Omar Dani
The Highflier Who Landed in Prison
HE came from an upper middle-class family, part of the government bureaucracy in Solo. Towards the end of the 1950s he joined the air force and began a career that later went badly wrong. It was the G30S affair that destroyed Air Commodore Omar Dani’s career. He was accused of being involved in the Indonesian Communist Party rebellion and thereafter was to spend a third of his life as a political prisoner. Tempo recently interviewed Omar who is now 85 years old after he survived a critical bout of Hepatitis C. He recounted to Tempo the events of the September 30 affair and his relationship with Suharto.
July 7, 2009
THIS happened more than 40 years ago but every word uttered by the judge of the Extraordinary Military Tribunal (Mahmilub) still rings clearly in his mind. It was on a Saturday, December 24, 1966, at the Mahmilub office (now the offices of the state planning agency or Bappenas) in Jakarta that the sentence was read out. The judge said that Omar had been proven guilty of rebellion and conspiring with evil intent to carry out treason against the Go
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