Small boxes of sexual crimes: turning oral histories into evidence for the International People’s Tribunal for 1965

• In Event: Oral History, Human Rights Violations, and the Law:

Abstract

This paper reflects on the process and ethics of turning individual life stories, told through oral history interviews, into evidence of crimes. Specifically, I reflect on my role in preparing evidence of sexual crimes for the International People’s Tribunal for 1965: a tribunal set up in 2015 in the Netherlands to achieve symbolic justice for crimes against humanity committed during the 1965-1966 mass killings in Indonesia. During these killings, an estimated 500,000 men, women and children were massacred, and more than one million others were rounded up and held as political prisoners. In the fifty years since these killings, the Indonesian state has yet to investigate or redress these crimes. The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 brought together survivors, researchers, artists and journalists from across Indonesia and around the world, who charged the Indonesian state with various crimes against humanity, including murder, enslavement and torture.
The Tribunal also charged seven separate sexual crimes as crimes against humanity, including rape, torture, sexual enslavement and forced pregnancy. My role in this Tribunal was to prepare evidence for the Prosecutor for each of these sexual crimes. This evidence was based on the oral testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses, gathered by Indonesian human rights organisations and researchers, as well as from my own oral history research over the last fifteen years.
This paper critiques the process of turning the life stories of individual survivors and witnesses into evidence for the Tribunal. Complex narratives of trauma and survival, told over hours, weeks or longer, were reduced to individual case files of crimes. Each case file – representing one person’s experience of one or more sexual crimes – contained information about the timing, location and people involved in the crime, and descriptions of the acts of sexual violence. The details were extracted from these personal stories to fill in small blank boxes of information for evidence. I argue that this process was one of intense mediation and obliteration. Evidence for the Tribunal was gained but at the cost of erasing much of the testimonies upon which this evidence was based.

Author

• Anne Elizabeth Pohlman, University of Queensland