AFTER 13 years in the Indonesia of President Sukarno "everything was rollicking along" in the comfortable, congenial world of the Budiardjos. It was 1965. Carmel Budiardjo was 40.
She had married Bud, an Indonesian communist, of all things in Prague. They had a teenage daughter, Tari, and a 10 year old son, Anto. Carmel, a London School of Economics graduate, was the daughter of "very Jewish parents", the Brickmans, who had emigrated to London from Poland before the first World War.
Having rung yet more radical changes in life, Carmel was now an economics analyst at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jakarta and a newspaper columnist on economics. She had even been able to study for a masters in Jakarta. "We could employ servants so it was possible to do all these things together."
Her move to Prague, where in 1945 she became part of the Eastern Bloc's post War International Union of Students, had begun as a mere visit. She had gone to the IUS's founding conference as a British delegate and stayed.
It was perhaps more a return to Central Europe than it seemed and part of a mission full of certainty of vision about a better post Nazi Europe.
She married Bud and Tari was born in the Czechoslovak capital. They moved to Bud's country in 1952 - as the post independence political repression that had made him an exile gave way to an environment of "quite healthy political activity".
In it the communist party, or PKI, was soon well on its way to becoming the majority force. President Sukarno juggled the PKI and the growing economic and political power of Abri the army, which was buying companies, diversifying its role now that fighting off the Dutch colonialists was part of history.
But the new Indonesian nation born in 1949, was suddenly to come to grief in 1965 - and with it the Budiardjo's life style. "Everything was turned upside down suddenly." After the murder of six army generals Bud was arrested along with thousands of communists or "communist suspects" - often named by frightened informers. Indonesia's Reign of Terror had begun.
Carmel lost her job at the ministry and took to giving private lessons in English at home and translating, to keep the family going. She was at something of a premium as an English teacher since she was "English English".
She had learned to keep away from other clandestine PKI colleagues, and they from her fashionable house, just around the corner from the home of Major General Suharto. She knew the house was coveted by senior officers. Rumours of massacres of alleged - PKI sympathisers in the countryside filtered through.
But one day in 1968, after the best part of a million people had been killed and power had been gradually wrested from Sukarno by General Suharto, the army came to arrest her. With as much dignity as she could muster, she let out two young women who had come for a lesson with the words: "Give me a ring before coming for your next lesson." She spent the next three years in prison.
BUD, himself freed not long before, came into the room where Carmel received the two army men and was taken along, too. On and off he spent 12 years in jail. Like thousands of others, neither of their incarcerations were graced by a trial, she says.
It took the World Council of Churches nine months to get the children to England, where interestingly Tari took up law. At 15 she had herself been arrested. Amnesty International took up the question of her mother's British citizenship, which Carmel had renounced in the full flush of love and solidarity with her new left wing life as an Indonesian. London eventually became persuaded that once a Briton always a Briton and that Tari's mother's citizenship renunciation was invalid.
When the Indonesians heard of this, they became uncomfortable at the idea that they had a British subject in one of their jails. The seizure of power by General Suharto had been done after all with the blessing of the West and there is documentation of an active CIA role. But her release had precious little to do, says Carmel, with pressure from London, which "did the minimum
The offer the regime now came to her with posed a dilemma. She could be freed on condition that she did not speak in public about politics and that she leave the country. As she hesitated to "use a privilege" like this she recalled that other women tapols (political prisoners) had enjoined her to eschew such qualms. "Get out of here as fast as you can, and start working for our release," they had said. Carmel says now she never felt cut out to be a campaigner but did so out of a sense of obligation.
But in London she learned of many issues in the vast South East Asian archipelago that she had not been aware of. She began publishing a newsletter, Tapol, and in 1973 set up the Indonesian Human Rights Association with another former tapol, Liem Soei Liong.
She discovered that while she had been in prison West Papua, one of the richest minerals territories in the world, had been "integrated" into Indonesia by a completely fraudulent "act of free choice". She and Liem wrote a book West Papua, the Obliteration of a People. (Not quite though as recent riots there indicate). But the process of wresting West Papua from the reluctant mercantalist Dutch had been begun by President Sukarno, who had been something of a hero to her?
Though she "didn't think it at the time" now she says Sukarno played a very damaging role and kind of started the process to military rule. . . He was very enigmatic, power seeking, and corrupt - though nothing to President Suharto - and his personal life was a disgrace," Carmel, now a grandmother, says tartly of his numerous wives.
Recently in Ireland to launch an Irish group, West Papua Action, she was received by Ms Joan Burton, Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs. She also met the President, Mrs Robinson.
Ms Budiardjo links the situation of the Nigerian people in the Niger Delta and those of essentially pastoral tribespeople of West Papua. They both suffer from the "twin evils of the military and the company". In Nigeria it's Shell oil; in West Papua it's the US British Freeport/RTZ mining company, for which Irian Jaya (its Indonesian name) is run, she says, and their indigenous people are repressed and marginalised.
For her human rights work she last year received "the alternative Nobel Prize", the Right Livelihood Award, at a ceremony in the Swedish Parliament.
THIS YEAR the book about it all that her granddaughter (Tari's daughter), Claire, got her to write, has come out. Surviving Indonesia's Gulag is to be launched in Ireland shortly. In it she describes her traumatic time in prison. She challenges the Indonesian New Order's account of the 1965 coup attempt as a communist bid for power. With President Suharto now in his 28th year of power, this episode remains Indonesia's most sensitive open political wound. Ms Budiardjo says it was essentially an inter army affair.
In a life where Cold War communist certainty gave way to defending rights, Carmel Budiardjo is still inquiring after about a dozen men who remain in jail because of what she insists was Suharto's coup over 39 years ago.
