Jakarta – Indonesia's reformist government is reviewing official histories of key moments in the country's past that it says were misrepresented by former President Suharto's regime.

Education Minister Yaha Muhaimin said that a government team was looking at school history textbooks to make sure they reflected accurately what happened in the country. "This is important, so that our children can get to know the facts," Mr Muhaimin was quoted by The Indonesian Observer as saying.

Critics say that Mr Suharto, who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist for 32 years, justified and bolstered his authority by falsifying history. He was ousted in street protests fuelled by the economic crisis in 1998.

Mr Muhaimin said that an attempted coup on September 30, 1965, blamed on communists, needed to be reassessed. The abortive coup triggered a backlash by the military and the right-wing that ended in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 people accused of being communist sympathisers. Many were ethnic Chinese.

The events discredited founding President Sukarno and enabled Mr Suharto, who was an obscure general before the coup, to rise to power. Speculation continues over the role of the different personalities and camps in the coup attempt and the true facts remain murky, historians say, according to the Observer.

Mr Muhaimin admitted that years of government indoctrination were to blame for the lack of knowledge about the event. "The children should also know that this incident happened because of our own negligence."

Mr Muhaimin also cast doubt on a 1949 attack by independence fighters, opposed to Dutch colonial rule, on the Javanese city of Yogyakarta in which Mr Suharto was cast as the hero, the Observer reported.

Indonesia marked the 35th anniversary of its victory over communism on Sunday with a scaled-down ceremony that marked the end of an era in the 35-year history of the commemoration.

Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri presided over the ceremony in silence at the Lubang Buaya (Crocodile Hole) Monument in East Jakarta. The site was used by the Indonesian Communist Party to launch the coup attempt in 1965.