out that Kopassus (Special Forces) troops in civilian clothes were snatching targets for torture and sometimes execution.
Suharto quit in May that year. Munir’s evidence got a military board to cashier recent Kopassus commander Prabowo Subianto and sideline his successor, Muchdi Purwopranjono, whose terms covered the abductions. Then the Timor crisis erupted. Munir exposed how Prabowo and others fostered the militias who massacred Timorese independence supporters and how another ex-kopassus general, A.M. Hendropriyono, organised mass deportations of Timorese in a vain attempt to discredit the referendum result.
The liberal Islamic leader Abdurrahman Wahid gained the presidency and started addressing the 1965-66 massacres. Reactionary forces rallied behind vicepresident Megawati Sukarnoputri to impeach Wahid and take over. She promptly installed Hendropriyono as chief of the State Intelligence Agency (BIN, from its Indonesian initials) and Muchdi as one of his deputies. As her term was expiring, to likely election defeat, in September 2004, BIN orchestrated Munir’s assassination. On a stopover in Singapore, en route to the Netherlands, a BIN agent bought him a juice and laced it with arsenic. He was dead on arrival in Amsterdam.
Matt Easton, an American human rights researcher, lived through this, and wrote We Have Tired of Violence: A True Story of Murder, Memory, and the Fight for Justice in Indonesia, a meticulous, forensic study of Munir’s career and death, and the efforts of his wife, Suciwati, and colleagues to get justice. Easton’s suspenseful, compelling narrative leaves you boiling with rage – not least because Prabowo is now defence minister and aspiring president, Hendropriyono has been adviser to current president Joko Widodo, Muchdi flits around Jakarta political parties and Megawati still sits as a powerful figure in the nationalist-military deep state. Easton reminds us to “resist forgetting”.
The New Press, 368pp, $55.95
Margaret Atwood’s 2006 short story collection, Moral Disorder, opens with a portrait of an elderly couple nearing the end of their lives. He is eager to share a piece of bad news from the paper; she’d rather enjoy the last of her days. Soon, she knows, their world will cease to exist.
The two characters at the heart of that story, Nell and Tig, are revisited in the prolific author’s ninth collection, which explores, in part, the inevitability of death and the legacies left behind. The book is dedicated to Atwood’s late husband, Graeme Gibson – that loss can be felt in these stories as Nell, too, finds herself widowed, overcome by an unspeakable grief and looking for hints in things left behind. In the sprawling story “A Dusty Lunch”, the loss is in the wartime papers and poetry of Tig’s father, the Jolly
Old Brigadier, and the suggestions of what his life may have been. “Widows” takes the form of a letter written to a friend about life after Tig – then it is redacted, kept private, with the letter sent much more perfunctory. Atwood is unsentimental yet still subtly tender in these stories.
Nell and Tig bookend the collection but the fun is in the middle section, which contains an assortment of miscellaneous, unconnected stories. There’s the expected dystopia – “Freeforall” taps into Handmaid’s Tale territory with the story of a fast-spreading sexually transmitted disease and arranged marriages among the uninfected – but Atwood shines in the odd and irreverent.