Finding my father’s killer

Based on what we knew and with some investigation, we found that in the six months that my father was held hostage by GAM, several people played key roles.

These included his colleagues such as Fery Santoro, who was his cameraman and fellow hostage.

Another compatriot, Munir Noer, tried for months to lobby for their release.

To piece together the disparate pieces comprising anecdotes and recollections of events that took place two decades ago, we travelled around the country and spoke to these individuals.

For months they were hostages until they were shot at - wrongly - by the Indonesian military during its attack on a GAM camp on Dec 29, 2003. He managed to escape the shooting, but my father did not.

We met him in a park in Central Jakarta to hear what went down that fateful day.

Fery recounted how GAM had taken them to a “swampy place” and the house they were in was on stilts.

That morning, all but one of the GAM members had left to search for another hiding place as they believed the Indonesian military knew their whereabouts.

/

Around noon, after listening to the radio, those left behind suddenly heard shooting in their vicinity.

“Dum. Dum. Dum. Dum. Dum. It was loud. I dived to the ground, each of us trying to save ourselves…”

“I [didn’t] know where everyone was. I [didn’t] know where I was because I was just crawling. I wanted to go back … I remembered your (Ridhwan's) late father because I was afraid something had happened to him."

But then Fery heard a voice in his head that said, "No, don't."

“So, I decided against it.”

It was only two days later that he found out my dad was killed.

Besides Fery, I reached out to another of my dad’s colleagues who might shed light on the shooting.

But at that time, I didn’t manage to ask about the details as we were told to move on with our lives.

Decades on, I reached out to him and we met at a cafe in South Jakarta. Despite the years, he hadn’t changed much, and was still friendly and welcoming.

Dicky said when the newsroom learned that my father had been killed, he was assigned to produce a breaking news story about it.

But suddenly the studio’s phone rang. A man called to apologise for my father’s death, claiming it was an accident.

Dicky asked for his full name, but the caller only said “Ucok”, which is a common nickname for people of Batak origin like myself.

According to Dicky, “Ucok” said they received orders to intercept a GAM group that was going to pass through that point at a certain time.

Munir then tried for months to lobby GAM for his release.

He was the only person outside the military who saw my father’s body in a morgue in Aceh, before he was brought to Jakarta for burial on Dec 30, 2003.

Together with Kiki, I travelled to Aceh to find out what he could recall of the time.

He told us that some time after my dad’s death, he was covering some floods in Aceh when he was approached by a Marine.

Munir said the person, whom he knew only by his last name, apologised for my father’s death and said his team accidentally shot him.

At the time, he was suspicious about why two male journalists were in a car with two women.

The two women were the daughters of my father’s landlord. They also happened to be the wives of Indonesian soldiers.

That was reason enough for him to hold them hostage.

Awi then brought the hostages to a hiding place at the top of a hill in a remote village in Peurelak.

Curious about how he spent his days as a hostage, I asked Awi if my dad spoke about his family.

My heart warmed at that.

Unfortunately, Awi didn’t have much else to share. He was only with the hostages for two days before handing them over to another GAM member.

His part of the puzzle ended here. It was time to go back to the drawing board and try a different tack.

“Why didn’t the military try harder to free my father while in captivity?”

That was one of the main questions that loomed large in my mind as Kiki and I tried to get in touch with him.

Tracking him down proved to be challenging, and it was only after a week of calls and messages that he got back to us.

When he did, it was to add another piece to the puzzle albeit a somewhat cryptic one: He disclosed details of the shooter.

He didn’t want to elaborate on this admission though, as he was not in charge at the point when the shooting happened.

After weeks of seemingly futile searching and interviews, getting a definitive answer to my father’s death appeared increasingly doubtful.

I wrestled with the thought of never knowing, and that weighed heavily on my thoughts when a door opened - finally.

/

Heading back into our investigations and interviews, there was one final lead: the Marine who apologised to Munir for the shooting. Unsure if we were on the right track, Kiki and I still tried to get in touch with someone who shared the same surname.

It felt like we were in the last-chance saloon at this point. Every non-answer deepened our dread.

Thankfully, after about a month of trying, we discovered that we did have the right person.

Success! I had so many questions that I wanted to ask him in person, at the very least to confirm what he said. But after he agreed to meet with us, he then disappeared.

For months, we tried to message and call him - to no avail.

Frustration set in, as initial hopes gave way to resignation.

When it seemed like we had hit a dead end with Y, he turned up once more.

Better yet, he agreed to an interview - on the condition that he not be named and filmed.