Anissa S. Febrina, Jakarta – Teachers, scholars, activists and members of the public are joining hands to file a petition and a legal action against a recent ban issued by the Attorney General's Office on a number of history textbooks.
The AGO's ruling is philosophically unconstitutional and technically faulty, scholars and activists say.
"The state is supposed to educate the nation as stipulated in the Constitution. But instead it insists on only mentioning a historical fact which is still in dispute," Indonesian History Society representative Asvi Warman Adam said last week.
Earlier this month, the AGO banned dozens of school books that do not make mention of the Indonesian Communist Party's (PKI) 1948 coup d'etat, as well as those missing the letters PKI after G30S (the September 30th movement).
The books not only failed to state the facts but challenged some "accepted truths", which could create public disorder, the AGO announced.
Despite scholars arguing the PKI was not the sole mastermind of the 1965 coup d'etat, which was followed by mass killings, the state has continued to insist otherwise, even after the fall of Soeharto.
A 2004 junior high school and high school curriculum tried to explain more comprehensively the events surrounding Sept. 30, 1965, by letting students discuss the different analyses. The banned books were written based on the 2004 curriculum, which was later revised by the National Education Ministry.
"As teachers, we are supposed to not only reveal historical facts, but also to explain the larger context and meaning of an event like G30S," said Ratna Hapsari, the head of Jakarta's history teachers association.
Besides being unconstitutional, the ruling was also technically wrong as it also banned a number of textbooks that were not supposed to contain the information the AGO said was missing, she said.
"The book for seventh graders by Tugiyono, for example, does not cover the PKI coup d'etat because that chapter is for ninth graders," Asvi said. "Seventh graders only learn the pre-modern history of kingdoms in the archipelago."
But, despite technicalities, the root of the problem lies in the fact the state still holds the power to censor information and historical facts, Indonesian Legal Aid and Human Rights Association (PBHI) head Johnson Panjaitan said.
The PBHI plans to take legal action against the ban. "If the nation has truly been reformed, there should no longer be institutions capable of censoring public information," Johnson said.
The AGO has the authority to monitor the circulation of written materials and has banned a number of books "deemed capable of disrupting political stability" since the Soeharto era.
After the fall of Soeharto in 1998, alternative information on the 1965 bloodbath, previously only discussed as an underground movement, started to surface. In 2002, during the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid, a number of noted historians issued a different analysis of G30S in a supplement to the state's version of Indonesian history and distributed it to schools.
In the spirit of reform, the effort was later on accommodated by the National Education Ministry's research and development center to be included in the 2004 curriculum.
One history textbook for 12th graders, based on the 2004 curriculum, for example, cited five different versions of the masterminds of the September event using more than 10 books written by local and foreign scholars as references.