A mystery
of the past still cloaked in intrigue
When President Megawati Sukarnoputri broke
with tradition, a group of Indonesians saw it as a gesture of hope. Matthew
Moore reports from Jakarta.
In one of her typically inscrutable gestures, Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri made headlines last week by not turning up at a disused well in East Jakarta for the annual October 1 ceremony.
She offered no explanation for why
she'd become the first president to miss the event in 35 years. But her
actions have offered some hope to a small but growing band of Indonesians
daring to call for the truth about the most tumultuous and destructive events
in the nation's history.
The well Mrs Megawati missed is where the allegedly mutilated bodies of six
generals and a lieutenant were dumped after they were killed on the night of
September 30, 1965, victims of a group of leftist army officers called
the Thirtieth of September Movement.
Just what happened that night, and after, who organised and who knew of the
killings, remains cloaked in mystery. Nearly four decades on, one dubious
official version of this period still lies over the country like a heavy
blanket. Within 30 hours of their executions, Major-General Suharto had
grabbed control of the army, crushed the rebellion and was on his way to
wresting control of the country from Mrs Megawati's father, and founding
president, Sukarno.
Suharto blamed the murder of the generals on the Indonesian Communist Party, or
the PKI, which he said was attempting a coup. So began one of the bloodiest
purges of the 20th century. Best estimates say at least 400,000
members or suspected sympathisers of the PKI were slaughtered by the -military,
military-backed militias or Muslim groups. Hundreds of thousands more were
imprisoned and tortured.
Some of those badly hurt survivors gathered this week at a forum in Jakarta to
pressure the government to establish a South African-style reconciliation
commission where the truth about the blackest period of modern Indonesian
history might finally be revealed.
The last surviving member of the Thirtieth of September Movement, Lieutenant-
Colonel Latif, hobbled through a room of sympathisers on legs that had been
shot through the knee and stabbed through the thigh during his 32 years
of jail. Since his release and Suharto's fall, he has published a book
detailing the two occasions he warned Suharto that the six generals were
planning a coup of their own to unseat Sukarno. Suharto, he said, did nothing
with the information he could have used to head off the killings.
Latif said it was now time for the whole truth to come out, but he doubted it
would. “Maybe the army is too afraid,” he said in a remark echoing the views of
many of the ordinary Indonesians who suffered.
One of those is a gentle Dutch-speaking former prosecutor, now 72, who
served 14 years in prison in Bali - punishment he said for advocating through
the courts the Sukarno government's land,reform program. In the view of this
lawyer, too many powerful people still had too much to lose for Indonesia to
face its past. “Many of the old guard are still in power, they are still in
government,” he said.
Since his release, the lawyer says he has managed to earn a modest income but
cannot escape the stigma of his past as a political prisoner, even though
Suharto has been gone for five years. “They come to me for legal advice, but
they don't want to take me into a partnership because they don't want to
compromise their organizations… I'm still a little bit tainted,” he said. And
he's still too afraid to allow his name to be used. “I'm not afraid of the
government,” he said, “I'm afraid of terrorists, of Muslim terrorists ... they
regard all former political prisoners as communists.”
This point is vividly illustrated in a new Australian documentary film by Chris
Hilton, Shadow Play, due to be shown in Australia on SBS next year.
Hilton's researcher and translator, Walter Slamer, said they continually
encountered a fear of the past while filming. Suharto's former chief of
intelligence, Yoga Sugama, was one -of many who refused to talk. Slamer said
Sugama's wife warned him why silence was preferred. “Don't wake the sleeping
tiger,” she said.
In many ways Indonesia is now a democracy, with a very free media, but reading
where power really lies remains fraught with difficulty. After half a lifetime
in jail following his conviction as a communist, Sukarno's foreign minister
Subandrio was finally released in 1995 and began a book giving his version of
events.
After Suharto fell from power after widespread rioting in 1998, a company
associated with leading newspaper publisher Kompas agreed to publish it, but
burnt the books days before they were to go on sale. Asked why the books had
been destroyed, Kompas editor-inchief Jakob Oetama said only: “They are still
too strong.”
The organiser of last week's reconciliation conference, John Mempi, from the
Centre for Democracy and Social Justice Study, had a different experience of
the military's power when six army representatives turned up to his conference
and got the power switched off during a speech by labour activist Dita Indah
Sari. Mempi agreed that in the present climate, no one would be brave enough to
screen Hilton's film.
But the fact that Mempi could hold his conference, and Hilton's film could be
screened at all, show that Indonesia has certainly come a considerable way
since Suharto's fall. But there remains little appetite for lifting the
long-standing ban on communism, as Mrs Megawati's deputy, Hamzah Haz, made
clear last week. Like his president, Hamzah Haz also stayed: away from the
October 1 celebrations, but he was scathing, of a book just published titled am
proud to be a PKI (Communist Party) kid. “The book should be banned,” he
said.
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