AJAR - HUMANITY - ID Two decades after the end of Soeharto#s dictatorship, many past atrocities in Indonesia remain unresolved, including the 1965 anti-communist violence that affected more than 500,000 people, and the lesser known issue of the #stolen children# of Timor-Leste who were forcibly removed from their families and brought to Indonesia during the conflict of 1975-1999. The survivors of the 1965 anti-communist violence and stolen children of Timor-Leste can be found across Indonesia, including in Jakarta, Central Java, West Java, Eastern Nusa Tenggara and South Sulawesi.

While the 1965 anti-communist violence affected any individual accused of having communist or leftist ties, the violence targeted women suspected of being Gerwani members. Furthermore, Timor-Leste#s truth commission (CAVR) estimated that several thousand Timorese children were taken by military officials and government-funded religious and charitable organizations. While most stolen children have been boys who were recruited as #operations assistants# (Tenaga Bantuan Operasi), a smaller number of girls were also taken and experienced exploitation as unpaid domestic workers and subjected to sexual abuse. Years ifnot decades have passed without redress for the survivors, some of whom are elderly,have physical disabilities due to violence, andface further stigmatization as ethnic minorities. Despite the international acknowledgement of Indonesia as a country with the highest level of democracy in the region, most survivors# voices are still silenced and unheard. Their children also face the intergenerational impact of violence and are in need of emancipatory tools to access urgent needs of justice and social services.

This project seeks to empower women survivors of the 1965 anti-communist violence, the stolen children of Timor-Leste, and the survivors# children, through youth-led participatory action research (PAR) that encourages survivors to learn from their painful past, identify their needs, and draw their strengths in order to increase their decision-making power and access to urgent needs. Building on AJAR#s participatory action research in Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Myanmar, we seek to review and deepen the metholodogy in areas where we have started implementing the process (for instance, in East Nusa Tenggara with 1965 women survivors) and scale up the methodology inother areas of Indonesia (Jakarta, West Java, Central Java, South Sulawesi), bringing new target groups (Timorese stolen children and children of survivors) into the fold.

The project consists of trainings for youth survivors in PAR processes and multimedia production, a series of youth-led PAR processes that incorporate multimedia tools to document the stories of conflict survivors, a dialogue series with local authorities, and a parallel offline and online multimedia exhibit based on the data collected by youth survivors for the public sphere. 20 youth survivors will participate in the research, along with 80 survivors whose stories will be documented. At the end ofthe project, survivors and their children will have made their stories heard and have increased their agency for change in the public sphere and among local authorities, while strengthening their capacity for healing, intergenerational solidarity, and mobilization towards an intersectional survivors# movement.