All events · Empires Unmade

The Buru Island Penal Colony for Indonesia's Political Prisoners

1969–1979 · East & Southeast Asia

Confinement

Confined

12,000

Figures come from Indonesian government statements at the time, from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International, and from prisoners' memoirs: roughly 10,000-12,000 'Category B' detainees, held without trial since 1965-66, were shipped to Buru from 1969, organised into numbered work units along the Wai Apo river. Indonesia held far larger numbers of detainees elsewhere; Buru was the largest single site.

Share of the population affected

2.0%

of the untried political detainees held by Indonesia's New Order after the killings of 1965-66, from whom the Buru exiles were selected, 1969

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What happened

Following the mass killings and mass detentions of 1965-66, the Indonesian government classified surviving detainees by supposed degree of involvement with the Communist Party; those in Category B, against whom no charges were brought, faced indefinite detention. From 1969 about 10,000-12,000 of them were shipped to Buru in the Moluccas, where they cleared forest, dug irrigation channels and grew rice under military supervision, in units that became permanent settlements. Prisoners were unpaid, subject to beatings and to deaths from illness and hunger; the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed the Buru Quartet there orally before writing it down. International pressure, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Carter administration, contributed to releases between 1977 and 1979. Released prisoners carried an ex-detainee marking on identity cards until 2004 and were barred from public employment. Indonesia's national human rights commission, Komnas HAM, concluded in 2012 that the events of 1965-66, including arbitrary detention and enslavement, amounted to gross violations of human rights; the Attorney General's office has not prosecuted, and in 2023 President Joko Widodo acknowledged past gross violations including this period without accepting state legal responsibility.

Parties

Indonesia's New Order government deported untried political detainees from Java to a prison colony on Buru and used them to clear and farm the island

Disputed

Indonesia has acknowledged that gross violations occurred but has not accepted legal responsibility or prosecuted; the number of deaths on Buru and in the wider detention system has never been established.

The denominator

Estimates of the number detained without trial after 1965 range from about 600,000 (the figure used by Robert Cribb and most historians, and broadly consistent with Indonesian government statements) to over a million in Amnesty International's accounting. Around 10,000-12,000 of them, classified 'category B', were deported to Buru from 1969.

Where the baseline comes from

Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 — Wikipediaopen-edited
Buru — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No count exists. Prisoner accounts and ICRC visits describe deaths from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition and beatings over a decade of detention, numbering at least in the hundreds, but Indonesia published no figures and no independent survey was permitted.

Documented forms of violence

Arbitrary DetentionForced LabourTorture

Amnesty International and ICRC reporting of the 1970s, prisoner memoirs and Komnas HAM's 2012 inquiry documented indefinite detention without trial, unpaid labour and ill-treatment.