In Search of Silenced Voices

The collection was recorded in the late 1990s. Hersri Setiawan, himself a political prisoner (tapol) from 1969 to 1978 in Jakarta and on the island of Buru, conducted the interviews in various countries in Europe and Asia. The aim was to collect individual life stories of Indonesian political emigrants who still live or were living in Western Europe, China, Vietnam and Indonesia. The interviews explore their activities as part of the Indonesian left-wing intelligentsia before 30 September 1965 and their lives after 1965 outside Indonesia. The project was supervised by Henk Schulte Nordholt and Willem van Schendel and funded by the Ford Foundation. In addition to the interviews, a large number of ego documents were collected including memoirs, reports and letters from or about Institute of People’s Culture (LEKRA), the trade union movement and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), among others.