'Accounts of Sept. 30 need rewriting'<\/p>\n
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta<\/p>\n
A historian demanded on Monday that the government revise the
\nhistorical accounts on the Sept. 30, 1965 coup attempt, that has
\nlong been blamed on the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party
\n(PKI), as part of the nation's efforts to come to terms with the
\npast.<\/p>\n
Asvi Warman Adam, a noted historian with the state-run
\nIndonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said that after the
\ndemise of the authoritarian regime of President Soeharto -- under
\nwhose indoctrination Indonesians were led to believe that the PKI
\nwas the sole mastermind of the coup -- numerous versions of what
\nhad actually transpired during that time of turmoil had emerged.<\/p>\n
\"Some said that Soeharto himself was the mastermind who stage-
\nmanaged the coup and was therefore responsible for its subsequent
\nbloodshed. Others said that he was merely a puppet of foreign
\ncountries whose sole intention was to secure their interests. All
\nthis has caused confusion among the public,\" he told a seminar to
\ncommemorate the Sept. 30 coup organized by victims of the
\ntragedy.<\/p>\n
Asvi said that the first and foremost casualties of the
\nhistorical confusion were students, who, until now, were still
\ntaught a version of the country's history drawn up by the
\nSoeharto regime.<\/p>\n
\"Teachers are still telling the same old story about the coup,
\nbecause the contents of most history books remain the same,\" he
\nsaid.<\/p>\n
He regretted the fact that the efforts to rewrite the history
\nof the coup had been hijacked by certain parties in the
\ngovernment. \"The most pressing need now is writing the details of
\nthe events surrounding the coup. Instead, a team from the
\nnational education ministry is busy writing Indonesian history
\nsince the stone age,\" Asvi said.<\/p>\n
In the abortive coup, seven army generals were killed. They
\nwere believed to be President Sukarno loyalists who were
\nopponents of Soeharto's faction in the Army. Soeharto, then a
\nmajor general, was commanding the Army's Strategic Reserves
\nCommand (Kostrad) at that time.<\/p>\n
Under the command of Soeharto, who later succeeded Sukarno as
\npresident until May 1998, at least 500,000 people labeled as PKI
\nmembers or supporters were believed to have been slain while
\nmillions of their descendants were, and still are, deprived of
\ntheir rights as citizens.<\/p>\n
This number does not include the members of the victims'
\nfamilies and relatives who were also killed in the carnage. The
\nofficial number given by the government is 78,000 people, with
\n300 listed as nationalists or from religious groups.<\/p>\n
Around 10,000 others were jailed on Buru Island, Maluku, most
\nof them without standing trial. Many others fled overseas.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, an analysis said that the coup attempt represented
\nthe pinnacle of a struggle for power between the PKI, the Army
\nand Sukarno -- the three most powerful entities in Indonesian
\npolitics at the time.<\/p>\n
Max Lane, an Indonesianist from the Perth, Australia-based
\nMurdoch University, said that the most important question that
\nneeded an answer was why the tragedy occurred in the first place,
\ninstead of who the mastermind was.<\/p>\n
\"We need to get an answer as to why the perpetrators of the
\nmass killings felt compelled to commit these atrocities, what had
\ncaused them to fear so that they killed so many people, what the
\nmotivation was,\" he said.<\/p>\n
Lane said that answering these questions constituted a moral
\nobligation of the older generation towards the young. \"Most of
\nour young these days are in the dark over the event,\" he said.<\/p>",
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