Rewriting history

The Soeharto government was inclined to deny the notion that history is God's own footpaths, as historian Arnold Toynbee once put it. The regime, like other despotic powers, was also a pesky revisionist.

Biased history textbooks became commonplace from the beginning of Soeharto's rule, as did the abuse of many other important media through which the identity of the nation is moulded such as films, the award of medals and the recognition of heroes. Many people, inclusive academics, have called for an end to this revisionist trend.

One revisionist atrocity, a regular on September's agenda, is a film on the aborted communist coup of 1965. Since 1984 it has been compulsory for all television stations to screen the film at the end of every September to mark the suppression of the coup. The film's critics, of which there are many, have said it is an out of date public relations gimmick.

The Jakarta Legal Aid Institute appealed to the authorities to stop screening the film in a call than won support from the public and the film industry alike. They believe the film was blatantly engineered to portray the Soeharto regime in a favorable light. Many have also said the film's dominant theme of revenge is counter-productive to efforts to forge a national reconciliation.

On Wednesday, the Minister of Information responded to this appeal by announcing that the film would no longer be compulsory screening. The move is a welcome one, even though our plaudits must be tempered by another demonstration of the government's reluctance to let go of the communist bugbear once and for all. Although the film will no longer have to be screened it will be replaced by another film, of the government's own choosing, with a "similar nuance."

The positive side to commemoration of the attempted coup this year -- the first in the new open atmosphere -- is that it has encouraged people to call for that chapter of the nation's history to be rewritten, not only because it has been manipulated to serve the interests of Soeharto's regime, but because of a lack of veracity in existing material dealing with the subject.

The lack of objectivity in writings on this episode of the nation's history has long been criticized by many historians, but the scribes who wrote history for the government turned a deaf ear to their protests, as indeed they did during Sukarno's time as president.

Laying down the facts of this episode in our history is becoming ever more relevant as those involved in the events march into the winters of their lives. So many questions remain unanswered about the attempted communist coup, an unprecedented coup which claimed the lives of six senior Army generals and one lieutenant.

Unanswered questions include who was really behind the bloody abortive coup, who its main players were, and what actually happened when the generals were taken forcibly from their residences to the Halim air base and thereafter. No one knows if or how deeply former president Sukarno was involved in the attempt, or if it is true that a certain Gen. Soeharto was informed in advance of the impending tragedy, as a leftist officer has claimed.

Objectivity is important not only to reconstruct the events of that time but also so that our younger generation fully understand, and learn the lessons, of that national tragedy.

If hearing is believing, many members of our younger generations are in the dark regarding this murky episode of national history. Many do not even have a clear idea of who Sukarno or Mohammad Hatta, the nation's founding fathers, really were.

Correcting this aspect of history can serve as a preliminary step to a total review of our national heroes, as one scholar urged about a decade ago. His proposal is entirely logical because many of our heroes were selected on the basis of Dutch colonial ideals.