From Indonesia with Love: Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals (Hearman, 2020)

=== [PDF page 1] === From Indonesia with Love: Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals and the Creation of Human Rights Activist Networks Vannessa Hearman Histoire sociale / Social History, Volume 53, Numéro/Number 108, Octobre/October 2020, pp. 417-436 (Article) Published by Les publications Histoire sociale / Social History Inc. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/his.2020.0020 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/772875 [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary === [PDF page 2] === From Indonesia with Love: Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals and the Creation of Human Rights Activist Networks VANNESSA HEARMAN* The incarceration of leftists in Indonesia under the army-dominated Suharto regime from 1965 to the late 1990s led to advocacy campaigns on their behalf by Amnesty International and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Campaigns such as these included the involvement of members writing letters to political prisoners and gave rise in some instances to long-term epistolary friendships between some prisoners and their international pen pals. Friendships, such as the one between English writer Patricia Cleveland-Peck and a former schoolteacher serving a 15-year sentence, Pudji Aswati, reveal how letter-writing fostered human rights activism, and led to the establishment of a long-term fundraising scheme—the Pudji Fund—to support former political prisoners in many parts [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary of the world. The deep emotional bonds developed between correspondents over several years led to the formation of strong networks of activism spanning several countries. En Indonésie, sous le régime militaire de Suharto de 1965 à la fin des années 1990, l’incarcération de partisans politiques de tendances gauchistes a conduit Amnesty International et la Société religieuse des Amis (Quakers) à diriger des campagnes de plaidoyer en leur nom. Les membres impliqués dans ces campagnes s’engageaient à écrire des lettres aux prisonniers politiques. Elles ont donné lieu, dans certains cas, à de longues amitiés épistolaires. Celle forgée entre Patricia Cleveland-Peck, une écrivaine anglaise, et Pudji Aswati, une ancienne institutrice purgeant une peine de 15 ans, révèle la manière dont l’échange de lettres a pu * Vannessa Hearman is Senior Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at Charles Darwin University in Australia. She would like to acknowledge Patricia Cleveland-Peck for providing her with access to correspondence and papers, as well as the participants of the 2018 “Gender Violence Across Time and Space: Netherlands, Indonesia and Timor-Leste” workshop at the University of Melbourne, where the paper on which this article is based was first presented, for their valuable insights. She is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, and to the journal editorial team and special issue editors, Steven High and Lana Dee Povitz. © Histoire sociale / Social History, vol. LIII, no 108 (Octobre / October 2020) === [PDF page 3] === 418 Histoire sociale / Social History favoriser l’activisme en faveur des droits de l’homme. Par ailleurs, cette amitié est à l’origine de la réalisation d’une campagne de financement à long terme, le Fonds Pudji, qui poursuit l’objectif de soutenir les anciens prisonniers politiques établis à travers le monde. Les profonds liens émotionnels qui se sont développés entre les correspondants pendant de nombreuses années ont notamment mené à la formation de forts réseaux d’activisme déployés sur la scène internationale. My criterion for distribution was simple. [The Pudji Fund] was intended to help non-violent political prisoners restart their lives on release. And if the money was there, I refused no reasonable request.1 – Patricia Cleveland-PeCk IN 1986, PATRICIA CLEVELAND-PECK, a writer in Sussex, United Kingdom, established a fund named after Pudji Aswati, her pen friend and an Indonesian political prisoner. For the next 32 years, the Pudji Fund supported former political prisoners with financial contributions toward the cost of their living expenses and income-generating activities. Pudji herself was one of the hundreds of thousands of Indonesians detained as part of the army’s anti-communist suppression campaign that began in mid-October 1965.2 Patricia Cleveland-Peck and several others who corresponded with Indonesian political prisoners were active members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Founded in mid-seventeenth-century Britain, the Quakers were a religious community that played a particularly significant role in the development of transnational activism and International Non-Government Organizations.3 Before the end of the seventeenth century, it had expanded its membership to America and Europe. In bearing witness to suffering and utilizing social and religious networks to institute change, the Quakers have become integral to campaigns for peace and human rights. Quaker practices of witnessing and testimony gathering in the pursuit of social change have led some scholars to conclude that Quakers were some of the earliest exponents of transnational activism in their opposition to and exposure of the practices of slavery from the eighteenth century onward.4 Correspondence between Quakers and Indonesian political prisoners began as a result of a letter-writing program called the Prisoner Befriending Scheme, which formed part of the Quaker campaign against torture from the late 1970s. 1 Patricia Cleveland-Peck, email to author, April 23, 2018. 2 Amnesty International, Indonesia: An Amnesty International Report (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977), p. 9 estimates between 55,000 and 100,000 political prisoners. 3 Thomas Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (London: Hurst and Co., 2013), p. 21. 4 Penelope Edmonds, “Activism in the Antipodes: Transnational Quaker Humanitarianism and the Troubled Politics of Compassion in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer, eds., The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo World since the Nineteenth Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 34. === [PDF page 4] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 419 The campaign can be traced back to the legacy and concerns of Eric Baker, one of the founders of Amnesty International (AI), who was a Quaker himself. Since 1973, AI had focused on the abolition of torture, and Baker brought this concern to the Society. The Quaker Abolition of Torture Group was established in London in 1979, and the Prisoner Befriending Scheme was a strand of this group’s activities. Local congregations, or “meetings,” adopted a prisoner or two, and each member committed to writing the occasional letter to the prisoners their congregation adopted. By 1982, Quakers in Britain had befriended 100 political prisoners, half of them from Chile, and the rest from Argentina, Indonesia, and the Soviet Union.5 The Quakers framed befriending as “an act of faith.”6 Eric Baker’s legacy of pacifism and opposition to torture resonated within both the Quaker community and AI, despite his passing in 1976, and many of the Indonesian prisoners “befriended” by Quakers were first identified by human rights groups such as AI and TAPOL (The British Campaign for the Defence of Political Prisoners and Human Rights in Indonesia).7 Following similar guidelines as those developed by AI, Quakers were encouraged to befriend only those prisoners who had not supported or been involved in violence in defence of their cause in the past. Some Quaker letter writers were both involved in AI and in regular communication with TAPOL, thus, in this way, linking the three organizations. Carmel Budiardjo, herself a former political prisoner in Indonesia, founded TAPOL—a close collaborator of the Quakers in their Indonesian campaign—in 1974. TAPOL passed on news received from Indonesia and assisted pen pals, many of whom were unfamiliar with Indonesia, with interpreting the information they received from prisoners, some of which was used in campaign materials.8 In the early 1970s, Indonesia attracted interest as an arena for human rights activism as a result of the country’s high rates of political imprisonment and other restrictions on civil liberties under the Suharto New Order regime. AI estimated in its 1977 report on the country that between 55,000 and 100,000 political prisoners were being detained there.9 Most of these political prisoners, including Pudji and her husband, Gatot Lestario, were members or sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) and were detained as part of the Indonesian army’s seizure of power from the nationalist President Sukarno, as I will discuss below. Since the end of the New Order regime in 1998, the plight of leftist women political prisoners in Indonesia has been discussed by a number of scholars.10 Memoirs by, oral history collections of, and biographies about such 5 Dorothy Birtles, Letters from Prison: 100 Political Prisoners Befriended by Quakers (London: Quaker Peace & Service, 1982), p. 3. 6 Andrew Clark, General Secretary of Quaker Peace and Service, July 1982 (letter inserted in all copies of Birtles, Letters from Prison). 7 Birtles, Letters from Prison, p. 3. The word “tapol” is an acronym in Indonesian for tahanan politik (political prisoner). 8 For Carmel Budiardjo’s biography and a discussion of the founding of TAPOL, see Katharine McGregor, “The Indonesian Human Rights Campaigner Carmel Budiardjo,” in Berger and Scalmer, The Transnational Activist, pp. 165–191. 9 Amnesty International, Indonesia, p. 9. 10 See Saskia Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Annie Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66 (London: Routledge, 2014); Katharine E. === [PDF page 5] === 420 Histoire sociale / Social History women have also been published, discussing their arrest and detention and the difficulties and stigma they suffered after they were released.11 Scholars have also, to a lesser extent, examined the establishment of human rights advocacy networks in connection with Indonesia; the origins of such networks can be traced back to the campaign to release leftist political prisoners.12 Less scholarly attention, however, has been devoted to charting the rise of humanitarian networks involving longterm leftist prisoners in Indonesia and their international sympathizers.13 Drawing on recently available archives of personal documents and letters, this article demonstrates the importance of individuals and personal relationships in creating strong bonds of friendship and loyalty as bases for political action and advocacy. Despite the inherent inequalities in relationships between the prisoners and their pen pals by virtue of the disparity of resources that existed between them, these epistolary friendships challenged the deep stigmatization and marginalization the prisoners suffered in their own country, Indonesia. In addition, this article also responds to Bradley Simpson’s call for greater historicization of the global human rights movement. The concept of human rights has become the dominant framework utilized by activists since the 1970s, a concept that represents itself as “an internationalism revolving around individual rights” and “a pure alternative in an age of ideological betrayal and political collapse.”14 Yet the concept of human rights was taken up very unevenly and in different forms across the globe for reasons that Samuel Moyn has outlined, which include the thinness of the concept itself as well as its perceived selective application. Human rights organizations and Western governments have promoted the perception that concerns about human rights emanated from the West and travelled to the postcolonial world; Simpson, however, has argued that “the historiography of [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary McGregor and Vannessa Hearman, “Challenges of Political Rehabilitation in Post-New Order Indonesia: The Case of Gerwani (the Indonesian Women’s Movement),” South East Asia Research, vol. 15, no. 3 (2007), pp. 355–384; and Amurwani Dwi Lestariningsih, Gerwani: Kisah Tapol Wanita di Kamp Plantungan (Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2011). 11 Carmel Budiardjo, Surviving Indonesia’s Gulag: A Western Woman Tells Her Story (London: Cassell, 1996); Sulami, Perempuan, Kebenaran, Penjara (Jakarta: Cipta Karya, 1999); Sudjinah, Terempas Gelombang Pasang: Riwayat Wartawati dalam Penjara Orde Baru (Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2003); Putu Oka Sukanta, Memecah Pembisuan: Tuturan Penyintas Tragedi ‘65–’66, (Jakarta: Lembaga Kreatifitas Kemanusiaan, 2011); Mia Bustam, Dari Kamp ke Kamp: Cerita Seorang Perempuan, (Jakarta: Spasi, VHR Book, and Institut Studi Arus Informasi, 2008); and Sumiyarsi Siwirini, Plantungan: Pembuangan Tapol Perempuan (Yogyakarta: PusDEP, 2011). 12 Bradley Simpson, “‘The First Right’: The Carter Administration, Indonesia and the Transnational Human Rights Politics of the 1970s,” in Akira Iriye, Petra Goodde, and William Hitchcock, eds. The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 179–200; Brad Simpson, “‘Human rights are like Coca-Cola’: Contested Human Rights Discourses in Suharto’s Indonesia, 1968–1980,” in Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 186–203; Katharine McGregor, “Exposing Impunity: Memory and Human Rights Activism in Indonesia and Argentina,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 19, no. 4 (2017), pp. 551–573; and McGregor, “The making of a transnational activist.” 13 See Vannessa Hearman, “Letter-Writing and Transnational Activism on Behalf of Indonesian Political Prisoners: Gatot Lestario and his Legacy,” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, (2016), pp. 1–23; and Brenda Capon, A Scent of Jasmine: A Friendship with Prisoners of Conscience (Wells, UK: Brenda E. L. Capon, 2006). 14 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), === [PDF page 6] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 421 human rights needs far more studies than we now have that take local sources and conceptions of human rights as their starting points.”15 In the case of Indonesia, the human rights movement that was emerging there in the 1970s after the end of the Sukarno era was critical of the army-dominated regime of the New Order under Suharto and involved activists and lawyers who drew on deeply rooted rights traditions of the past.16 Under their first president, Sukarno (1949–1967), Indonesians debated the extent to which human rights could be won primarily through national liberation, sovereignty, and opposition to imperialism, as had been emphasized by the president. Clear-cut distinctions between the rights of a group and the rights of an individual were not as apparent in the emerging Indonesian human rights movement as they were in the Western human rights movement. For the political prisoners in Indonesia, therefore, their understanding of human rights was shaped and influenced by those earlier concepts of rights as bound up with group rights such as decolonization and self-determination. This sense of collectivity permeated their dealings with external intermediaries such as their pen pals and the organizations with which they were involved. The motivations, actions, and ideas of individual human rights advocates are often concealed, as are specific local histories and conceptions of human rights, by the promise of human rights as both a universal and anti-political concept. The role of human agency and interrelationships at the local level can be obscured by a triumphalist narrative of the rise of human rights worldwide. Yet the circulation, application, and vernacularization of human rights ideas rely heavily on individuals. This article thus also responds to the call by Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer for a more systematic study of the role of “transnational activists in deeper historical perspective” given their importance.17 It is a study of the interactions of activists, through an analysis of their correspondence, to gain an insight into both their rationales for action and what Donatella della Porta terms “the affective and cognitive mechanisms” that make links and connections between activists work.18 In particular, this article examines an early instance of transnational collective action, defined by Della Porta and Sidney Tarrow as “coordinated international campaigns on the part of networks of activists against international actors, other states, or international institutions.”19 The intimacy of the letter and similar personal correspondence plays a powerful part in creating close and affectionate bonds, and therein lies its strength in shaping and encouraging the development of political campaigns and networks. The intimacy of the letter parallels that of the landline telephone, a central tool, according to Barbara Keys, in “creating and nurturing the relationships and 15 Simpson, “‘Human rights are like Coca-Cola’”, p. 202. 16 Simpson, “Human Rights Discourses,” p. 201. 17 Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer, “The Transnational Activist: An introduction,” in Berger and Scalmer, The Transnational Activist, p. 5. 18 Donatella della Porta, “Life histories,” in Donatella della Porta, ed., Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 284. 19 Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, “Transnational Processes and Social Activism: An introduction,” in Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, eds., Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Lanham, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 2–3. === [PDF page 7] === 422 Histoire sociale / Social History the sense of community that made activism possible” in the protest movement to stop US intervention in Central America in the 1980s.20 Like the telephone, letters also create a “tangible, tactile sense of community.”21 A number of scholars have analyzed the role of letter writing (including electronic mail in more recent times) in political lobbying and campaigning, including most notably, Margaretta Jolly in her cultural study of letters between feminist activist women.22 However, despite its role as “a staple of all political campaigns,” in Jolly’s view, the art and function of letter writing “is invariably underestimated.”23 Responding to this observation, I examine in this article how personal letters between individual correspondents, letters not intended as campaign tools, motivated overseas correspondents to advocate publicly for those imprisoned in Indonesia. Even if such a correspondence had begun as part of a structured epistolary campaign, such as the Quakers’ Prisoner Befriending Scheme, letter writers often exceeded campaign guidelines that addressed appropriate ways to write prisoners, including suggestions about the frequency and tone of letters. Some writers became highly involved in the lives of the prisoners and their families, and sometimes this included providing financial assistance, but also at times extended to open and sustained public advocacy for the prisoners. A powerful reason for the disregard some correspondents demonstrated for the official guidelines, I argue, lies in the nature of the letter as a gift that binds the addressee and the writer together. Following Marcel Mauss’s theory on the system of the gift, Liz Stanley argues, “There is the gift of the letter itself, but more importantly, there is what it metonymically stands for and symbolizes about the ongoing social bond between writer-giver and addressee-receiver.”24 Letters also create an “ethics of care” with the expectation, in this context, of women receiving care from one another, nurturing one another, and building change from love and friendship.25 While it was tricky to “maintain care across distance,” Jolly’s study of women’s friendships as reflected in letters, for example, has shown that distance was not an obstacle but rather a “raison d’être of alliance.”26 The creation of a sense of obligation, an ethics of care, and the desire for reciprocity is crucial in weaving networks of activism that begin life as personal correspondences, as I go on to discuss below. This article forms part of a broader research project on correspondences established between Indonesian leftist prisoners and pen pals overseas and how 20 Barbara Keys, “The Telephone and Its Uses in 1980s U.S. Activism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 48, no. 4 (Spring 2018), p. 486. 21 Keys, “The Telephone and Its Uses,” p. 509. 22 Margaretta Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). See also Margaretta Jolly, “‘We are the Web’: Letter Writing and the 1980s Women’s Peace Movement,” Prose Studies, vol. 6, no. 1–2, p. 196; and Kate Douglas, “Witnessing on the Web: Asylum Seekers and Letter-Writing Projects on Australian Activist Websites,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (2006), p. 46. 23 Jolly, “‘We are the Web’,” p. 196. 24 Liz Stanley, “The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium,” Life Writing, vol. 8, no. 2 (2011), p. 140. 25 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, pp. 34–36. 26 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 36. === [PDF page 8] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 423 they brought about greater awareness about the plight of such prisoners and the establishment of grassroots campaigns for their release.27 In 2017, as part of this project, I wrote to Patricia Cleveland-Peck to find out more about the “Pudji Fund” that she administered on behalf of former political prisoners. Over the course of our email correspondence, she offered to send me her collection of her correspondence with Pudji—which consists of around 90 letters written by Pudji and copies of replies from Cleveland-Peck—and a number of other documents related to the prisoners and the fund.28 The letters between Pudji and Cleveland- Peck were written over ten years, between 1982 and 1992, covering the period when Pudji was imprisoned in Malang and Kebonsari, East Java, and continuing through her release in 1989 and for several years after.29 In her theorizing of the gifting nature of the epistolarium (the epistolarium, put simply, being “a heuristic for thinking about letters and other epistolary activity”), Stanley emphasizes that the epistolary relationship, by its very nature, extends relationships to third parties.30 Letters discuss people beyond the writer and the addressee, who are then brought into the relationship in increasingly intricate webs. This complexity is evident when one examines the breadth of correspondence in Cleveland-Peck’s archive. Over time, the epistolary relationship between her and Pudji broadened to include her children, “Pramono” and “Daryanti” (pseudonyms), who started to write to Cleveland-Peck in 1982, as they began to regard their parents’ international friends as trustworthy sources of advice and comfort. The epistolarium also contains letters from a priest who smuggled letters and parcels in and out of prison, the British activist Carmel Budiardjo, and a Quaker couple from New Zealand who lived near Jakarta and acted as go-betweens in receiving funds and letters for Pudji and her family. There was also mention of other intermediaries through whom letters, goods, and funds passed in order to evade censorship, surveillance, and often theft by public authorities. Therefore, the [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary epistolary friendship between the two women expanded well beyond themselves; this expansion occurred as a result of the increasing activism for Indonesian political prisoners that pivoted around Pudji and Gatot. In engaging with life writing such as this, the researcher is immediately confronted with difficult ethical dilemmas that are built into such a genre.31 There are competing values between the desire to “tell one’s story and the need to protect others, the obligation to truth and the obligations of trust.”32 Jolly has referred to letters as “neglected archives” of women’s experiences, showing women’s mutual 27 See, for example, Hearman, “Letter-writing and transnational activism.” 28 The Cleveland-Peck Papers (hereafter CPP), in addition to the letters between Pudji and Cleveland-Peck, contain correspondence and documents related to the Fund and more generally to advocacy for Indonesian political prisoners. All references to the CPP refer to this collection of letters and documents that are in the author’s possession at the time of writing. At the conclusion of the research, Cleveland-Peck has requested that the author deposit these papers in a library or archival institution in Australia or Europe. 29 I refer throughout to Patricia Cleveland-Peck by her surname; Pudji Aswati, however, like many Indonesians, did not use a surname and thus I refer to her throughout by her first name, Pudji. 30 Stanley, “The Epistolary Gift,” p. 140. 31 G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 202. 32 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, p. 198. === [PDF page 9] === 424 Histoire sociale / Social History support for one another, but she emphasizes that this form of communication is not “innate to women’s experiences” and that letters are often incomprehensible without “reconstructing the context of the relationship that engineered them.”33 Their “very embeddedness in particular relationships,” she writes, “raises instant dilemmas and questions of trust, duty, power and fairness.”34 In this context, I have carefully anonymized or employed pseudonyms in discussing individuals other than Cleveland-Peck, Pudji, and those whose names are already in the public domain—including Gatot, whose letters have been published.35 Such a practice allows me to still show the web of relationships that surrounded the two women while pursuing “tact, fairness, respect and confidentiality.”36 In balancing ethical considerations and the analysis and disclosure of the letters, I have also drawn on Jolly’s argument that “the ethics that has prompted the public circulation and the writing of letters in feminism … treats personal relationships as potential resources rather than mere liabilities.”37 In letter writing, Jolly contends, women have sought to “arbitrate through love rather than judgment, through speaking about private things rather than through silencing them, through using the distance underlying a letter to come closer.”38 In arbitrating “through love rather than judgment,” the correspondence drew my scholarly interest because of the remoteness of the likelihood that a group of deeply stigmatized and dehumanized people, long-term leftist political prisoners in Indonesia, had cultivated years of long-distance friendships and that such friendships had had such a profound impact on some pen pals. In this article, I discuss how long-term epistolary friendships between Indonesian political prisoners and their pen pals led to the formation of an international humanitarian and human rights activist network from the 1980s onward. By tracing the origins of the Pudji Fund as one manifestation of this network, I analyze how an epistolary friendship—a friendship based on letters— motivated the creation of a small-scale yet tangible assistance scheme for former political detainees. I argue that the dialogic, relational, and reciprocal nature of letter writing, predicated on the idea of the letter as “a gift,” helped foster the development of a transnational activist network concerned with the plight of political prisoners. An ethics of care, as established between the two women through letters written and sent over a period of 10 years, was ultimately responsible for Cleveland-Peck’s decision to set up a fund that benefited former prisoners beyond Indonesia.39 33 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 194. 34 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 194. 35 Peter Brown, ed., The Last Years of Gatot Lestario (London: Doreen Brown, 1986). 36 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 469. 37 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 487. Emphasis added. 38 Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 487. 39 On the ethics of care in women’s letter writing, see Jolly, In Love and Struggle, p. 194. === [PDF page 10] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 425 Pudji’s Journey to Prison Pudji Aswati was born the third of nine children in Semarang, Central Java, in 1929.40 Her mother was widowed in April 1945 when her husband died while he was detained by Japanese occupying forces.41 Puji completed high school despite her family’s poverty and the disruptions of the Indonesian war for independence (1945–1949). After completing high school, Pudji went on to study education at college and worked part time at the prestigious Taman Siswa school as an English teacher. Although it was explicitly nonpolitical, the Taman Siswa network was known as an institution in Java that fostered nationalist sentiment.42 In 1952, Pudji married Gatot Lestario, a teacher and the headmaster of a Taman Siswa school in Kediri, a small town in the adjacent province of East Java where the couple settled after their wedding. The couple were deeply involved in leftist politics. In 1954, they moved to the port city of Surabaya, the capital of the province and an urban heartland of the PKI, a major communist political organization in Indonesia during Sukarno’s rule.43 The PKI wielded political leadership over sectoral mass organizations, such as Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia [Indonesian Women’s Movement]), Indonesia’s largest women’s organization, as well as trade unions, youth, peasant, and cultural groups. Gatot was a member of the PKI’s provincial committee, and Pudji was a militant in Gerwani. Assigned to the education and information department, she wrote articles about women’s movements and organizations in other countries for Gerwani’s newsletter. Professionally, from 1955 onward, Pudji taught English at a Chinese school in Surabaya. The PKI’s fortunes shifted dramatically when on September 30, 1965, a group calling itself the Thirtieth September Movement (Gerakan 30 September, G30S), consisting mainly of military officers and soldiers supportive of Sukarno, kidnapped and killed six high-ranking army officers and a lieutenant.44 The movement declared that their actions had aimed to protect Sukarno from an army coup and that the deaths had been unintended. The army blamed the PKI, its political rival, for the actions of the Thirtieth September Movement and commenced anticommunist operations against the party. Half a million people were killed between 1965 and 1966 in these operations, which also involved civilians opposed to the PKI, such as members of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization. The PKI and leftist mass organizations, including Gerwani, were officially banned from March 1966. 40 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, September 2, 1982 and Semdam VIII Brawidjaja, Operasi Trisula Kodam VIII Brawidjaja (Surabaya: Jajasan Taman Tjandrawilwatikta, 1969), p. 305. 41 CPP, Pudji, life history notes, undated. 42 In Indonesian, Taman Siswa is literally “garden of learners.” See Ruth T. McVey, “Taman Siswa and the Indonesian National Awakening,” Indonesia, no. 4 (October 1967), pp. 128–149. 43 Founded in 1912, the PKI was the largest non-ruling communist party in the world by 1965, claiming a membership of some three million people in a country of about 100 million. See Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959–65 (Singapore: Equinox), p. 366. 44 See John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) for an account of the events surrounding the Thirtieth September Movement. === [PDF page 11] === 426 Histoire sociale / Social History From mid-October 1965, Pudji and her family led a life on the run from the anticommunist violence. First, they went into hiding in Surabaya for approximately two years. When it became more difficult to avoid arrest, the couple’s two children, “Pramono” and “Daryanti,” were sent to live with Pudji’s mother in Central Java. Gatot departed Surabaya for the rural areas of southern East Java, where the PKI’s provincial committee, in an attempt to salvage what was left of the party and its cadres, was establishing refuges for party members fleeing the persecution.45 Dozens of leftist fugitives, including Pudji and her children, made their way south to the bases from all over Java.46 The rural bases provided them with places to hide from anti-communist operations, but the leaders’ long-term aspiration was for these to become launching pads for resisting the army. Accordingly, cadres then attempted to reorganize the party in the surrounding towns and to embark on military training to challenge the army’s rise to power. However, these efforts were crushed by the army when from May to September 1968 it conducted the Trisula Operation, a counterinsurgency operation to suppress the PKI bases. Over a period of about four months, some 2,000 were killed and thousands more displaced in the area.47 Pudji was arrested on June 22, 1968.48 After her arrest, the army transported her and several other women activists to Malang, a town north of Blitar. Ten years after her arrest, she was tried in court and convicted of subversion for setting up a base in South Blitar. In 1978, a year during which most leftist prisoners detained since 1965 were released, Pudji was sentenced to 15 years in prison, without regard for the time that she had already spent in detention.49 Her husband, Gatot, made it out of the South Blitar area and travelled to Jakarta, over 1,000 kilometres away from the base, surviving on the run until 1969.50 Gatot was convicted for subversion and sentenced to death in 1976.51 While on death row, he was imprisoned on the island of Madura, off the northern [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary coast of Java. He and Pudji kept in touch with one another through letters. Their children visited from Jakarta whenever possible, but with both working and studying part time to gain tertiary qualifications, they were unable to visit their parents frequently. Moreover, their situation was further complicated by the stigma of being associated with leftist political prisoners and both had difficulties gaining stable employment and finding marriage partners, requiring them to be discreet about their family connections. 45 On the PKI’s South Blitar base, see Vannessa Hearman, Unmarked Graves: Survival and Death in the Anti- Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press in association with the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2018), pp. 138–170. 46 CPP, Pudji, life history notes, undated. 47 “Reds Renew Campaign in Indonesia,” New York Times, August 11, 1968. 48 Semdam VIII Brawidjaja, Operasi Trisula, p. 231. 49 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, February 9, 1982. 50 Semdam VIII Brawidjaja, Operasi Trisula, p. 298; and CPP, Gatot Lestario, “Part II Memoires.” 51 Amnesty International, ASA 21/11/84, “Two Former Communist Leaders under Threat,” Internal communication of the Asia Research Department of Amnesty International, November 1984, https://www. indonesia1965.org/wordpress/index.php/1984/11/01/two-former-communist-leaders-under-threat-ofexecution-1984/asa-21-11-84/ === [PDF page 12] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 427 Weaving an Epistolary Friendship: The Letters The appearance and characteristics of the letters exchanged between Pudji and Cleveland-Peck attest to the vast differences between them. On the one hand, Pudji wrote her letters in English and by hand in a cursive script, usually on very thin notepaper so that the prison administration did not incur high postage charges on her behalf. In the margins, her letters bore the initials of the prison censor, the words “examined by the security and order [kamtib] section,” and the date the letter was checked. On the other hand, Cleveland-Peck typed her letters; the carbon copies, on plain white paper, are stored in her files. From the mid-1980s, she began using customized letterhead that included an artist’s drawing of her home and the animals on the hobby farm she ran with her husband in Sussex. Following Pudji’s release, Cleveland-Peck stopped storing copies of her letters, and therefore, other than what could be gleaned from Pudji’s letters, there is no record of Cleveland- Peck’s side of the correspondence from January 1989 onwards. The earliest letter from Pudji in Cleveland-Peck’s papers was dated February 9, 1982. Evidently, at this time, they had only recently begun writing to one another. Pudji expressed her happiness at having a pen friend who happened to be an author.52 Although Cleveland-Peck had briefly worked as a lawyer, she is known predominantly as an author of children’s books and travel articles. In addition, she and her husband, both of whom were active Quakers, made a living operating a small farm, on which they also grew their own food, and running a boarding service for pets. Cleveland-Peck recalled how she began writing to Pudji: “It really started when I heard a Quaker talk by [Quaker leader] George Gorman. He was talking about ways of helping people. At the time I had three small children and lots of animals to look after and was beginning to write. One thing I could do was to write letters and there was already a Quaker initiative, which found pen friends for prisoners. From this I obtained the name of Pudji and began to write to her and learn her story.”53 Therefore, her correspondence with Pudji began as part of an “epistolary campaign” organized by the Quakers to alleviate the social marginalization of political prisoners.54 As an educated woman, a mother of small children who also worked from home, Cleveland-Peck saw letter writing as a meaningful activity that could be fitted into her daily routine. Letters between the two women were similar in structure. Each letter was usually dated with the day, month, and year on which it was written. Each woman tracked the arrival of their letters, partly to monitor the extent to which prisoners received mail sent from abroad. The need for letters to pass through the prison censor led to lengthy delays, despite the women writing more than once a month to one another. At the beginning of each letter, the women effusively thanked one another for a previous letter (date mentioned) to which they were replying, as well as perhaps parcels of books or knitting wool that Cleveland-Peck had sent. This mutual gratitude, expressed in each letter, underscored Stanley’s conception of the epistolarium as a system of the gift. For example, on September 14, 1982, 52 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, September 2, 1982. 53 Cleveland-Peck to author, April 23, 2018. 54 Jolly, ““We are the Web”,” p. 217, n. 48. === [PDF page 13] === 428 Histoire sociale / Social History Cleveland-Peck wrote, “I am very happy with our correspondence and so delighted that I have you, such a brave and intelligent woman as my pen-friend.”55 In each of their letters, the women expressed concern and empathy for one another and asked questions about each other’s family members, children in particular. They shared news about family members, as well as recent travels in Cleveland-Peck’s case. In 1984, Pudji began writing through what she termed an NCA (a non-censored address), which enabled her to express herself more freely. Her NCA letters took circuitous routes, with friendly contacts smuggling them out of the Malang prison and mailing them from different cities. When she began using NCAs, instead of writing on very thin, lined paper, she wrote on whatever came to hand, such as carefully extracted middle pages of cheap exercise books. These books, which were popular with school students for the colourful images of flowers, celebrities, cartoon characters, or motor cars that decorated the margins of each page, were easily obtained in bookshops and grocery stores in 1980s Malang. In their early correspondence, the women discussed shared interests in literature, writing, and needlecrafts like knitting as relatively safe and neutral topics. They described to one another the landscape and place in which they lived. Over time, as they wrote about their respective families, inevitably the letters turned to Pudji’s imprisonment, her separation from her family, and how these circumstances came about. Despite the emphasis on anti-politics in letter writing campaigns sponsored by human rights and faith-based organizations, animated as they were by humanitarian concerns rather than politics, it was inevitable that the letters touched on politics when their authors discussed Pudji’s incarceration. Pudji referred to the 1965–1966 anti-communist violence as “the national turbulence.”56 At the time she was writing, it was still likely unclear, even to activists of the Left like Pudji, what precisely had occurred in 1965 in Jakarta. In contrast to her unease in writing about the 1965 events, Pudji wrote lucidly about the violence that she and her five fellow Gerwani inmates had suffered at the hands of the army and its civilian militias since the outbreak of Indonesia’s anti-communist violence.57 In an account of what occurred after her arrest, Pudji wrote, “Most of us came from Surabaya with husbands and children, but when we were going to Malang (to prison) we were all alone, no member of the family accompanied us.”58 All the women had lost husbands and some of their children, who had disappeared or been killed in the 1968 Trisula Operation. They had left their children with South Blitar villagers or with relatives when they went on the run to evade the military operation. Some were never reunited with their children. From the tentative beginnings of their correspondence, discussing, for instance, a shared interest in literature and needlework, Pudji and Cleveland-Peck began to cultivate a greater intimacy, based in part on a shared empathy as wives and mothers, in their letters over time. In response to Pudji’s account of her circumstances, Cleveland-Peck wrote, “I do feel lucky in that, for although many 55 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, September 14, 1982. Emphasis added. 56 CPP, Pudji, life history notes, undated; and CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, September 2, 1982. 57 CPP, Pudji, “The Memories of Prison Life,” undated. 58 CPP, Pudji, “The Memories of Prison Life,” undated. === [PDF page 14] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 429 miles separate us geographically, in spirit, in love of literature and in the fact that we are wives and mothers, we are close to each other. Only you have had many trials and bitter things to bear in your life whereas so far, I have had a happy life with my family around me, so of course, I must help you in every way I can.”59 Cleveland-Peck’s expressions of empathy for Pudji’s disclosure of experiences of violence and hardship fostered a deepening affection between the two. Their letters consistently signed off with “much love” or “with love” and promises to write again. The two women also shared a commitment to religious worship. Their letters consistently ended with references to God and their Christian faith. For Cleveland- Peck, as a Quaker, religious belief and humanitarian action seemed to be closely linked. She attended Quaker Meetings in a nearby town in Sussex.60 Cleveland- Peck explained to Pudji the nature of Quaker worship: [O]ur own special way of worship … as you know is one of hour of silence together in which anyone can speak if moved by the Spirit of God. This is because we feel there is something of God in every man and by waiting quietly together, God may speak through any person. For this reason we have no priests, no sacraments for we believe all are ministers and all life sacramental. Very different I know from the Mass, for I was brought up a Catholic.… This is very simple, very bare…61 Like many other detainees, Pudji converted to Catholicism and was baptized in prison. The New Order required all citizens to practise a religion. Those detained for their connections to the PKI came under particular scrutiny, as the regime suggested that atheists were communists and vice versa. As both a demonstration of their rehabilitation and a source of spiritual comfort, and despite some initial misgivings, detainees agreed to receive religious guidance in prisons and detention centres from Muslim or Christian clergy or laypersons who visited [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary detainees regularly. Connections with religious clerics also facilitated access to support from congregations in the form of such “luxuries” as soap, shampoo, and toothpaste, all of which made prison life more bearable.62 The questions of work and career occupied much space in their letters, as economic independence was an important issue for both women. Cleveland- Peck told Pudji about the progress of her book and film projects and her travels overseas, such as to Gambia in 1982, in pursuit of stories.63 In return, Pudji told her pen pal of her past career as a teacher and her worries about how she would earn a living once she was released. In the spirit of trying to find solutions for her friend, Cleveland-Peck supported Pudji’s desire to improve her English, which she could use for teaching and translation work, by sending textbooks and novels. 59 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, September 14, 1982. 60 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, October 3, 1983. 61 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, October 3, 1983. 62 See Vannessa Hearman, “The 1965–66 Violence, Religious Conversions and the Changing Relationship between the Left and Indonesia’s Churches,” in Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin, and Annie Pohlman, eds., The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) p. 188. 63 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, December 4, 1982. === [PDF page 15] === 430 Histoire sociale / Social History The limits of what was achievable through international connections as well as the power imbalance between the two women were often exposed, however, as a result of the New Order regime’s imposition of restrictions on the eks tapol (an acronym for former political prisoners). Once released, eks tapol were barred from employment as writers, journalists, and public servants, which included teachers in state schools. As a writer and one who enjoyed reading her friend’s letters, Cleveland-Peck had earlier encouraged Pudji to write both children’s stories for publication and an autobiography to inspire others: “Yes, my dear Pudji, please write children’s stories. I know that you can do it because you told me some Indonesian legends. Also you have been a teacher so you know how to tell stories and keep the interest of the children.... For the moment try to write every day.”64 But with the growing realization that she could not work as a writer owing to her eks tapol status, Pudji quietly set aside her writing efforts and stopped mentioning her hopes of being able to make a living from writing. Another source of friction in the women’s correspondence appeared as a result of the prison authorities’ regulation of inmates’ daily lives. Prisoners were required to participate in literacy campaigns, helping teach other prisoners to read and write. To supplement their meager rations, they also made handicrafts that they could barter with prison guards for such items as sugar. Occupied with these prison tasks, Pudji gently resisted the suggestion from Cleveland-Peck that she keep a diary: “Dear Patricia, you can do what you like,” she writes, “[but when] the evening falls, we feel already tired with our daily work.”65 The collective Figure 1: Pudji Aswati in blue prison uniform (left) showing a guard her embroidery, Malang Women’s Prison, 1982. Source: Patricia Cleveland-Peck. 64 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, October 3, 1983. 65 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, November 6, 1983. === [PDF page 16] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 431 Figure 2: Pudji Aswati (right) wearing a blue flowered kebaya blouse in the Malang Women’s Prison garden. Source: Patricia Cleveland-Peck. space the women shared through the letters, therefore, was nonetheless limited by the rules of the prison environment and the discriminatory practices of the regime against the eks tapol. These factors further reinforced the differences in power held by each woman and the extent to which each could determine the course of her life. Campaigning and Fundraising for Political Prisoners Cleveland-Peck’s decision to deepen her commitment to supporting Pudji and her fellow inmates was a response to restrictions placed on the earning capacity of Indonesia’s former political prisoners and their lack of financial means after years in prison. Once pursuing writing was no longer an option, in considering how Pudji and her comrades could become financially independent, Cleveland-Peck began entertaining the idea of setting up a fund to channel support from the dozens of Quakers and AI activists in North America, western Europe, and Britain who wrote to the women regularly through befriending schemes. Pudji explained that she had no capital whatsoever to make a fresh start: “I don’t possess anything, but my two children and my husband.”66 She and Cleveland-Peck discussed teaching English to private students and establishing a bookshop to earn a living once she was released, while Pudji’s fellow inmates explored the idea of setting up a handicraft cooperative that could be supported by the fund. The epistolary friendship established between Indonesian political prisoners and their pen pal sympathizers also created new relationships among fellow sympathizers. Prisoners often connected pen pals with one another by asking them 66 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, September 29, 1982. === [PDF page 17] === 432 Histoire sociale / Social History to take turns copying and sending one letter to others, thus saving them the cost of postage stamps from prison. These mutual friendships created a network of pen pals for Pudji and Gatot in such countries as Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands. As the years of imprisonment wore on, the group of pen pals that was coalescing around Pudji and Gatot escalated their activism to secure the couple’s release. As the Quaker Peace and Service booklet Letters from Prison noted, “the degree of involvement [by letter writers] varies a great deal, some Friends far exceeding our basic requirement of the sending of an occasional letter to a prisoner.”67 In discussing her decision to become involved in such campaigns, the path to activism for Cleveland-Peck was, it seemed, strongly underpinned by her religious beliefs and humanitarian spirit. Her concerns were less to do with politics and more orientated toward peace and human rights issues. She told Pudji, “I am not involved in politics myself; other of course than in the human rights movement and the peace movement, both of which I support with all my heart.”68 Gatot and Pudji’s pen pals initiated their own advocacy campaign for the couple, loosely in conjunction with the general campaigns for the release of Indonesia’s political prisoners conducted by organizations such as TAPOL and AI. A Quaker couple, Doreen and Peter Brown, in London initiated a petition for Gatot and Pudji to be released and allowed to live in exile outside of Indonesia. They also wrote letters to pressure the Indonesian government, specifically President Suharto and the Minister for Justice, Ismail Saleh, to release the couple. Doreen, in turn, wrote group letters to the pen pals to report on these advocacy efforts and to encourage them to take certain actions, such as to pressure Suharto to accept Gatot’s clemency plea and for the government to reduce the length of Pudji’s sentence. In so doing, they mobilized, as Sidney Tarrow has written in defining transnational activists, “domestic and international resources and opportunities [136.159.235.223] Project MUSE (2026-10-14 00:53 GMT) University of Calgary to advance claims on behalf of external actors, against external opponents, [and] in favour of goals they hold in common with transnational allies.”69 The decision by a number of pen pals to extend their efforts for the couple beyond writing the occasional letter is, I argue, also bound up with the nature of the letter as a gift that then draws them into a relationship of dialogue and mutual reciprocity and obligation. News of the execution of Pudji’s husband, Gatot, and two other prisoners on death row, Joko Untung and Rustomo, by firing squad in Pamekasan in early July 1985 hastened the creation of a political prisoner support fund. News of the executions was slow to come out. On August 21, Cleveland-Peck penned a letter to Pudji: Only yesterday did I hear the terrible news about Gatot. I still cannot believe it, it is too stunning a blow. I write to you now to tell you that I think of you and weep 67 “Friends” refers to members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Birtles, Letters from Prison, 68 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, September 14, 1982. Emphasis in original. 69 Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 43. === [PDF page 18] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 433 with you and that my whole family sends you all our loving thoughts at this sad, sad time.… I wish so much that I could be near to offer you help at this time, but we are so far away. I cannot say that I know or imagine how you feel but that would be an idle claim for my life has not brought me the experiences that you have had to live with.70 No reply came for some four months until, in December, Pudji wrote, “Your letter is a great meaning for me because you regard us as human beings with feelings and thoughts. You could imagine how great my loss was; it seems now that I stand alone to face this challenge. There are no consolations anymore which encourage me not to lose my hope. I have lost not only a husband, but also a teacher. But I must be courageous how hard and bitter it must be.”71 In the above exchange, Pudji refers to giving and losing and the limitations imposed by distance and a lack of physical proximity. Possibly spurred by her feeling of helplessness at not being able to give something significant and tangible to Pudji, Cleveland- Peck redoubled her efforts to set up the fund she had planned. Having fostered by then an epistolary friendship over the preceding three years, Cleveland-Peck was perhaps acutely aware that the crisis Pudji was experiencing required her to act. As Celia Hughes has argued, “reciprocity between … writers rests on the unspoken expectation that each one will enact particular selves within the epistolary relationship.”72 Cleveland-Peck, in her far more powerful and privileged position as a transnational activist, took advantage of her network of contacts in the Quakers and beyond and began raising funds. The Pudji Fund started quietly. In October 1985, the Browns had attempted to visit Pudji in prison in Malang without obtaining prior permission, and the authorities had barred them from entering and subsequently prohibited letters and parcels from abroad.73 In view of these events, Cleveland-Peck did not wish to draw too much attention to the fund and the implications such attention could have for Pudji. Nonetheless, in July 1986, she informed Pudji that she had begun “receiving cheques from different Friends for the ‘Pudji Fund.’”74 The first donors were the recipients of handmade books compiled and self-published by the Browns, which contained extracts of Gatot’s letters. In their grief and desire to do something meaningful for Gatot’s bereaved family, Peter Brown had located and typed up 90 of Gatot’s letters, obtained from their own collection and those of other pen pals.75 He then compiled extracts from the letters into a book handwritten in calligraphic script. Approximately 100 copies were made and distributed to a tight circle of Gatot’s pen pals and activists such as those in TAPOL. An information slip about the Pudji Fund was included with each book, which stated the following: 70 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, August 21, 1985. Emphasis added. 71 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, December 19, 1985. Emphasis added. 72 Celia Hughes, “Left Activism, Succour and Selfhood: The Epistolary Friendship of Two Revolutionary Mothers in 1970s Britain, Women’s History Review, vol. 23, no. 6, p. 878. 73 CPP, Doreen Brown to Patricia Cleveland-Peck, November 17, 1985. 74 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, July 8, 1986. “Friends” refer to members of the Quakers. 75 CPP, Doreen Brown, circular letter to pen friends, February 1986. === [PDF page 19] === 434 Histoire sociale / Social History The story of Gatot Lesario [sic] and his wife Pudji Aswati has interested and moved many people. For Pudji, who lost her husband after seventeen years imprisonment, the future will be hard. Hoping that some of the vast amount of goodwill shown by Friends and others can be channeled in a practical way, the Pudji Fund has been launched and contributions, large or small will be received with gratitude. Although the fund is named after Pudji Aswati and we hope she will be the first recipient, the aim is somewhat wider: to assist in the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners of conscience on their release from prison. In this way, the name of Pudji Aswati will go on to give strength and support to others in a similar predicament.76 The information slip encouraged potential donors to send their donations to Cleveland-Peck. The first beneficiary of the fund bearing her name was not Pudji herself, but her former fellow inmate, “Marsinah” (pseudonym).77 Marsinah had been elected a local member of parliament for the PKI in East Java in 1955 and was a member of the party’s provincial leadership body before the violent events of 1965. In November 1986, Pudji wrote to Cleveland-Peck to ask if Marsinah could be the first recipient of the fund, after hearing about “how, after returning home, she has nothing, nothing.”78 Pudji related in her letter that Marsinah’s husband, a former member of a trade union for naval workers, had become a “paper boy,” delivering newspapers after his release from prison, but was then unable to continue due to ill health. With eks tapol being restricted in their choice of occupations, they would likely have to eke out a living in the informal sector. Marsinah needed some capital to start a small business making and selling cakes to support herself and her husband. The Pudji Fund operated under the umbrella of the Quakers’ charitable status in Britain, which provided the fund with a measure of institutional support and stability. By 1987, it was renamed the Rehabilitation of Former Prisoners of Conscience (RFPC) Fund.79 The use of the term “prisoner of conscience” showed the influence wielded by AI on those actively campaigning for Indonesian political prisoners and on the Quakers as an organization that agreed to be formally associated with the fund. Cleveland-Peck promoted the fund in the pages of the Quaker journal The Friend and reported on its progress in several articles.80 She administered the fund with other pen friends, with most donations coming from Quakers in response to an annual newsletter she published about the fund.81 76 Patricia Cleveland-Peck, “The Pudji Fund,” information slip found in Brown, The Last Years of Gatot Lestario (London: Doreen Brown, 1986). 77 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, November 8, 1986. 78 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, November 8, 1986. 79 CPP, Cleveland-Peck to Pudji, May 11, 1987. 80 Cleveland-Peck to author, April 23, 2018. See, for example, Patricia Cleveland-Peck, “One Man’s Story,” The Friend, September 19, 2013, https://thefriend.org/article/one-mans-story. 81 CPP, Patricia Cleveland-Peck to Roderick Ogley, October 2, 1989. In October 1989, the fund contained £2,021 (approximately equivalent to £5061 in 2020 according to the website http://www.in2013dollars. com/). === [PDF page 20] === Friendships between Political Prisoners and their Pen Pals 435 The fund assisted Pudji and her former fellow inmates to generate income and meet their daily needs. After they were released, the women shared a home on the outskirts of Malang and made handicrafts that were then sold in Jakarta at a shop run by the New Life Foundation (Yayasan Hidup Baru), a prison fellowship group.82 After lengthy prison sentences and experiencing the effects of growing older, the women also needed assistance with medical bills when they suffered from such health problems as rheumatism and cataracts. Pudji had become gravely ill with cancer by the time of her release in 1989 and the fund that initially bore her name paid for her surgeries and chemotherapy. The operation of the fund, as well as the correspondence between Cleveland- Peck and Pudji, was always constrained by the restrictions placed by the Indonesian government on eks tapol and their families. Overshadowing their friendship was the monitoring and surveillance of eks tapol by government representatives and the army. To avoid attracting unwanted attention, letters, parcels, and remittances from abroad were routed via friendly contacts in Jakarta, including the New Zealand couple mentioned earlier and a staff member of the Dutch Embassy. These were then passed on to Pudji’s children, who brought the items to their mother and her friends. In November 1989, Cleveland-Peck and her husband travelled to Indonesia to meet Pudji and her former fellow inmates after receiving a grant from Quaker Peace and Service, a department of the Quakers dealing with peace and social justice issues.83 Because of concerns that, like the Browns on their earlier visit to Malang, they would be harassed by security forces or prohibited from Figure 3: Patricia Cleveland-Peck (right) with Pudji Aswati sitting beside her at home with some friends. Malang, November 1989. Source: Photo by Dennis Cleveland-Peck. 82 CPP, Pudji to Cleveland-Peck, undated. 83 Patricia Cleveland-Peck, “Journey to Malang,” The Friend, May 4, 1990; and CPP, Patricia Cleveland- Peck, “Report on Journey to Indonesia, November 1989,” typescript. === [PDF page 21] === 436 Histoire sociale / Social History meeting the women, the couple travelled to Malang accompanied by a pastor from the New Life Foundation. It was the first and last time that Cleveland-Peck met Pudji in person, as she died from cancer in May 1992. Cleveland-Peck, who is in her early eighties at the time of writing, formally closed the fund in 2018. In reflecting on its origins, she wrote, “The fund was completely motivated by Pudji and my initial correspondence. It was good to explain to other recipients that I was doing it in her memory. The Indonesian prisoners and what they had been through was crucial to this.”84 Over a 32-year span, Cleveland-Peck administered the fund, raising and sending money to former political prisoners in Chile, Mexico, South Africa, the Philippines, and other countries, all of whom wrote to her assiduously about their lives for several years. The fund financed their small-scale efforts to generate income, from running a poultry farm to purchasing tools and typewriters. Conclusion This article has contributed to the historicization and localization of global human rights activism by examining the actions of activists in several countries and the relationships they constructed with one another. Social relationships and mutually shared experiences of activism were built together through the medium of letter writing and gave rise to advocacy and fundraising for former political prisoners. Letter writing played a powerful role in constructing and cementing personal relationships and creating bonds that fostered transnational activism. The emotional connection and trust built between Pudji and Cleveland- Peck over several years, the ethics of care that each had come to rely on in their relationship, were instrumental in fostering transnational activism and the legacy it left behind. For the prisoners, the discriminatory policies of Indonesia’s New Order regime and the stigma of being an eks tapol entrenched the need for a high degree of reliance on the kindness of others, including those overseas, in relationships built over networks of correspondence. The relationships between correspondents based in Western countries and several Indonesian political prisoners motivated those Western correspondents to undertake a range of initiatives on behalf of political prisoners, from petitions and demonstrations to the establishment of a fundraising scheme. The Pudji Fund survived for three decades thanks to some institutional backing but more importantly thanks to a strong network of people connected by their life experiences of supporting a group of Indonesian prisoners materially, emotionally, and politically. Although the two women’s relationship was vulnerable to the vagaries of government policies and the power differences inherent in their relationship, the Pudji Fund also helped to offset the social stigma and powerlessness experienced by eks tapol in starting a new life. 84 Cleveland-Peck to author, April 23, 2018.