
At the dubble interview of Yanti Mualim:
At the dubble interview of Yanti Mualim: My sister Marijke The-Wertheim visited on the 11th of November 2015 the International Peoples Tribunal 1965 in The Hague. Four days long witnesses were heard there of the mass murder in 1965/66 on communists and (supposed) sympathizers, and of the imprisonment for many years without any form of trial that, under the dictatorship of General Soeharto, followed the murders. The reason that this tribunal was not held in Indonesia itself but here in the Netherlands, was because even now, after 50 years, these witnesses would not be safe over there. It is also therefore that even here in The Hague a number of the witnesses gave their answers to the interrogations of the judges behind a black curtain. We heard the testimony of a former prisoner who was made invisible in this way. He was imprisoned eleven years on the prisoner’s island Buru, laying in an out-of-the-way corner of the archipelago, without knowing what he was accused of or for how long he was to be imprisoned.
During our visit Yanti Mualim made, with the assistance of Joss Wibisono, this dubble interview with us.
We returned home deeply impressed, both of the terrible things we had heard and of the incredible courage of the organizers and witnesses of this Tribunal.