Correcting history

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.