18 April 2016•Update: 22 April 2016
By Ainur Rohmah
TUBAN, Indonesia
Indonesia's security minister has called on the country to make peace with its past at a symposium dedicated to the hundreds of thousands believed killed in state-sponsored violence from 1965 to 1966.
Speaking on the opening day of the national symposium on the 1965-1966 mass killings at a Jakarta hotel Monday Luhut Binsar Panjaitan said that President Jokowi Widodo's government had ruled out a criminal investigation into the period, but would consider an “expression of regret” to those who died and their families.
“Perhaps its wording would be ‘remorse for past events, which were a dark history for this nation, and which we hope will not ever happen again,’" antaranews.co. quoted the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs saying of any response.
“We’re still looking for the exact wording.”
The symposium was attended by some of the thousands of survivors of one of the darkest chapters in Indonesia's history.
Between 1965 and 1966, at least 500,000 so-called communists and their sympathisers are believed to have been killed in a state-sanctioned purge.
The bloodshed remains one of the largest mass killings the world has ever known.
In 2015, an international people's tribunal in The Hague concluded that the Indonesian government was responsible for the massacres and oppression of 1965.
On Monday, however, Panjaitan underlined that it did not plan to apologize.
"[It] never crossed the government's mind that we will ask for forgiveness," he told reporters.
The two-day symposium -- April 18-19 -- is being attended by around 200 people, including victims and perpetrators of the violence, activists, community organizations and government officials.
