Slave Labour and Silence in Plantungan Camp (Głąb, 2026)

Głąb, K. M. (2026). Slave labour and silence in Plantungan camp: Women’s experiences of imprisonment and memory suppression. *History and Anthropology*. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2026.2687553 PDF: 02 Secondary Sources/2.2 1965 Violence, Memory and Historiography/Glab (2026) - Slave Labour and Silence in Plantungan Camp.pdf PDF PAGES 1 to 25 of 25. Text from the PDF text layer where present, otherwise Tesseract OCR (ind+eng); OCR errors remain. === [PDF page 1] === History and Anthropology ISSN: 0275-7206 (Print) 1477-2612 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ghan20 Slave labour and silence in Plantungan camp: Women’s experiences of imprisonment and memory suppression Katarzyna Marta Głąb To cite this article: Katarzyna Marta Głąb (18 Jun 2026): Slave labour and silence in Plantungan camp: Women’s experiences of imprisonment and memory suppression, History and Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2026.2687553 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2026.2687553 © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 18 Jun 2026. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 93 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ghan20 === [PDF page 2] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2026.2687553 Slave labour and silence in Plantungan camp: Women’s experiences of imprisonment and memory suppression Katarzyna Marta Głąb SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article examines the Plantungan women’s camp as a central Indonesia 1965–66; instrument of gendered repression under Indonesia’s New Order plantungan; political regime. The study argues that Plantungan functioned as a imprisonment; forced labour; sexual violence; memory and gendered carceral regime in which women’s bodies were silencing simultaneously disciplined, exploited, and morally stigmatized. To support this, I draw on fieldwork in Central Java, interviews with former prisoners, local memory traces, and various published testimonies. Through forced labour, spatial isolation, sexual violence, ideological instruction, and the enduring myth of the ‘wild Gerwani,’ the state produced a multilayered apparatus of domination that sought not only to punish political dissent but to reshape gendered subjectivities. The analysis situates women’s testimonies within broader frameworks of biopolitics, necropolitics, and feminist theory, demonstrating how state power operated through everyday routines, embodied practices, and enforced silences. It also traces the afterlives of this violence, showing how memory erasure, local stigma, and the absence of institutional reckoning have shaped survivors’ lives long after their release. Finally, the article examines contemporary artistic grassroots efforts that challenge official forgetting and reclaim gendered histories excluded from national narratives. This reconstruction of prisoners’ lived experiences illuminates the intersections of gender, forced labour, and authoritarian power, while contributing to debates on memory politics and transitional justice in Indonesia. Introduction During 1965 and 1966, the Indonesian army, led by General Suharto and aided by para military militias, launched mass arrests, killings, and purges of members and alleged sym pathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The military justified these actions by claiming that PKI-affiliated personnel had abducted and murdered seven army officers at a training field near Halim Air Force Base. This site, located on the outskirts of Jakarta, was later mythologized in regime propaganda as Lubang Buaya (‘Crocodile Pit’). Although this narrative was quickly proven false, it became the central legitimizing story for the CONTACT Katarzyna Marta Głąb kglab@swps.edu.pl SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. === [PDF page 3] === 2 K. M. GŁĄB widespread violence that followed (Robinson 2018; Roosa 2006; Wieringa, Melvin, and Pohlman 2019). Over one million people were arrested and detained as political prisoners, while an estimated 500,000 communist supporters and their associates were murdered in purges across the country (Cribb 1990). Beginning in late 1965, Suharto’s propaganda apparatus disseminated anti-communist hysteria through every available channel, claiming that the generals had died in torment, tortured in Lubang Buaya by young members of the Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Gerwani), a left-leaning women’s organization (Cribb 1991, 29). Even later admissions by regime-affiliated institutions that such events never occurred (Fauzi and Kusumadewi 2016) did little to erode these images, which helped legitimize sexual violence during the killings and justified the detention of thousands of women. By December 1965, media accounts routinely described grotesque scenes of torture and mass sexual frenzy, supported by ‘testimonies’ extracted through coercion (Tiwon 1996). The campaign’s architects deliberately sexualized Gerwani, depicting its members as predatory, immoral, and inherently dangerous, while portraying the army as the moral saviour of a nation under threat (Wieringa 2002b). The military’s central role in the 1965–1966 violence was consolidated through a hege monic narrative campaign that cast the PKI as an inhuman threat and placed Gerwani at its symbolic core. Despite autopsy findings indicating that the officers had been shot rather than tortured (Anderson 1978),1 Suharto repeated these allegations, embedding the myth of ‘wild Gerwani’2 into public memory. This narrative was echoed in the press and intensified by labels such as ‘bloodthirsty’, ‘red whores’ and ‘sexual demons’ (Wier inga and Nursyahbani 2018). It mobilized moral outrage, especially in conservative and Muslim communities (Wieringa 2009). Consequently, Gerwani became a conduit for wider anxieties about gender, morality, and political disorder. The false story thus oper ated as a gendered instrument of state violence. By collapsing political dissent into deviance, propaganda enabled the arrest, sexualized dehumanization, and long-term confinement of women. In sites such as Plantungan, this ideological fiction was translated into the everyday reality of control. The consequences were immediate: Gerwani members and many women with no pol itical affiliation were arrested, subjected to interrogation, rape, and torture, and trans ported to prisons and camps (Pohlman 2015, 2017; Wieringa 2011).3 Testimonies collected for IPT 19654 indicate that women and girls were often seized from their homes, workplaces, or fields on the mere pretext of political suspicion (Kolimon et al. 2015). Families rarely knew where they had been taken, fearing that inquiries would result in accusations of communist sympathy (Lestariningsih 2011). Holding many people in detention was an important part of the effort to target and suppress those on the political left (Kammen and FaizahF 2012, 442). In the aftermath, the army rapidly established a sprawling system of detention sites across the Indonesian archipelago to manage hundreds of thousands of detainees held without trial (Final Report of the IPT 1965, 2016, 43). As Kammen and FaizahF (2012) note, this infrastructure expanded rapidly, incorporating existing prisons, police stations, military posts, and ad-hoc facilities, such as confiscated private homes, warehouses, office buildings, and disused schools. Between late 1965 and the end of the 1960s, detainees were repeatedly moved across short-term holding sites as the army attempted to manage overcrowding and classify prisoners by perceived political danger (Kammen === [PDF page 4] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 3 and FaizahF 2012). After 1969, the system shifted toward long-term concentration camps designed for forced labour and ideological ‘rehabilitation.’ While Buru Island was the most notorious site for men, Plantungan became the central long-term detention site for women in Central Java. Women associated with or suspected of sympathizing with left-leaning organizations were swept into this expanding network of repression. Many were first detained in Jakar ta’s women’s prison at Bukit Duri, at Salemba, or in regional prisons such as Ambarawa and Wirogunan in Yogyakarta. Most of these arrests occurred during the ‘second wave’ of detentions (1968–69) after Suharto had consolidated power, authorized systematic action against those labelled ‘enemies of the nation’ (Komnas Perempuan 2007, 75). From these dispersed sites, women were transferred, often abruptly, to face what some feared would be – in Carmel Budiardjo’s5 words – their ‘final penyelesaian (solution)’ A substantial body of scholarship has examined the mass killings of 1965–1966 and the torture and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people, including women (Kolimon et al. 2015; Lestariningsih 2011, 2019; Pohlman 2008, 2015, 2017; Wieringa 1995, 2002a, 2002b, 2009, 2011; McGregor, Dragojlovic, and Loney 2020; McGregor 2023). However, knowledge of women’s specific experiences continues to emerge slowly. This is particularly true for Gerwani members and those merely accused of associ ation. The lingering power of the New Order6 propaganda, combined with social stigma and fear, has constrained survivors’ willingness to speak and limited public discussion. As a result, the history of women detained on political grounds has remained partially obscured, fragmented, and vulnerable to distortion. Moving beyond the conventional focus on political imprisonment, this article analyses Plantungan as a gendered carceral regime where forced labour functioned as both economic extraction and gendered dis cipline. This article investigates the experiences of women imprisoned and subjected to forced labour in the Plantungan camp and examines the afterlives of these experiences in Indonesia’s contemporary memory landscape. While existing studies have profoundly documented the ideological stigmatization of these women, this study nuances our understanding by analysing Plantungan through three interconnected registers: forced labour as economic extraction, sexual violence as a form of discipline, and memory erasure as a continuation of violence. I argue that Plantungan functioned as a gendered technology of authoritarian power with enduring mnemonic afterlives. Within this carc eral regime, women’s bodies were systematically exploited and stigmatized, revealing both the mechanisms through which violence was normalized under the New Order and the processes through which it was later obscured or effaced from public conscious ness. By centring the convergence of political repression, bodily discipline, gendered moral regulation, economic exploitation, and enforced silence, the article illuminates a dimension of the 1965–66 repression that has often remained secondary in broader national narratives. Theoretical and methodological framework This analysis is grounded in interlocking theoretical perspectives that illuminate how authoritarian regimes instrumentalize and reconfigure gendered bodies. Following Fou cault’s (1977, 1978) conceptualization of disciplinary and productive power, I approach === [PDF page 5] === 4 K. M. GŁĄB Plantungan as a biopolitical site. Its primary intent was to remake political dissidents through strict regimes of labour, surveillance, and moral regulation. The camp’s treatment of women as tractable bodies was predicated on their total exclusion from juridical pro tections, rendering them entirely subject to arbitrary sovereign power. This state of legal invisibility allowed for the exercise of what Mbembe (2003) defines as necropolitical power, where certain lives are marked as maximally exploitable and subjected to slow, administrative forms of death. Plantungan exemplifies this logic, positioning women within a zone of extended precarity where their biological existence was defined solely through productive extraction and state-mandated discipline. Engagement with feminist political theory is essential to understanding the bodily governance at Plantungan. Fed erici’s (2004) analysis of the appropriation of women’s reproductive and domestic labour under capitalism provides a framework for how the New Order reconfigured detainees’ skills into coerced productivity to sustain the camp’s internal economy. Furthermore, Butler’s (1990) account of the regulatory norms illustrates how the camp enforced a mor alized femininity aligned with national narratives of purity, domesticity, and loyalty. Plantungan represents an Indonesian inflection of a global pattern where women’s detention sites combine labour with ideological ‘purification.’ Beyond the canonical Nazi and Stalinist examples or the Japanese ‘comfort women’ system, research is increas ingly highlighting less visible sites of confinement (for detention camps in Asia, see volume edited by Cribb, Twomey, and Wilson 2022). Similar dynamics of mental recalibra tion and patriotic propriety have been documented in South Korea during the 1970s. The Park Chung-hee regime used punitive ‘vagrancy rehabilitation centres’ to compel women into textile and cleaning work to restore patriotic propriety (Hong 2012). In Taiwan’s martial law ‘defence mobilization’ sites focused on the mental purification and ideological recalibration of politically suspect women (Han 2023). Military dictatorships in Uruguay (Alonso 2016) and Chile (Gómez-Barris 2009) utilized clandestine centres like Punta de Rieles and Londres 38 for enforced domestic service and reproductive policing. Further examples include Kenya’s colonial ‘native reserves’ and detention villages, such as Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps, which mobilized agricultural labour under narra tives of civilizational uplift (Bruce-Lockhart 2014; Elkins 2005); and Rhodesia’s ‘protective villages’, where women were conscripted into subsistence labour and tightly policed (Kriger 1992). In Francoist Spain, the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer likewise subjected to unpaid labour framed as domestic rehabilitation (Guillén Lorente 2022). Situating Plan tungan alongside these international examples highlights a recurrent global fusion of labour and gendered morality. Frequently obscured in national histories, this dynamic renders the suffering of ‘politically suspect’ women administratively invisible. To bridge theory with the lived experience of survivors, I utilize the triadic imagery pro vided by former prisoner Mia Bustam (2008, 201). By depicting the detained women as sapi merah (red cows), budak (slaves), and obyek korupsi (objects of corruption), she pro vides an analytic political-theoretical lens through which to understand the logics govern ing Plantungan. This metaphor captures the camp’s core dynamic: women were treated simultaneously as sources of profit, labouring bodies, and objects of disciplinary interven tion. Through Bustam’s metaphor, Plantungan emerges as a site where economic extrac tion, political repression, and gendered moral regulation converged into a single apparatus of biopolitical power. === [PDF page 6] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 5 Methodologically, this research is grounded in a qualitative, thematic analysis of memory traces. The testimonies were analysed by identifying recurring tropes of domes ticity, bodily autonomy, and economic exploitation – themes that bridge the theoretical concepts of gendered discipline and necropolitical extraction. The insights draw on mul tiple sources. These include informal conversations with local residents and interviews with female camp survivors conducted in Bansari district (Temanggung Regency, Central Java) in February and March 2018. Additionally, the study utilizes site visits to the former camp and an extensive review of published or filmed testimonies. The primary interviews involved former female prisoners aged eighty-one to eighty-nine and were conducted in their homes, ensuring a safe and familiar environment. Contact was established through local villagers. The fieldwork was facilitated by a hosting family in Rejosari, a small village between the Sumbing and Sindoro mountains that served as the base for this work. All participation was strictly voluntary, anonymous, and undertaken only after prospective interviewees had agreed in advance to speak with me, in accordance with rigorous ethical protocols. Given the advanced age of the survivors and the sensitivity of the topic, the study acknowledges the limitations of ‘trau matic memory’ and does not claim statistical representativeness; instead, it prioritizes the depth of lived experience and the ‘memory traces’ that persist in the local landscape. By reconstructing these narratives, the study aims to reclaim a history that remains largely silenced in the Indonesian public sphere. Historical foundations and spatial isolation of Plantungan Geography of control and the panoptic landscape If Plantungan’s geography created the conditions for control, its built environment and daily routines implemented it. The camp’s infrastructure and organization demonstrate how surveillance, labour, and spatial design shaped women’s experiences. The army established the camp on the grounds of Leproseri, a former Dutch leprosy hospital located approximately three to four hours from Yogyakarta. Originally built in 1871 to serve the Dutch army, the site functioned as a hospital for leprosy patients from 1930 until its closure in 1968 (Lestariningsih 2011). The facility was intentionally isolated on the right bank of the Lampir River. While the social stigma of leprosy kept surrounding communities at a distance, the fast-flowing river and dense forests further reinforced its absolute seclusion (see Figure 1). The spatial configuration reveals how architecture and landscape operated as instruments of control. The location had a direct impact on the prisoners, exerting control over their bodies and minds. Plantungan functioned as a colonial hospital, a forced-labour camp, and later a juvenile prison. Throughout these shifts, it utilized what Foucault (1977) describes as a panoptic logic. This arrangement enabled continuous visibility, within the framework of a ‘total institution’ (Goffman 1961). Through this arrangement, power operated efficiently to manage health, administer punishments, compel participation in nationalist propaganda lessons, or enforce mental reform through forced labour. Prisoners’ bodies were integrated into this spatial order through hierarchies and circulation routes. These structures delineated authority, determined movement, and organized tools of intervention. Such practices were familiar in hospitals, detention centres, and prisons alike. === [PDF page 7] === 6 K. M. GŁĄB Figure 1. Lampir River, above which the former camp is located; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. The prisoner population grew steadily throughout the early 1970s. Christina Sumar miyati, former political prisoner and activist, reports that in 1971, 500 women of varying ages were deported to Plantungan (in Yuniar and Easton 2015, 49). A Catholic cleric visiting the camp reported that by May 1974, there were 870 prisoners (Tempo 2015, 102). Many were simply relatives of suspected PKI members, or women targeted due to association, profession, or neighbourhood rumours. Among them were writers, translators, teachers, journalists, artists, and students. Tripartite spatial organization and infrastructure The upper zone: administrative and service buildings The spatial layout of the former camp, as observed during a 2018 site visit, still clearly reveals the tripartite organization that once structured the daily lives of its inhabitants. The uppermost area consisted of buildings on the hilltop. Once the elegant residences of doctors, hospital directors, and later camp commanders and their guests, these struc tures were now abandoned and collapsing. Also located here were former patient wards, baths, a small church, the Al-Barokah prayer room (mushola), a small mosque, the hospital kitchen, laundry facilities, and various outbuildings. These were the spaces where political prisoners were routinely forced to work (see Figure 2). The middle zone: reappropriated colonial infrastructure Further down the slope, toward the river, stood renovated colonial-era buildings dating back to the nineteenth century (see Figure 3). In 2018, these were repurposed as a juvenile prison (Lapas Pemuda Kelas IIB – correction facility). According to the guard on duty, twenty-six boys convicted for theft and robbery lived under military- === [PDF page 8] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7 Figure 2. Abandoned buildings of the former Leproseri hospital, then a women’s camp; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. based control and labour-based routines (interview in Plantungan, March 3, 2018). These buildings, once home to hospital patients, now housed prisoners and staff offices alike (see Figures 4 and 5). Figure 3. View of the former women’s camp; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. === [PDF page 9] === 8 K. M. GŁĄB Figure 4. Prison buildings; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. The lower zone: the river, springs, and erasure of memory The lowest part, just above the riverbank, where hot sulphur springs still bear traces of colonial infrastructure, includes a covered bathing area (see Figure 6). Crossing a nine teenth-century bamboo suspension bridge (see Figure 7) one reached the area where Figure 5. Prison buildings: sleeping room for juvenile prisoners; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. === [PDF page 10] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 9 Figure 6. Bath on the Lampir River, built near the camp barracks for women, view from the prison buildings on the hill; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. wooden barracks once stood, accommodating prisoners; today no trace remains (see Figure 8), an erasure that mirrors the broader state-sanctioned forgetting of the camp’s history. While hot sulphur springs in this zone have been converted in 2017 into a tourist facility, the site’s troubled past is effectively obscured from the public gaze. The recent transformation of the hot springs into a commercial tourist site represents an active production of oblivion, where the curated aesthetics of leisure effectively displace and erase the site’s traumatic carceral history. Camp economy The physical organization of the camp tells only part of the story. For the prisoners, the structure of the camp was inseparable from the work they were compelled to perform. Upon arrival, women were forced to clear land overgrown with waist-high grass using their bare hands (Sutarni in Putu Oka Sukanta and Lindsay 2014, 243). Bustam (2008, 129) describes venomous centipedes, ‘teapot-size’ frogs, and numerous snakes that pris oners feared killing lest others seek revenge. In a chilling intersection of memory and soil, they often uncovered the human remains of former leprosy patients, as the camp had been built directly over old burial grounds (Suci Danarti in ‘Plantungan’, Putu Oka Sukanta 2011).7 As Christina Sumarmiyati recounts (in Soe Tjen Marching 2017, 100), in the camp, a certain order and rhythm of the day were maintained for the prisoners, dictated by the daily activities and tasks performed by the women and camp guards. The day was struc tured around water and food distribution, roll calls, religious lectures, prayer, work assign ments, and a twenty-four-hour on-call piket duty. Piket required designated prisoners to === [PDF page 11] === 10 K. M. GŁĄB Figure 7. Hanging bridge over the Lampir River, which women crossed daily; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. monitor and report, in writing, all activities within the camp to the authorities (Bustam 2008, 135). Systematic economic exploitation was the core of existence and ranged from pro ductive labour to arbitrary tasks imposed at the whim of officials (for example a fishpond, Bustam 2008, 130). Ibu Mari, a former prisoner, highlighted the extractive nature of this labour with biting irony: ‘The camp command was very creative. They were going to build a SPA for army members with our hands’ (interview, February 15, 2018). This testimony highlights more than just physical hardship; it illustrates a systema tic extraction of value where the prisoner’s body is treated as a productive resource within a gendered carceral economy. Analytically, these labour assignments represent more than mere punishment; they constitute a form of slave labour integrated into a necropolitical framework (Mbembe 2003). Women worked daily to avoid starvation (Amnesty Inter national 1973, 24). As Ibu Mari also recalled, they were organized into branches, respon sible for agriculture, tailoring, animal breeding, cooking, and cleaning; each unit was === [PDF page 12] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 11 Figure 8. The area of the former camp, where barracks for women stood; Plantungan, Central Java, March 2018. Photo by author. supervised by a prisoner appointed by the authorities (interview, February 15, 2018). Tex tiles (batik, clothes) produced by women were sold in local markets or distributed to army families. The profits were routinely pocketed by guards. While they produced cattle and crops, the military appropriated the majority of the yield, leaving the women with nutri tionally deficient rations. This scarcity was momentarily suspended only for official visitors or international delegations, when high-quality food would suddenly appear (Bustam 2008). Such inspections, however, only deepened the prisoners’ dehumanization, as they were coerced into acting out scripted roles to project a false image of ‘rehabilitation’ (Mariana 2015, 148–149). These staged performances concealed a system of state-sanc tioned coercion where women’s productive capacities were extracted to sustain the very regime that oppressed them. To subjugate bodies and souls The violence experienced in Plantungan extended far beyond forced labour and spatial confinement. What occurred inside the camp constituted a multilayered regime over women’s bodies, sexuality, and psychological integrity, shaped by both military practice and patriarchal ideology. As Pohlman (2015, 2017) argues, sexual violence during the kill ings was not incidental but a systematic instrument of militarized torture. While Pohlman (2019, 98) categorizes the diverse sexual atrocities of the 1965–66 period,8 these dynamics resurfaced in Plantungan in forms specifically adapted to the camp environment. Here, sexual violence was not an incidental byproduct of war but a strategic instrument linking the women’s earlier interrogations with their daily vulnerability under carceral authority. === [PDF page 13] === 12 K. M. GŁĄB Sexual violence as discipline and control In the secluded and isolated setting of Plantungan, sexual violence perpetrated by guards was rampant.9 Women in Plantungan were forced not only to work for camp officers and their families but also, in many cases, to provide sexual services to soldiers sta tioned onsite. The overt collective torture of early detention was gradually replaced by quieter, private acts of violence. These coercive acts occurred in the homes and offices of the guards, facilitated by a climate of patriarchal authority and military impunity. These practices align with what Pohlman (2017) and Mariana (2015) identify as the military’s sys tematic use of rape as a tool of discipline, humiliation, and political repression across Indo nesia during 1965–66. This dynamic is mirrored in Plantungan, where – as Christina Sumarmiyati described – the prisoners’ lived in a state of continuous psychological tension, fuelled by ‘the constant threat of rape by the guards’ (Mariana 2015, 132). Sumar miyati also mentions that many young women were lured into ‘relationships’ with soldiers and officers, sometimes becoming objects within an informal sexual economy and, at times, recruited into the camp’s surveillance networks. Older prisoners attempted to protect them by fostering collective solidarity organizing sports, artistic, and religious activities to pre serve unity and limit the authorities’ divide-and-rule tactics (Christina Sumarmiyati for ITP 1965, 2015).10 The consequences of this gendered violence were profound and multi-generational. As Agatha Sumarni (pseudonym) noted, ‘In Plantungan, children were born without fathers’ (in Baskara 2011, 336). Mariana (2015) interprets sexual crimes under the Suharto regime as part of a continuum with earlier systems of sexual slavery, including jūgun-ianfu during the Japanese occupation. She argues that women’s bodies in Indonesia have repeatedly been mobilized as sites through which political agendas, patriarchal control, and military power are enacted. This continuity is clearly visible in Plantungan, where the military acted within a cultural framework that treated rape as a source of shame for the victim rather than a crime by the perpetrator (Riyani 2020), and where impunity for sexual vio lence is deeply ingrained. The gendered and structural nature of this power dynamics is further evidenced by the survivors’ accounts that sexual violence significantly decreased only after their transfer to Bulu Prison in Semarang, where the presence of female guards disrupted the climate of patriarchal impunity that characterized Plantungan (Baskara 2011, 336). Consequently, the birth of fatherless children in the camp was not merely a biological fact but a mark of ‘social death,’ further entrenching the moral stigmatization that would haunt these women and their offspring long after their release. Lestariningsih and Soekarba (2019, 430) note that within segments of Muslim society, male dominance is framed as divinely ordered, restricting women’s social, economic, and political agency. In patriarchal society, men traditionally exercised power, while women were often relegated to roles of dependence and submission to men (McGregor, Dragoj lovic, and Loney 2020).11 Such cultural norms fostered a climate of lawlessness in which sexualized propaganda justified coercion, both during the mass killings and within the camps. Pohlman (2017) emphasizes that the scale and persistence of sexual violence cannot be explained as spontaneous acts of revenge; rather, they were part of a coordi nated strategy deployed by the army and paramilitary groups. Plantungan exemplifies this logic: coercive sex served simultaneously as punishment, intimidation and surveillance. === [PDF page 14] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 13 Physical neglect and everyday psychic torture Physical and psychic subjugation extended beyond sexual violence. Bustam (2008) recalls that women with cancer or other serious illnesses were routinely denied medical treat ment. his physical neglect was compounded by psychological manipulation. Guards con stantly invoked the military’s fabricated narrative of the ‘bloodthirsty Gerwani,’ using symbols like razor blades to instil fear and shame. As Ibu Siti, former prisoner, recalled: ‘They were persistent in reminding us’ (interview, February 17, 2018). Mandatory ideologi cal lectures described by one woman as ‘both boring and annoying’ were filled with insults against communists and glorifications of the New Order (Bustam 2008, 199). Bustam refers to these required sessions as a form of ‘psychic torture’, eroding women’s self-worth and reinforcing their status as morally tainted subjects. One of my respondents, former prisoner, Ibu Ana, recalled: ‘Our self-esteem was decreasing day by day when we heard the news from the outside and watched the actions of the camp auth orities’ (interview, February 17, 2018). Despite the violence, survivors often describe their early impressions of Plantungan with ambivalence. Compared to the overcrowded and filthy urban jails like Bukit Duri, the open air and mountain landscape offered momentary relief. However, even these memories of solace were marked by the omnipresence of surveillance. Bustam recalls her garden and flower park, including tall sunflowers that were later ordered to be cut down so that prisoners could not hide among them (Bustam 2008, 128). Yet, this relief masked more painful dimensions: forced separation from husbands, children, and extended family (Lestariningsih 2011, 235), the loneliness of widowed or bereaved women who had lost sons and husbands during the killings, and the enduring guilt of mothers whose children were raised by relatives or, in some cases, held in prison with them (Sumiyarsi 2010, 133). Over time, the women internalized many aspects of the camp’s rules simply to survive. The seeming normalization of daily routines, the tempor ary beauty of the landscape, and small creative practices all existed alongside acute trauma. The prisoners’ memories thus reveal a system that simultaneously brutalized and habituated. These overlapping forms of violence, sexual coercion, medical neglect, psychological manipulation, enforced labour, and social isolation, worked together to subjugate both the body and soul. Through embodied routines, emotional deprivation, and constant reminders of their supposed inferiority, Plantungan forged a regime in which domination was not merely imposed but absorbed, shaping women’s self-percep tions long after their release. Through spatial isolation, slave labour,12 sexual violence, medical neglect, psychologi cal manipulation, and ideological indoctrination, the state constructed a system in which women’s bodies served as both instruments of punishment and sites of propaganda. These mechanisms of domination extended beyond the camp’s boundaries: they frac tured families, reshaped identities, and generated silences that persist in local and national memory. By reconstructing women’s experiences across material, bodily, and emotional registers, this article argues that Plantungan was more than a detention site. It functioned as a gendered technology of authoritarian power whose afterlives continue to shape Indonesian social and political life. === [PDF page 15] === 14 K. M. GŁĄB Memory, erasure, and silence The women’s experiences in Plantungan continue to reverberate through the ways the site is remembered – or deliberately forgotten – by survivors and neighbouring commu nities. These narratives and silences illuminate the processes through which the camp has been obscured, contested, or selectively erased. The physical isolation of Plantungan, enforced by both military surveillance and the natural boundary of the Lampir River, translated into a profound social and mnemonic distance. During informal conversations conducted during my field visits in 2018, most residents of the nearby village avoided the topic of the camp, either claiming to have forgotten or citing the strict military surveil lance that once surrounded the site. Only one, Pak Budi, from Kambang village, situated on a hill across the river, agreed to speak with me in a brief, unstructured interview. He captured this atmosphere of conditioned silence: ‘There was nothing known. We didn’t know because the army was watching them very closely all the time’. His immediate addition: ‘And this river here [separating the camp from the village] before [1965 and before Suharto’s time] many times was flowing with blood because of the Communists’ (interview March 4, 2018), suggests that this local silence is not a mere absence of memory but a defensive response to the spectre of extreme violence. This material and social isolation was further reinforced by powerful metaphors of contagion. The testimony of Ibu Maria highlights the central metaphor of the camp: ‘political leprosy’ (interview, February 21, 2018). By repurposing a former leper colony to house political prisoners, the New Order regime effectively transformed a medical stigma into a political one. In this biopolitical framework, the women were treated as ‘contaminated’ subjects who, much like actual leprosy patients, had to be segregated to protect the ‘healthy’ (non-com munist) national body from ideological infection. This ‘political leprosy’ is maintained through a dominant hegemonic narrative that con tinues to portray Gerwani women as inherently immoral – a trope that retroactively legit imizes their past imprisonment and ensures their present silence. Consequently, the testimonies of sexual violence remain largely inaccessible within Indonesia; they are mostly published in foreign languages to protect survivors from local speculation and the emotional harm that recognition would inflict on their families. As Roosa (2006) notes, the post–1965 state apparatus was designed to obscure the truth, leaving survivors trapped between the trauma of military terror13 and the enduring shame of the ‘Gerwani whore’ label (Lestariningsih 2019). This stigma affected even those wholly unconnected to the events at Lubang Buaya, as the regime utilized sexual torture and rape not only as physical violence but as a means of permanent moral disgrace. For many women, the dev astation continued long after the camp’s closure in 1979; they lived and died in extreme poverty, burdened by a status that effectively barred them from social belonging. The case of Ibu Sus, a university lecturer from Yogyakarta documented by Ita F. Nadia (2007, 127–132), exemplifies this continued ‘social death’ and the afterlife of the camp’s exploitative logic. Branded a ‘lonte (slut) Gerwani’, she was coerced and raped for years by a lieutenant who threatened her with re-imprisonment. Her story illustrates a broader pattern where the ‘ET’ (ex-political prisoner) status on identity cards functioned as a mark of permanent rightlessness. Many women were forced into roles as cleaners, cooks, or sex slaves in the households of military officers – figures who were otherwise respected in their local communities (Nadia 2007). In these spaces, the slave labour of === [PDF page 16] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 15 Plantungan was simply relocated to the private sphere, sanctioned by entire community that – as one former prisoner, Ibu Ana, recalled – often knew exactly what was happening but remained complicit through silence (Interview, February 17, 2018). This transition from camp to domestic exploitation highlights how the regime’s technology of power aimed at the total appropriation of the female body, both during and after formal detention. Perhaps the most profound rupture caused by the Plantungan regime was the destruc tion of the parent–child bond (Lestariningsih 2011, 235). The state’s gendered propa ganda was so effective that it was often internalized by the survivors’ children, who came to view their mothers not as victims, but as immoral criminals (Ibu Mari, interview, February 15, 2018). As former detainees recount, many children, sometimes infants, were placed with extended family or strangers, and years later felt no bond with their biological mothers.14 This perception of the prisoners as ‘not fully human’ contributed to a tragic cycle of rejection (Sutini in Baskara 2011, 309–321). Many children, raised by strangers or extended family, felt no biological or emotional bond with their mothers upon their return (Lestariningsih 2011). To protect their offspring from the ‘contagion’ of their politi cal past and the threat it posed to their futures, some survivors even chose to change their names or sever ties completely (Wiludiharto 2004, 81). In this sense, the carceral technol ogy of Plantungan succeeded in its ultimate goal: the total fragmentation of the victim’s identity and the erasure of her history from the intimate sphere of the family. By recon structing these intersecting registers of violence – material, bodily, and emotional – Plan tungan must be understood not merely as a detention site but as a gendered technology of authoritarian power whose afterlives continue to shape Indonesian social and political life. The new order’s hidden slavery To grasp the full significance of the forced labour imposed on Plantungan prisoners, it must be situated within the broader landscape of coerced labour that the New Order inherited, reworked, and extended – starting with how Indonesian school history text books, recount the brutality of forced labour under the 1942–1945 Japanese occupation (Isnaeni 2008). Large numbers of Indonesians, mostly men, were conscripted as rōmusha, performing unpaid manual work on roads, fortresses, ports, and other infrastructure. A key Suharto-era volume, Indonesian National History, states that rōmusha worked ‘from early morning to evening’ without ‘suitable food and care’, leading to many deaths from ‘diseases, fatigue and hunger’ (Poesponegoro 1984, 37). This history has entered Indonesian collective memory. As the daughter of a former prisoner, Ibu Amina, noted ‘It was a very important topic in my high school history class’ (interview, February 8, 2018). However, these lessons often omit the sexual abuse of women within the Japanese ‘comfort women’ system (McGregor 2023). Many Indonesians are familiar with narratives of forced labour from the Dutch colonial era, including rodi – compulsory labour used for plantations, breeding, and to construc tion of roads, irrigation canals, and other public works. Another well-known concept is korve, denoting labour for minimal or no pay,15 and karah, referring to large-scale com munity mobilization for tasks commissioned by the authorities. Under the New Order regime, the concept of korve was distorted and applied to the prisoners’ slave labour === [PDF page 17] === 16 K. M. GŁĄB on Buru Island, where it was framed as part of a ‘humanitarian’ project.16 Korve was intended to ‘change the hearts and minds’ of communists and facilitate their reinte gration into society. Such forms of state coercion were strategically distinguished from gotong-royong, which is framed as a key element of Indonesian identity: a traditional Java nese mechanism of mutual aid and joint work for the benefit of the local community (Suwignyo 2019). In contrast to this recognized history, the suffering of political prisoners under the Suharto regime remains almost wholly unknown. Preoccupied with daily survival, many Indonesians did not perceive that state investments often concealed mass graves and relied on slave labour. Consequently, many of the bridges, highways, and national monu ments praising independence heroes, which appeared across Indonesia in the late 1960s and 1970s, were constructed by prisoners who paid for this labour with their health and lives. The army rarely fed its so-called ‘hired’ workers, leaving families to provide food for both the prisoners and the guards (Razif 2004). On Buru Island, prisoners working in rice fields, forests, and plantations not only sustained themselves but also supplied a signifi cant nutritional base for the wider Moluccas region (Razif 2004). Prisoners were systematically exploited across the archipelago for forced slave labour. They were assigned to various tasks, deployed to agricultural labour, mining, construction, and infrastructure works that effectively constituted slavery. Around Pekanbaru, Riau province in Sumatra, they were forced to build the An-Nur Grand Mosque (Roosa 2020, 235). In North Sumatra, many of the lands cleared by political prisoners are now part of Indonesia’s powerful plantation economy (Azam 2025). In Palu, Sulawesi, they built a central park, roads, and bridges (Wahyuningroem 2013), and the region benefited from their unpaid labour until Suharto’s resignation. Razif (2004) gives further examples: in Lampung, Sumatra, political prisoners were forced to deepen the Kopel riverbed under threat of army beatings. In Cianjur, West Java, they constructed the Siliwangi monument, later celebrated locally. They maintained urban cleanliness and beautified towns in East Java and built major monuments such as the Operasi Trisula monument in southern Blitar.17 After release from Sukami skin prison in Bandung in 1992, former detainees continued to perform labour every two weeks: pulling grass along roads, cleaning administrative and military offices, and serving in army households as builders, servants, and aides responsible for laundry, cleaning, repairs, and furniture-making (Razif 2004). The material legacy of this slave labour remains visible across Indonesia, though its origins often go unrecog Surviving without justice Contemporary collective memory of the events that precipitated the political upheavals of 1965 and the tragedy of millions remains dominated by the spectacular narrative of the deaths of seven officers. This narrow focus reinforces a selective, hegemonic account in which the fate of women, tortured, raped, enslaved through years of forced labour and detention, nearly vanishes from public consciousness. In this memory regime, the PKI functions as an abstract category devoid of individual faces. The testimo nies of former female prisoners survive only as faint echoes in a public sphere still shaped by fear, stigma, political taboos, and cultural norms of silence. In this context, bottom-up === [PDF page 18] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 17 memory initiatives not only challenge long-standing oblivion but also take on the role of a substitute for what the Indonesian state has never meaningfully pursued: mechanisms of transitional justice aimed at truth, recognition, and the restoration of victimhood as pol itical subjectivity (see Wahyuningroem 2019). The absence of official measures, no empowered truth commission, no reparations, no state institutions addressing sexual violence or forced labour, places the burden of memory almost entirely on civil society. One of the most significant initiatives in this respect was the opening of the Temporary Memory Recollection Museum (Museum Tem porer Rekoleksi Memori) on 7 December 2015 at Taman Ismail Marzuki in Jakarta. Estab lished by human rights organizations and designed by architect Stefani Larassati,18 the project sought to create a space for reflection and dialogue about the victims of 1965 while laying the groundwork for a permanent institution dedicated to documenting state violence – the Museum HAM (The Museum of Human Rights). This ambition, however, was never realized due to a lack of political will and persistent disputes over how to interpret the mass killings of 1965–66 (Triyana 2017), that is emblematic of what Connerton (1989) calls the organized dismissal of memory, a structural forgetting enabled by institutions that refuse to house inconvenient pasts. The temporariness of the museum is telling: the state tolerates remembrance only insofar as it remains ephem eral, optional, and structurally non-binding. The very notion of rekoleksi, both as the act of summoning memories and as a quiet withdrawal into introspection, underscored the fragile status of memory in a context devoid of institutionalized truth and justice. The museum exhibited works by young Indonesian artists dedicated to remembering 1965. In an interview with Tempo (2015), Larassati stated that the exhibition sought to reach both ‘those who do not yet know’ and ‘those who wish to remember and discuss.’ In doing so, the museum functioned as a safe space conducive to reflection, and a form of civic archive and institutional critique, a surrogate for transitional justice, which, although lacking formal authority, created a space for public engagement with suppressed histories. Among the exhibited works, the series ‘The Winner of Life’ (‘Pemenang Kehidupan’) created by photographer Adrian Mulya and writer Lilik Hastuti Setyowatiningsih, consti tuted a particularly powerful intervention. Between 2008 and 2015, Mulya photographed residents of Waluya Sejati Abadi, a home for elderly women survivors of New Order repres sion, including former detainees of Plantungan. The ten black-and-white portraits depict older women with tired, steady gazes directed straight into the camera, images that serve as both documentation and accusation. Mulya (2016) referred to them as mbahmbah, invoking a Javanese term of respect for elders. The term mbah, meaning ‘grandma’ or ‘grandpa,’ often signifies authority and life wisdom associated with older age. In the context of the materiality of memory, these photographs operate as indexical traces (Barthes 1981), which do not simply depict but materially touch the reality of past vio lence. Portraits exemplify what Barthes (1981) terms the punctum: the affective detail that pierces the viewer, and what Hirsch (2012) conceptualizes as postmemory: a form of inher ited, affective engagement that binds later generations to traumas they did not directly experience. In this sense, Mulya’s portraits are not merely records. They are affective carriers of memory. They persist as what Butler (2004) calls grievable bodies, bodies whose vulner ability, once publicly acknowledged, destabilizes the state’s narrative monopoly. === [PDF page 19] === 18 K. M. GŁĄB Setyowatiningsih’s biographical notes reveal unjust arrests, torture, years spent in Plan tungan, and ongoing ostracization long after the regime’s fall. The exhibition offered not only an artistic commentary but a symbolic act of naming and acknowledgement, align ing with a central principle of transitional justice: the right to truth and recognition of harm. In sharp contrast to the New Order’s portrayal of Gerwani as ‘depraved murderers,’ the exhibition illuminated the women’s actual motivations and the reasons the women gave for joining the organization in the 1960s: social activism, opposition to polygamy, and efforts to establish literacy and vocational training for women in eastern Indonesia. Through the com bined force of photography and narrative, the exhibition reconstructed a counter-archive that restored public voice to women systematically erased from official history. A parallel form of reclaiming memory emerged through the Dialita choir, founded in 2011 by former prisoners, mothers, wives, and daughters of victims, women connected to the history of repression (Lestariningsih and Sunarti 2023). The songs they perform today originated in prison and camp settings, written in conditions where recording lyrics or melodies was forbidden. Sung from memory, they circulated from cell to cell as instruments of emotional endurance, solidarity, and subtle resistance. Here the signifi cance of voice as a materialization of memory becomes particularly evident. In memory studies, the voice, particularly the sung voice, is understood as an ‘embodied archive’ (Cavarero 2005; Connerton 1989), stored in the body, breath, and collective rhythms of performance. The lyrics of the songs rarely contain direct references to interrogations, torture, and persecution, but Dialita’s repertoire constitutes a repository of unwritten, unsanctioned memory that eludes state control while creating a relational space in which unspeakable experiences can be indirectly articulated (Lestariningsih and Sunarti 2023). In doing so, the choir performs a form of symbolic reparation: a public reinstate ment of dignity in place of the material redress that the state has never provided. Initiatives such as the aforementioned exhibition and the Dialita choir demonstrate how gender can be reclaimed in the face of gender-based violence. The choir’s singers intentionally draw on their feminine perspectives and experiences, contributing to the creation of alternative memories for younger generations of Indonesians. Yet, these initiatives remain partial and cannot substitute for the structural reforms that Indonesia continues to lack. A state that has never acknowledged responsibility for forced labour, sexual violence, and the long internment of women leaves the work of memory – and of justice – to artists, activists, and survivors themselves. Consequently, memory-making practices serve not only as acts of remembrance but also as forms of political pressure, attempting to fill the void left by the absence of official truthseeking, accountability, and reparations. In this light, the title ‘The Winner of Life’ acquires a profound irony. The women of Plan tungan survived, but they are not ‘winners’ in any conventional sense. Their faces, songs, and testimonies endure despite systematic attempts to annihilate them-as material and embodied traces that testify to the fact that state violence did not entirely succeed in erasing their existence. Through these performative archives, they re-enter the political community. However, this remains a radically incomplete project – one that, in the terms of transitional justice, should be the responsibility of the state, rather than being left solely to those who survived against all odds. === [PDF page 20] === HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 19 Conclusion The history of Plantungan exposes a gendered infrastructure of authoritarian power in which the Suharto regime transformed women’s bodies and memories into tools of pol itical repression. The camp served as a core instrument of governance, an enclosed environment designed to control, exploit, and morally delegitimize women cast as enemies of the state. Central to this process was the enduring myth of the ‘wild Gerwani’. Testimonies of former prisoners demonstrate that Plantungan fused coercive labour, sexual slavery, material deprivation, and ideological indoctrination into a coherent regime. Labour served not only punitive ends but materially supported the camp’s economy and, indirectly, the developmental ambitions of the New Order. Sexual violence functioned as an instrument of control and intimidation, entrenching narratives of female deviance manufactured by the state. These practices also fractured families: returning home, survivors faced social ostracism, familial ruptures, and the nearly total absence of institutional recognition. Memory of the camp was subsequently shaped by silence, spatial obliteration, and the ongoing reproduction of state-crafted shame. In this landscape of official forgetting, members of civil society have taken on the work of remembrance. Artistic and mnemonic initiatives, photographic projects, biographical interventions, and the performances of the Dialita choir, serve as counter-archives that challenge dominant narratives and make visible the lived realities of women whose his tories were systematically suppressed. Such efforts remain fragile substitutes for the struc tural truth-seeking, reparations, and public acknowledgement that have never materialized. Acknowledging these women’s histories is not merely an act of remem brance but a prerequisite for any meaningful reckoning with Indonesia’s unresolved past. These findings underscore the urgent need for Indonesia to restore institutional mech anisms capable of recognizing victims of gendered political violence. Only by incorporat ing their testimonies into public education can the country achieve a meaningful reckoning with its unresolved past. Further research is needed to document regional vari ations in women’s detention experiences, the long-term socio-economic consequences of forced labour, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Such work would not only enrich empirical understanding but also offer essential guidance for designing future frameworks of truth-seeking and reparative justice. Notes 1. Benedict Anderson (1978) pointed out that the autopsy conducted on the day of the incident at a military hospital, with General Suharto and President Sukarno signing the report, revealed gunshot wounds to the back of the head and injuries indicative of physical assault. However, the published autopsy results made no mention of mutilation, and these findings were not publicly released by the regime. 2. The ‘wild Gerwani’ myth refers to New Order propaganda falsely accusing Gerwani members of performing lewd dances and mutilating generals during the 1965 coup attempt. This nar rative justified subsequent mass violence and the long-term moral stigmatization of leftist women. 3. Sexual violence and torture with permanent mutilation (including damage or removal the genitals) were also used against men. 4. The IPT 1965 (International People’s Tribunal 1965 Foundation) was established by research ers, academics, human rights activists, and independent Indonesian journalists to address the === [PDF page 21] === 20 K. M. GŁĄB crimes against humanity committed in Indonesia following the failed political upheaval in 1965. Its president in 2020 was Prof. Saskia Wieringa. The foundation’s work contributed to the establishment of the International People’s Court in The Hague with the hearings in November 2015 of victims, witnesses, and experts to document and explain the crimes com mitted during that period.. 5. Carmel Budiardjo was the only known non-Indonesian female political prisoner. 6. The term ‘New Order’ was coined by Suharto to contrast with the ‘Old Order,’ referring to Sukarno’s presidency. 7. Ibu Suci Danarti in Plantungan: Pictures of Suffering and a Woman’s Power, 2011, directed by Putu Oka Sukanta. 8. different categories of rape, sexual violence as torture, sexual slavery, ‘other’ sexual violence, forced pregnancy, and forced abortion; where the category of ‘other’ covered a range of sexual assaults and other outrages against personal dignity, including sexualized forms of mutilation and other acts meant to demean and humiliate victims. 9. K. Indarto, ‘Potret-potret Palsu Plantungan’, catalogue essay for the photo exhibition Habis Gelap tak Kunjung Terang, Taman Budaya, Yogyakarta, April 20–24, 2006, also available at http://kuss-indarto.blogspot.com/2006/10/potret-potret-palsu-plantungan.html. 10. Testimony of Christina Sumarmiyati for IPT 65, August 13, 2015, available at: https://www. tribunal1965.org/christina-sumarmiyati/. 11. On Islam and sexuality in Indonesia and the subordination of wifes in Indonesian Muslim mar riage, see Riyani (2020). Strong patriarchal norms are present primarily in traditional Muslim and Christian communities, but it is not a one-dimensional phenomenon; see, for example, 12. In this article, ‘slave labour’ is used not merely as a descriptive term but as an analytical cat egory aligned with Mbembe’s (2003) framework of necropolitics. As Mbembe argues, the slave condition represents a form of ‘social death’ where the individual is kept alive in a state of injury, stripped of any political status. In Plantungan, forced labour functioned as this type of necropolitical extraction, where women’s bodies were treated as state-owned tools. 13. The army simulated before the public the process of settling the perpetrators of crimes 14. Plantungan: Pictures of suffering and a woman’s power, 2011, documentary directed by Putu Oka Sukanta. 15. See korve, Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI), https://kbbi.web.id/korve (Accessed July 23, 2019). 16. From this term they derived a range of korve categories, covering daily chores and even artis tic or recreational activities imposed or permitted by guards, as noted by former prisoner Hersri Setiawan in his memoirs. For example, korve gurung involved singing on command, korve besi referred to musicians playing gamelan at the guards’ request, korve mata meant watching a performance as demanded by the guards, and korve lendir was designated for sexual abuse. 17. Monumen Operasi Trisula, completed on December 18, 1972, commemorates the massacre of communists (Operation Trisula, Operasi Trisula) in South Blitar, eastern Java, carried out by the military in cooperation with civilians in 1968. 18. In cooperation with Goshem Muhammaden and WEN Urban Office. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 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Respondents Bansari District (Temanggung Regency, Central Java): Ibu Amina, February 8, 2018 Ibu Mari, February 15, 2018 Ibu Ana, February 17, 2018 Ibu Siti, February 17, 2018 Ibu Maria, February 21, 2018 Former camp in Plantungan: Anonymous guard on duty, March 3, 2018 Kambang village (Plantungan, Kendal, Central Java): Pak Budi, March 4, 2018