Thursday, September 12, 2013

Supersemar is ...

Supersemar

Supersemar
The Supersemar, the Indonesian abbreviation for Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret was a document signed by the Indonesian President Sukarno on 11 March 1966, giving the army commander Lt. Gen. Suharto authority to take whatever measures he "deemed necessary" to restore order to the chaotic situation during the Indonesian killings of 1965â€"66. The abbreviation "Supersemar" is a play on the name of Semar, the mystic and powerful figure who commonly appears in Javanese mythology including wayang puppet shows. The invocation of Semar was presumably intended to help draw on Javanese mythology to lend support to Suharto's legitimacy during the period of the transition of authority from Sukarno to Suharto.
In effect, the Supersemar came to be seen as the key instrument of the transfer of executive power from Sukarno to Suharto.
SupersemarIII. Decides/OrdersLIEUTENANT GENERAL SOEHARTO, MINISTER/ARMY COMMANDERTo: In the name of the President/Supreme Commander/Great Leader of the Revolution1. Take all measures deemed necessary to guarantee security and calm as well as the stability of the progress of the Revolution, as well as to guarantee the personal safety and authority of the leadership of the President/Supreme Commander/Great Leader of the Revolution/holder of the Mandate of the [Provisional People's Consultative Assembly] for the sake of the integrity of the Nation and State of the Republic of Indonesia, and to resolutely implement all the teachings of the Great leader of the Revolution.2. Coordinate the execution of orders with the commanders of the other forces to the best of his ability.3. Report all actions related to duties and responsibilities as stated above.
Indonesians usually end documents with the place the document was signed and the date. Given that the Supersemar was supposedly signed in Bogor, it is odd that the Supersemar is signed "Djakarta". In his account of the events of March 1966, Hanafi, a close friend of Sukarno and ambassador to Cuba says that he went to Bogor on 12 March and met with Sukarno. He says that Sukarno told him Suharto had sent three generals with a document they had already prepared for him to sign. He says that Sukarno felt he had to sign it because he was in a tight spot, but that the generals had promised to defend Sukarno and that the order would not be misused. However, Martoidjojo, the commander of the presidential bodyguard, who went with Sukarno in the helicopter to Bogor, says that the Supersemar was typed in Bogor by Sukarno's adjutant and military secretary, Brig. Gen. Mochammed Sabur. Djamaluddin corroborates this.
The wording of the Supersemar itself could be read as a threat, namely the section reading "to guarantee the personal safety and authority of the leadership of Sukarno. However, in 1998, accusations appeared of an even more direct threat, namely that two members of the presidential guard had seen Gen. M. Jusuf and Gen M. Panggabean, 2nd assistant to the Army minister, pointing their pistols at Sukarno. M. Jusuf and others have denied this, and that Panggabean was even present. They called into doubt the credibility of key parts of the accusations, and said it was impossible for the two men to be so close to the president at the time.
One of the most obvious oddities regarding the Supersemar is that the original document can no longer be traced. Although Indonesia was in a fairly chaotic state at the time, it is surprising that more care wasn't taken to preserve a document that school history books cite as the legitimization of Suharto's ensuing actions. After all, the original document of the Indonesian Declaration of Independence is still preserved.
One of the publications to appear since the fall of Suharto alleges that there were several versions of the Supersemar. Even before the fall of Suharto, an official publication commemorating 30 years of Indonesian independence reproduced one version of Supersemar, while an officially sanctioned high school history textbook featured a different version.
According to Hanafi, in his discussions with Sukarno at the Bogor Palace on 12 March, Sukarno was angry that the Supersemar had been used to ban the PKI, as it was the prerogative of the president to ban political parties. He said he had asked Third Deputy Prime Minister Johannes Leimena to take a written order to Suharto, and that he would wait to see what Suharto's reaction was â€" whether he would obey it or not. He asked Hanafi to help Third Deputy Prime Minister Chaerul Saleh and First Deputy Prime Minister Subandrio The two men showed Hanafi the "Order of 13 March", which stated that the Order of 11 March was technical and administrative in nature, not political, warned General Suharto that he wasn't to take any actions outside the scope of the order and asked Suharto to report to the president at the palace. Saleh planned to make copies of the order and distribute them to loyal members of the palace guard and to Sukarno's young followers. Hanafi says 5,000 copies were made, and that he took a few back to Jakarta with him, but he does not know what happened to the others.

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