'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.