Carmel Budiardjo went to Auschwitz and saw Indonesia

Carmel Budiardjo married an Indonesian and lived happily in the country’s capital for years — until Suharto jailed and then expelled her.

Carmel Budiardjo, campaigner for human rights in Indonesia, passed away at 96. Source: Supplied

OBITUARY

Carmel Budiardjo
Human rights activist. Born London, June 18, 1925; died London, July 10, aged 96.

At the height of the Cold War, the US and its allies looked at war-torn Southeast Asia and saw an archipelago of communism tumbling south through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and on to Thailand and Malaysia. Next-door Indonesia was then – and is now – the fourth most populous country and hosted the world’s largest Communist Party of perhaps three million members.

Sukarno, the 64-year-old founding president of Indonesia had, by 1965, given the US cause for alarm as the noisy “anti-imperialist” leaned increasingly towards the Soviet Union and China on which he relied for aid. Four years ago it was revealed how active the US was in the events that followed the chaotic, poorly planned coup attempt on September 30, 1965 for which the communists were blamed. In the ensuing power struggle, Suharto replaced Sukarno.

A brutal crackdown followed the coup attempt during which any notion of human rights was abandoned as Indonesia’s army and various militia murdered communists – real or imagined – sometimes working from lists supplied by the US embassy.

Involving abductions, rapes and torture, the bloodbath is estimated to have killed more than – some report many more – one million Indonesians, lasted years and remade the nation.

Amnesty estimates that 77,000 people were soon rounded up and jailed without charge. One was a former English student activist, Carmel Brickman. While studying in Prague after World War II she met an Indonesian student, Suwondo Budiardjo, whom she married. They went to live in Jakarta in 1951 and she became an Indonesian citizen three years later while working as a translator and, later, economics lecturer.

Suwondo became senior in the department of communications, and after those September events came under suspicion; communists had infiltrated many key government departments. He spent 14 years in and out of jail without being charged, at one time being severely beaten for five hours.

Meanwhile, his wife was in an overcrowded women’s prison where children were also held, tortured and raped.

“I started to give them lessons in English,” she recalled towards the end of her life. She was freed in 1971 and deported. On a visit to Auschwitz concentration camp she was overcome by the parallels with what she had witnessed in Indonesia and began a campaign to free her husband and help the others trapped in Suharto’s shameful, sweaty gulags. She formed an organisation, Tapol. Its name is a contraction of Indonesian words for political prisoners, “tahanan politik”. Tapol immediately sought to put pressure on the Suharto regime to release its political prisoners. By the 1970s there may have been 580,000.

Then, on December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor. Budiardjo knew better than most what this would mean and how the Indonesian military would behave. Tapol never lost its focus on Indonesia’s political prisoners, but it turned a spotlight on the treatment of the East Timorese while most of us in the West looked elsewhere.

Budiardjo and her team developed relationships with the brave human rights and pro-democracy campaigners, publicising their cause, shaming the occupiers and offering assistance. Tapol campaigned against economic aid for Indonesia and the sale of weapons to the regime.

The courage and resilience of the East Timorese always galvanised the Tapol team. “They have never, through the whole period since 1975, given up their struggle,” Budiardjo said in a documentary at the time. “They have gone through the most devastating destruction of their lives, their culture (and they have been forced into) living in the most appalling conditions their capacity to grow food has been effectively destroyed … and yet never for a minute have they given up the struggle.” Her 1984 book, The War Against East Timor, explained to the world the terror to which its surviving population was subjected. Amnesty International estimates up to 200,000 East Timorese lost their lives during the occupation.

She was appalled when, in 1989, then foreign minister Gareth Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with Indonesia, which she saw as cruelly abandoning the interests of the East Timorese.

But she was delighted when in 1996 Catholic bishop Carlos Belo and resistance leader Jose Ramos-Horta shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in seeking independence for East Timor. It is unlikely they would have without Tapol backgrounding the West’s politicians and facilitating meetings with them.

More recently Tapol has been supporting self-determination for people of West Papua.

A statement by the government of East Timor said Budiardjo “will never be forgotten in Timor-Leste and will forever be remembered with great affection, admiration and respect for her commitment to human rights, justice and solidarity”.