At the beginning of August 2013, Haidir requested me to become a friend on Facebook, and soon after I received his email: ‘Thank you for accepting me as your friend. Please allow me to introduce myself: I am from the ex-political prisoner family of Savanajaya.’

I call my grandfather mbah or embah. His name is Usup. He comes from the small town of Tenjo, in West Java. One time, he told me his life story, which led him to the cruel jungle created by the New Order government, the island of Buru. It began in 1970, when two men grabbed him at gunpoint. Then he was dragged into a car. My grandfather was not interrogated for a long time. They just asked him where he worked, and embah answered: ‘P.T. Unilever’. He was imprisoned from then on; first he was sent to Bandung then to Nusakambangan Island, before ending up on Buru. After that, his life started in the world of prisoners, unbeknown to his wife and son. He was imprisoned in the barracks of unit 4 [Savanajaya].

But there remains a question which has no answer even now: ‘Why was he arrested?’

The Time of Release

In 1976, embah was ‘rehabilitated’. He decided to stay on Buru, rather than move back to Java. After the political prisoners were released, and the migrants from Java arrived in Buru, the government gave the people there a plot of land to build a house and to raise livestock. Thus, the ex-political prisoners usually started a new life with farming and animal husbandry. My grandfather chose to be a farmer. The indigenous people of Buru treated prisoners quite well. In fact, many were grateful to the former political prisoners, as they developed a pretty efficient farming system so that the locals too could harvest their own crops.

When the families – wives and children – of the ex-prisoners were sent from Java to live on Buru, my grandfather's wife and son never arrived from Tenjo. So embah married a widow, an ex-wife of his cellmate. Her name was Sriyanah and she was originally from Lamongan in East Java.