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The Modern Political Economy
New York
1993
1. The Coup That Failed
During the last months of 1965 the Indonesian nation was gripped in a great and tragic madness. It was one of those times in human affairs when the assumptions on which civic life depends are swept away in a flood of hate and violence. In the capital city of Jakarta the children of the elite took to the streets, and public buildings were sacked. In the countryside of Java and Bali, villagers attacked their neighbors with knives and machetes. The dead were too numerous to count; estimates ran into the hundreds of thousands. By the time the killing came to an end, the third largest Communist party in the world lay destroyed.
It is in the nature of such events that controversy should surround the central questions they present. 1 Much of the controversy has concerned the role the Communist party of Indonesia played in the violent coup attempt that set so many other bloody events in motion. Another controversial subject has been the extent to which Sukarno himself might have known in advance about the attempted coup by dissident army officers. Still other questions have concerned the role of Soeharto, the army general who succeeded to power in the aftermath of the killings, and the role of the Chinese and the Americans in the affair. Yet, by far the most disturbing question has been how so many people could die, not anonymously as in modern warfare, but at the hands of their neighbors.
Wholly satisfactory answers to these questions will probably continue to elude us. Too many participants are dead, too many survivors silent. The trauma remains one from which the society can hardly be said to have recovered.
Nevertheless, it is important to search out as best one can the true nature of what happened. For these violent events, and the perceptions of those who survived them, contain the origins of much of what followed.
The Immediate Background to the Coup
The story begins in Jakarta in August 1965. It was a time of great discord in Indonesia's national government. President Sukarno seemed nominally supreme in his command of state affairs, but this was far from the actual case. He had presided over the banishment from public life of a growing number of nationally prominent personalities and their parties, until his government no longer represented a large portion of the nation's elite. As his political base narrowed, his role was increasingly reduced to that of balancing the interests and ambitions of the two powerful groups that remained, the Communist party and the army. The party leaders and the army had been deeply divided over a number of issues for many years. Neither side doubted that some kind of showdown would eventually occur between them. At the time, however, both had reason to feel unprepared for such a test of strength.
The Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI) had suffered a serious setback during the previous year. Breaking with its own long-term strategy of working in concert with other major groups in the national front, the party had struck out on its own in urging tenant farmers in Central and East Java to take "unilateral action" against their landlords, to make the land they tilled their own. But the campaign was disastrously ill conceived and considerable violence occurred; in the end the party's rural forces were bested. Meanwhile, the party was progressing in its efforts to infiltrate the army officer corps, but the number of officers it could rely on in a physical showdown was small.
The leadership of the Indonesian National Army (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, or TNI) had meanwhile been shaken by evidence of significant disunity in its own senior ranks. A seminar that had been called earlier in the year to draw the army's regional commanders together in a unified stand on matters of national policy had degenerated into polemics. It was the first such meeting since the regional rebellions of the late 1950s had been put down. In the political environment of 1965, army unity in ideological matters had become a high priority. According to participants, a significant minority of commanders held out in support of Sukarno's increasingly leftist domestic and international priorities.
In the background lay Indonesia's "confrontation" against neighboring Malaysia. The decision to "confront" the founding of Malaysia in late 1963 may well have been the result of happenstance as much as studied Indonesian intent. In any case, the time could not have been worse from the Indonesian point of view. The country was in the midst of a prolonged drought; rice production was down, and food was in short supply. In addition, the confrontation campaign disrupted Indonesia's exports and this, in turn, reduced not only the country's earnings of foreign exchange, but also the government's revenues, the bulk of which came from taxes on foreign trade. Thus the government was increasingly obliged to finance its own operations by printing paper money. Inflation spiraled. Among the urban population, many of whom depended on civil servants' incomes, the conditions of daily life became harsh indeed.
The campaign against Malaysia created serious problems for the Indonesian armed forces. The army was organized and trained for territorial defense; most of its units had no experience outside their native provinces. The air and naval arms necessary for invasion had proven hopelessly inadequate in the West Irian campaign. The army leadership also mistrusted both the air and naval services; they had been equipped and trained in recent years by the Russians, and their leaders were on good terms with the local Communist party leaders. Moreover, army intelligence had little knowledge of what awaited invading forces on their arrival on the Malayan peninsula; the first small units sent ashore on intelligence and sabotage missions had been quickly rounded up. But the balance of military forces on either side of the Straits of Malacca was not what weighed most heavily on the army commanders. Their main concern was the domestic political situation. From the outset they had to avoid the Communist party outflanking them on an issue of such strong nationalist appeal. As plans for the invasion of Malaysia advanced, they also had to avoid having their best and most loyal officers and their units removed from Java. The recent Communist party campaign in the countryside of Java left army commanders deeply concerned about their own rear defenses. From late 1964 on, Indonesian army intelligence officers were in secret communication with their opposite numbers in Kuala Lumpur, with a view to limiting the scale and costs of engagement. 2
The anti-Malaysia campaign presented the Communist party, on the other hand, with an opportunity to strengthen its standing with Sukarno and to isolate Indonesia still further from the Western powers. Sukarno was deeply committed personally to the anti-Malaysia policy but, after almost two years, little had happened beyond the war of propaganda; the army was obviously dragging its feet. By the beginning of 1965 the Communist party was pressing for a full role in the cabinet, and under the ground rules Sukarno himself had laid down, the party could not be denied indefinitely. In the early months of the year the party had further unnerved the generals by making two even more threatening proposals: (1) that the commanders of the armed forces, at every level, should be advised by a "troika" of political commissars, one of whom would represent the Communist party; and (2) that "workers and peasants" should be armed in a "fifth force" for the "safeguarding of the revolution." By March 1965 Sukarno was receiving intelligence reports that some army commanders were making plans to overthrow him. In May he began to support the "troika" idea.
These developments thoroughly alarmed the army leadership, as well as many in the civilian elite. Lt. Gen. Achmad Yani, the army commander-in-chief, was now meeting regularly with a "brain trust" of his closest associates to discuss the army's deteriorating political position. He protested the party proposals. He denied reports of an army plot against the president. But the party initiatives had placed him and his colleagues thoroughly on the defensive, and civilian friends wondered how long the army could stave off the PKI's accession to formal power.
All this fed into the tension that was mounting in the background when, on August 3, Sukarno suddenly fell ill. The precise nature of his illness was never clear. He had had a long-term kidney condition and periodically sought treatment in Vienna. On this occasion, however, a team of Chinese doctors was flown in from Beijing, and Sukarno's personal staff was totally mute about his condition. The impact this development had on both the party and army leaders is not difficult to imagine. Indeed, both were soon engaged in planning their moves should Sukarno suddenly die. Within a few days, Sukarno was said to be recovering; soon he was said to be preparing his annual address for Independence Day on August 17. But leaders of the party and the army were now receiving reports that the other was on the verge of a coup. By early September the Jakarta press was referring to rumors of a possible coup by either the army or the party. As things turned out, it was the army's most senior officers who were caught unprepared.
The Coup and Its Aftermath
In the early hours of October 1 General Yani and five of his closest army associates, all general officers, were routed from their beds by units of the presidential security guard and told the president wished to see them immediately. Three resisted and were shot and killed on the spot; the other three were bundled into trucks and taken away, along with the bodies of the three dead. The most senior general of all, Abdul Haris Nasution, the celebrated former army commander and now Minister of Defense, also was sought at his home that night but escaped, although an aide was killed and Nasution's young daughter mortally wounded. (Nasution had gone over a garden wall to the grounds of the Iraqi ambassador's neighboring residence, but broke his leg in the fall and remained hidden there until well after dawn.)
The following morning Radio Indonesia announced that army units under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Untung, the commander of a battalion of the presidential guard, had forestalled a coup that was planned by a Council of Generals. The statement declared, inter alia: "Power-mad generals and officers who have neglected the lot of their men and who above the accumulated sufferings of their men have lived in luxury, led a gay life, insulted our women and wasted government funds, must be kicked out of the army and punished accordingly. The army is not for generals, but is the possession of all the soldiers of the army who are loyal to the ideals of the Revolution of August 1945." 3 A later broadcast reported that a Revolutionary Council would be named as the "source of all authority in the Republic of Indonesia." 4 President Sukarno was said to be safe, but his whereabouts were not disclosed.
In a matter of hours, amid continued uncertainty about where either Sukarno or the missing generals were, the uprising was brought under control by Major General Soeharto, commander of the Army Strategic Reserve, without a shot being fired. Sukarno was found to have gone to a nearby air base, as had D. N. Aidit, the leader of the Communist party. The army occupied the air base during the night of October 1, after Sukarno had been advised to leave and the Communist party chairman had fled. The bodies of all six missing generals were found a few days later in a well on the edge of the base. Nasution's daughter died of her wounds soon thereafter. The violence of these deaths, coupled with the breach of Guided Democracy convention, infuriated the army leadership that remained and deeply shocked many of the civilian elite.
Meanwhile, the leaders of several army units in Central Java declared their support for the Revolutionary Council. The mayors of several towns did the same. There were a few mass demonstrations of support by local communist organizations. Otherwise, the province remained in a state of suspended animation until mid-October, when a battalion of paratroopers arrived from Jakarta to bring the rebel units to heel. The arrival of this battalion seems to have spurred the local Left to action. Roadblocks were set up; telephone lines were cut. The paratroopers made a show of strength in one town after another, and by the end of the month the rebel army units agreed to follow orders and leave the province.
By this time, however, attacks were beginning on Communist party offices and on Chinese property in several cities of Central Java, anticommunist demonstrators had been fired on, and reports were circulating that religious and nationalist leaders had been killed. By early November, still able to control only a single town at a time, the paratroopers began arming youths from religious and nationalist organizations. The affair was soon thoroughly one-sided, and killings occurred on a massive scale.
A short story written by Umar Kayyam in 1966 provides a fictional account, based on an eyewitness interview, of an army "sweep" through a rural communist stronghold:
Suddenly people were running through the streets screaming that the army had taken the village of B. The army had moved in quickly and silently, passing through barricades the people had thought impenetrable, attacking without warning. What kind of force were they dealing with? Some kind of spirit? The army was everywhere.
The farmers, drilled by Hassan and their own leaders, fought relentlessly. They took up guns, Molotov cocktails, sharpened bamboo poles, any available weapon. The reactionary army was their enemy. It had come and it would kill them and rob them of their land unless they destroyed it first.
But one by one the villages of the Subdistrict fell. Resistance was soon crushed, and the outcome of the fighting was horrible. Insufficiently trained, the farmers resisted blindly and in a single day the whole (of) T. had fallen and was occupied by the army. The farmers in their frenzy set fire to their own homes and granaries. Those who didn't surrender were cut down mercilessly. Corpses lay sprawled on the dikes of the rice fields, along the banks of the rivers, and on the footpaths throughout the countryside. One quarter of the inhabitants of the Subdistrict were dead and nearly half of the surviving men taken captive. 5
In East Java no army units declared support for the Revolutionary Council. The commander of the naval base at Surabaya did so, however, on October 1, and the following day the communist labor union began a previously announced program of taking over the state enterprises in the province. On October 13 the Islamic youth organization, Ansor, held rallies in several towns, which were followed by attacks on Communist party offices; at one such rally, eleven party supporters were hacked to death. On October 18 a clash between communist and Ansor youth left ninety-seven dead. In the next few days several thousand Communist party supporters were reported massacred. Army units seemed to have been directly involved in the killing by the end of October, but chiefly in the towns. In the villages religious leaders seemed to have been given their head. By mid-November killings had taken place throughout the province. 6
In Bali rumors were soon circulating about what was happening in Central and East Java. On November 11 a clash between communist and Nationalist Party youths left seven dead. By the first week of December the killing was widespread.
Fictional accounts tell of youths interrogating their friends and former teachers, even their family doctors. Brutal beatings took place. Groups were taken to a river bank and shot. Others were made to sit at the edge of their graves, and then shot. 7
Satyagraha Hoerip, in "The Climax," describes a district in which hundreds were killed in a three-week period. "Even those with only minimal connections [with the Communist party] had been killed. Others were given to the authorities, then taken back at night and taken out of town." 8 The story's narrator describes his efforts, eventually successful, to avoid killing his brother-in-law.
In each province, after several weeks of this mass butchery, local army leaders appeared to have decided that the violence had gone far enough. By late November military authorities in Central Java had prohibited unauthorized arrests and were warning against "excesses." By the end of December those in East Java were doing the same. In Bali paratroopers had to be rushed from Central Java to bring the situation under control. But violence continued in all three provinces well into 1966.
Equally fierce action was taken against Communist party members and supporters in several other parts of Indonesia. In Aceh, in the far north of Sumatra, the population was, as it is now, overwhelmingly Islamic, and Communist party followers were few in number, perhaps totaling only several thousand; attacks on them were sufficient for the military commander to announce in December that the province had been "entirely purged in a physical sense of PKI elements." 9 In the adjoining province of North Sumatra, members of an army-supported labor union attacked members of the Communist party's union, many of them migrants from Java working on state plantations; members of Muslim and Christian youth groups attacked other known Communist party followers in the vicinity of Siantar, again with the loss of several thousand lives. In West Java, where the Communist party was not particularly strong, the army might have forestalled wider killing by its quick arrest of more than ten thousand party activists; close to ten thousand others were estimated to have been killed there nevertheless. In these and other parts of Indonesia, however, the scale of violence did not approach that of the densely populated provinces of Central and East Java and Bali.
Who Was Responsible?
Much later, men close to the army leadership of the time would deny that any central command ever authorized army units to carry out mass executions. They have argued that initially the army was not at all in control of the situation in much of Java. Some of the army's most trusted commanders and their units had already been removed from Java and were in North Sumatra and West Kalimantan, committed to the campaign against Malaysia. The army has also claimed that it was in fact the army itself that eventually brought the killings to an end. Nevertheless, the army certainly played an active role in the deaths of countless numbers of people, not only through the paratroopers sent to Central Java under the command of Gen. Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, who made no attempt to disguise the role his men played, but also through the many civilian youths whom these and other units organized, armed, and transported. At no time did General Nasution, General Soeharto, or any other figure in the army leadership publicly condemn these actions of army units, or call publicly for an end to the violence. The army leadership knew more or less what was happening and, by its action and inaction, sanctioned it.
Yet, it is also true that much of the killing, with and without army involvement, was carried out by civilians. In Central Java these were principally members of the conservative wing of the National Party, the once-dominant party in the region, commanding the loyalties of the traditional elite down to the leaders of the villages. The Nationalists had seen their position steadily eroded as Communist party strength grew, challenging their heritage as the major party of the national revolution, the party of Sukarno, the rightful heir to the positions and perquisites of the former colonial regime. They also had witnessed a deep split in their party over whether to enter into an alliance with the Communist party or stand apart from it. The same was true in Bali. In East Java, on the other hand, the killing was done principally by followers of the Nahdatul Ulama, the region's major Islamic party, led by its youth wing, Ansor.
Evidence also indicates that some of the worst of the killing was centered in areas that had previously seen violence between Communists and anti-Communists. In September 1948, when the republican government was confronted by superior Dutch forces in Java, its own military and paramilitary units experienced great dissension. A group of procommunist officers took control of the town of Madiun, declared a revolutionary government, and touched off an ill-coordinated and poorly executed revolt. Communist party leaders, apparently caught unprepared, nevertheless gave the revolt their support. Loyal army units, among which the Siliwangi Division was most prominent, recaptured the town of Madiun in two weeks and put down the entire rebellion in two months. Armed rebel units, however, killed scores of civilians in the surrounding district in the course of the rebellion, and Islamic teachers and civil servants seemed to have been singled out for execution. In the aftermath a few party leaders fled, but most were captured and executed. Some thirty-five thousand of their armed followers were held under arrest for a time. Retribution also was exacted by the Muslim community in a wave of violent attacks on party followers in the Madiun area. 10
At the time of the attempted coup in 1965 conflict had been raging between the two groups for almost two years. The violence was touched off by a Communist party campaign in support of land reform, which inspired violent incidents across the whole of rural Central and East Java. What began with knifings and kidnappings escalated to group battles, with as many as two thousand on each side using clubs, knives, and machetes. According to one authority, it was the largest outbreak of violence in the recorded history of rural Java up to this time. 11
The Land Situation
The land situation in Java was indeed critical. Some 54 percent of rural households on Java owned less than half a hectare (or less than 1.1 acres); another 13 percent were landless. Although in certain localities a small rural elite held sizable portions of land, a large landlord class simply did not exist in Java. Rather, Java's population growth had led to the progressive fragmentation of all landholdings. In addition, the increasing demand for land led to a constant increase in the value of land. Both these processes were driving an increasing number of poor farmers into daily wage labor, and obliging tenants and sharecroppers to accept less and less equitable terms in order to remain in farming.
The national government paid little attention to this problem until radical unionists in the late 1950s forcibly took over foreign-owned plantations. Up to this time land ownership had been regulated by an agrarian law promulgated by the Dutch colonial authorities in 1870. But a legal basis had to be provided for the expropriations in order to assure the security of plantation exports. So long as the plantations were legally the property of foreign owners, their products faced seizure by court order in foreign ports.
Nevertheless, the national political consensus was that a limit should be placed on the amount of land any one family could hold, and the surplus should be distributed to the landless. When Parliament passed the new land law in September 1960, it limited the amount of land any family might own or control through mortgages or leases. In the case of irrigated rice land in densely populated areas the limit was 8 hectares, or approximately 17.6 acres. The excess was to be registered with government officials who would then distribute it to landless peasants; owners were to be compensated over a period of years. The Department of Agrarian Affairs initially estimated that 1 million hectares would be available for distribution. By 1963, however, this had been scaled down to about one-third that amount. By the end of 1963 the government was reporting that only one-tenth of the latter figure, or some 35,000 hectares, had so far been distributed. Communist critics claimed the true figure was less than 20,000 hectares.
Wolf Ladejinsky, writing in early 1964 and using official data, concluded that not more than 6 percent of the four to five million sharecroppers on Java could possibly ever receive any land under the law. Few landlords with any sizable holdings were on this island, where two-thirds of Indonesia's population lived, and some districts had no land to redistribute at all. A more important question, in Ladejinsky's view, was the terms of tenancy. The law required that all agreements between landowners and tenants were to be in writing and registered with local authorities, but by 1964 this was honored chiefly in the breach; of several million probable agreements in all of Java and Bali, only twenty thousand had been recorded. 12 The law also required that landlord and tenant should each receive 50 percent of the crop, but the law failed to specify the sharing of expenses, such as the cost of fertilizers. Moreover, landlords frequently loaned money to their tenants for various purposes. Rural economic relations were far more complicated than the new agrarian law had taken into account. Ladejinsky concluded, in a private report to the government, that although the new law was on the books, "All else appears to be as of old." 13
The Communists' Rural Strategy
About the time the new land law was enacted, the Communist party was beginning to work vigorously to build a rural base, particularly in Java. The party had obtained only 16.4 percent of the total vote in the national parliamentary elections of 1955. But 88.6 percent of its vote was in Java, and much of this support was believed to be concentrated among abangan peasants in Central and East Java. Abangan are largely peasants and lower-class townsmen in Java whose religious tradition consists of animistic, Hinduistic, and Islamic elements, with emphasis on the former two. 14 In the local elections of 1957 the Communist party supplanted the National Party as the leading party in Central Java. This was attributed, in part, to the party's appearance as an energetic and effective champion of abangan values against the interests of the santri community. Santri are largely traders and richer peasants in Java whose religious tradition consists of "a careful and regular execution of the basic rituals of Islam." 15
Party leaders might well have seen a need for a new and stronger rural base. The mass base the party had developed by the late 1950s was largely made up of organized workers of firms and plantations formerly owned by the Dutch and other foreigners. In many cases, these workers had taken control of the enterprises that employed them in 1957, but they became increasingly vulnerable following the introduction of martial law later the same year. Army officers were put in charge of the enterprises, and some did not shrink from using force to establish their authority. Party leaders may also have been responding to critics within the party who were unhappy about the leadership's accommodation to some of the authoritarian features of Sukarno's Guided Democracy. In any event, party leaders decided to enlarge and tighten up their organization among the general rural population. In 1958 preparations were begun for a first National Peasants Conference to launch a concerted drive to organize the rural population.
The main feature of this drive was a "go down" movement, a campaign to encourage party cadres in cities and towns to go to the villages, become familiar with conditions there, and educate the peasants about the policies and programs of the party. The "go down" movement was needed because party cadres were mostly townsmen unaccustomed to the physical conditions of rural life, and reluctant to spend long periods in the villages. They also faced obstacles there from village authorities, the well-to-do, and traditionalist advocates of village harmony. In some villages, divided among hostile factions, party support tended to come from unemployed youth and other radicalized elements, but these were mostly illiterate, accustomed to showing deference to people of higher status, and unversed in the ways of modern organization. So it was decided to introduce organizers from outside the villages, and to put the authority and prestige of the party's leadership behind the effort.
The National Peasants Conference of April 1959 resolved that the most important aspect of party work in the villages was to bridge the gap between urban party cadres and villagers through the "three togethers"--living together, eating together, and working together. The official position was that this would be a gradual process, both to educate the cadres and to win the peasants' confidence. Nevertheless, the party chairman, D. N. Aidit, on the occasion of the Conference, authorized an attack on landlord interests and, on the party's behalf, demanded that the traditional division of crops be changed from 60:40 in favor of landowners to the same ratio in favor of their tenants. 16
The Communists' Rural Offensive
There the matter rested until December 1963. At that time, having given scant attention to the subject for several years, Aidit called on the party to undertake a "rural offensive" in support of land reform. The peasants, he said, had to take "unilateral action"--to "take the law into their own hands." 17 This marked a radical break with the past: the long-term party strategy of maintaining a united front with other parties was put aside; for the first time the theme of a struggle between the haves and have-nots was introduced into the villages in a direct and organized way; and, finally, the established social and political allegiances and traditional values of social harmony and deference were challenged. 18
The timing of this initiative was well chosen; it so happened that in the last months of 1963 and the first months of 1964 parts of Java and Bali were experiencing the worst drought in living memory. Without any rain the irrigation channels stood dry, and rats infested the villages in search of food. Village stores of rice were ravaged; even trees around people's homes were shorn of their leaves. Reuters reported in February 1964 that a million people were starving in Central Java. Antara, the official Indonesian news agency, reported that thousands were starving in Bali. D. N. Aidit himself was quoted as saying, "People are now eating virtually anything edible." 19
Serious conflicts were soon occurring in Central and East Java as a result of unilateral peasant action. By April 1964 the press was reporting serious outbreaks of violence over peasant actions throughout Central Java. By June the incidents had spread to East Java and were being reported daily in the Surabaya newspapers. The clashes were marked from the outset by knifings and kidnappings, and soon large-scale confrontations were taking place. Factions took to burning down the houses of hostile elements and destroying their crops in the field. Groups of between three hundred and four hundred, and even as many as two thousand, were reportedly involved in some incidents. In a number of places, police intervention led to serious loss of life.
These developments created considerable alarm among leaders of the National and Nahdatul Ulama parties. The Islamic party leaders were particularly incensed, because the Communist party appeared to be engaged in a broad offensive against Islamic interests. Many of the holders of sizable plots, especially in East Java, were santri family heads. Often the owners of extensive tracts of land were Islamic religious institutions. The Communist party had only recently tried to have Sukarno declare the leading Muslim student organization illegal. Islamic leaders, feeling increasingly threatened by the direction Guided Democracy was taking, viewed the attack on Muslim land rights as the last straw.
The uproar was muted in the controlled Jakarta press, and Sukarno sought at first to put the weight of his authority behind the land reform program. In July 1964 a special session of the Supreme Advisory Council resolved that implementation of the program should be speeded up. In August, in his annual Independence Day address, Sukarno criticized the slow pace of the program. But by early December Aidit was acknowledging that the party's opponents were getting the better of his cadres. Then Chaerul Saleh of the Murba Party claimed he had documents showing that the Communist party planned a coup. On December 12, in an atmosphere of great tension, Sukarno called a meeting of the heads of the ten then-legal political parties. After thirteen hours the meeting ended in a unanimous call for a truce in interparty conflict. But the violence continued well into 1965.
In May 1965, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist party, Aidit blamed the situation on party cadres who had acted impetuously and without regard to party guidelines. But it is difficult to avoid the opinion that he and the other party leaders had misjudged the situation. In breaking the line on their own long-term "national front" strategy, the party leaders had succeeded chiefly in isolating themselves from the other national groups in the Sukarno coalition. By attempting to instigate confrontation along class lines, the party leaders also had revealed the weakness of class-consciousness, as well as the enduring strength of traditional attachments to party and religion among the rural population.
In August and September 1965 reports in the local press of Central and East Java indicated a resurgence of conflicts in these provinces, particularly of incidents in which youth groups--attached to the Communist party, on the one hand, and the Nationalist Party and Nahdatul Ulama, on the other--engaged in violent attacks on each other.
Longer-Term Contributions to the Violence
Sartono Kartodirdjo, who has documented the history of unrest in Indonesia's rural society over several centuries, has argued that the events of 1965-66 were part of a long-established pattern of political competition that was at least as intense in the countryside as in the towns. Radical social movements arose with some regularity among the lower social strata, the oppressed, and the underprivileged. These movements did not, however, arise only from conditions of economic deprivation and oppression. A strong element of millenarianism also emerged in the late colonial period. "The severe threat to the Javanese sense of identity posed by an increasingly heavy foreign political and cultural hegemony produced a powerful reaction in peasant society, expressed in an intense longing for a restoration of an idealized traditional order." 20 If the Communist party thus drew on utopian hopes that were important in Javanese culture from very early times, the reaction to the party's intrusion from early 1964 on also had a basis in a powerful tradition.
Of the intensity of relations between party politics and religion in rural Java, Clifford Geertz, writing in the late 1950s, had this to say:
Because the same symbols are used in both political and religious contexts, people often regard party struggle as involving not merely the usual ebb and flow of parliamentary maneuver, the necessary factional give-and-take of democratic government, but involving as well decisions on basic values and ultimates. Kampong (village) people in particular tend to see the open struggle for power explicitly institutionalized in the new republican forms of government as a struggle for the right to establish different brands of essentially religious principles as official: "If the abangans get in, the koranic teachers will be forbidden to hold classes"; "If the santris get in, we shall all have to pray five times a day." The normal conflict involved in electoral striving for office is heightened by the idea that literally everything is at stake: the "If we win, it is our country" idea that the group which gains power has a right, as one man said, "to put his own foundation under the state." Politics thus takes on a kind of sacralized bitterness. 21
The bloodshed in the countryside was further influenced by popular ideas of political history, learned by every Javanese peasant from the stories of the wayang . Benedict Anderson has argued that power has generally been regarded in traditional Javanese thought as highly concentrated--in the capital city, in the palace, and in the person of the ruler, "who personifies the unity of society." 22 Sukarno had demonstrated this concern for unity time and again in his attempts to create by rhetorical invention--of which Nasakom , the union of nationalism, religion, and communism, was an example--symbols of a unity that did not exist in the society. The same concern was seen in the dogged refusal of the largely Javanese elite to recognize the claims of the "outer islands" for a larger measure of autonomy in the 1950s. In this tradition, in which a diffusion of power is seen as weakness, Anderson argued that as "Power begins to ebb away from the center, the reigning dynasty loses its claim to rule, and disorder appears." 23 And "a ruler who has once permitted natural and social disorders to appear finds it particularly difficult to reconstitute his authority. Javanese would tend to believe that, if he still had the Power, the disorders would never have arisen." 24
Those Javanese who were taking their cues from what was occurring in the capital city in October 1965 were presented with ample evidence that anticommunism was in the ascendancy. The same government radio station that had carried the leaders' announcements of the attempted coup, and thus encouraged the uprisings that followed for a short time in Central Java, was now reporting widening popular demonstrations, and army arrests, directed against the Communist party and its subsidiary organizations. Many of those involved in the demonstrations and arrests in Jakarta were thoroughly convinced that the Communist party had been behind the coup, and they were using the situation to wreak vengeance on the party and its people. They did so not only because of the deaths of the generals and the attempt to take control of the government, but also in return for all the intimidations they had suffered themselves at the hands of party activists in the past. Thus, reactions to the coup on the part of the capital's elite provided a further sanction to the rural anticommunist pogrom.
One is left, then, with a partial answer to the principal question with which this discussion began. The deep divisions within Indonesian society, divisions of religion, economic interest, social class, and political party, appear to have been at the root of the violence. These divisions were exacerbated by the procommunist revolt of 1948, by the national and local elections of 1955 and 1957, and, most recently and deeply, by the campaign of the Communist party to change the traditional rules that governed the use of land. The failure of the attempted coup provided an impetus to anticommunists in the countryside to wreak vengeance on those who had been attacking and intimidating them for almost two years. Moreover, traditional political thinking that placed a high value on the direction of events in the capital city could only have provided further encouragement to anticommunists in the provinces. Finally, the army's own actions contributed directly to the scale of the violence, and sanctioned the violence of others.
Some Remaining Issues
The number of dead was never determined. Official and unofficial estimates ran from 78,500 to 500,000. Whatever the number, one has to assume that many others died as an indirect result of the violence and the breakdown of family and community relations. Prominent among these would have been such vulnerable groups as infants, children, and the elderly, especially those from the poorest families who must have been on the edge of survival in the drought years of 1963 and 1964. Routine registrations of births and deaths, which had been unreliable even in normal times, were useless for this period. Data from the census of 1961 were not sufficiently analyzed to provide a basis for later comparison. And when preparations for the 1971 census were being made, it was found that all the 1961 data had been thrown away. So reliable estimates of mortality for the districts in which the violence occurred could never be made.
Among other issues, the role of the Communist party in the attempted coup has been a matter of considerable controversy. The coup itself did not involve any known members of the party directly. That the party was involved in planning the coup--as much as that seemed a foregone conclusion to many anticommunists in the elite--is not grounded in conclusive evidence. It is known from their own testimony at their later trials, and from criticisms by surviving remnants of the party both in Indonesia and abroad, that some party leaders knew the coup was going to take place. It is possible that Aidit had a larger hand in the affair than this. But we have no proof and it is possible we never shall.
What Sukarno knew, and when he knew it, is also uncertain. The most damaging evidence was circumstantial. On the morning of October 1, Sukarno fled to the same air base to which Aidit fled, and at which the bodies of the six generals were later found. He met during the day with some cabinet ministers, the heads of the other armed services, and one army general representing the coup leaders. He was later reported to have told the general that he wanted no more bloodshed, that the movement should be stopped. When he prepared a public statement late in the day, however, he announced only that he was taking over the temporary leadership of the army. He did not denounce the attempted coup, or express regret at the deaths of the generals, until October 6. These circumstances were enough to arouse grave suspicions about his role, and he was to be dogged by them in the months that followed.
Several years later speculation arose outside Indonesia as to whether Soeharto himself might have had some advance knowledge of the coup. 25 Soon after the night of September 30 the story was put out to journalists that Soeharto had gone fishing that evening with a son. In 1968, in an interview with a foreign journalist, Soeharto corrected this account to reveal that he had gone that evening to a military hospital to visit a sick son and, while he was there, Colonel A. Latief, a central figure among the plotters of the coup, came and spoke to him briefly. The colonel was well known to Soeharto, who had been his commanding officer. Critics have inferred that Latief came to inform him of what was about to happen and to ensure that Soeharto would not intervene. Soeharto has suggested that Latief must simply have been checking on his whereabouts. It seems probable that the plotters would indeed want to satisfy themselves that Soeharto, who was next in command to succeed to army leadership, had not been alerted to any untoward events that might occur later that night. That he was not on the list to be kidnapped was probably because many of the plotters had served under his command in the Irian campaign, and he was close enough to the plot leader, Untung, to have attended his wedding. In addition, the plotters might well have calculated that they could "handle" Soeharto; it was well known that Yani did not take him seriously. In any event, Soeharto was awakened at about five the next morning by Mashuri, a prominent lawyer and secretary of the local neighborhood administration, who had reports that shots had been heard in the vicinity of Nasution's house. Mashuri later said that the surprise with which Soeharto greeted his early morning report was undoubtedly genuine. Nevertheless, the meeting with Latief remains a curious event, as does the long delay in reporting it.
The Chinese role is also a matter of speculation. That the Chinese leadership in Beijing enjoyed a warm relationship with D. N. Aidit and the other leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party is beyond question. Chinese leaders had encouraged the newly aggressive stance of the Indonesian party leaders, to the point of having first suggested the idea of an armed "fifth force." Chinese officials in Beijing also initially greeted the news of the coup with much satisfaction, congratulating the members of the Indonesian delegation who were in the Chinese capital for the annual October 1 celebrations. There is no evidence, however, that Chinese leaders either knew of the plot in advance or were party to it. Many Indonesians were nevertheless convinced that the Chinese had known, and were involved. Among them were the leaders of the anticommunist student demonstrators, who were soon attacking official Chinese property in Jakarta, and Soeharto himself, who was to remain personally opposed to official recognition of the Chinese government for almost twenty-five years.
The most curious misunderstanding of the whole tragic affair, however, is the continuing belief in the West that primarily Chinese and Indonesians of Chinese descent died in the killings. 26 Both groups have long been objects of attack in periods of social unrest in Indonesia, and 1965 was no exception. Their schools were closed, and their shops and even homes were ransacked in many towns. But Chinese-Indonesians were not prominent among the members of the Indonesian Communist Party, unlike the situation in neighboring Malaysia. Chinese also were not present in any large number in the countryside after 1959, when a presidential decree ordered resident aliens out of the villages as part of a program to reduce their role as middlemen in the economy. Later efforts to calculate the number of Chinese victims have yielded estimates as low as two thousand. 27 Alien Chinese and Chinese-Indonesians undoubtedly lived in great fear for many months, and close to 10,000 opted to leave the country in 1966-67. But the violence was largely to property, and the number who left Indonesia was not to be compared with the estimated 100,000 who left in 1959-60. 28
The impression abroad might have resulted from press reports of the ransacking of the embassy and other property of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Jakarta. The press also reported the anti-Chinese action in Aceh, where an overzealous army commander ordered the entire community of several thousand Chinese-Indonesians out of the province. These hapless people were stranded in the port city of Medan for several years, refugees in their own country. The Chinese government carried two shiploads of them to China before official relations collapsed and it became impossible to continue the rescue effort. Christian churches looked after the rest until the matter was finally taken up by higher authorities. The army commander's order was reversed, at least in practice, and the people were permitted to return to Aceh.
Controversy has also surrounded the issue of possible American involvement in the coup. Colonel Untung, in his first radio announcement, claimed that his action was intended to forestall a government takeover by a Council of Generals sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The charge of CIA complicity has been repeated from time to time, but the evidence is highly circumstantial. The CIA did take the unusual step of making public a 1968 report concluding that the coup was directed by the leaders of the Communist Party of Indonesia. 29 Much later it was revealed that, following the failure of the coup, a political officer of the U.S. embassy in Jakarta turned over the names of several thousand communists to Indonesian army headquarters and kept track of those killed or captured. 30 As to American complicity in the coup attempt itself, however, there is no more support than in the case of the PRC.
Ramifications of the Coup
The horror of the events of 1965 in Java and Bali had few comparisons in the contemporary world. Gunnar Myrdal, searching for a way to describe the killings, compared them with the partition of India and the continuing war in Vietnam. 31 The comparisons had some foundation, for the Indonesian violence did erupt in part out of deep religious intolerance, as the partition of the subcontinent had, and also emerged out of a life-and-death struggle over political ideology, as had the war in Vietnam. But there was a third element, which linked the events in Indonesia to the Great Leap Forward occurring in China in the mid-1960s, and that was the intrusion into rural society of a radical national political program. Like those other tragedies, what occurred in Indonesia must be seen, in the end, as the result of monumental political failure.
The failure was not that of any one individual, although a few individuals mattered disproportionately. Yani had indeed been corrupted by his experience as a member of Sukarno's palace circle, was open to the charge of neglecting the welfare of the army rank and file, and was in no sense a leader of the political Right, a deficiency which left a large part of the political spectrum without a national spokesman. Aidit failed to appreciate the vulnerability of his position, and permitted himself to be caught up in a rebellious adventure for which he was quite unprepared. Over a longer period of time, he had aimed to come to power as the leader of a revolutionary party, but by parliamentary means, without a revolutionary army. The imbalance between these ends and means seems, in retrospect, to have been fatal to his enterprise.
Yet Yani and Aidit had come to play the roles they did in 1965 principally because the Indonesian government had by this time come to represent so little of the body politic. Indeed, one might seriously question whether the Indonesian government ever did, from the declaration of independence in 1945 on, represent the bulk of the Indonesian people in a meaningful way. It was frustration of this magnitude that had led the "outer islands" to rebel against the Jakarta government in the late 1950s. And it was the same intense frustration that had led to the reaction against the communist ascendancy in the political heartland of Java in 1965.
Sukarno may well be remembered by future generations of Indonesians for his contributions to their independence and national unity. It was argued at one time that he lacked only the skills to administer the independent and unitary state he helped to found. But the events of late 1965 raised a much larger question: Had Sukarno led the nation in creating a political order it could live with? Not only he, but a large part of the national elite as well, had participated in the creation of a state in which all power was lodged at the center, and had then acquiesced in his pronouncement of a one-man dictatorship over the whole. It was this investment of all authority over a large and varied society in a single person that invited rebellion. And it was the effort of Sukarno and his ministers to exercise authority with increasingly limited means that led to resistance and reaction.
The social impact of so many deaths, whatever the number, as well as the arrests that occurred--official reports put these at 106,000 in 1966, at 200,000 in 1967, and, later, it was estimated that as many as 500,000 had been arrested at some time or other, although most were quickly released--remains largely a matter of speculation. After 1965 the number of religious conversions grew dramatically, particularly in Central Java; increasing numbers of people turned to mystical Javanese cults and to Christianity. Many village families migrated--to the towns or the "outer islands"--to escape the stigma of having been on the losing side. The wives of some of those arrested divorced them. But of the widows and orphans, and the men who survived and were eventually, after many years, released, next to nothing is known.
A political outcome of the deaths, arrests, and intimidation of the remainder of the political Left was to leave the Indonesian elite even more conservative than it had been before. Most members of the elite at the time were civil servants or members of the armed forces. The remainder were, for the most part, politicians who, in the spirit of Guided Democracy, were similarly appointed to their posts and dependent on their government salaries for a living. The Communists, never numerous in these circles, nevertheless loomed large because of the aggressiveness of their representatives in the national front and the mass media. The elimination of radical voices from these arenas in the last months of 1965 permitted the conservative majority in the elite to express their traditional political values without effective opposition.
It was probably inevitable that as the political life of the capital city became increasingly chaotic the urban economy should worsen. Later estimates placed the per capita income of Indonesia in 1965 at the lowest level in all of Asia. Food availability was low, and life expectancy short. These conditions greatly exacerbated the political situation. With so much of the capital city dependent on government employment, it was not long before student protests, which initially had been targeted at the Communist party, began to take aim at the government itself.
The virtual destruction of the Communist party by the end of 1965 facilitated this redirection of attention. So long as there was a stand-off between the party and the army, Sukarno had room to maneuver, to play one side against the other. Now only the army and the president remained. It was just a matter of time until one or the other would emerge as the sole holder of power and authority in the nation.
Note 1: The literature on the failed coup is large and varied. Early accounts include Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval , and Shaplen, Time Out of Hand . Early analyses include Anderson and McVey, A Preliminary Analysis , Lev, "Indonesia 1965," pp. 103-1O; Wertheim, "Indonesia Before and After the Untung Coup," pp, 115-27; Hindley, "Political Power," pp. 237-49; Notosusanto and Saleh, The Coup Attempt , and Van der Kroef, "Interpretations of the I965 Indonesia Coup," pp. 557-77. Later assessments that focus their attention on one or another of the major actors include Legge, Sukarno ; Mortimer, Indonesian Communism ; and Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia . Back.
Note 2: Mackie, Konfrontasi . Back.
Note 3: "Initial Statement of Lieutenant Colonel Untung," in Anderson and McVey, A Preliminary Analysis , p. 122. Back.
Note 4: "Decree No. I on the Establishment of the Indonesian Revolution Council," in Anderson and McVey, A Preliminary Analysis , p. 123 Back.
Note 5: Kayyam, "Bawuk," p. 168 Back.
Note 6: A rare eyewitness account of the killings in East Java, in which military personnel and Ansor youth are described as beheading a truck-load of victims, is excerpted in Jones, Injustice, Persecution, Eviction , p. 115. Back.
Note 7: A collection of short stories describing such events appears in Aveling, ed. and trans., Gestapu , p. 110. Back.
Note 9: Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia , p. 143. Back.
Note 10: Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia , pp. 290-305; see also Ann Swift, The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of I948 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1989), p. 116. Back.
Note 11: Kartodirdjo, Agrarian Unrest , p. 22. Back.
Note 12: Ladejinsky, "Land Reform in Indonesia," pp. 343-44. Back.
Note 14: The abangan tradition is an "intricate complex of spirit beliefs, and a whole set of theories and practices of cunning, sorcery, and magic " (Geertz, The Religion of Java , p. 5). Also, and perhaps later, abangan is a "derogatory term to denote Javanese who do not take Islamic religious learning seriously"; Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture , p. 197. Back.
Note 15: Geertz, The Religion of Java , p. 6; also see Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, p. I96. Back.
Note 16: Hindley, The Communist Party of Indonesia , pp. 160-80; Mortimer, Indonesian Communism , pp. 276-95. Back.
Note 17: Mortimer, Indonesian Communism . Back.
Note 18: A principal source on the PKI campaign is Mortimer, Indonesian Communism . For reactions in East Java, see Walkin, "The Moslem-Communist Confrontation," pp. 822-47. For reactions in Central Java, see Kartodirdjo, Agrarian Unrest . For a discussion of rural poverty, class structure, and peasant conservatism in West Java, see Aidit, Kaum Tani Mengganjang Setan-Setan Desa (Farmers destroy the village devils), which contains no hint of the "unilateral action" campaign that began in late I963. Arguments that greater weight should be placed on class structure are found in Wertheim, "From Aliran to Class Struggle"; and Margot Lyon, Bases of Conflict . Back.
Note 19: Mortimer, Indonesian Communism , p. 300. Back.
Note 20: Kartodirdjo, Agrarian Unrest , p. 98. Back.
Note 21: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures , p. 167. Back.
Note 22: Anderson, "Idea of Power in Javanese Culture," p. 22. Back.
Note 25: Wertheim, "Suharto and the Untung days," pp. 50-51; Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, Letter to the Editor, New York Review of Books , June 1, I978. Back.
Note 26: See, e.g., editorial, "Lilliputian Politics in Huge Indonesia," New York Times , April 25, I987. Back.
Note 27: Coppel, Indonesian Chinese , p. 58. Back.
Note 28: Mozingo, Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia , p. 250. Back.
Note 29: Central Intelligence Agency, Indonesia 1965. Back.
Note 30: Kathy Kadane, "U.S. Officials' Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in '60s," Washington Post , May 21, I990. Back.
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