Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo says he regrets nation’s bloody previous as victims demand justice

President Joko Widodo expressed deep regret on Wednesday over gross human rights violations during Indonesia’s tumultuous post-colonial past, going back to the mass killing of communists and suspected sympathizers in the mid-1960s.

At least half a million people died, according to some historians and activists, in violence that began in late 1965 when the military launched a purge of communists who they said were planning a coup.

A million or more people were jailed, suspected of being communists, during the crackdown, and in 1967 Gen. Suharto ousted President Sukarno, Indonesia’s independence leader, and went on to rule the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country for three decades.

Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, recently received the report from a team he had commissioned last year to investigate Indonesia’s bloody history, having promised to take up the issue when he first came to power in 2014.

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