Memorialisation: “Human Rights Walk” on International Youth Day of 12 August and Aceh Day of Peace, 15 August 2023

In Aceh, some historical sites are right in the heart of bustling towns, including the sites of assassinations in public places. Hardly anyone has been held accountable for them, but somehow merely exposing them may be considered a security matter: 10 uninvited intelligence officers followed the “Human Rights Walk” hosted by KontraS Aceh in the provincial capital, and questioned some of the 95 participants.

The Walk with 80 students and 15 CSO members in Banda Aceh stopped at four sites of human rights abuses: namely three extra-judicial killings and the detention and torture of inmates at a prison washed out by the 2004 tsunami. The mostly drowned detainees included peacemaking figures and leading members of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).

The participants started near the iconic Baiturrahman Mosque, where the former deputy governor T. Djohan was shot on 10 May 2001, after attending dusk prayers. They then proceeded to the former site of the Keudah prison, where one survivor who managed to climb out of the drowned building during the 2004 tsunami was Irwandi Yusuf, who was later elected as Aceh’s first post-peace governor.

The next site was at the intersection of a mosque where the chancellor of the Syiah Kuala University, Dayan Dawood, was gunned down, also in 2001, on 6 September; only a year after the assassination of another chancellor, Safwan Idris of the Ar-Raniry University, in his official residence within the university compound. One of two assailants posing as students shot him at close range on the morning of 16 September 2000 in his living room.