Indonesian President Joko Widodo acknowledged on Wednesday that his country’s past was marked by a series of “gross human rights violations”, including bloodshed and arrests in 1965 and 1966.
Some historians and activists have estimated that at least 500,000 people died in the violence, which began in late 1965 after a failed communist coup by then-General Suharto and the military, the darkest period in Indonesia’s history. A million or more people were imprisoned on suspicion of being communists.
“With a clear, genuine mind and conscience, I as a head of state acknowledge that gross human rights violations have taken place in many incidents,” he said.
“And I’m very sorry those violations occurred.”
The president, commonly known as Jokowi, cited 11 other incidents that spanned the period between 1965 and 2003 before his tenure as leader, including Suharto in the late 1990s. including shootings and kidnapping of students during protests against three decades of U.S. rule.
Students leading the protests were targeted and there were also many victims during this period from the Chinese community, a minority in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and sometimes resented for their perceived wealth.
Jokowi said that the government would try to restore the rights of victims “fairly and wisely without denying judicial remedies”, though did not specify how.
The President also cited human rights violations in Papua’s troubled region, noting his acceptance after reading the findings from a team set up in 2022 to investigate these violations.