Jakarta – President Prabowo Subianto has created a new sub-category of National Hero, an official title which the country awards to its best sons and daughters for outstanding services to the nation.

This new category is for "false heroes" to accommodate Indonesia's second president Soeharto, who ruled the country from 1966 to 1998 with an iron fist and with lots of bloods on his hands. He may be a hero to some, but to the nation, he cannot be but a false one, not until we clarify his role in the military-led mass killing campaigns in the mid-1960s that led to his seizure of power which he held on to for over three decades.

We lament that President Prabowo ignored the protests these past few weeks in opposition to the plan to confer the title on Soeharto on National Hero Day on Monday. Adding insult to injury, he added the name of Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the chief of the Army's Special Forces who led the military's extrajudicial slaughter in the mid-1960s, to the list of this year's recipients of the hero title.

It is an affront to the nation's sense of justice, and goes against the values enshrined in the state ideology of Pancasila.

Massive corruption during Soeharto's reign brought the country to the brink of an economic collapse in 1998. He squandered massive windfalls from the oil booms of the 1970s and 1980s when Indonesia was a net oil exporting country. He enriched his family, relatives and cronies but left most of the nation impoverished.

Conferring the national hero title on Soeharto and Sarwo Edhie reopens an old national wound that has hardly healed from the bloodbath of the 1960s, when they led the Army campaign to crush the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) through extra-judicial mass killings conducted in collaboration with paramilitary groups.

We will never know the extent of the deaths because the military keeps preventing any attempt to dig into the truth about the circumstances of the political struggle that forced Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, to hand over power to Soeharto. But we know it was bloody and traumatic, and it has left a deep impact on the nation's psyche to this day.

Successive governments have since tried to erase this darkest era in the national history from our collective memory. The current project to rewrite the national history will not likely lead to an admission of the genocide of the 1960s.

Soeharto was clearly a historical mistake, and if the proverb "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" rings true, we must brace ourselves to repeat that mistake.

We are seeing a consistent pattern to whitewash the horrors of the Soeharto regime, including the massacre and persecution of PKI members, supporters, sympathizers and their relatives, children and grandchildren, not to mention the way he silenced critics.

The ghosts of the victims and the perpetrators of that tragic period will not likely rest in peace until we as a nation own up to our history.

The Soeharto clan, through their supporters, have long been trying to get the government to bestow the hero title on him. Presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Joko Widodo rightly rejected the request. Prabowo is too personally conflicted to be making the decision. As the former son-in-law of Soeharto, and one who built his career in the Army, he should have excused himself from making the final decision and deferred it to the next president.

The nation may one day accept Soeharto's contribution and services to give him the national hero title, a real one rather than false, but for this to happen, first we need to establish the role he played in the tragedy of the 1960s.

The military should stop preventing every attempt at uncovering the truths surrounding those years. This is for Soeharto's own good, for the military's own good and ultimately, for the good of the nation.

Six decades have lapsed, surely the nation deserves to know the truth. Otherwise, we as a nation will never heal.

Source: https://asianews.network/false-national-heroes-the-jakarta-post