Should he go or should he stay home and send a lower-ranking proxy? Kevin Rudd will be one of many foreign leaders torn between the pros and cons of attending the imminent funeral for the former Indonesian president Soeharto.

To attend will be seen in many quarters as conferring some kind of forgiveness for the dark side of Soeharto's rise to power and his 32 years ruling our huge neighbour: the massacre of some half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party, the tens of thousands of political enemies locked up on Buru Island and places of banishment, the rigged and brutal takeovers of Papua and East Timor, the suppression of dissent, the "mysterious killings", the egregious economic rent-seeking of his family members and cronies.

Not to go will dissociate present-day Australia from a period encompassing more than half the time since the independence leaders Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the Indonesian republic in 1945, a time when a battered and confused people found a kind of stability and moved out of desperate poverty into a modest prosperity, where most found religious freedom, a lot the means to educate themselves, and where despite the top-down corruption, ministers such as Mohamad Sadli, who died last week at 85, were given scope to build a modern economy.

It would also reek of hypocrisy. From Harold Holt telling a New York audience approvingly about how Soeharto's army was "knocking off" the communists, to favourable maritime boundary agreements, to the Indonesian support for Australian positions in Association of South-East Asian Nations and Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forums, to Jakarta's tacit support for the reach of US power through its archipelago, Australian governments consistently saw Soeharto's rule as a strategic plus for this country. We encouraged one of his worst adventures – the annexation of Portuguese Timor – when arguably we could have talked him out of it.

Had the Asian financial crisis not brought his rule to a involuntary end in May 1998, Australian prime ministers would have been courting Soeharto for many more years.

So we think Mr Rudd should go – as a mark of respect for the office, and as a sign of our involvement with Indonesia. Behind the various issues of contemporary friction – asylum seekers, the safety standards of Indonesian airlines, the death penalties hanging over Australian drug traffickers – the Soeharto years were a slab of history from which the stories still need to be told, fully and truthfully.