Who are the heroes?

It is quite interesting how people from different nationalities and backgrounds perceive history.

During Australia's Bicentennial celebrations, the Australian post office issued a 33-cent commemorative stamp bearing the picture and signature of King George III (1738-1820). Underneath were the words, "The decision to settle New South Wales," which of course, was proclaimed by royal edict and resulted in the First Fleet making their landfall in 1788. The above British monarch thus occupies a specific, central role in Australian history.

The same King George III figures prominently in another country's past. The Americans of 1776 reviled him as "the Mad King" and a week after the declaration of independence that July, a huge angry crowd in New York tore down a 2-ton statue of the toga-robed King on a horse, and dismembered it. It is unlikely that the U.S. postal service will ever honor King George III on its stamps.

Winston Churchill is revered as the great statesman who, in Great Britain's period of crisis and isolation in 1940, while Nazi bombers were wreaking havoc on its cities, courageously urged his countrymen to fight on, and gave the famous phrase: "We shall never surrender." But it was also this same Winston Churchill, being the product of a pro-Empire education, who stubbornly rejected the idea of independence for India, and on several occasions, refused to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, referring to him as "a half naked fakir, trying to negotiate on equal terms with representatives of the King-Emperor." It took Churchill's electoral defeat and a new British government for India to achieve its independence (1947). It is unlikely that Winston Churchill will be accorded quite a lofty position in the pages of India's history books.

While discussing Indonesian matters with an American professor of history some time ago, I was stunned to hear him ask: "But wasn't Sukarno a Japanese collaborator?" After some moments I was able to reply that I thought the only people Sukarno really collaborated with were the Indonesian masses, and he was loved by them in 1945.

Reading some literature concerning that period (which was quite some time before I was born), I know that while Indonesian revolutionaries were suspicious of all foreign powers who came to rule here, Sukarno told them privately that the Japanese could be "used" for the sake of Indonesia's independence. (The American academic was apparently influenced by a Eurocentric, "Allied" view -- and he considered the Netherlands an ally in World War II, however ignoble their policies in colonial territories).

Peoples' views of history and historical figures depend on their own ethnic, nation-specific, and group-based perspectives. Who are the heroes?

FARID BASKORO

Jakarta