Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – More than three decades after an abortive coup blamed on the communists, Indonesians are still unable to come to grips with this bit of their nation's history.

Dr Ribka Tjiptaning Proletariati has reignited the debate over revoking a decree banning communism with her recently-launched autobiography entitled, I Am Proud To Be A Child Of A PKI Member, referring to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

"If the motivation is to spread communism then the book must be banned," Vice-President Hamzah Haz said last week, soon after the book was released to coincide with the anniversary of the coup.

And Dr Ribka, a member of the ruling PDI-P, is now awaiting police summons after a television interview where she talked about the possibility of setting up a party with the communist ideology, which was banned in a 1966 decree issued by the National Assembly.

The Attorney-General's office, the police and the intelligence agency are reportedly studying the book to see whether it contains subversive material.

But Dr Ribka says she is unperturbed, after living for 37 years in a country where people view communists with barely-suppressed hostility.

"I don't mind," she told The Straits Times. "The more controversial it is, the more people will want to read the book." The leading Kompas daily said communism is still perceived as a "scary ghost" – an atheistic teaching that promotes cruelty, violence and oppression.

In a poll published by the daily last week, the majority of respondents referred to communism as a "bad thing".

And although 80 per cent of the 825 respondents welcome former PKI members in their neighbourhood, most do not want them to hold positions in the government and law enforcement.

The September 30, 1965 coup, which claimed the lives of seven ranking army officers, led to the fall of founding president Sukarno and paved the way for former president Suharto's rise to power.

What followed was the alleged massacre and persecution of more than 500,000 communist members and sympathisers, supposedly by the army with the help of Muslim groups.

For the next 32 years, family members of the communists found themselves being denied access to jobs and education.

For years, until the 1998 fall of Suharto, television stations were required to broadcast the government's version of the event in a movie.

October 1, the Sanctity Day of Pancasila (the country's ideology), was made a day of solemn commemoration of the coup victims. But last Wednesday, President Megawati Sukarnoputri and Mr Hamzah were surprisingly absent at the ceremony.

Mrs Amelia Yani, the daughter of coup victim General A. Yani, said: "We felt that our parents' death are no longer honoured." But commentators thought their absence was justified, considering that the truth behind the coup has been disputed with the emergence of recently released CIA documents and studies on the events surrounding it.

Historians have been questioning the role of Suharto and Washington in the abortive coup, against the backdrop of the Cold War between the capitalist West and the socialist East.

Political scientist Harry Tjan Silalahi said: "Rewriting the history is now a must to uncover the truth." But analysts said it would still be a long time before the country would lift the ban on PKI and communist ideology.

An attempt to lift it, made by former president Abdurrahman Wahid in 2000, had drawn opposition from Muslim factions who feared the communist party's revival.

Shunned as communists

• Dr Ribka cannot obtain a licence to practise medicine because of her father's ties to the PKI.
• Community leaders have tried to forbid people from seeing her at a private foundation-owned clinic.
• For years, her family was in hiding. "We ate cats and mice, slept in terminals and people's kitchens."