It is all a question of how societies mean to deal with the past. There are the old pains, in the guise of legacies for many, which people in various countries have been trying to handle in these past many years. With a world gradually coming round to the idea that people matter, that people’s ideas matter, stories of a repressive past naturally come under the scanner.
One recalls the megalomania which defined the Shah of Iran in the years between the early 1950s and his fall in 1979. All of Iran was not only his fiefdom but also considered to be his family estate. His siblings were powerful in almost every sector of the economy and cheerfully plundered the land. His daughter from an early marriage too had a large share in the pie.
His son-in-law Ardeshir Zahedi served as an influential ambassador to Washington and foreign minister. The 2,500th anniversary celebrations of the Persian monarchy in 1971 were faux history. Remember that the Pahlavis had never been royal but usurped the throne when the Shah’s father, an ordinary military officer, commandeered the state.
Today nothing of that sordid legacy survives in Iran. In the decades since January 1979, when the Shah fled Iran in the face of the Islamic Revolution, all of what the monarch symbolised has been dismantled. The story of the Shah’s rule -- its plunder of national wealth, its calculated repression of democratic aspirations through the use of such forces as Savak -- is a reminder to people around the world of how the inordinate ambitions of a man or a family can eventually cause revolutions to erupt and bring about a sea change in societies.
Which brings us to what the authorities in Taiwan have of late been doing. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party has meticulously gone into doing away with the largely questionable legacy of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The island, littered with statues of the man who, having lost the struggle for China against Mao Zedong’s communists found sanctuary in Taiwan and set up the Republic of China in 1949, is these days busy pulling down these statues.
And why is that work going on, given that Chiang ruled Taiwan from 1949 till his death in 1975? The response is that even as Chiang harboured ambitions of regaining China, he administered a brutal political system in Taiwan through his political organisation Kuomintang (KMT).
The KMT remained in power for years after Chiang’s passing, but with changes in the political weather, it has seen its influence and appeal diminish for Taiwanese. The ruling DPP would clearly like to inaugurate a new phase in politics, one which the KMT has condemned as de-sinicization, in other words, moving away from the goal of recapturing power in mainland China.
The KMT opposition believes that the dismantling of Chiang’s statues underscores a broader plan of the government now in office, which is to abandon the goal of winning back China and instead focusing on Taiwan as an entity independent of any links to the People’s Republic. All of this raises the question of the difficulties involved in doing away with bad legacies. Chiang’s supporters are many and the KMT will not permit the DPP to govern without worry.
Chile is one other instance of the pretty insurmountable obstacles to an erasure of a dark legacy. Augusto Pinochet has been dead for years and yet his supporters, in the millions, have made it difficult for Chileans to have the country return to a full democracy. Attempts to liberalise politics, to do away with the Pinochet legacy have always run up against serious impediments.
It is often a bizarre characteristic of societies, indeed of people, that terribly iron-fisted rulers appeal to their instincts, which instincts are often base and therefore ugly, making them unable to comprehend the grave dangers associated with clinging to a bad past.
Chile paid a price in the early 1970s, beginning with the election of the socialist Salvador Allende as President. In the three years in which Allende’s government tried to assert itself in the country, it came up against an ever-widening conspiracy involving America’s CIA and the Nixon administration aimed at engineering its ouster.
That reprehensible goal reached fruition when the army under General Pinochet led a bloody coup which caused Allende’s death in 1973 and over the subsequent seventeen years clamped a state of darkness and fear on the country. Pinochet left office in 1990, but in essence he did not abjure power till his death.
It is Pinochet’s dark legacy which remains despite the many efforts of his successors to turn the page. Pinochet’s supporters are as vocal in his defence as adherents of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s are in Spain. Franco is today a non-person in Spain and yet it has to be acknowledged that among today’s generation large swathes of the young, through propaganda and presentations of alternative history, look upon Franco as a saviour of the country.
And even as they sing his praises, the Madrid authorities keep discovering the remains of his victims, the thousands of men and women his forces murdered during the civil war of the 1930s and later.
In an important way, the discovery of long buried skeletons brings to light the truth of how nations afflicted by bad politics must do everything they can in moving against the ill reputations of the perpetrators of old crimes. It is a lesson which sooner rather than later ought to apply to Indonesia, which in the years of General Suharto, especially in the period between autumn 1965 and mid-1967, saw as many as two million citizens die at the hands of the military.
Suharto shrewdly eased out President Sukarno from power, had the soldiers shoot the communist leader D N Aidit and took Foreign Minister Subandrio into custody, keeping him in prison for nearly three decades. A number of governments have come and gone in Jakarta since the ouster of Suharto from power in 1998, but none of them have had the will or the intention to investigate the brutalities which were a dark characteristic of the Suharto era.
The sinister legacies of authoritarian rule are in reality haunted houses with ancient ghosts inhabiting them in macabre fashion. These haunted houses require to be cleansed of the ghosts before life can flow in and around nations long suppressed, freely and without hindrance.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune.
