Purifying Indonesia, Purifying Women: The National Commission for Women's Rights and the 1965–1968 anti‐Communist violence Nelly van Doorn‐Harder Introduction On May 29, 2006, Komnas Perempuan, the Indonesian National Commission that advocates for the rights of women, met with a delegation of nineteen women survivors of the 1965–1966 anti‐Communist violence to consider their official complaint. The moment was historic: these women officially broke their silence of forty years. Between 1965 and 1968, they had been the victims of horrible acts of violence committed by other Indonesians, their neighbors, colleagues, and even friends. Participating in para‐military and vigilante groups, the perpetrators had murdered between half and one million Indonesians and incarcerated more than one million. Accused of harboring Communist sympathies or being active members of the party, many of these women spent decades in jail. For forty years, the Suharto government had forbidden any mention of their plight. Their local communities, at times even their own families, had ostracized them. They had been demonized based on their direct, indirect, or alleged involvement in the Indonesian Communist Party (Partei Kommunis Indonesia or PKI). The rationale for the massacres, incarceration, and silence was that Communists polluted Indonesian society and made the country impure. By virtue of their gender, women were especially susceptible to allegations of impurity, which gave their adversaries permission to rape and sexually abuse them. Komnas Perempuan is an abbreviation that stands for Komisi Nasional Anti Kekerasan terhadap Perempuan (The National Commission against Violence against Women). A government‐sponsored organization, it was set up on October 15, 1998, after the collapse of the oppressive Suharto regime (1966–1998). When in the spring of 1998, during the transition period from dictatorship to democracy, large‐scale communal riots erupted, many women were sexually assaulted. This was not the first time such patterns of violence and sexual assault had occurred. It had been an open secret that during military operations the regime's security forces violated human rights on a staggering scale. Military personnel targeted women in places the government considered rebellious, such as Aceh, Papua, and Timor Lorosae. All through the 1990s, civil society groups insisted that the state start to accept responsibility for this particular form of gendered violence. The press and many average Indonesians observing the 1998 violence noticed that there was an eerie resemblance between what was happening at the time and previous attacks on women during the 1965–1966 events. As a result, women activists lobbied for the creation of an organization that would focus on basic human rights of women alongside the Indonesian Commission for Human Rights that is called KOMNAS HAM (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia). In this article, I focus on some of the strategies developed by Komnas Perempuan to address the plight of the 1965–1966 victims. By 2005, many of the women survivors were elderly and had lived most of their lives as outcasts. Their numbers were dwindling fast and there was a paucity of information about them. The main sources about their lives are interviews recorded by local organizations that try to collect the women's stories. Especially after 1998, several of such initiatives emerged all over Indonesia. Typically, they locate and interview survivors of the 1965–1966 violence to document their stories. For example, a network of organizations for Human Rights and Women's Rights in the city of Solo, Middle Java, called Koalisi Keadilan dan Pengungkapan Kebenaran (KKPK) or the Coalition for Justice and Truth Telling, collected stories about how the victims survived and dealt with the massacres. Their findings are collected in a book and a movie. The mandate of Komnas Perempuan is to report gender‐based human rights abuses and create public awareness campaigns for Indonesian society. This task is not easy since it requires sustained efforts to highlight violence against women in the media. From the beginning, one of its main goals has been to change the pervasive mindset that blames the victims of sexual violence and makes their plight invisible. This attitude explains why so few cases are reported to the authorities. The consistent effort of Komnas Perempuan to inform the public has resulted in the substantial increase of the number...