Testimonio and telling women's narratives of genocide, torture and political imprisonment in post-Suharto Indonesia

To date, there has been no official investigation into or redress of the Indonesian killings of 1965/66 and the mass political detention of citizens under General Suharto’s New Order (1966/98). I argue that non-legal arenas must be explored for the documentation and circulation of testimonies by those who survived these events. As part of a larger project which aims to document, analyse and present the experiences of women during the killings and subsequent political detention, I outline two aspects of this documentation process. First, I adopt testimonio as both a political and analytical framework to argue that certain aspects of testimonio are essential to the continuing negotiations over who can speak, about what, and with what result in post-Suharto Indonesia. Second, I analyse a number of discursive strategies found within the narratives to highlight some of the issues which permit or proscribe the articulation of certain stories