Communist threat is scapegoat politics: Survey

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)