Indonesia: Top Academic Supported Militarism

David Jardine
An Australian academic’s book about Indonesia’s military reveals the alleged role of a leading academic and university rector in spinning history in favour of militarism and the dictatorship. Nugroho Notosusanto, one-time rector of the University of Indonesia and Minister of Education under Suharto, is the subject.
In 1945, when Indonesia proclaimed its independence from the Netherlands, it had no army-in-waiting, indeed no police, nothing at all in the way of a formal apparatus of repression or defence. The leadership was essentially anti-militarist and in the case of Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir, avowedly anti-fascist.
Twenty years later the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) submerged the nation's leftists, principally but not solely the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in a bloodbath that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
That bitter episode continues to be the target of official obfuscation and falsification. The shameful 2007 burnings of school history texts offering alternative versions of the events of 1965-66 demonstrate a continuum between democratic Indonesia and Suharto's New Order, at least where presentation of uncomfortable truths is concerned. The spectre of the New Order continues to hover above writers and historians.
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Source: University World News, Issue No: 0093 20 September 2009