Prisoners of circumstance

Thus, the prisons and detention camps are filled not only with communists but also with leaders and rank-and-file members of the host of mass organisations connected in some way with, or generally giving support to, the Communist Party. Many such people have been arrested merely because they had left their houses during the massacres that swept the country during the last months of 1965. Added to these, there are numerous prisoners who were attested merely because of extremely tenuous or purely social relationships with persons who were thought to be communists. Others were arrested merely because they happened to be in a particular house when someone there was arrested. Persons who insisted on accompanying an arrested relative simply to know where they were being taken often found that they too were placed under arrest arrest.

One extraordinary case is that of the youngest prisoner known to Amnesty on Bum Island. When he was 11 his mother and father were both arrested. Too young to survive alone, he accompanied his mother to prison. She died some time later and the boy was taken to the father in detention at Nusakambangan, the prison island in Central Java. The father was scheduled for transfer to Buru, but died before this happened. Nevertheless, the boy was sent to Bum camp where he is now held as a 'B' prisoner, the category reserved for committed Marxists and traitors'.