Carmel Budiardjo is not anymore among us, she passed away on the 10f July 2021, at the respectable age of 96. Carmel belonged to the first generation of people who became solidarity campaigners worldwide for East Timor. As she was a campaigner on human rights in Indonesia, quite obviously, Timor-Leste became an important topic for Carmel. The invasion of East Timor in December 1975 was done with such brutality, and created such a severe famine for several years, that it became one of the worst tragedies of the 20th century.
There was a military takeover in Indonesia in October 1965. Its ruling clique became one of the longest serving military regimes in the world, lasting until 2002, when Suharto’s regime collapsed. Carmel was arrested in 1968 and spent some three years in a variety of prisons until November 1971. She was allowed to go back to the United Kingdom after a judicial struggle with Indonesia. At that time, Indonesia was arguably the place with the most political prisoners in the world. When Carmel was taken out from Bukit Duri women’s prison in Jakarta and was able to travel back to England, she felt relief, but at the same time she was very sad that she had to leave her fellow prisoners still in detention. I think from that moment on, Carmel was determined to become a full-time human rights campaigner, which she did. In the obituaries that appeared after her death, people in the newspapers and magazines often described Carmel as an internationalist, cosmopolitan or transnational activist. All those apply to Carmel.
Carmel had many qualities. She had the ability to learn languages quickly, whether she was living in Prague or living in Jakarta, she quickly spoke the languages. We worked together for more than 30 years, and still at the very end, I was still learning from her experiences. So, selamat jalan [goodbye] Carmel, and also to the others who died earlier.
Two documents show how close we were in our relationship with the resistance leadership in East Timor. It was fairly difficult to keep contact regularly with the leadership, because East Timor was closed to the outside world. So, I select a handwritten document, 46 pages written by the leader of CRRN, the Conselho Revolucionário de Resistência Nacional, led by Xanana Gusmão in those days in 1986. The message was written on the 28 May, so it’s quite timely, because this is the date of inauguration of a new Indonesian cabinet. The other document is two pages, written by Xanana, still in prison in Jakarta, the Cipinang Prison on 18 October 1998. Suharto had already fallen, but Xanana was still in prison. There was another leadership in Jakarta, and that gave probably more leeway to Xanana to send a letter to us. It was done under the name of the CNRT, the National Council of Timorese Resistance.
Carmel tells her own story:[1]
My family and I, we grew up in Greenwich. My family’s Jewish, they had fled from Poland. They came after the First World War when they were children. My father had a small tailor shop, selling ready made clothing. The shop was downstairs. And we had a scullery at the back. And we lived upstairs. I did fairly well in secondary school, and was able to get a scholarship to go to the London School of Economics. At pretty well every university there’s always a student union, and I became involved in the Students Union in the LSE. Soon after the war, students from many countries who had been against the fascist regime decided to come together. In 1946, I went to Prague, the center of organising for what became the International Union of Students. The IUS became quite involved with students from different countries, and quite a few of these students were from Indonesia. Because in Indonesia, there was a clamp down by the Dutch rulers.
So, a lot of the students fled to Europe, and were based and lived in Holland, not in Prague, but some of them moved over to Prague, because Prague at that time was prepared to give asylum to lots of political refugees. I was very much involved with some of the people who had fled and had gone back to Indonesia. And in fact, that’s where I met the man who was to become my husband. That was Suwando Budiardjo and I got to know him and that’s where our first child was born. She was born in Prague. Sometimes we organised demonstrations about certain problems for international concern, particularly concerned with the conditions of refugees. We would have demonstrations about that for example.
I picked up the language Indonesian quite quickly. It’s one of my abilities. I can learn languages quite quickly. So, I started together with one or two other people translating speeches that Indonesian president Sukarno made or other top state officials made, translating them from Indonesian into English. He was very popular. He would go traveling around the country making speeches, and we got huge numbers of people coming to hear him speak. It was very popular. I would say of all the political leaders in Indonesia at that time, he was certainly the most, most popular.
After I moved to Indonesia, actually, the conditions there were quite good, no problem really. Under Sukarno, people were able to live quite, quite freely, until 1965.
In those days, in the mid-1960s, it was the height of the Cold War. The War in Vietnam was increasing. The Americans had to send so many military there. Sukarno was a left-winger, in the camp of China, Vietnam, and so on.
Later on during his presidency, he started getting rather close to the army, which created problems. It was an incident in 1965, the first of October 1965, a group of generals were killed. It had never been certified as to exactly who organised this. Sukarno was still the president. And it became kind of the established fact that the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) did this. There was never any proof of this. But as a result of this, anything to do with the PKI became an enemy. So, it didn’t matter who you were, where you lived, what you had done. So, if you had any connection at all with anything that was left wing, you were involved in this incident. We were all involved.
This was an excuse for the military to destroy the PKI, which is in fact, what happened, it was completely destroyed. Between October and December 1965, there were huge killings in certain parts of the country in Central Java, East Java, North Sumatra. In certain areas in particular, there were very great massacres. People like myself, who believed in any way in these organisations, were also regarded as being totally bad. We lost our jobs, young people couldn’t enroll in the university and so on. So, all our political rights were destroyed at that time.
Besides the massacres hundreds of thousands of people were arrested throughout the country. At one time, because Amnesty International became involved with this, at one time, they said there was something like 77,000 untried political prisoners in Indonesia. I spent about three years in prison. I can only speak about what I experienced myself. I was in a women’s prison called Bukit Duri on the outskirts of Jakarta. The cell that I was put into was actually for one person, but there were three of us in there. So, we had big bench, like a stone bench. You know, Indonesia never had so many prisoners. So, one person had to sleep on the bench, one person had to sleep on the floor, and one person slept under the bench. Some of the prisoners were very, very young. We call them the children, 13, 14 years old. I mean, early, early, teenage, very, very young girls, the expression in Indonesian was anak-anak, the children. They were also there, which was disgusting. Of course, none of us were involved, but the ones who were very heavily damaged by this whole experience were the young girls, who were also sometimes raped and that kind of thing.
I personally was actually never beaten. But it happened to quite a few women. I think maybe there was a certain reluctance with me because I was not Indonesian. They were thinking maybe, maybe she’s English, the British government may get upset and so on. So, they didn’t actually start beating me. For other prisoners, the use of torture was very, very widespread. What I began to do, was to give the other prisoners lessons in English. Of course, this was actually not allowed. But we used to do it. And we always knew that we were not really allowed to have pencil and paper, but somehow we managed. Many of the prisoners were very clever at getting things from outside. And so we were able to organise lessons. Of course, they thought that was wonderful, because very few of them knew any foreign language. They maybe could speak Dutch, but they couldn’t speak English.
My lawyer managed to persuade the authorities that no, I was not Indonesian, I did not become Indonesian automatically by marrying. So, I was reestablished as it were, as a British subject. When the army decided to release me, I think it was because they were afraid of pressure from the British government. Because I had to leave the country immediately and come back to the UK. But the last words that I remembered from the women was: Carmel, help us! Help us when you get abroad!
Well, it was the combination of sadness that I was feeling, but at the same time, hoping that when I’d get abroad, there would be that I would do something to campaign for their release. Which is actually, in fact what I did. Initially, I spent some number of months trying to get my husband released, because he was also a prisoner. But before that was eventually achieved, we decided to set up an organisation, together with others, was British Campaign for the Release of Indonesian Political Prisoners, which then became known as TAPOL, Tahanan Politik.
The main components were Carmel and me, because I was Indonesian and Carmel also lived in Indonesia for a long time. And so that was more or less our strength. So very often people say, TAPOL is fairly small and punching above their weight. And that’s more or less what it was, because of our context and the relationship, our information was always accurate. As Carmel said:
TAPOL, in the beginning, was only dealing with political prisoners. At one point, we realised this Suharto regime would last very long. But the issue of political prisoners wouldn’t last that long. The pressure on Suharto to release political prisoners was huge. At one point, I remember, in the mid-1970s until the end of the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter was in charge in the US. He was probably the very first US president who made human rights a structural part of policy within foreign affairs. Carter tried with all kinds of ideas to convince Suharto that the release of political prisoners was a must. In 1978-79, collectively, political pressures were released, there was a lot of them. The figure that was mentioned sometimes was about 1.2 million, by far the biggest in the world. Finally, they were all released. We already decided to that we also campaign on other issues. As Carmel said, that meant East Timor:
The major issue was how to get information quickly, which of course, was not possible. We had to make very expensive phone calls; we had to write to people. The Indonesian military conducted a huge campaign in 1977-78. There were several smaller guerrilla groups within East Timor, and it was very difficult to have good information about them. The only relationship was a radio communication between East Timor and Darwin in Australia, that was also cut off. So, the only escape was channeling information out through the Catholic Church. Even that was not easy. The Catholic Church was also isolated. In those days, information and speed were different. Nowadays, if something happened five minutes ago, you already know the information five minutes later. In those days it wasn’t like that. It was a different period. Information was so important to achieve, but it was not easy. So sometimes we received information from a person three months later. Still, then, it was valuable. Nowadays, if you receive information three months later, people say so what maybe situation has changed already. So different, totally different concept of time.
We decided to campaign also on issues that showed up Suharto. Suharto was very much dependent on a lot of things from abroad, like arm sales, weapons, on the economy, financial aid, and so on. So, we also campaigned on those issues. In the beginning, it was not very effective, because of the Cold War. There was the Soviet bloc, and the Western bloc, and both had their dictators. Suharto was a dictator of the West. If you campaigned in the West against Suharto, then people would say he was our dictator, so don’t touch him. Of course, they don’t say that so rudely to you. But in the end, it was like that. So it was very frustrating in the early years.
As Carmel said, that meant a need for support.
There are quite a few members of parliament who are interested in human rights situations in different countries around the world. And one of these is the parliamentary Human Rights Committee. When we first made contact with it, the committee was chaired by Lord Avebury from the Liberal Democrats.
Contact with the government is difficult. Governments are more interested in making investments and earning money from their relationship with countries. Indonesia is very rich in natural resources. So, it’s a goldmine for British investors. So, they prefer not to think about the human rights situation, because if you start talking about human rights, people say: Oh, well, then why are we having all these contexts with Indonesia when the situation there is so bad? So they tried to cover it up, simply by the fact that they did they did not oppose it. To me, that is complicity, because they just allow it to happen –something awful, like a country being invaded.
In certain moments of the history of the Suharto dictatorship, TAPOL was very crucial, because of the position of Carmel. I remember the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor in 1991. The information coming to the outside world was very bad. So, we worked day and night, really day and night, because the phone calls from all parts of the world were not going to the news agencies, because they had no people on the ground. So, they all came to us. Our information was basically from some of the Timorese that were in Timor. It was very limited, but even that limited information was precious, to keep the issue going. And it became indeed, a very big issue.
Very often a tragedy can become also a turning point. In South Africa, you had also something like that, the Sharpeville killings in 1960, when suddenly the whole world was angry about it and it became a big issue. In East Timor, the Santa Cruz massacre became the turning point. And at the end, more or less people can analyse it and say, because of what happened in Santa Cruz, East Timor later on became independent. You can make that kind of conclusion.
Up to the 1990s, very often, the spokesperson of the Indonesian democracy movement was TAPOL itself, because activists in Indonesia could not speak, so we had to speak in their name. Gradually, they were also able to go abroad and speak themselves. Of course, that was much more favorable. So, we brought a lot of Timorese victims to the UN human rights commission in Geneva, where they could speak out. Gradually, we became the intermediary. The relationship with the movement both in Indonesia and Timor was always very good.
One of the main achievements of TAPOL was to try to convince people in the West – whether it’s the press, the public, or the campaigners – that the culprit was actually the West. They’ve always spoke about standards. One of the main standards was, of course, not human rights, but how to benefit from a system. In that sense, the difference between the human rights work in TAPOL and human rights work done by more traditional human rights campaigners, like Amnesty, is that we were actually campaigning much more against the behaviour of a criminal government.
The strengths of Carmel were also that she was able to adjust herself in those different periods. When we needed to be radical, she was radical. When we needed to be more moderate, she also managed to do that. So, Carmel managed all the time to be flexible and lenient. Carmel never stopped campaigning; she was very committed. That was the main issue of her life, which I think is a very important commitment. Because of her strong firm commitment, I was also encouraged to do more. So were many others.
References
[1] Text from film interview with Carmel Budiardjo, courtesy TAPOL.
