Elizabeth F. Drexler

∞: This article positions the Indonesian weekly Thursday silent protests by victims’ families, Aksi Kamisan, as a space of and beyond transitional justice. Analysing Kamisan as repeated, embodied creative acts that reset perceptions, possibilities and imaginations about social belonging, political subjectivity and national identity discloses how authoritarian era affective forces undermine transitional justice and demonstrates the power of alternative temporalities in coming to terms with past violence. ‘Circular time’ brings past and present injustice into the same frame as consistent action extending into the future. Circular time highlights how the time of waiting, uncertainty and lack of justice extends backward and forward connecting past, present and future in the repetition of impunity, and creates community and the space to imagine just futures. Circular time is created by repeated action against impunity in the present and celebrating the perseverance, consistency and agency of victims. Circular time resists the imposition of temporal linearity. Art performed at Kamisan and the act of standing in solidarity engages communities and audiences in a realm of politics and national belonging that is not possible in formal institutions. Over time, these repeated, temporary, inclusive actions can counter still resonant authoritarian era propaganda.

Analyzing photos and narratives of the “widows’ battalion” in Aceh, Indonesia that appeared in international and local print media between 2000 and 2002, this article traces how images of female combatants initially provided evidence of a uniformed, armed ethno-nationalist movement motivated by past state violence and linked to historical legends of women involved in armed resistance to colonialism. Subsequently, the heroines were recast as immoral young women pursuing inappropriate sexual relationships with the occupying military. The problems of intelligence gathering, double agents, and the indeterminate zone of overlap in which male soldiers collaborated in the past were rewritten as a problem of sexual or intimate relations that violated religious and cultural norms. In Aceh, the affective power and complexity of women’s positioning as both victim and combatant is fueled by the invocation of the iconic heroines of the anticolonial resistance and ideas about international human rights. Images and narration of the widows’ battalion appear to champion female combatants past and present, but in fact, contribute to the consolidation of the power of male commanders and combatants in the resistance movement. Analyses of human rights photography must consider the affective power of images beyond engaging the empathy of distant spectators to consider their role in conflict dynamics.

This article considers the case of Timor-Leste, occupied by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, to elucidate the conditions that bedevil transitional justice processes in the aftermath of massive and long-running political violence, when a perpetrator state enjoys impunity because its wartime strategies facilitated denial of its responsibility, political violence was organized through the militarization of local society and individuals operated between the state and the resistance. The continuing social memory and knowledge of such conflict coupled with its judicial invisibility have significant consequences for rebuilding everyday lives. International agencies and processes have not only failed to attend to these dynamics in Timor-Leste but also replicated and perpetuated them, making the restoration of trust on which social reconstruction depends even more difficult.