Indonesia's history lesson for Korea

• Published Dec 2, 2015 4:32 PM KST
• Updated Dec 2, 2015 4:32 PM KST

By John Burton

As Korea continues to debate whether it should adopt state-authored history textbooks for middle and high school students and whether an “official” history is good history, perhaps it should study the example of how Indonesia has handled the most traumatic incident in its post-war history: the 1965 military coup that subsequently led to large-scale massacres.

On Sept. 30, 1965, six senior army generals were seized from their homes by a group of soldiers from the presidential guard, who then killed them. The army blamed the killings on the powerful Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), saying the incident was a prelude to the communists seizing power from the country’s long-ruling independence leader Sukarno. The claims triggered the massacre of up to 1 million PKI supporters, many of them ethnic Chinese who were said to be supporting the alleged plot that was said to have been engineered in Beijing.

A surviving army general, Suharto, took advantage of the turmoil to mount a coup d’etat shortly afterwards that placed him in power until 1998, when popular protests in the wake of the Asian financial crisis led to his ouster.

The above sequence of events in 1965 was the official narrative of Suharto’s New Order government and was constantly promoted through school textbooks and a three-hour propaganda film that was shown annually on television every Sept. 30 as well as in classrooms.

But in recent years questions have been raised about the murky circumstances of the murder of the generals 50 years ago. Some suggest it was the result of a botched army mutiny. Others say the PKI leader had turned rogue in encouraging the killings while the rest of the communist leadership was kept in the dark.

There is also speculation that Suharto orchestrated the killings to eliminate army rivals. There are even hints that the U.S. CIA or Britain’s MI6 successfully mounted a disinformation campaign that unjustly put the blame for the killing of the generals on the PKI, a group whose growing influence in a strategic Southeast Asian country the spy agencies wanted to counter.

After the overthrow of Suharto in 1998, a more liberal government decreed that the official version that had been learned for nearly 40 years would be replaced by the presentation in schools of several different interpretations and analyses. One alternative was that PKI as an organization was not involved in the Sept. 30 events. Another was that the killing of the generals had been triggered by an internal army conflict.

However, after the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general, in 2004, the policy was once again reversed under pressure from conservatives. Textbooks offering alternative versions of the 1965 events were recalled and destroyed and the teaching of a single, government-approved version was once again adopted and remains the case until now.

It is interesting to note that Korea and Indonesia have thus gone through a similar pattern of how they have treated sensitive historical issues in textbooks, having started with an official single version before progressing to a multiple interpretation approach before reverting to a single version once again (if President Park Geun-hye succeeds in her aim).

However, it has been difficult to stuff the historical genie back into the bottle, at least in the case of Indonesia. After all, at least one generation of Indonesian schoolchildren were exposed to new ideas of what happened in 1965. Moreover, teachers who have resisted the re-introduction of an official version have responded by encouraging students to investigate what happened in 1965 by interviewing their grandparents or conducting research on the internet, including work by foreign scholars who reject the official version.

Whether such methods would work in Korea remains uncertain because of the continued emphasis on rote-learning tailored to pass exams. But middle and high school students, at least those interested in history, cannot be shielded by the ongoing public debate about historical issues ranging from the Japanese colonial period to the rule of Park Chung-hee.

President Park’s quest to adopt textbooks extolling an official narrative is likely to prove futile if she wants to change public attitudes towards her father’s legacy, which will be determined, in part, by her own political and economic achievements during her five-year term.

The concept of imposing a single version of history on the public has been rendered obsolete anyway by the arrival of the digital age. But the case of Indonesia has also shown that public indoctrination will be inevitably eroded if there is increased academic freedom, campaigning by activists and a more open education system that encourages debate.

What the Blue House fails to understand that all of history is like the film, “Rashomon,” a tale of multiple viewpoints that can never be completely reconciled.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at johnburtonft@yahoo.com.