Calls for the Indonesian government to launch a truth and reconciliation process to address the slaughter of half a million suspected communists in the 1960s are growing ahead of a planned government-funded discussion of the atrocities next week.

Human rights activists are hopeful the two-day symposium in Jakarta on 18-19 April will lead to the repeal of a decree banning Indonesians with any family ties to the former Indonesian Communist party (PKI) from government jobs and positions with the military and police.

The 1981 regulation currently excludes an estimated 40 millionpeople from such positions.

“These are people who haven’t done anything wrong. They might have had a grandparent or a great-grandparent who was allegedly affiliated with the PKI,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told reporters in Jakarta.

“Ending this process of blacklisting … is obviously an important step and frankly is something that is the sooner the better.”

Last September marked 50 years since the start of the mass killings that occurred across the country from 1965-66, amid cold war fears about the global spread of communism.

At the time Indonesia had the third-largest communist party in the world.

Given the deep political sensitivities associated with the atrocities, activists say the scheduled talks in Jakarta are a step in the right direction, and could provide the necessary impetus for a broader reconciliation process.

Roth added: “What is needed is to begin with a truth-telling process … an opportunity for the survivors, perhaps for some of the participants, for the descendants to speak publicly, so that the Indonesian people can hear these first-hand accounts.”

However, the Indonesian government has repeatedly resisted attempts to openly grapple with this bloody chapter in its history. It has censored and shut down public discussions on the abuses of 1965, and rejected the results of a 2012 investigation by Komnas HAM, the National Human Rights Commission, which detailed gross rights violations from the period.

Late last year a 77-year-old Swedish man was deported and blacklisted for attempting to visit a mass grave on the island of Sumatra, where his father and 40 other suspected communists are buried.

Elected in 2014 on promises of prioritising human rights violations and tackling corruption, the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, has been largely disappointing on the former issue, said Haris Azhar, the coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence.

“Nothing really has come from Jokowi as president, and nothing impressive has come from his government or cabinet on how to address this,” said Azhar.

In the United States, Indonesia’s human rights commission has also lodged an official request with the US government to release archived records believed to detail the CIA’s covert involvement in Indonesia’s 1965-66 massacres.