Rewriting history

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out of date public relations gimmick.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.