Long Journey to Preserve the Memory of the Community

Families of victims and victims of the tragedy around the 1998 reform continue to fight for justice. They try to keep the incident from disappearing from public memory.

KOMPAS/RAKARYAN S (OKI)

Tens of thousands of students from all over Jabotabek on Tuesday, May 19 1998 came to and occupied the DPR/MPR building in Senayan, Jakarta, urging President Suharto to step down as president.

JAKARTA, KOMPAS — Families of victims and victims of events related to the 1998 reform remain consistent in trying to maintain collective memory related to human rights violations that occurred in that period. Throughout a quarter century of the Reform Era, they continued to hope justice would arise, even though this event had begun to be forgotten by some people.

Based on Kompas' poll on 9-11 May 202 involving 506 respondents in 38 provinces, one third of respondents did not have an image related to human rights violations at the beginning of the Reform Era. The respondent group aged 17 to 24 years (Generation Z) has the greatest proportion of respondents who said they were ignorant of the events (46.4 percent).