Talking Indonesia

Kate McGregor - Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence During its Occupation of East Asian and Southeast Asian countries in World War II, including the Netherlands Indies, the Japanese military installed a system of enforced prostitution, known euphemistically as the ‘comfort women’ system. Today these crimes are relatively well-known and condemned. In 1993 the Japanese state issued an apology known as the Kōno statement. In the 1980s and 1990s, a transnational activist movement which included women from Korea, Japan, the Philippines and elsewhere, began to speak out and make demands for redress. In Indonesia, however, activism on the so-called ‘comfort women’ issue was slower to emerge, faced with challenges from both inside and outside the country. In her new book 'Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia', Kate McGregor takes a close look at the system itself and seeks to understand it in the context of Indonesia’s own colonial and post-colonial history. What were the social c