Remembering the Communist Party (PKI) in the post Suharto era.

G30S PKI

Under General Suharto, after 1984, every September 30th citizens, particularly schoolchildren, were obliged to watch Arifin C Noor’s propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the September 30 Movement and the Indonesian Communist Party), which portrayed the events of 1965, including the murders of six Indonesian Army generals on the night of the 30th, according to the official view, that is, that the murders constituted an attempt by the Communist Party to overthrow the government.

Pengkhianatan G30S PKI

The Executive Director of the Institute for Public Studies (IPS), Fadli Zon, however complains that these days the traditional view of events is being attacked from all sides and ordinary people are becoming confused.

The efforts to change the story of G30S/PKI and to make the PKI look like they were the victims and not the instigators keeps going on and is getting more and more intense.

There were now at least five versions of the events of 1965, he said, some of which blamed the PKI for part involvement in a coup attempt, some exonerated the PKI entirely, and some blamed the CIA and MI6.

Some of these alternative views managed to find their way into school history text books in 2004, which were later banned, and some of them then confiscated and publicly burned, as the authorities attempted to re-assert the primacy of the orthodox view of history.

Fadli said the aim of the PKI was always to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and they had attempted to do so three times, in 1926, 1948, and then 1965. antara

Kediri

Akhyar, a resident of Kanigoro village in Kediri, remembers how on 19th January 1965 thousands of Communist Party members attacked a meeting of the Indonesian Islamic Students association, (PII, Pelajar Islam Indonesia) being held in a mosque in the village. Some of the students were tortured and killed, he said.

Akhyar says however that after the events of September 30th local people had their revenge on the communists, and Kanigoro became a centre of anti-communist activity, with the bodies of murdered communists being buried in a mass grave, today called “Makam Parik”. antara

Madiun

Madiun, like Kediri, was once known as a stronghold of the Communist Party, but the deputy mayor of the regency, Gandhi Yunita, said on 1st October, Pancasila Day, that he hoped this stigma had finally been erased.

Gandhi said that in the 1940’s the PKI moved its base from Solo to Madiun and in 1948 staged a rebellion in the town, led by Amir Muso, in an attempt to establish a Peoples’ Republic. In the village of Kresek in September 1948 Gandhi says communists murdered many clerics, policemen, teachers, health workers, and journalists, before their rebellion was crushed by the Siliwangi division of the Army. tempo

Even to this day the people of Madiun have not gotten over the psychological trauma of the PKI’s atrocities.