Jakarta, IO – The film Eksil or’ The Exiles’ has been playing in Indonesian cinemas recently. It was directed and produced by Lola Amaria who also co-wrote the screenplay together with Gunawan Rahardja. The two-hour film won the best documentary film award during the 2023 Indonesian Film Festival.
Eksil tells the story of Indonesian students studying in Communist countries during the 1960s who were unable to return to Indonesia after the events of the 30th of September in 1965. The film shows the longing for Indonesia that many continued to feel all their lives. One man who found refuge in Sweden described how Armenian refugees in Sweden after a time created an organization that represents them in the Swedish parliament. The Indonesian refugees in Sweden however have never done that because they never considered themselves a part of Sweden. They continued to think of themselves as Indonesian. As he put it, “Every morning I wake-up and go to my computer and look for an Indonesian newspaper to read about what is happening in Indonesia.”
Many were forced to spend their whole lives living abroad. “We did nothing but were punished more severely than a murderer,” or as another put it, “We spent our lives trying to find a way home, to our mothers, to our land. It is as though we were forced to hide when the sun was shining brightly.”
There has been some criticism of the film as being too long for commercial audiences and that the storyline is not clear enough – jumping backwards and forwards too much; that the editors were not ruthless enough in their editing. This is understandable as it is also an archival record but that is also what makes Eksil an important film because it records what a segment of Indonesians experienced in the aftermath of 1965 and is therefore a part of the nation’s memory and consequently also its identity – and Lola Amaria deserves only praise for her enormous years of effort in collecting the many interviews and putting them together into such a sensitive and informative film.
How did it all start? In 1962, President Sukarno launched a program to send hundreds of Indonesian students to study abroad in Communist countries such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and China. These countries in turn prepared special programs for students from third world countries. An example was the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow which was founded in 1960 as the Peoples’ Friendship University. After the death of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, it was renamed the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when in 1992, its name reverted to the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia.
The University’s main objective was to provide higher education ‘to people who had liberated themselves from colonialist oppression’. Nelson Mandela said that hundreds of young South Africans found there the education they were denied in their own homeland. Education was free and the Soviet government also paid for the students’ initial travel expenses to and from the university after graduation. At the time, it had six faculties with strong emphasis on engineering, agriculture, and medicine. One of its most famous graduates was Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader who recently died in a Russian prison.
In 1965, six Indonesian generals and an officer were kidnapped and killed. Some were tortured and the Partai Komunis Indonesia or ‘Indonesia Communist Party’ usually referred to as the PKI, were blamed for the murders. In the aftermath of the violence that followed, the BBC estimates that around 500,000 Communists and suspected Communists were killed. Other sources estimate the figures to be closer to 800,000 people.
Waruno Mahdi was one of the students sent to study in Russia although not at the Patrice Lumumba University. He was accepted at the prestigious Mendeleyev University where he was later to graduate summa cum laude with a doctoral degree. Waruna comes from a distinguished family. On his father’s Minangkabau side, his great grandfather was one of Indonesia’s first doctors, his grandfather founded the first psychiatric hospital in Indonesia and his father was a diplomat who smuggled arms for Indonesia during our struggle for independence. On his mother’s side, Waruno’s ancestors contributed significantly to the success of the sugar industry in East Java during the 19th century.
After the events of 1965, he says that he was contacted by the Indonesian Embassy in Moscow and asked to come to there. From other Indonesian students he already knew that he would be asked to sign a statement condemning the alleged atrocities by the PKI. Waruno refused to meet with the Embassy and sometime later, was called again. This time, to sign a statement endorsing the deposing of Sukarno as president. Waruno says that he again refused to appear and sign the document because he wanted to remain loyal to President Sukarno. Consequently, his Indonesian passport was revoked by the Embassy.
Former head of Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission and now chairman of Amnesty Indonesia, Marzuki Darusman explained that the legal basis for regulations permitting the government to revoke the passports were based on Ketetapan MPR No 25 of 1966 or ‘Decree number 25 of 1966 of the Indonesian Consultative Assembly’ regarding the Dissolution of the Indonesian Communist Party or PKI.
The Soviet authorities allowed Waruno to remain in the Soviet Union when his passport was invalidated but he was also asked to join the pro-Communist Organisasi Pemuda Indonesia or Indonesian Youth Organization in Russia. Again, he refused, as he was not a Communist. His refusal apparently upset the Soviet authorities and at first, he was forced to work as a labourer at a cement factory. However, following protests by foreign students at his university he was then sent to live in a town called Voronezh located in southwestern Russia straddling the Voronezh River. It is about 450 kilometres from Moscow and had no other Indonesian inhabitants, leaving Waruno quite isolated. There, he worked as a chemical engineer at a chemical plant for seven years when in 1972, he met an African student who explained to him how he could get out of the Soviet Union and go to the West without a valid passport.
The student told him that he needed to take a train to West Berlin and disembark at the stop called Zoologischegarten. There was no passport control at Zoologischegarten and he would be able to simply leave the train and walk into West Germany. This was the only station in West Berlin where there was no immigration control and Waruno conjectures that it was probably set up in this way to help people trying to escape from East Germany into West Germany, at the time.
Waruna contacted his friends who were fellow Indonesians also trapped in the Soviet Union and one of them volunteered to go by train to Zoologischegarten and test if this information was true. His attempt was successful and a month later, Waruno first moved to Moscow from Voronezh met up with two other Indonesian friends and together they boarded a train to West Berlin where they successfully disembarked at Zoologischegarten.
In the film one of the former Indonesian students who became stateless commented that he thought the Soviets allowed the students to leave via the Zoologischegarten stop because the USSR had backed the PKI and therefore was viewed suspiciously by the Indonesian government in relation to the events of 1965. He believed the Soviet government wanted to restore good relations with Indonesia and therefore wanted to be rid of any students opposing the Suharto government.
Waruno brought with him Russian medical books for an Indonesian woman living in Berlin who had studied medicine in the Soviet Union and needed the books. In return she allowed them to stay at her apartment in West Berlin. In Germany he received political asylum and was granted a stateless passport in accordance with the terms of the Geneva Convention. With the passport he was able to travel everywhere except to Indonesia. At first, he worked as a night security guard, then as a factory worker and finally, he became lucky and was able to secure a position working for the Kaisar Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry where they had a vacancy for the very specialized type of chemistry that Waruno had been working at in Voronezh.
Indonesian students who were in China in 1965 had similar experiences. Kuslan Budiman one of the people interviewed in the film explained that after 1965 Indonesian students could also not leave. During the Cultural Revolution, they were collected and protected by the Chinese military however, it became like a prison because although they were given food they were not allowed to work or travel. Another former student in China, Tom Iljas said in the film that he asked to leave China but was forbidden to do so by members of the PKI who were in China at the time. After some years, they were finally given exit permits by the Chinese government and he left in 1972 with his family of three children and was later, given refugee status is Sweden where he has lived since then.
In 1999, the Indonesian Embassy at the Hague called upon Indonesians without passports to register to receive Indonesian passports. Waruna Mahdi registered but unfortunately after a year the passports had still not been issued, so he finally applied for German citizenship and obtained a German passport – making it possible for him to attend his father funeral three months later in Indonesia.
After Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) became President of Indonesia, he tried to have Decree number 25 of 1966 of the Indonesian Consultative Peoples Assembly regarding dissolving the PKI, revoked. There was much controversy around Gus Dur’s action and it was rejected by the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, in 2003, Decree number I of 2003 of the Consultative Peoples’ Assembly was issued whereby Indonesians related to former members of the PKI were to be treated more fairly. It states that all citizens regardless of background have the same rights and may not be discriminated against and that the government must hold to the principles of democracy in this regard. It was probably the controversy that raged around Decree number 25 that hindered the Embassy from being able to issue the promised passports for so long.
Marzuki Darusman explained that not all Indonesians studying in Communist countries in 1965 had the same experience. Some simply signed the documents that the Indonesian Embassy requested them to and returned home. Others refused to sign and many were finally forced to take up the citizenship of countries such as Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. They were finally able to visit Indonesia using these foreign passports. It was the students who either had affiliations with the PKI or who had relatives who did, that experienced harassment and difficulties when they returned to Indonesia even after the passage of Decree number 1 of 2003.
Waruna Mahdi says that as the child of a diplomat he had lived outside Indonesia most of his life. He had many foreign friends, had attended English-language schools, and later Russian schools. So, for him statelessness was not something very horrible. Nevertheless, the effect of having every girl-friend in Russia a KGB spy and having espionage agencies from different countries trying to recruit him has left a strain and a nervousness in him. What gives him joy has been his pursuit of linguistics and today he is one of the top international specialists in Malay and Austronesian languages including their history as well as comparative studies of Southeast Asian languages.
For people such as Tom Iljas, some of whose family were PKI members and Asahan Aidit, the brother of D.N. Aidit, chairman of the PKI – it was a very different story. In the film Asahan Aidit retells how when he finally visited Indonesia and went to see his relatives in the provinces, they refused to meet him saying it was too dangerous for them to do so. On the second day they asked him to leave and so he returned to Jakarta. In the 1960s, he was in Moscow when he received the news that his brother had been killed and he has been in exile ever since.
Tom Iljas brother and sister were imprisoned by the Suharto government and his father was killed. When in 2015 he returned to Painan, his village in West Sumatra, he found only his mother for the rest of the family had fled. He tried to visit the site of a mass grave where his father was buried in the woods but was refused permission by the police who instead deported him. In the film, the students who were associated in some way with the PKI are still today afraid of being arrested or killed if they return to Indonesia.
Their plight was a sad and unfair one with many loving and missing Indonesia all their lives. Perhaps, the most moving scene in the film was the funeral of one of the exiles in the Netherlands. In the church the congregation sang, ‘Indonesia Pusaka’ by Ismail Marzuki. It has a sad melody and one verse in the song describes Indonesia as:
Indonesia where I was born
cradled and raised by my mother.
A place of shelter for my old age
And where I shall close my eyes at last…
Even the flowers on his grave were red and white. As one exile put it, “Our graves are all over the world. Some are marked and some are not. Some are scattered in the wind…” (Tamalia Alisjahbana)
