Political backsliding has been part of history and not just in our times. But what might have made the difference in the present era is for those who go for such revisionism to be aware of the sensitivities which people are subject to. In other words, politics is an area where the slightest move arouses emotions, good or bad, among people.
Let the mind wander into politics as it has been shaping up, or sliding into a questionable activity, in Indonesia. President Prabowo Subianto, a former general, has decreed General Suharto, the late dictator of the country, as a national hero.
Suharto, one will recall, was the man who kept an iron grip over Indonesia following the cataclysm which overtook the country on September 30, 1965. It was revealed that on that day the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), the largest platform of communism beyond China and the Soviet Union, had attempted a takeover of the state in a violent coup d’etat.
Questions have abounded all these decades about the truth of what transpired in Indonesia in September 1965. But what has been obvious is that between September 1965 and early 1967, anywhere between one million and two million Indonesians were murdered in a pogrom initiated by Suharto and the army. President Ahmed Sukarno was sidelined and then removed from office. Foreign Minister Subandrio was condemned to death but then was forced to live in incarceration for nearly three decades. DN Aidit, the powerful PKI leader, was summarily executed by the soldiers in September 1965.
General Suharto, who would ensconce himself in the presidency and seek to legitimize his regime through having a till then nominal political party called Golkar supporting his authoritarianism, ruled Indonesia for 32 years before changed political circumstances forced him from power. In those years, it was an unabashed kleptocracy Suharto let loose in the country, with his family enriching itself even as citizens suffered.
The Suharto years opened up the country to an exploitation of its resources by Western powers. The late Australian journalist John Pilger noted early on the sheer glee with which Western businessmen rushed to Jakarta post-September 1965 to grab the bounties thrown up by the rise of the Suharto regime.
General Suharto sought to extend his regime’s reach beyond Indonesia when he had his army invade the tiny country of East Timor (Timor-Leste today) at a time when inspirational Timorese political figures such as Xanana Gusmao decided that their people needed to be free. East Timor declared itself a free republic once the long-entrenched Portuguese colonial power decided to go home in 1975. The generals in Indonesia had other ideas.
Timorese independence was short-lived as Indonesian soldiers stormed the new state and decided that East Timor would be a province of the Indonesian republic. Do remember that as Suharto planned to invade East Timor, US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were meeting him and were fully in the know about Indonesia’s intentions. They did not dissuade Suharto from launching the invasion. The ramifications were terrible. A genocide was unleashed. The people of East Timor remained captive to Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999.
Not until Suharto was forced from power in 1998 did the new regime in Jakarta agree to a referendum enabling East Timorese to decide whether they chose to remain with Indonesia or go their separate way as an independent nation. The people of East Timor overwhelmingly opted for independence. That was again a reason for the Indonesian army to launch a bloodbath of East Timorese, tens of thousands of whom perished before the country was able to gain independence in 2002. The country remains poor despite the presence of such resources as gas and oil but proud of its assertiveness as a nation. It has now become a member of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
General Suharto remains a figure to be compared with such men as the Congo’s Joseph Mobutu (who renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko and decided to call his country Zaire). Suharto’s iron grip on Indonesia coupled with the vast corruption which underpinned his rule and systematic human rights violations do not make comfortable reading for people in and beyond Indonesia.
To give him the honour of a national hero flies in the face of Indonesia’s history, for that history rests on the anti-colonial struggle that Ahmed Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta and other pro-independence nationalist leaders waged in the 1940s. President Prabowo Subianto’s act to lift Suharto posthumously to respectable heights does not change history. But it is a deliberate assault on history nevertheless, of the kind that has been observed in a number of nations in recent times.
Prabowo Subianto incidentally happens to be the former son-in-law of General Suharto. Besides, he is a former general. That his act of glorifying Suharto has not been challenged, though people of conscience in Indonesia have condemned it, is a sign of the Indonesian army beginning to convey the message that on its watch Sukarno, Hatta and Subandrio will remain airbrushed out of history. That is a terrible thing to happen, for whenever an army appropriates the right to refashion or manipulate a nation’s history and dominate politics, societies are thrown into unmitigated disaster.
Indonesia is a beautiful country where Asian values, based on rich traditions embedded in the past, have underscored its place in the world. And yet the silence which has punctuated the pogrom that pushed millions of Indonesians to a bloody end in the 1960s does its political classes little good. For Suharto loyalists to suggest that the late dictator’s rise to power was a response to an abortive power grab by the PKI does not hold water.
And it does not because of what Tan Sri Ghazalie Shafi, a former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, told a South Asian media conference in Kathmandu in 1994. All through 1964, said Shafi, the Malaysian government had kept in touch with a young Indonesian army officer named Suharto. Shafi did not go any further, but his message was loud and clear: The alleged PKI involvement in the tragedy of September 30, 1965 and the weeding out of the Sukarno government were an instance of regime change before that term was to come into use in our times.
Historians owe it to themselves to research the Suharto years, the transgressions the regime was guilty of at a time when Indonesia came into the grip of organised, officially sanctioned terror aimed at changing the course of the country’s history. That change in course was engineered by a harsh dictatorship not averse to enriching itself through corruption. Prabowo Subianto has disappointed people everywhere by having his former father-in-law redefined as a national hero.
When men and women, in the pursuit or exercise of unchecked power, seek to obliterate the past, to alter history by giving their dark spin on it, it is generations present and future which are fated to plough through life in absolute misery.
