Living with a spectre of the past

Traumatic Experiences
among Wives of Former Political Prisoners of the ‘1965 Event’ in Indonesia

Budiawan

Sanata Dharma University

Introduction

Like the end of most authoritarian rulers elsewhere, the fall of Suharto in Indonesia has opened an opportunity for the survivors of the past political violence to break their silence publicly. Of those who have taken the chance to articulate their sense of self are former political prisoners of the ‘1965 Event’ (or eks-tapol in the popular Indonesian term). They have expressed their claim as victims, instead of perpetrators, of the past tragedy. Such an expression appears in memoirs, autobiographies or other forms of self-narrative booming since several months after Suharto stepped down in May 1998, [1] and the formation of some organizations among them. [2] The primary objective of these self-articulations is to seek a public recognition of their truth claims of the past, in order to release their burden of the past.

However, not every survivor of the ‘1965 Event’ welcomes this opportunity. They do not take a part in these memorial movements. They remain silent about what they have experienced. Of such survivors are wives of eks-tapol, particularly those who ‘committed adultery’ when their husbands were imprisoned. These survivors were never jailed, nor tortured, nor raped, nor even detained for interrogation. They were not political prisoners. Their ‘adultery’, however, has made them feel imprisoned in the past. Whereas it was the existing situation that had conditioned them to ‘commit adultery’. The imprisonment of their husbands made them feel insecured. Besides, they had to struggle for the survival while nobody knew for how long their husbands would be in jail. Yet, as not every wife (or most wives) of political prisoners did so, they could have taken other pathways for survival, however difficult it might have been. They feel that they lost in fighting against the condition. Such a feeling partly has made them unable to express their memories. In other words, although they ‘only’ got the indirect effects of the past political violence, they remain to live with a spectre of the past.

This paper is concerned with such a case. There are at least two reasons why this sort of case is worth discussing. Firstly, in mass political violence where parts of society are either imprisoned or killed by the ‘winning’ party, not a few children turn to orphans and wives to widows, either temporarily or permanently. However, they are absent or under-represented in public discourses. Mainstream social sciences and history are partly responsible for this lack of concern. In this context, any attempt of discussing such ‘hidden’ survivors will bring a better understanding of the (continuing) effects of mass political violence. Secondly, in spite of ‘only’ getting the indirect effects of the political violence, children and wives tend to suffer from more traumatic experiences, partly because what they have experienced is completely beyond their expectation. They may have carried heavier burden of the past compared to those who were imprisoned, who might have perceived their bitter experiences as a consequence of their engagement in political activism. This means that studying such survivors will bring a serious implication on the notion of victim and the order of victimhood. This paper, however, focuses its concern on wives of eks-tapol, particularly those who ‘committed adultery’ when their husbands were imprisoned. In the context of the ‘1965 Event’ and its aftermaths, of those experiencing the indirect effects of the violence, the latter have suffered from the most traumatic experiences. This is observable in their continuing silence and anxious or apathetic expressions on, instead of enthusiastic celebration of, the current ‘wind of change’. To show the degree of their trauma, it needs to make some comparison with wives struggling for survival without the assistance of illegitimate spouses. [3]

This paper is organized as follows. Firstly, it will present a brief account of the ‘1965 Event’ and its aftermaths. This will provide the historical setting of the case in question. Secondly, it will describe the case in question in detail. I will rely the data on my personal observation and the field notes of the research project currently conducted by ‘Syarikat’ – a Non-Governmental Organization initiated by a number of young activists of Moslem organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) – which has been concerned with the issue of reconciliation at the grassroot level. [4] Thirdly, it will bring the case in question into a theoretical translation discussing trauma, memory, and identity.

The ‘1965 Event’ and its aftermaths

The term ‘1965 Event’ refers to what happened on September 30, 1965. In the official version of Suharto’s regime, what happened on this date is narrated as an abortive Communist coup. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) is told to have masterminded the putsch of the presidential guards regiment (Cakrabirawa) to kidnap and kill six top Army officers on the eve of October 1, 1965, ‘as a way of controlling the military before eventually controlling the state.’ [5] This narration relies on ‘the evidences from the trials of the top PKI leaders and those who were involved in the September 30, 1965 Movement’. [6]

According to the Suharto’s regime, the ‘1965 Event’ was the climax of the PKI’s efforts to turn the state ideology Pancasila (Five Principles)<[7]a> and the National Constitution into Communism. However, as is officially narrated, due to the close co-operation of the military – under the leadership of Major Gen. Suharto, by then the strategic commander of the Army (Pangkostrad), who was out of target of the ‘September, 30, 1965 Movement’ - and the people, the PKI’s last attempt could be crushed. Pancasila and the Constitution were saved, so was the existence of the state and nation. [8]

What is unspoken concerning the military campaigns against the PKI and its subsidiary organizations is the fact that from the end of 1965 to mid-1966 roughly estimated five hundred thousand people being accused as communists were killed, either by the military-supported armed civilians or by the military itself. [9] Meanwhile, another more than one million people were imprisoned without trial for a few years up to more than twenty years. One source notes that 1,375,320 people categorized into Group C (those who had ‘indications of having links with the PKI’) were detained for less than ten years, while 34,587 people (including more than 10,000 people being interned in the Island of Buru) categorized into Group B (those who had ‘indications of having links with the 30 September Movement’) were detained for more than ten years, and 426 people categorized into group A (those who were ‘involved in the Movement’) were tried, some were sentenced to death and the rest to life imprisonment. [10]

The extermination of the PKI following the event on September 30, 1965 was in turn a way of taking over Sukarno’s rule (since the PKI was his largest supporter). It opened the road for Suharto (and his generals) to power. Since its inception Suharto’s regime produced and reproduced the story of communist threat. Former political prisoners of the ‘1965 Event’ were quite often blamed almost whenever there was a riot. Being labelled as ‘ideologically and historically unclean’ (tidak bersih diri), they were vulnerable for such scapegoating, in addition to losing their civic rights. While their offsprings, being labelled as ‘genealogically unclean’ (tidak bersih lingkungan), their access to participate in public works (such as working for military services, being civil servants, working for state-owned companies, etc.) were limited. In short, anyone associated with what the regime called communism was repressed or silenced. By doing so, fear of the so-called communists and communism was maintained. Partly, if not mainly, upon such a fear Suharto’s regime sustained its power for thirty-two years.

After the fall of Suharto, state apparatuses have less frequently reproduced the anti-communist discourse. However, the anti-communist discourse persists, since parts of the society still sustain it due to their memories of the conflicts against the PKI. This means that ideas of dealing with the past violence are still faced with challenges from parts of the society. This fact is partly responsible for the continuing silence of parts of the survivors of the 1965-66 massacre. In the case of the central concern of this paper, their silence is observable in their disbelief in the so-called ‘point of no return’. Exploring their manifestation of such disbelief will help to understand to what degree their traumatic experiences still haunt them and constraint them to see another possible future. The following section explores the case in question.

On Three Wives of Former Political Prisoners

As it was mentioned earlier, mass political violence have always turned a significant number of children to orphans and wives to widows, either temporarily or permanently, since the primary targets of violent actions are mostly men. To women whose husbands are killed or imprisoned their primary concern is the problem for survival, in addition to seeking some social protection. This problem is crucial in a class of society where man is positioned as the only breadwinner of the family, while woman as ‘only’ the manager of household affairs. Political violence has made wives almost left alone to struggle for the survival of themselves and their children. In many cases the extended family serves as a social safety net, where grandparents, uncles, or aunts may provide some economic assistance or even a source of economic reliance for the wives and children of those being imprisoned or killed. But in other cases, the extended family isolate, or even take a part in condemning them as the leprosy of the society. No single factor can explain why the former happens and in what conditions it is the latter that happens. In the context of the ‘1965 Event’ and its aftermaths, where the anti-communist campaigns ran massively and effectively, people tended to take a distance from those being stigmatized as communists or the family of a communist. Being seen as having a close relationship with them could drag one to have a trouble with the security apparatuses. Consequently, even if one had sympathy with them, s/he could not express it openly, except the security apparatusses.

In many cases wives of political prisoners had to struggle for survival alone. Some received economic support from their parents. Many married again legally, after asking for a divorce to their imprisoned husbands. But, not a few committed adultery or married illegitimately for the sake of their survival. Below are the stories of three wives of eks-tapol. They came from the same social stratum, i.e. the so-called relatively educated urban middle-rank income earners where men are the only breadwinners of the family. They had different experiences during the imprisonment of their husbands. Their different experiences have brought different effects in their everyday life. The first one, Mdm. Surti (not her real name), struggled for survival completely alone, without any assistance from her parents and relatives. The second one, Mdm. Siti (not her real name), formerly struggled for survival alone; but later she found a married man, a police officer, who showed sympathy and finally cohabited with her. The third one, Mdm. Sri, completely relied on her parents’ assistance for rearing her children.

Mdm. Surti

She has two children, a son and a daughter. Both were seven and four years old respectively when the ‘1965 event’ happened. She was completely a housewife, while her husband was a military officer in a low-middle rank.

Since Mdm. Siti’s husband belonged to the military unit under the line of command of the commander of the September 30, 1965 Movement, he was arrested and imprisoned without trial for thirteen years, although he was not involved in and had never known about the Movement. This changed Mdm. Siti’s course of life. To rear her two children she had to earn the living alone. She could not expect any assistance from her parents and parents-in-law as they were poor and aged. Neither could she expect helping hands from her own relatives and the relatives of her husband, as they were in a hard life as well.

At first Mdm. Surti worked for a small home industry producing rice flour. She worked from 4.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m everyday, except on Sundays. Her two children were left home, where her son took care of his sister for the whole day.

With the money she earned she could feed herself and the two children. She could also buy some food for her imprisoned husband. And she could make a little saving. But, in early 1970s when her son had to enter secondary school, where the school fee was of course higher, she started to think of running her own business. With the saving she had collected for six years and some loan from her former boss, she ran her own rice flourmill home industry. It was running well so that she could send her two children to universities until both obtained their degrees.

In 1978 her husband was released. It was a happy moment since the whole family was reunified and could live together. However, it did not last long. Her husband was unhappy to find that she was a successful businesswoman. What made him unhappy was not her success as such, but in his perception, its social and psychological consequences. To him, the fact that now she was the breadwinner of the family was unacceptable. In his eyes his wife seemed to have changed, in the sense that she was not as subservient as she had been before he was imprisoned. They did not live in harmony. Eventually they decided to live separately. She built a new house and lived with her daughter, while her son took care of her husband in the other house. They did not get divorced. But since then they have been like strangers to each other.

To Mdm. Surti her bitter memory of the past was not when she had to work hard to rear her two children, but the unwillingness of her husband to see her as a successful breadwinner of the family. What she could not understand and even was hurting was her husband’s attitude towards her hard struggle for years for the survival of the family. Instead of showing a thankful sense to find that the family could pass the hard years without depending on other people, he suspected that her success would erode his authority as the head of the family.

Everytime she remembers those beginning moments of disharmony, she always wonders whether every man is like her husband. Sometimes she wants to forget those moments, but she can’t as long as her husband does not initiate to apologize. However, expecting her husband to apologize is like expecting a leopard to change its spots. She wants to forget him, but she fails. She knows that she will always fail to forget him. What she can do is only to keep those stories for her two children only, [11] expecting that her son will not be like his father. Ironically, despite her deep disappointment about her husband, she still wants to keep the so-called Javanese cultural wisdom that “a woman should protect her husband’s dignity”.

Obviously that the central problem to Mdm. Surti is the embodiment of patriarchal value system in her husband’s ways of seeing gender relation. Below is another story in what ways such a value system has partly shaped the ways of an eks-tapol’s wife to deal with her bitter past.

Mdm. Siti

She had already had two children when her husband was arrested and imprisoned in early November 1965. Both of her children, a boy and a girl, were by then three and a half and one and a half years old respectively. Her husband was previously a secondary school teacher, while she was a full time housewife.

To earn a living she had to work by herself. She could not expect any helping hands from her parents and parents-in-law since each only had a small plot of land to support their own living. Neither could she expect some economic assistance from her relatives and the relatives of her husband since many of them were also imprisoned. In short, she had to rely on her own efforts to struggle for the survival.

She ran a small shop selling goods for basic needs. Nobody assisted her to run the shop, while she still had to take care of her two small children. The profit she earned could in fact support their living. Unlike most children of political prisoners, her two children were not underfed. She could even afford to buy them toys, which was by then a luxurious thing to most families of political prisoners.

However, she did not know until when she could stand to do all of those works by herself. Besides, she did not know, as nobody knew, until when her husband was imprisoned. Due to such an uncertain future of her husband, she could not reject when a man, who was a police officer, [12] was approaching her and showing his sympathy on her hard life condition. At first she just received a helping hand. Later on she started to think of him as the substituting father for her two children, although she knew that he had already been married and having his own children. But she was not sure if it was a right decision, since her husband was still alive. In such indecision she made a love with him and she got pregnant. After she gave a birth, the man came to her house more often. They even cohabited. Relatives and neighbors surely knew about it. They surely did not say anything to her, but they ‘whispered’ to each other about what had happened to her. Mdm. Siti did not know (and never knows) exactly what other people said and thought about her. Ironically, it was the ‘silence’ of other people that made her feel condemned. Since then the problem she had to handle was how to defend from such ‘silent’ social condemnation.

In mid-1969 the government announced about the plan for releasing thousands of political prisoners by the turn of the decade. [13] Mdm. Siti wondered if her husband would be one of them. She was faced with indecisive condition: her husband would likely come home, but someone else had entered her life, giving her some economic and psychological protection, and acting like the father for her three children. Finally knowing that her husband would be released immediately, she asked her illegitimate spouse to leave, asking for his understanding on what would likely happen if he was there when her husband came home.

By the end of 1969 Mdm. Siti’s husband was released. He had heard that his wife had got a new child of someone else’s seeds during his imprisonment. [14] He could not reject the fact that there had been a stepchild in his family. He started to learn to accept the reality. What happened then was that, instead of apologizing to him due to her adultery (until having a baby), his wife blamed him for her scandal. She insisted that she would not have committed adultery had he been not imprisoned; and she has been convinced that he would not have been imprisoned if he had not followed his brother to be engaged in a political activism. This conviction has shaped the ways this couple of husband and wife communicate to each other until now, as is manifested in their everyday life. It has also shaped the ways they have ‘managed’ their memories. To Mdm. Siti, the source of her bitter past was ‘politics’. What she has done since her husband was released is to take him away from anything associated with ‘politics’. She controls the stories of newspaper he should read, she controls the TV programs he should watch, she controls what sorts of talk he should have with other people, especially with his brother, who lives next door.

Unlike the stories of two wives above, the story of Mdm. Sri below is less dramatic. The story below is probably the most common one to wives of former political prisoners.

Mdm. Sri

She has four children: the first two are daughters and the following two are sons. They were seven, five, and three years old respectively, while her youngest child was only six months old when her husband was arrested by the end of October 1965. She was a completely housewife, while her husband was previously a seconday schoolteacher. Her husband was imprisoned for four years. He is the elder brother of Mdm. Siti’s husband.

After her husband was arrested, since the house where they had lived in was built not on their own land but on the one rented from her husband’s uncle, she and her four children were driven out. Her husband’s uncle only gave her some amount of money as ‘a compensation’. Since they were homeless, her parents took care of her and the two sons, while her parents-in-law took care of her two daughters. In the first months after her husband was imprisoned, she could still make some money by selling the remaining household goods, including many books of her husband’s collection. But only in a couple of months there was nothing left to sell.

Mdm. Sri did not have any idea of running a business to earn a living. For the survival of herself and her two sons she completely relied on her father’s pensioning allowance. Her father was a retired schoolteacher, while her mother ran a small busniess selling traditional clothes from door to door. In addition to taking care of her two boys, periodically she saw her two daughters living with her parents-in-law outside the town. She and her mother every other month took turns to see her husband bringing him food[15] and other personal equipments. They did it routinely until he was released by the end of 1969.

Despite living in a poor condition, where she had to manage the money received from her parents tightly, Mdm. Sri did not have any experiences that now she has to keep in her memory only. She never blames her husband for the past bitter living conditions, as she realizes that thousands, even hundred thousands of other families shared such a living experience. She has perceived her husband (and other former political prisoners) as the ones who were vicitimized by the party who wished to take a power. It is such a perception that she and her husband have told their children.

After Mdm. Sri’s husband was released, the whole family was reunified and living with her parents-in-law outside the town. For the survival, her husband began to learn to cultivate some plots of land owned by his own parents. He did this job for around five years. Afterwards he migrated to Jakarta to apply for a job like he had before being imprisoned, i.e. to be a teacher in a private school.

In the case of Mdm. Sri, the memory of the years after the ‘1965 event’ was not burdensome since there was nothing to hide or repress. The ‘current wind of historical change’ has opened an opportunity for her husband to articulate his sense of self by actively joining some non-government organizations initiated by eks-tapols.

Below I would like to bring the stories above into some theoretical translation in order to achieve a better understanding of the cases in question in the context of discussing trauma, memory and identity in social and cultural perspectives.

Trauma, memory and identity: social and cultural perspectives

In its basic notion, trauma refers to a special category of experience connected to loss. People perceive trauma as fundamentally involving loss. All traumas involve loss, but not all losses are traumas (Harvey, 2002). In the context of loss, people often experience a sense of missing something very important, a sense of incompletion, and a feeling of disappointment.

In a collective violence, experiences in such a special category are the result of victimization. Trauma and victimization thus play a central role in a politics of memory. Memories, however, are never simply records of the past, ‘but are interpretive reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and social contexts of recall and commemoration’ (Antze and Lambek, 1996:vii). In other words, trauma should be best understood in its relation to the complexities of memory, while memory is mutually linked to identity. To put the three concepts together within the social, cultural, and political settings will bring a better understanding of why particular survivors of past political violence remain to live with a spectre of the past; and why they do not see the fall of an authoritarian regime as an opportunity to negotiate the past.

If trauma is connected to loss, the first two of the three cases above show different experiences of loss in ‘dealing with men’. In the case of Mdm. Surti, it was the loss of respect on her husband that she has experienced. His lack of appreciation upon her efforts to struggle for survival has seriously disappointed her. His sense of being threatened by her success in running a business has made her wonder if every man is self-centred. However, due to the existing ‘cultural wisdom’ that wife should protect her husband’s ‘social dignity’, she has been faced with a cultural constraint to express her deep disappoinment openly. In this case, memory is then ‘a culturally specific field’, in the sense that remembering is indeed personal, but how it is communicated (or not communicated) is shaped by its cultural contexts. Here memory is then ‘neither a cultural given nor an individual creation, but something between the two’ (Teski, 1995:50).

It is in such ‘in-betweenness’ that some memories cannot be accomodated in the present life and situation, as it happens to Mdm. Siti as well. In her case it was the loss of her dignity as a woman that she has experienced. She knows that committing adultery is violating the standardized moral principles of every society that sees the institution of marriage as something sacred. Committing adultery is socially perceived as contaminating such a sacred thing. But, she also knows that there is an unequal treatment on a man who has committed adultery compared to a woman who has done the same thing. People give a harsher condemnation on a woman who has committed adultery. As if there is no excuse for an adulterous woman, while an adulterous man is to some degree tolerable. It is such unfair treatment that has prompted Mdm. Siti to protest, of which her husband, as the closest man in her life, has been her mediating target. In this context, she represses some of her memories and writes them out of history. It is ‘not a sort of psychological mechanism of repression of painful memories’ in which she actually ‘loses all recall of a painful past event or events’, but rather ‘a conscious suppression of memories that challenge present identities and actions of individuals and groups’ (Teski and Climo, 1995:5).

In such a perspective, Mdm. Siti’s domination over her husband is thus a manifestation of her challenge to the phalocentrism of the society. However, since such an inward challenge has victimised her own husband, instead of getting sympathy, she receives a double social condemnation. She has been condemned for her adultery and the transfer of her guilty feeling to her husband. These are observable in how people around her, i.e. relatives, neighbors, etc., communicate with her. People tend to boycott any communication she initiates, or they only pretend to listen to what she talks.

In the case of Mdm. Siti it is obvious that a failure to negotiate with the social and cultural contexts will only result in a sort of social isolation. She is isolated not primarily for what people see as her past wrongdoing, but for how she has dealt with it. Her state of being socially isolated has in turn made her have a sense of distrust to other people. She realizes that other people only pretend to talk to her, thus she also pretends to talk to them. A pseudo-communication has been the result of one’s failure to negotiate with the patriarchal social and cultural order.

On the other side, the case of Mdm. Sri shows how a conformist attitude to the existing social and cultural order has resulted in the smoothness of social communication. In her case there was no traumatic experience of the past, as she lost nothing in dealing with her husband within the historical context of the effects of the ‘1965 event’. Each has returned to his/her social place within the family after her husband was released. He has returned to be the head of the family, while she takes care of the household affairs. Having no experience of being a breadwinner has maintained Mdm. Sri’s perception that woman should be subservient to man, in order to maintain what she believes as the harmonious relation between them. Unlike the two cases above, the case of Mdm. Sri does not have any unspeakable experience. Telling memories of the hard living conditions in the past does not meet any sorts of constraint. To many extents even it gives her a pride, as she did not fall into what a wife like Mdm. Siti has experienced. In other words, her pride does not lie on the past experiences as such, but on her success of avoiding any temptations that could make her trapped into what other people condemn. It is exactly what John Shotter argues that ‘our ways of talking about our experiences work, not primarily to represent the nature of those experiences in themselves, but to represent them in such a way as to constitute and sustain one or another kind of social order’ (Shotter, 1990:121-2).

The three cases above show how the existing patriarchal cultural values work in a class of a society experiencing the effects of a mass political violence. Within such values there is an unequal gender relation of power. Woman is subordinated to man. In a family life man is positioned as the only breadwinner, while woman as the manager of household affairs. Due to such a division of labour, it was shocking to most wives who had to struggle for survival alone when their husbands were either killed or imprisoned after the ‘1965 event’ happened. However, as is seen in the case of Mdm. Surti, it is also such a patriarchal value system that does not give any appreciation on the hard struggle of woman for the survival of the family. Woman’s role in earning for living is perceived as substitutive or complementary, so long as the husband is still alive. It is also this patriarchal value system that has hindered woman to express her disappointment on her husband openly. In this case past experiences turn to be traumatic not because of the nature of the experiences as such, but because of the dominant cultural values system that has made sense of the experiences.

In the case of Mdm. Siti how the patriarchal cultural values system works is observable in the ways neighbors and relatives produced ‘whispering’ voices on her adultery. Such a social condemnation reflects the unequal relation of power, since in such a scandal it was the woman who has been blamed. The reasons of blaming are connected not only to the ethical principles of marriage institution, but also to the cultural values that woman should keep her loyalty and obedience to her husband at any circumstances. Being prompted to launch protest, Mdm. Siti has developed her own self-defense mechanism. It is ‘politics’, more than just a political condition, that she has seen as the very source of her bitter experiences. Her husband was imprisoned because of ‘politics’, which in turn made her have such an unexpected experience. In this case she shares the de-politization agenda of Suharto’s regime, which kept exploiting the public fear of politics to establish its control over the whole citizens.

Besides, Mdm. Siti still believes that her husband’s experience can repeat in the future if he is engaged in ‘politics’ again. That is why she strictly forbids her husband from being engaged in the memorial movements initiated by groups of eks-tapol since the fall of Suharto. She does not believe that this current ‘wind of change’ is like a ‘point of no return’. She keeps a Javanese cultural expression on the idea of cyclical time in her mind, which means that a past event, although not precisely the same, can repeat itself in the future. She does not welcome the opportunity for the survivors of the ‘1965 event’ to articulate their sense of self publicly because she believes that ‘the past can return in the future’. Future seems to be non-existent since it is only a repetition of the past. These both political and cultural discourses in turn strengthen ‘an overstimulation of her psychic structures’ (Minow, 1998: 64), because of which she does not only break social bonding with others but also closes any possible futures. What is meant by ‘breaking social bonding with others’ here is not a full self-isolation (except with her family), but putting any suspicion in her every communication with others. To her everybody looks like a stranger.

The cases of Mdms. Surti and Siti show that traumatic experiences are repressed. To them, especially to Mdm. Siti, the past has produced a ‘humiliated memory’, where recollecting the past is painful (Kirmayer, 1996: 183). This has shaped the ways they construct their identities, which is inseparable from the predominantly cultural values system. They both identify themselves as not only victims of the past violence, but also victims of patriachal system. Both perceive that ‘men always want to be true’. Mdm. Surti’s silence about the ‘beginning moments of the disharmonious relation with her husband’ is a way of trying to escape from such cultural values system. While Mdm. Siti’s sense of hatred to anything associated with ‘politics’ by placing her own husband as the mediating target is a way of protesting the unequal judgment on women who have committed adultery, compared to men who have done the same thing. Her tight control over what her husband should do in the everyday life is the very manifestation of such protest. This means that a woman as a victim of men’s domination is in turn dominating the closest man in her life. Meanwhile the case of Mdm. Sri shows that she is not revictimized by the patriarchal values system since she does not resist it. She keeps herself within the system so that she has not had any traumatic experiences.

If trauma is inseparable from the cultural values system, then its process of healing should begin from the radical criticism of the cultural system. Unless this agenda for cultural change is working, then such traumatic survivors of mass political violence remain to live with a spectre of the past, regardless of the ‘wind of change’.

Cultural changes, however, do not stem from the palace, but from the family – the site where political violence brings its most painful effects.

Closing remarks

This paper has demonstrated that it is not the nature of past experiences as such, but how cultural values system (in addition to social and political discourses) makes sense of the experiences which brings a trauma. Trauma, like memory and identity, is thus always mediated through social, cultural and political complexes. This implies that coping with traumatic survivors of collectice political violence always involve a negotitation with social, cultural and political discursive practices.

In the concern of this paper, it is obvious that women who ‘only’ suffered from indirect effects of the past political violence are in fact more traumatic than men, even men who were imprisoned without trial for years. If the fall of Suharto has opened an opportunity for these former political prisoners (who are mostly men) to break their sense of being

socially imprisoned, it does not mean that way to women like Mdms. Surti and Siti. They are imprisoned by the patriarchal cultural values system rather than by the past political violence as such. But, due to the past political violence they have experienced a double imprisonment. Consequently, any advocation for such survivors should be in a close co-operation with those deeply engaged with any emancipation movement for the equal gender relations of power.

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