Vaudine England – History is becoming one of the hottest topics in Indonesia, with President Abdurrahman Wahid paying visits to former presidents, dissidents and alleged communists while the national human rights body opens inquiries into a range of recent traumas.

Mr Wahid has given the go-ahead to investigate the biggest and most mysterious trauma of all: the massacre of half a million people in 1965 and 1966 just as a young and thrusting Suharto was consolidating his takeover of the presidency.

More recent traumas, apart from the rampage through East Timor last year, include the riots of 1998 which finally dispatched Suharto from office, the apparent military attack on then opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri's party headquarters in 1996, and the little-known deaths of Muslims at Jakarta's Tandjung Priok port area in 1984, where a mass grave has recently been revealed.

Many of the key players in these events are still alive, albeit ailing, and provide easy targets for a government eager to show its reformist credentials.

Not surprisingly, all inquiries now under way promise to provide further ammunition against the New Order regime of former strongman Suharto. They also promise to destroy careers, unearth unpalatable truths and further threaten the old guard in the armed forces.

Betraying just how sensitive such subjects are is the continued insistence of the former ruling party, Golkar, to defend a decree which prohibits any teaching of Marxist or communist ideas. Decree XXV of 1966 also legitimised the slaughter of alleged communists following the banning of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), then Asia's largest legal communist party outside China.

In contrast, when President Wahid was on a recent trip to Paris, he received Ibarruri Aidit, daughter of Dipa Nusantara Aidit, the PKI leader, who was killed shortly after the abortive coup was blamed on the party in 1965. "I am very heartened with his statement that a person like me does not need the Government's protection, because it is my right to go home," she said.

Crucial to Suharto's claim to legitimacy was his claim of a PKI coup attempt in 1965 requiring Suharto, then head of Kostrad special forces, to banish communism and save the nation, but scholars question key details in the Suhartoist version of events, with some saying Suharto mounted the coup. "Many people say that the PKI was to blame while others say that the PKI was not to blame. The matter should be settled in a court of law," said Mr Wahid.

Either way, the fact remains that a killing spree left at least 500,000 dead, and the killers were ordinary people aligned to groups such as the Indonesian Democratic Party (now led by Vice- President Megawati) and the Nahdlatul Ulama, until recently chaired by Mr Wahid. "I apologised for the murders of people who were said to be communists ... I never hid all this," Mr Wahid said.

While scores of alleged communists and former political prisoners must still carry damaging marks on their identity cards, old- guard generals are refusing to open up about their pasts. Former vice-president to Mr Suharto, General Try Sutrisno stands in the firing line on the 1984 massacre in Tandjung Priok, while former armed forces chief General Feisal Tandjung is being asked to explain the July 27, 1996, attack on Megawati's party headquarters.