| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
On a wintry January evening in 1973, the members of Amnesty International USA Group 11 gathered on the Upper East Side of New York City to adopt a new prisoner of conscience, Sutanti Adit of Indonesia. Adit, a medical doctor and the wife of the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, had been arrested and imprisoned in the ruthless campaigns of repression that followed a failed 1965 coup against the Sukarno government, which had ruled Indonesia since its formal independence from Dutch colonial control in 1950. She was among more than a hundred thousand Indonesians arrested, interrogated (often under torture), and imprisoned by the state. As many as fifty thousand of them remained in custody for more than a decade housed in prison camps whose sanitation, medical facilities, and food were inadequate at best. They were permitted very limited contact with the outside world, including family and friends, and harshly mistreated by prison guards.1
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