Search for 'Supersemar' original text still on: Akbar

JAKARTA (JP): The government has rescinded its stance on the missing March 11, 1966, document known as the Supersemar in which founding president Sukarno handed over power to then Army minister Maj. Gen. Soeharto.

Minister/State Secretary Akbar Tandjung said on Tuesday the government was still searching for the original document. Only a day earlier, Akbar said in Bandarlampung that the government no longer considered the existence of the letter of order an issue, and that it would not dwell on the matter any further.

The government has a copy of the letter which in effect was the transfer of power from Sukarno to Soeharto, who subsequently became the country's second president, to restore order and security in then chaotic Jakarta following the aborted communist coup on Sept. 30 the previous year.

Akbar, speaking to journalists after installing new National Archives chief Mukhlis Paeny -- who replaced Noerhadi Magetsari -- said: "We will keep looking for it."

He said the government would ask personalities who were close to the creation of the historic letter, which many political scientists and historians have long believed to be the groundwork for Soeharto's New Order regime, about its current whereabouts.

Akbar said they would include Gen. (ret) M. Jusuf and former president Soeharto. Jusuf, then an Army brigadier general, is the sole survivor of three generals sent by Soeharto to receive the Supersemar letter from Sukarno at the Bogor presidential palace in West Java.

The other two generals were the late Amir Machmud, then a brigadier general who was also the Jakarta military commander, and the late Basuki Rachmat, then an Army major general.

The three generals, like Soeharto, were Sukarno's ministers. Soeharto was also the chief of the Army strategic reserves command, known then as RPKAD.

It is not clear when the original document went missing, but some people have called the transfer of power based on the document a bloodless coup.

Mukhlis said the National Archives would study the "authenticity" of the copy which it obtained six years ago from the Army information office.

Historians have said it is important that the original text be recovered as it should shed light on whether Soeharto really carried out all of Sukarno's instructions.

The question of what prompted Sukarno to issue the order or under what circumstances he gave it, have recently resurfaced after similar debates in the 1980s.

Last week, a former security guard at the Bogor Presidential Palace claimed Sukarno signed the prepared text at gunpoint of former Army deputy chief of staff Gen. (ret) M. Panggabean.

Panggabean fiercely denied the allegation of Second Lt. (ret) Soekardjo Wilardjito, who currently lives in Yogyakarta. He called Soekardjo a liar.

Panggabean said he was resting at the Army headquarters in Jakarta at that time.

However, Soekardjo's lawyers at the Yogyakarta Legal Aid Institute defended their client's testimony, claiming they had "evidence and other witnesses" to verify the charges.

Lawyer Budi Hartono said the institute had also contacted Sukarno's family regarding the matter. "We hope Sukarno's family has kept documents relating to the Supersemar," he said on Tuesday.

Coup

Another source said Tuesday that the document was just a small part of a bigger scenario played out by the then superpowers (USA, UK and the Soviet Union) who despised Sukarno's ideas to unite new independent countries against them in the United Nations.

The 67-year-old former minister of Sukarno said the Army was just an operative in the bigger scenario. "Yes, it was a coup by the Army, but it was done in a very covered way," he said, asking for anonymity.

"How could it be arranged, that the generals were all at their respective houses (when they were kidnapped and later killed)? It could not have been the communists that set this all up," he argued, referring to six generals killed during the coup on Sept. 30, 1965 blamed on the outlawed Indonesian Communist Party.

He said it was Soeharto and his cohorts, in a conspiracy with the three above powers, that toppled Sukarno.

Sukarno had to go since he had introduced the New Emerging Forces, as the union of the new independent countries were called by Sukarno, and the idea to cut the "colonialism lifeline" by promoting the countries' "self-reliance" policy, he said.

Regarding the Supersemar, the source said Sukarno annulled it through his "letter of order" dated March 13, 1966 but this was ignored by Soeharto.

"This again shows Soeharto's naughtiness," he said. (23/44/aan/prb)