Welcoming the commemoration of International Human Rights Day, which falls every December 10, the Aceh Commission for Disappeared Persons and Violence (KontraS) will hold some activities on Sunday (9/12/2018).

The event will start at 07.00 WIB in the morning. KontraS and alums of the Human Rights and Transitional Justice school held a peaceful demonstration in the form of an exhibition of photos documenting the Aceh conflict. The exhibition was held at the Car Free Day arena, Jl T Moh Daud Beureueh, Kuta Alam. The distribution of flowers and snippets of information about past violent events in Aceh also accompanied the event.

At 14.30 in the afternoon, the event continued with a retracing to several historical conflict locations around Banda Aceh. Participants who have gathered at the KontraS Aceh Office will hold a walk-through with the following route:

The first point that the participants visited was
The shooting location of the Acehnese leader, HT Djohan, near the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, Banda Aceh (10 May 2001). After that, the traces continued to the location of the former Keudah prison in the Baiturrahman sub-district, Banda Aceh. The site is known to be the place where several political figures from the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) have been detained since the decade of the 70s.

From Keudah, the participants went to the location of the shooting incident against the Unsyiah Chancellor, Prof. Dayan Dawood (7 September 2002), in the Lampriet area. The last point of traceability, participants will visit the location of the shooting incident against the Chancellor of IAIN Ar-Raniry, the late Prof. Safwan Idris (16 September 2000), in Darussalam.

In the evening, at 20.30 WIB, the activity to commemorate Human Rights Day was followed by watching and discussing the film 'Jalan Sword' produced by WatchDoc and Kompas TV. This documentary film by Dhandy Dwi Laksono tells the history of the armed conflict in Aceh before the peace in 2005. This activity will be held at the Aceh KontraS Secretariat Office.

The head of the event committee, Aprizal Rachmad said, this activity was a follow-up to the Transitional Human Rights and Justice School organized by KontraS Aceh on 26-29 November.

"The committee is an Alumni of the School of Human Rights and Transitional Justice and is directly facilitated by KontraS Aceh," he said.

This activity aims to recall the history of the Aceh conflict in the past. The effort to remember, said Aprizal, is not to reveal the wounds of the victims. However, it is a lesson for the community so that the grief of the conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the past will not be repeated.

“Preserving memories of the past is part of efforts to organize the future of Aceh, which has entered a period of peace since the Helsinki MoU agreement on August 15, 2005. The community, especially the youth, must take the incident of conflict as a reminder so that this does not happen again in the future,” he said.