INDONESIAN President Prabowo Subianto has a historic opportunity.
He has a narrow window to address the nation, call for an end to the endless debates over whether communism remains a constant threat to the country and direct our collective focus toward shared prosperity.
He has the stature to do it. He should also assure the public that militarism will not return at any cost. Signs are growing that the military is creeping back into social and political life, a sphere it had vacated for over two decades. Rampant, systemic corruption across nearly every layer of power, unchecked abuses within the executive, legislative and judicial branches and entrenched poverty remain the true crises facing Indonesia today, not communism.
We are also witnessing expanding militarisation, aggressive centralisation of authority and mounting human rights violations, not least the ongoing oppression of marginalised communities such as the Papuan people. These are the urgent realities before us. Even avowedly communist states like China and Vietnam run economic models far more pragmatically open than those of many self-styled democracies, and both are on track to prosperity.
Indonesians could be forgiven for chuckling at United States President Donald Trump, who has invoked “communism” and “communists” more than 100 times since late June.
In his stump speeches, Trump routinely brands political opponents as “hardcore, godless communists”. During his address marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, he went so far as to declare communism “a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11”. Such political theatre rings hollow against lived history.
I still vividly recall the trauma of 1965 as a seven-year-old boy. My father, an elementary school teacher, was nearly murdered by local members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) simply because he was Catholic.
Many of my childhood friends in North Sumatra could only watch in horror as their fathers and uncles were dragged from their homes. Some never returned; those who did were abandoned, stripped of basic human dignity.
Yet for decades, conservative factions, hard-liners, elements of the armed forces and entrenched political elites in Indonesia have weaponised this tragedy.
They invoke the “latent danger” of the long-dead PKI to silence dissent and justify systematic abuses, though none has ever substantiated their claim of an imminent communist resurgence in the country.
Today, government offices across the archipelago, for the 60th time since 1966, have lowered their flags to half-mast to commemorate the Sept 30, 1965 coup attempt attributed to the PKI, an upheaval that claimed the lives of six Army generals and a young lieutenant.
Ten months after that incident, the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly enacted Decree No. XXV/MPRS/1966, disbanding the party and outlawing Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Six decades on, that red phantom is still being dragged out to intimidate government critics. Even the new Criminal Code, which took effect earlier this year, preserves this obsession: Article 188 penalises the public dissemination of Marxist-Leninist doctrines or ideas that are contrary to Pancasila with up to five years in prison. The only modest concession is an exemption for academic research.
Prabowo should seize this moment to follow the courageous path forged by the late president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, who offered an unreserved apology to the victims of the 1965-1966 purge, and say clearly: Enough is enough.
Reports said 500,000 citizens were slaughtered in the bloody aftermath of the 1965 events. Over the 32 years of Soeharto’s authoritarian New Order regime, millions of relatives, descendants and falsely accused citizens were treated as domestic pariahs through systemic discrimination and arbitrary detentions.
While state persecution softened following the dictator’s fall in 1998, the paranoia never fully dissipated. Brief attempts to demythologise history, such as the 2004 curriculum reform that removed the knee-jerk “PKI” label from textbooks to present a more balanced inquiry, were swiftly abandoned under pressure from retired generals and reactionary groups. By 2006, the old orthodoxies had returned.
To this day, the state refuses to officially acknowledge the generation of children orphaned by the purges, cast adrift and marked by inherited guilt. Some might scoff at the notion that Prabowo possesses the moral authority to put this issue to rest.
Yet the record tells an interesting story: Across his public statements, there is virtually no direct account of Prabowo invoking the communist bogeyman to attack his adversaries.
It is true that his campaign surrogates weaponised the issue relentlessly against rival Joko “Jokowi” Widodo during the polarising 2014 and 2019 elections, slandering Jokowi’s family with baseless claims of communist ties. But Prabowo never endorsed those claims from his own mouth. Tellingly, the smear campaign evaporated the moment he entered Jokowi’s cabinet as defence minister in late 2019.
Prabowo has also shown a quiet willingness to revisit sanctified historical narratives. During a plenary cabinet meeting in May 2025, he pointedly revised the orthodox narrative surrounding the 1948 Madiun uprising, noting that the crisis was heavily engineered and exploited by Dutch colonial forces that refused to recognise Indonesian sovereignty.
On Oct 5, Prabowo will address the Indonesian Military (TNI) on its anniversary as commander in chief.
That forum, paired with this week’s solemn commemorations, offers him a definitive platform to reaffirm civilian supremacy and break the cycle of manufactured panic and fear.
Mr President, tell the nation that ghost has had its day. It is time to bury the spectre of communism once and for all, and lead Indonesia forward. —The Jakarta Post/ANN
Kornelius Purba is a senior editor at The Jakarta Post.
