Commemoration of 1 October,“Hari Kesaktian Pancasila”:a post mortem analysis?

Abstract

On the morning of 1 October 1997 Jakarta officials, including the highest ranks of the military and the civil service, gathered to commemorate the last Hari Kesaktian Pancasila [Sacred Pancasila Day] of Suharto's regime. The site at which they gathered was Monumen Pancasila Sakti [Sacred Pancasila Monument], an elaborate monument and museum complex built around the disused well into which the bodies of the six army generals and one lieutenant, victims of the 1965 coup attempt, had been dumped. By 1997 commemoration of Hari Kesaktian Pancasila was a well-established state ritual. A commemorative ceremony had been held at the monument for thirty consecutive years of the New Order period.While official representation of the events of 1 October 1965 has previously received considerable attention in scholarship on Indonesia, the annual commemorative day upon which Indonesians were reminded of the coup attempt has escaped detailed analysis. 2 The significance of commemoration is that ". . . it involves the co-ordination of individual and group memories, whose result may appear consensual when they are in fact a product of the processes of intense contest, struggle and, in some cases annihilation" (Gillis 1994, 5). Hari Kesaktian Pancasila celebrated a very selective memory of both the coup attempt and the transition years from Sukarno to Suharto. It focused solely on the violence directed at the seven army victims of the coup attempt of 1 October. After the crushing of the Thirtieth of September movement up to one million people were killed, and many others imprisoned, for membership of or affiliation with the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) (Cribb 1990, 13). In reality, multiple memories of the transition years exist, yet the purpose of commemoration of 1 October is to telescope these memories into a singular memory of the transitionthat of the violence against the military "heroes".Hari Kesaktian Pancasila is most commonly perceived to be the day on which Indonesians were reminded of the official version of the coup attempt, in which the communist party was the culprit. While this was certainly the main focus of the Asian Studies Review. The name Suharto chose for the commemorative day of 1 October had considerable political significance. In his 1967 presidential decision, regarding this new commemorative date, Suharto declared that commemoration of Hari Kesaktian Pancasila was premised on the special character and features of 1 October as a day on which people's certainty in the truth and kesaktian of the Pancasila, as the only life view which can unite the entire state, nation and Indonesian people, was strengthened and instilled (Soedjono 1975, xiii [emphasis added]). Suharto implied that from 1 October 1965 onwards the people, presumably under the direction of Suharto and the army, embraced the Pancasila and rejected all other life views, notably communism (which Suharto banned at the 44 Katharine E. McGregor © Asian Studies Association of Australia 2002.Figure 3: Monumen Pancasila Sakti featuring life-sized po...

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