The 9/30 tragedy

Something horrible happened 40 years ago that changed the course of Indonesia's history, unfortunately for the worse. But while the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping and murder of six Army generals on the night of Sept. 30, 1965, remain shrouded in mystery, the effects of this tragic event are unequivocal: it was a case of one tragedy leading to another, and another, and another.

Whoever was responsible for the kidnappings and killings, and whatever their motives -- both questions remain contentious to this day among historians -- the events of that night, which lasted until the early hours of Oct. 1, unleashed a killing spree that went on for months, with the main targets, though by far not the only targets, being suspected members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which was blamed for the murder of the generals.

If that was not enough of a tragedy, the nation saw the young Army general Soeharto seize the presidency the following year, ushering in an era of repression, brutality and corruption that would last for the next three decades.

Soeharto was easily one of the most ruthless rulers of the 20th century, and his human rights record matches those of other dictators of his era: the jailing of tens of thousands of people without trial, the invasion of East Timor and the ensuing brutal rule of the territory, the silencing of politicians, clerics and students who disagreed with his policies, his brutal policies in Aceh and Papua, to name but a few. Last week, more than seven years after his removal from office, the National Commission on Human Rights announced that 14 government critics who went missing during Soeharto's rule had been murdered.

Soeharto's legacy goes beyond the atrocities he and his regime committed. The militaristic and often brutal nature of our political culture today, from the intolerance to the use of violence to settle differences, is deeply rooted in Soeharto's New Order, and it will likely require one or two generations to undo this unfortunate legacy as the nation struggles to transform itself into a democracy.

But the biggest tragedy for the nation is our own denial that 9/30 was a tragedy of horrific proportions. Soeharto used the event to sanctify Pancasila, effectively turning the state ideology into an instrument he could wield to justify his brutal policies.

Officially, at least during the Soeharto years, the event was marked on Oct. 1, thus confining the tragedy solely to the killing of the six generals and, at least according to military historians, to the abortive coup by the PKI. What happened afterward was justified as a necessary evil, even a historical necessity, although the killing spree was not openly recognized.

There was no mention in the military-dictated official history books of the ensuing bloodshed, which according to international human rights organizations left at least half a million people dead. The precise figure will never be known precisely because we as a nation pretend it never happened.

C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The New York Times from Jakarta on April 13, 1966, compared the Indonesian killings with other slaughters of the 20th century, including the Armenian massacres, Stalin's starvation of the Kulaks, Hitler's Jewish genocide, the Muslim-Hindu killings following India's partition and the purges following China's turn to communism.

"Indonesia's bloody persecution of its communist rivals these terrible events in both scale and savagery," Sulzberger wrote.

Four decades later the nation has not fully come to terms with the reality of these events. We barely know the truth. We only have the truth Soeharto's military wanted us to have. The worst part is that most of us do not seem to want to know what happened. We would rather bury this ugly past and forget it entirely.

But here is the bad news: We can never bury the past. This dark page in our history will continue to haunt us for as long as we fail to get to the truth. As they say, only the truth shall set us free.

More than seven years since Soeharto left the political stage, surely the time has come for the nation to rewrite the history of what happened on the night of Sept. 30, 1965. History is always written from the perspective of the victors. Soeharto was the winner of the power struggle in the mid-1960s, thus he had his day. "His story", rather than history, ruled the day.

But as his legacy shows, there are no real winners here. The entire nation suffered, and continues to suffer to this day. There are only losers.