Sukarno seminar fallout

To our already extensive lexicon of foreign and foreign- sounding words, one more has been added -- or, to be more precise, revived: Nawaksara. Former president Sukarno was the first to use the word in his state of the nation speech before the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly in March 1967.

The Nawaksara address was the president's policy account to the nation's supreme policy-making body, and as such it was voted down by an assembly that, in the days following the aborted 1965 communist coup d'etat, had been purged of communist and other leftist Old Order elements.

Today -- more than 30 years after the event -- few, if any, younger Indonesians are familiar with the word, which, after all, most older people have forgotten. Three decades of economic success have brought about so much change that the country has assumed an almost totally new look and very few vestiges of the old regime remain.

Why, then, this sudden revival of interest in something that to all appearances is buried and forgotten? And why now, at this precise moment when the nation is about to hold one of its most crucial general elections?

The credit goes to the Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports Hayono Isman, who announced last week that a government-supported seminar on the 1967 rejection of president Sukarno's policy account had been approved by President Soeharto. On Monday, the President himself defended the government's plan to hold a seminar on Sukarno's downfall in order to provide Indonesians with "accurate" information of what occurred 30 years ago.

With President Soeharto's approval secured, it is now as good as certain that the seminar will be held later this month as planned. Although Sukarno made no mention of the attempted coup in his Nawaksara speech (doing so only in a supplement provided later) speakers will no doubt recall how president Sukarno, in those crucial days, defended his refusal to outlaw the Indonesian Communist Party and called the 1965 coup attempt a mere "ripple in the ocean of the revolution". His left-leaning policies and his brand of "guided democracy" will come under the spotlight.

There is no doubt that such a seminar could provide vast valuable historical information for students and historians -- provided, of course, that balanced, dispassionate discussion can take place. Such a seminar could indeed, as Minister/State Secretary Moerdiono put it, let Indonesians study their history and learn from past experiences.

From the purely historical point of view, therefore, there is only positive things to say for holding it. One problem which the organizers must keep in mind, though, is that such a forum may also raise a host of new questions. Many people, for example, believe that the true objective of the planned forum is not merely to delve into the past to obtain accurate historical information, but to provide a response to the negative publicity that has been aimed from various sides at the New Order government in recent months.

One must keep in mind, though, that the present generation of Indonesians is the product of a social environment that is totally different from, say, that of the 1996 Generation, which took an active part in the quelling of the 1965 putsch and in bringing about the downfall of Sukarno. Hence, the historical perspective of today's young Indonesians can be expected to be different. Young Indonesians have easy access to all kinds of information -- desirable and undesirable -- from across the globe, and they are better trained to examine it with a critical mind.

Aside from all that, there can be little doubt that the planned seminar will reopen some old wounds, government assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. Also, demands for similar forums on other historical topics that are still considered sensitive may arise. The Nawaksara seminar in itself is a good idea, as long as we are prepared to accept any resulting fallout.