Surabaya – Accusations that left-wing groups were behind last week's attacks on opposition offices in President Abdurrahman Wahid's home province were misguided attempts to turn his supporters against them, analysts said here.
Opposition Golkar party leaders including chairman Akbar Tanjung and national assembly (MPR) chairman Amien Rais have blamed leftists, the socialist People's Democratic Party (PRD) and radical student groups for the stoning, burning and ransacking of Golkar party offices in East Java.
Rallies by fanatical Wahid supporters protesting against efforts by the national parliament to oust the president over unproven claims of corruption erupted into attacks on Golkar offices in eleven East Java towns, including the capital Surabaya.
"The demonstrations in East Java and other areas were probably infiltrated by communists or the long arm of the PKI [former Indonesian Communist Party]," Rais, one of Wahid's fiercest critics, told the Java Post newspaper.
Rais, who heads the National Mandate Party (PAN), leads a loose coalition of Muslim-based parties spearheading efforts to force Wahid to resign or be impeached.
A professor at Surabaya's Airlangga University, Dede Utomo, said the finger-pointing at left-wing groups could be read as attempts to revive past hatreds between the mass Muslim organisation Nhadlatul Ulama (NU) and left-wing groups.
Bitter antipathies between the two groups erupted in the mid 1960's when hundreds of thousands of alleged PKI members and sympathisers were slaughtered and up to one million detained following an alleged coup attempt blamed on the communists.
Wahid, who led the 40-million strong NU for 15 years, has acknowledged and apologised for the role of NU's paramilitary guards Banser in the slaughters, which were concentrated in East Java and Central Java.
"Coming from Amien Rais it's clearly an attempt to revive those divisions," Utomo said. "But they're not based on reality. Maybe Akbar and Amien don't know that Banser is now in close contact with former [communist] political prisoners, and they're organising with NU protection."
When a mass grave of executed prisoners accused of communist sympathies was dug up by relatives in Central Java last year, 300 Banser guards provided protection, Utomo said.
The NU youth wing Ansor has formed a committee to investigate the 1965-1966 killings, he added. "Things have changed quite a bit since then. There's a lot of cooperation between Banser and former communists and their relatives."
The accusations from Tanjung were an attempt to deflect the anti-Golkar sentiments raging among Wahid's supporters over efforts to impeach the president, Utomo said.
Wahid told East Java community leaders in Surabaya on Friday that he had received police and military reports blaming a foreign-funded group for leading the attacks on Golkar offices in eleven places.
Without identifying the groups, Wahid said they were "the same people who stirred up the military" into attacking an opposition party headquarters in 1996.
Wahid's comments could also be an attempt to shift blame from his supporters, Utomo said. "I think what Gus Dur is trying to do is deflect the attacks on NU. Or else he's saying what Akbar and Amien and their followers in Jakarta want to hear."
NU's leader in East Java, Ali Maschin Musa, said his members were unconcerned by accusations against left-wing groups. "We're not interested. It's not us they're blaming," Musa told AFP. "The police can say what they like, but they have to get proof," he said.
There was no chance of the accusations provoking anger from NU members towards PRD or student groups, he said. "The people in the wrong here are the political leaders in Jakarta trying to violate the consitution. That's our focus, defending the constitution," Musa said.