'Accounts of Sept. 30 need rewriting'

'Accounts of Sept. 30 need rewriting'

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A historian demanded on Monday that the government revise the
historical accounts on the Sept. 30, 1965 coup attempt, that has
long been blamed on the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI), as part of the nation's efforts to come to terms with the
past.

Asvi Warman Adam, a noted historian with the state-run
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said that after the
demise of the authoritarian regime of President Soeharto -- under
whose indoctrination Indonesians were led to believe that the PKI
was the sole mastermind of the coup -- numerous versions of what
had actually transpired during that time of turmoil had emerged.

"Some said that Soeharto himself was the mastermind who stage-
managed the coup and was therefore responsible for its subsequent
bloodshed. Others said that he was merely a puppet of foreign
countries whose sole intention was to secure their interests. All
this has caused confusion among the public," he told a seminar to
commemorate the Sept. 30 coup organized by victims of the
tragedy.

Asvi said that the first and foremost casualties of the
historical confusion were students, who, until now, were still
taught a version of the country's history drawn up by the
Soeharto regime.

"Teachers are still telling the same old story about the coup,
because the contents of most history books remain the same," he
said.

He regretted the fact that the efforts to rewrite the history
of the coup had been hijacked by certain parties in the
government. "The most pressing need now is writing the details of
the events surrounding the coup. Instead, a team from the
national education ministry is busy writing Indonesian history
since the stone age," Asvi said.

In the abortive coup, seven army generals were killed. They
were believed to be President Sukarno loyalists who were
opponents of Soeharto's faction in the Army. Soeharto, then a
major general, was commanding the Army's Strategic Reserves
Command (Kostrad) at that time.

Under the command of Soeharto, who later succeeded Sukarno as
president until May 1998, at least 500,000 people labeled as PKI
members or supporters were believed to have been slain while
millions of their descendants were, and still are, deprived of
their rights as citizens.

This number does not include the members of the victims'
families and relatives who were also killed in the carnage. The
official number given by the government is 78,000 people, with
300 listed as nationalists or from religious groups.

Around 10,000 others were jailed on Buru Island, Maluku, most
of them without standing trial. Many others fled overseas.

Meanwhile, an analysis said that the coup attempt represented
the pinnacle of a struggle for power between the PKI, the Army
and Sukarno -- the three most powerful entities in Indonesian
politics at the time.

Max Lane, an Indonesianist from the Perth, Australia-based
Murdoch University, said that the most important question that
needed an answer was why the tragedy occurred in the first place,
instead of who the mastermind was.

"We need to get an answer as to why the perpetrators of the
mass killings felt compelled to commit these atrocities, what had
caused them to fear so that they killed so many people, what the
motivation was," he said.

Lane said that answering these questions constituted a moral
obligation of the older generation towards the young. "Most of
our young these days are in the dark over the event," he said.