Setting history straight

Many Indonesians may think it a waste of time and energy, especially during the economic and social crisis, for the nation to dwell on a controversy which has been considered settled for more than three decades. After all, what happened in and around Jakarta during those critical hours on Oct. 1, 1965, is by now fairly well-known to most Indonesians.

But is it? At least up to May 21 of last year -- which is the date when a groundswell of reformist sentiment forced Soeharto to relinquish his position as president of Indonesia -- the following chain of events was the authorized description.

Late on the night of Sept. 30, 1965, leaders and activists from the subsequently outlawed Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were busy putting the final touches to a plot to take over from then president Sukarno. The presumed objective was to preempt a military coup d'etat which the Communists led by rightist Army generals.

In the early hours of Oct. 1, the Communist Party was ready to strike. Hit squads in military trucks fanned out across the city in search of the targeted victims: six top Army generals who the PKI regarded as the most dangerous enemies of the Party. Before dawn, virtually the entire top Army leadership was wiped out. The victims were either killed while resisting capture at their homes or cruelly executed in a macabre ceremony at Lubang Buaya, a hamlet on the fringes of the Halim Perdanakusumah Air Force Base.

That, in essence, is the official account of the "G30S-PKI" affair, which a whole generation of school children and students have been made to memorize for the past 34 years. To ensure that the guilt of the Communist Party and its "Old Order" supporters was not lost on the rest of the population, over the past three decades a succession of governments employed every form of propaganda at their disposal to make sure that the official version of the affair was unchallenged.

With history in a certain sense being a record of a people's collective memory, this version could of course be regarded as being generally acceptable. However, in the current reform era objections to the official line have emerged.

First, a number of released political prisoners, who had for years languished in detention for their alleged roles in the affair, have vowed to publish their own "correct" versions of the event to rehabilitate their good name and to "put history straight".

Several retired Air Force officers are now presenting their own version of the infamous events at Lubang Buaya. The Air Force was stung by assertions that it was somehow involved in the coup because of the use of its Lubang Buaya training base by the PKI plotters and Sukarno's presence at Halim Air Force Base during the most critical hours of the affair.

In a newly published book titled Lifting the Haze over Halim, 1965, the ex-officers denied any Air Force involvement in the coup. They cite rivalry between the Air Force and the Army at that time as one of the reasons for distrust in the Air Force. As for Sukarno's role in the affair, it is still a matter of debate whether he was in any way involved or had any advance knowledge of the putsch.

It may in conclusion be noted that in all the 54 years of its history as an independent nation, Indonesia never experienced an event with such far-reaching political implications as the 1965 coup. Given the many controversies that still surround the event 34 years after it happened, a revision of the current official interpretation of the event seems necessary.

With that in mind, every piece of new information which players and witnesses can supply must be welcomed. Beyond that, it is the task of our historians to set history straight.