SINGAPORE -- During Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Jakarta and Bandung for the Golden Jubilee Commemoration of the 1955 Bandung Conference, Indonesian organizers underscored China's place at the conference and Hu stayed an extra day to sign a Strategic Partnership Agreement between Indonesia and China, a partnership with four Asian strategic dimensions.
First, history was in the making. A bitter episode in Indonesian-Chinese relations was laid to rest, just as China was riling Japan for supposedly not facing up to its own history. Indonesians remember the trauma of the 1965 military coup. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had gained strength under the Sukarno regime to the alarm of Washington and others in the Western world. After the alleged assassination of military top brass (whose bodies were dumped in a well), military forces moved in and killed hundreds of thousands of suspected PKI members. The party was banned from Indonesian politics.
The Chinese Communist Party expressed stiff opposition to the incoming Suharto administration in 1967. Relations between the two countries were not normalized until 1990. The recent Strategic Partnership Agreement capped a painful episode in Sino-Indonesian relations and should pave the way for a visit to Beijing later this year by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.