Communist threat is scapegoat politics: Survey
JAKARTA (JP): Few people in this country buy the Armed Forces' (ABRI) warning of a possible communist comeback, believing that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), outlawed since 1966, has been used as a convenient scapegoat when no other answers are available, according to a survey jointly commissioned by The Jakarta Post and D&R weekly magazine.
The survey asked 1,130 people in five major cities between Oct. 6 and Oct. 10 the question of how they saw ABRI's claim that the PKI was actively maneuvering behind the scenes to wreak havoc on the country.
"There is no other scapegoat but the PKI" received the largest vote, with 36 percent of the respondents ticking the answer. That the warning was "a force of habit by ABRI" was the next most popular answer, with 31 percent.
Nearly 19 percent of the respondents said ABRI's warning was based on accurate political intelligence and 1.4 percent believed that PKI had subverted the country's political system.
The survey by the Resource Productivity Center was given to 250 people in Jakarta, 225 in Surabaya, 215 in Yogyakarta, 225 in Bandung and 215 in Denpasar. It sought to determine people's attitude to the recent repeated warnings, particularly those made by ABRI, that communism was making a comeback.
In the latest claim, the military said the mysterious killing spree which began in the East Java town of Banyuwangi was the work of descendants of PKI members. The killings targeted Moslem religious teachers and people who were said to have practiced black magic.
Earlier, the military said recent protests organized by Forkot, an alliance of student senates from several universities and colleges in Jakarta, were "communist" inspired. The same accusation was leveled against the People's Democratic Party (PRD) two years ago when its leaders were rounded up by the military and later jailed.
PKI was the largest communist party outside the communist bloc when it was crushed and outlawed in 1966, six months after the Army blamed it for engineering an attempted coup against then president Sukarno. The abortive coup itself set off bloody clashes between communist and noncommunist forces that left hundreds of thousands of people dead.
Since then, the military has constantly warned the nation of a latent danger of a communist revival. But, as the poll shows, few people in this country believe that the threat really exists.
The respondents were divided on why the issue of the communist threat had persisted to this day.
More than 22 percent believed that, as an ideology, communism was still very much alive. More than 20 percent said the issue was being kept alive by the New Order regime as a way to justify its policies. Another 18 percent said the issue was alive because it was difficult to erase the memory of PKI brutality. Yet another 16 percent said the issue was being used to intimidate people, and 16 percent said it was part of the government's policy of divide and rule.
When asked whether they believed ABRI's claim that Forkot and PRD had been subverted by PKI, 73 percent gave a definite "no" and only 23 percent said yes. Similarly, 75 percent of the respondents disagreed with the view that radicalism was synonymous with communism.
Respondents who believed that the communist threat was part of ABRI's political engineering were asked for the possible reasons. "It's a tool to quell the opposition" came top with 37 percent; next came "a tool for the New Order to preserve power" with 28 percent and 24 percent said the threat was used to intimidate people.
Of those respondents who did not think that ABRI was engineering the communist threat, 51 percent said communism always flourished amid poverty and 46 percent said communism still existed and could stage a comeback.
When asked what it was about communism that was deemed threatening, nearly half of the respondents said the ideology precluded the existence of God. More than 43 percent said communism justified all means to achieve its ends, and 33 percent said communism was not compatible with the national identity. Another 18 percent say communism's greatest threat is that it does not recognize private property.
The totals exceeded 100 percent on some of the questions because respondents were allowed to tick more than one answer.
The latent danger of communism came third when people were asked what they considered the greatest threat facing the nation, with 20 percent of respondents ticking it. Topping the list was the prolonged crisis with 56 percent and national disintegration with 41 percent. Seventeen percent of the respondents ticked ABRI's dual function.
The government's attitude toward the communist issue is currently ambiguous.
Last month it dropped the requirement for all TV stations to broadcast Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Betrayal of the September 30 Movement/PKI), a dramatization about the abortive coup. The film had been a compulsory program for all stations on every Sept. 30 since its release in 1984.
The Ministry of Education and Culture has now agreed to review the official record of the Sept. 30, 1965 affair and the ensuing developments that led to the downfall of Sukarno and Gen. Soeharto's rise to power in 1966.
Yet as far as the government and military are concerned, the communist movement is still a major threat. This is most apparent in the political bill currently being debated by the House of Representatives. The bill, drawn up by the government of President B.J. Habibie, still requires candidates running for elected public office to prove that they were never involved in the communist movement. In the past, this entailed tight screening conducted by the military.
The survey did not find significant differences between the answers provided by respondents in the 19-to-34 age group -- who made up 71 percent of the respondents -- and the older respondents who experienced the turbulence of the mid-1960s. (emb)