Correcting history

The police wasted no time in investigating a claim that former president Sukarno signed the Supersemar document almost at gunpoint. As we recall, Supersemar, the executive order signed on March 11, 1966, supposedly empowered Maj. Gen. Soeharto to take all necessary steps to restore peace and order in the country that was on the verge of collapsing. Soeharto quickly used the overriding powers accorded to him by the letter to outlaw the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), arrest its leaders, and disband Sukarno's cabinet.

While the circumstances surrounding the signing of the Supersemar letter in the Bogor presidential palace remain unclear, the event was a major turning point in Indonesia's political history. Supersemar marked the decline of Sukarno and the rise of Soeharto to the presidency, a position which he held on to for more than three decades until his resignation in May.

For 32 years, there was only one version of what had happened on that fateful day in 1966. This is the official version which says that Sukarno willingly signed the letter brought to him by three Army generals, all of whom were Soeharto's emissaries. When he signed it, Sukarno effectively transferred his executive powers to Soeharto.

Now, with the return of freedom of expression after Soeharto's own downfall, one of Sukarno's bodyguards who was at the Bogor palace at the time, has claimed that the president was pressured into signing the Supersemar. Soekardjo Wilardjito, aged 71, was summoned by the police this week to explain himself for challenging the official version. He has backtracked from his earlier claim that he saw two generals brandish pistols, and now says they were merely gripping their guns, an act that was nevertheless seen as intimidating to the president.

The police questioning of Soekardjo focused not so much on trying to establish the truth about Supersemar, as on pinning possible criminal charges on him for spreading lies. His claim has nevertheless renewed public interest to find out about what really happened.

The signing of Supersemar was so important to the nation's history that the official version should not go totally unchallenged. The official version is not only one-sided, it also leaves many unanswered questions, one of them being the whereabouts of the original letter. Each time this question has come up, the government has lightly, if not conveniently, dismissed the importance of the original letter. Yet, until we see the document, we have to take the government's claim of the exact wording of the letter with a grain of salt.

Soekardjo could turn out to be a crank looking for cheap publicity amid the media's frenzy to dig up the dirt on Soeharto's administration. But he could also be telling the truth. Whichever is the case, he has opened a Pandora's box that has long been kept shut by an even greater force of evil bent on preventing the nation from knowing the truth about its past.

So much of the history of the way the New Order government was established and managed has been kept in the dark. The New Order administration did not only make history, it also tried to write its own history by insisting on its versions of many important events as the truth.

Few people in Indonesia, even those who call themselves scholars and historians, have dared to challenge the official version of the Supersemar signing; the Sept. 30, 1965 tragedy; the way Indonesia became caught up in East Timor, and many other events that changed the history of the nation. They could take their cue from Soekardjo and use the current historic opportunity to correct the nation's history.