Learning from past mistakes

I don't claim to know for certain all the facts of history, but am writing from personal experience.

I was a boy in 1964/1965, and even then my parents encouraged me to read English-language books. Two of my favorite places were the British Council, then located on Jl. Merdeka Barat, and the USIS library on Jl. Veteran. They were great sources of learning and a means to improve my English. I looked forward to visits after school.

At the library entrances, I always noticed men dressed in black, wearing red berets, carefully noting who came in and out. Very intimidating people, they even stared suspiciously at children like me. When I asked elders who they were, the answer was: Pemuda Rakyat (People's Youth of the Indonesian Communist Party).

Indonesia was then a very leftist nation and was waging war against neocolonialists and imperialists (Nekolim), who had set up the new state of Malaysia, supposedly to encircle our country. In school, we were taught that we should become Manusia Indonesia Baru (the New Indonesian Man), based on the "New Soviet Man" concept in the USSR. The basis of foreign policy was "the Jakarta-Phnom Penh-Hanoi-Peking-Pyongyang axis -- all being militant anti-Western states.

I remember clearly riding on a bus with friends and passing the burned-out bulk of the British Embassy, which had been set ablaze by angry mobs, led by the same Pemuda Rakyat who strongly supported the policy of "confrontation" with Malaysia. Great Britain was considered our enemy's main sponsor, while America was always referred to as "the U.S. imperialists" on TVRI. I remember also hearing the news of a British housing compound near Jl. Pakubuwono in Kebayoran Baru being ransacked by "progressive revolutionaries".

On the Indonesian Communist Party's anniversary in 1965, I remember being driven down Jl. Jendral Sudirman and seeing giant hammers and sickles all along Jakarta's main thoroughfare. At that time, anybody against the government's left-leaning policy was labeled as having communisto-phobia. It was almost as if we were already a Marxist republic.

It is now fashionable for the international media, especially people unaware of what life was like in those days, to describe the anticommunist feelings and violent backlash occurring in 1965/1967 as "an internal Indonesian Army matter, blamed on the communists". To me, that is revisionist history -- the communists were not entirely innocent. In fact, they were almost all- powerful at the time. I believe the will of the Indonesian majority -- most having a religion -- was to see the people known to be atheists removed from positions of almost supreme power.

I must emphasize that I am not for the previous New Order. During the former regime, there were severe abuses of power. I am all for the reformists, provided Indonesia becomes a better nation after this present crisis. But a return to the Sukarnoism of 1964/1965 would be a big, costly mistake.

FARID BASKORO

Jakarta