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The Modern Political Economy
New York
1993
2. Sukarno Yields to Soeharto
In the center of the government quarter of Jakarta in the mid-1960s lay one of the largest open squares within the precincts of a modern city, nearly a full kilometer long on every side. From the early nineteenth century, this square was known as Koningsplein, or King's Square, and on its northern side the Dutch colonial government built a palace to serve its governors-general. On December 27, 1949, the Dutch flag in front of the palace was taken down for the last time, and the flag of the new Republic of Indonesia was raised in a simple ceremony before a crowd of several hundred people. The square was subsequently named Medan Merdeka, or Freedom Square. The palace was known in early republican days as the Presidency, but by the 1960s, in the spirit of Guided Democracy, the building was again a palace, officially, and was named Istana Merdeka, or Freedom Palace.
The first raising of the Indonesian flag before the palace was reenacted each year on August 17, the anniversary of the proclamation of Indonesia's independence in 1945. By the early 1960s the event was attended by throngs of people who stretched across the great square almost as far as the eye could see, while in demarcated ranks in front stood groups representing the armed services, the government departments, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the political parties and their affiliated youth and student groups, labor groups, farmers' organizations, women's associations, and all the rest, wearing uniforms or carrying banners that identified their attachments. Before such an assembly Sukarno was a spectacular orator, stirring the feelings of the great masses of people to a high pitch, until tens of thousands chanted with him, roared in response to him, exhibiting, as nothing else could, the power of his claim that a mystic union existed between himself and the Indonesian people. Resounding with his phrases, the palace and the square before it were filled with an emotional charge of very high voltage in the political imagination.
By March 11, 1966, however, when a morning meeting of the cabinet was to take place in the palace, opinion in the capital had turned against Sukarno. His purpose in calling the meeting was to obtain a statement from the cabinet denouncing the student demonstrations that had been creating an uproar in the city. Even as the day began, students were amassing in front of the palace. The atmosphere was tense. Two weeks earlier, presidential guards had shot and killed two students. But on this day, the forces that had been building up against the president would prevail.
Events Leading to March 11
Mass violence of the kind that swept the towns and villages of Central and East Java did not occur in Jakarta. Army units based in the capital city and its vicinity had come quickly to the support of General Soeharto, as had the Siliwangi Division responsible for the province of West Java, which constituted the capital's immediate hinterland. The army units available to Soeharto were, however, countered for some time by units of the other services on which Soeharto could not rely, including the navy, the air force, and the police. In addition, army leaders did not arm civilian youths in the capital in any significant number; on the contrary, they attempted to keep what control they could over civilian demonstrators. The result was that, although violence did occur, it was directed principally against property, not persons, and was highly selective, not indiscriminate.
What was significant in Jakarta, as a result, was not violence so much as the threat of it, and the growing estrangement that developed in this environment between activist army officers and students on the one hand, and Sukarno and the political figures long associated with him on the other. The issue was initially the Communist party, but as Sukarno remained unyielding, and the economy neared collapse, the issue became the president himself.
Some sense of the spiraling of feelings on either side can be gained from a brief review of the larger events that followed the failure of the September 30 Movement.
On October 1 Sukarno declared that he was taking personal command of the armed forces. On the following day, after a tense meeting, General Soeharto was given responsibility for "the restoration of security and order." 1
Late on the night of October 3, after the bodies of the generals were discovered at the air force base, Sukarno made a radio broadcast in which he denied accusations that the air force had been involved in the affair.
On October 4 the bodies were removed from the well in the presence of a large assemblage of journalists, photographers, and television crew. Soeharto, who was present, spoke briefly for radio and television, suggesting that the president's assessment was not acceptable to the army. It was not possible, he said, that the incident was unconnected to certain members of the air force. He also suggested that the Communist party had been involved. 2
On October 5 a massive funeral was held for the slain officers. The funeral was attended by almost everyone who mattered in the noncommunist elite--except Sukarno, who sent an aide.
On October 6 Sukarno presided at a meeting of the entire cabinet at the "summer palace" in Bogor, about an hour's drive from the capital. He now condemned the killing of the generals, said he had not approved of the formation of the Revolutionary Council, and appealed for calm. Two members of the Central Committee of the Communist party attended the meeting and read a statement dissociating the party from what they termed "an internal army affair." 3
On October 8 a rally organized by anticommunist students was attended by tens of thousands. Speakers called on the government to ban the Communist party. Posters read: "Crush the PKI! Hang Aidit!" One group of youths went from the rally to Communist party headquarters and set the building on fire.
On October 11 Sjarif Thajeb, an army medical doctor and Minister of Higher Education, ordered the closure of fourteen leftist institutions of higher education, including Res Publica University, which was owned and operated by a Chinese-dominated organization, and ordered the Communist party's student organization to halt its activities. On October 15 Res Publica was gutted by fire.
On October 16, presumably in a move to moderate the situation, Sukarno dismissed Omar Dhani as head of the air force, and appointed Soeharto commander of the army. At the ceremony installing Soeharto, the president spoke of the coup attempt as "a ripple in the ocean of revolution." 4
On October 21 Sukarno issued a number of decrees, which in the rhetoric of the time were described as "commands," one of which prohibited unauthorized demonstrations.
In late October a new and larger anticommunist student organization was formed at a meeting at Sjarif Thajeb's home. This was the Indonesian Student Action Front (Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Indonesia, or KAMI) (Kami also is the Indonesian word for "we"). 5
By early November the army was rounding up leading figures in the Communist party and its affiliated organizations in Jakarta. Three members of the party Central Committee were arrested, and a fourth was shot. Aidit himself was captured and summarily executed in Central Java on November 22. 6
The deepening political divisions reflected in these events worked their way quickly through the economy. Commodities were already in short supply, and prices were rising rapidly. In November rice mills were placed under government supervision, and in December all foreign trade was placed under government control. By mid-December the government also decided to grant a large New Year's bonus to government employees. There were an estimated four million government employees of one kind or another at the time, and further inflation was bound to follow the government action. The problem was confounded even further when the government hastily announced a "currency reform," called in all the currency in circulation, and introduced one new rupiah note for every thousand old ones.
The timing could not have been worse. At this season of the year, about nine months from the last rice harvest and three months before the next one, rice supplies were traditionally low and prices were pressing upward; the approaching year-end holidays added further to the pressure on prices. A buying panic followed the announcement on the currency, and the price of rice rose by two-thirds in a single day. By the end of December foreign exchange reserves were exhausted, and prices had reached a record growth of 500 percent for the year. Nor was any end in sight. On January 3 the price of gasoline was increased by 400 percent, and fares on Jakarta buses by 500 percent. 7
These economic developments produced a rapidly widening reaction among the anticommunist students in Jakarta. On January 10 the Indonesian Students Action Front opened a seminar at the University of Indonesia on the state of the economy. On the same day the Action Front also sponsored a rally that adopted a statement entitled "Three Demands of the People," calling for the banning of the Communist party, a halt to inflation, and the purging of leftists and incompetents from the cabinet. On January 15 the cabinet again met in Bogor, and Sukarno invited all the leading student organizations to send representatives. The Student Action Front mobilized thousands of anticommunist students in Jakarta and Bandung, and trucked and bussed them to Bogor. When they were outside the spacious Bogor palace grounds, some of the students tried to climb the high iron fencing, and warning shots were fired by the presidential guard. 8
Sukarno on this occasion compared himself to Martin Luther and proclaimed, "I will not move a millimeter." 9 He called on those who believed as he did to organize a Sukarno Front in his support. Leaders of numerous organizations made statements in support of Sukarno in the next few days, among them the leaders of the National Party and the Nahdatul Ulama, the nation's foremost political parties, other than the Communist party, that were still legal. Soeharto followed suit, issuing a statement that the army "stands behind the President/Great Leader of the Revolution and awaits his further commands." 10
At this point, perhaps buoyed by this show of support, Sukarno overplayed his hand. On February 21 he announced a new cabinet of a hundred members. Notably missing from the long list was Nasution, at this stage the most prominent military figure in the nation and the army's most prominent anticommunist. On February 24, the day the new cabinet was to be installed, a huge outpouring of students surrounded the Jakarta palace starting early in the morning. The army also had troops in place, separating the students from the presidential guard. Frustrated, students halted traffic and let air out of the tires of scores of vehicles, blocking the roads to the palace, and obliging Sukarno to order helicopters to bring some of his cabinet officers to the ceremony. As the cabinet, having been sworn in, was having tea, shots were heard. Students had broken through the army buffer, and presidential guards had fired, this time into the crowd. Two students were shot dead. 11
Events now moved swiftly. A massive procession marked the funeral on February 25 of one of the students, a rightist activist from the medical faculty of the University of Indonesia. In a lengthy meeting with Soeharto that same day and into the night, Sukarno insisted that the students be stopped, and again Soeharto gave in. The Student Action Front was declared "dissolved" and demonstrations were banned. At the same time, on the advice of army officers, student leaders moved out of the University of Indonesia campus--and into the intelligence headquarters of Colonel Ali Moertopo, a long-time aide to Soeharto. 12
On February 28 Subandrio--a vice premier, the foreign minister who was seen as the architect of Indonesia's increasingly warm official relations with Communist China, and a focus and symbol of the entire conflict--told a crowd of Sukarno supporters that terror on the part of the government's enemies would be met with terror. A new anticommunist organization, nominally of high school students, held a rally at the University of Indonesia, and Subandrio was hanged in effigy. Leimena, another vice premier, ordered the University closed. Army guards were posted but ignored Leimena's order, and the Women's Action Front, joined by Yani's widow, brought food to feed the large number of students who were now occupying the campus around the clock. 13
By early March Soeharto was under increasing pressure from some of his officers to take aggressive action. According to an official army history, he met with Sukarno on March 6 and warned, "I would not be responsible if some officers permit their troops to violate discipline and join the people's action." 14 That evening he met with the principal anti-Sukarno officers: Ahmad Kemal Idris, chief of staff of the Strategic Reserve, Soeharto's own former unit, and Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, commander of the Paracommando Regiment.
Sukarno now evidently feared that a showdown was imminent. On March 8 he issued an Order of the Day reminding members of the armed forces that it was their duty to be loyal to him as president of the republic. Nationalist supporters of Sukarno attacked the United States embassy. Anti-Sukarno students, now under yet another name and led by a militant Muslim student leader, occupied the foreign ministry and ransacked the building; occupied a Ministry of Education building; and attacked the New China News Agency office, a People's Republic of China (PRC) consular building, and a PRC cultural center.
On March 10 Sukarno met with party leaders and demanded they sign a statement condemning the student demonstrations. After discussions that lasted five hours, language was agreed on and all signed.
Thus, for almost six months, the Indonesian state was increasingly divided between two poles of power. At issue by now was not only the legality of the Communist party, the foreign policy tilt toward Beijing, the mismanagement of the economy, and the whole cast of policy in the direction of revolutionary change. Among an elite that had all along been largely traditional in its orientation, at issue now was the duality in government, the lack of unity, and the prolonged absence of any kind of stability in the nation's affairs.
The Events of March 11
On March 11 the cabinet met at the palace on the square. The topic was again the student demonstrations. Again the students were in the streets in the vicinity of the palace, letting air out of the tires of vehicles, and bringing traffic to a halt. Notably absent was Soeharto, pleading a sore throat. The atmosphere in the room was said to be tense. Sukarno began by calling on his ministers to resign if they were not prepared to follow his leadership. At this point an aide rushed to his side with a message: large numbers of unidentified troops were in the square and were advancing on the palace. Alarmed, Sukarno rushed from the room, followed by Subandrio and Chaerul Saleh, and fled the palace grounds by helicopter.
By early afternoon it was established that Sukarno was at the palace in Bogor. Three major generals of the army--Amir Machmud, Basuki Rachmat, and Andi Muhammad Jusuf--went to Bogor by helicopter to see him. They found Sukarno in the company of Subandrio, Leimena, Chaerul Saleh, and one of Sukarno's wives, Hartini. Discussions among them went on for some hours. When the talks ended, the generals returned to Jakarta, carrying a short letter signed by Sukarno and addressed to General Soeharto, instructing him "to take all measures considered necessary to guarantee security, calm, and stability of the government and the revolution, and to guarantee the personal safety and authority of the President/Supreme Commander/Great Leader of the Revolution/Mandatory of the MPRS in the interests of the unity of the Republic of Indonesia and to carry out all teaching of the Great Leader of the Revolution." 15
Soeharto acted promptly. On March 12, on the president's behalf, he signed a decree banning the Communist Party of Indonesia. On March 18, having failed to persuade Sukarno to dismiss them, he ordered the arrest of Subandrio and other leftist cabinet members. Soeharto aides were soon referring to the March 11 letter as the Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret (Letter of Instruction of March Eleven) from which was coined the acronym Super-Semar . The acronym gave the letter, and Soeharto, a symbolic tie to one of the most mystical and powerful figures in the Javanese wayang .
For all their ambiguity, the events of the day were powerfully evocative of the forces operating in Jakarta at the time. They also were revealing of the personality of the new chief executive.
The Student Movement
The mass mobilization of anticommunist students, some of whom by January were demanding that Sukarno be arrested and tried for complicity in the attempted coup, was a new element in Indonesian political life. Students had played a significant role in the country's political history before. Indonesian students in Europe were the leading advocates of national independence in the 1920s. On August 16, 1945, youth leaders had kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta and prevailed on them to issue an immediate declaration of national independence. Indonesian youths also fought in the revolution; in a battle recounted in schoolbooks for every Indonesian child to read, armed youths held off more than a division of British and Indian troops in Surabaya for ten days in November 1945--a battle that marked a turning point in the independence struggle. But university students--even secondary school students--had been few in number in 1945, the children of middle-ranking officials in the prewar colonial government. By 1965, with the rapid growth of the civil service after independence, some nine thousand students attended universities in Jakarta, and tens of thousands were in the city's secondary schools. 16
The initial decision to organize Jakarta's students to take political action after October 1 was made by two youthful Muslim and Catholic leaders: Subchan Z. E., vice chairman of the Nahdatul Ulama, and Harry Tjan, secretary general of the Catholic Party. Mar'ie Muhamad, secretary general of the large nonparty Islamic Student Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam, or HMI) was present as well. The three had found common cause during the previous year in trying to counter the increasingly aggressive initiatives of the Communist youth and student organizations. A principal battleground had been the national youth federation, which was part of the national front. Another was the campus of the University of Indonesia, which was the scene of continuing demonstrations and counterdemonstrations from early 1965 on. Learning that the air force was training young communist activists in the use of small arms, one of the three young men met with General Nasution to arrange the same training for anticommunist youth. The date was September 28. 17
When the Revolutionary Council was announced on the state radio on the morning of October 1, the young men had no doubt that the Communist party was behind the event. Their first thought was to flee the city and seek the protection of the Siliwangi Division. But one of the group, Catholic activist Lim Bian Kie (who later changed his name to Jusuf Wanandi), had a position with the Supreme Advisory Council and a government jeep with palace plates, and it was decided to send him in search of information; Lim drove through the square, saw the army units in formation there, and found the palace staff in a state of confusion: no one knew where Sukarno was. As time passed without further news, the youth leaders waited. When the state radio announced in the evening of October 1 that army units under the command of General Soeharto were in control of the city, they saw as well as anyone the significance of the event. 18
After their big rally of October 8, the religious youth leaders had paid their first call on General Soeharto. The student movement now grew in size and complexity. While most of the city's students were Javanese, much of the organizing was done by activists of other ethnic origins--students from the more aggressive cultures of Sumatra and Sulawesi, and a handful who were of Chinese descent. Also, although most of the demonstrators were Muslims of varying persuasions--the Islamic Student Association had provided the bulk of the manpower to counter the Communists on the campus of the University of Indonesia--some of the leaders were Christians. The leadership group also acquired members who were democratic socialists in orientation, who identified with the old Socialist Party (Partai Sosialis Indonesia, or PSI), and who were soon publishing a daily newspaper and operating a string of radio stations in the name of the student movement. It was a loosely knit phenomenon, and it held together marvelously well--so long as its purposes were few and simple.
The student leaders were in touch with Soeharto and his associates on a more or less daily basis from early October on. The students had to deal with the army. They needed permission to travel at night in spite of a curfew. They needed funds to organize and transport their demonstrators. They needed to be sure their demonstrations would not be stopped. And they needed small arms to defend themselves. So student leaders consulted regularly with officers of the Strategic Reserve, notably its two principal commanders, Ahmad Kemal Idris and Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, and with the Strategic Reserve's principal intelligence officers, Ali Moertopo and Yoga Sugama. The students also needed physical protection as the atmosphere grew increasingly heated. It was out of fear that their lives were in danger from pro-Sukarno military units--chiefly members of the presidential guard, and, after January, the marines--that they agreed to move in with Ali Moertopo's intelligence staff. It was the first intimate contact between student leaders and members of the army who were close associates of Soeharto. 19
Relations between the student leaders and these army men were antagonistic almost from the beginning. The students wanted to get rid of Sukarno while their own movement had momentum, and before he could build a countermovement of his own. As far as the students were concerned, Soeharto and his associates were overly cautious, wanting to be sure of every step before it was taken. Ali Moertopo and his fellow intelligence officers, on the other hand, viewed the students as young hotheads who could bring the government down but could not put a new one in its place. More immediately, Soeharto and his associates did not want any more student martyrs; one more student martyr of either the Left or the Right, they feared, could plunge the city into a level of violence they could not hope to control. 20
The Army Activists
The students gained considerable strength from their open alliance with anti-Sukarno activists among the army officer corps. These officers also lent a good deal of credence to Soeharto's warning to Sukarno that they might take action against him.
The senior figure was Brig. Gen. Ahmad Kemal Idris. His father was a Minangkabau from West Sumatra, a region that has produced an inordinate share of the intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen of modern Indonesia. Kemal Idris had a sizable reputation for speaking his mind in plain language--and for taking direct action. In 1952, as a young cavalry officer of the Siliwangi Division, he had made the dramatic gesture of placing an armored unit in front of the Presidency with its cannons aimed at the building; this was at the height of an army protest over a cabinet decision to sack Nasution, as well as other accumulated grievances, an incident that set in train a series of events that eventually led to the fall of the cabinet. In 1956 Kemal Idris was implicated in another plot by Siliwangi officers, this one touched off by allegations of corruption against Roeslan Abdulgani, the Nationalist foreign minister; Abdulgani was eventually charged and convicted, but not before Kemal Idris and others had been relieved of their commands.
Sukarno refused to approve any further appointments of Kemal Idris for several years; Kemal Idris managed to be reinstated only by offering to serve in the Congo with the Indonesian detachment that was part of the United Nations forces there. On his return to Indonesia he served under Soeharto in the Strategic Reserve and, in an extraordinary show of defiance of the president by army commander Yani, was designated to lead Sukarno's pet project, the invasion of Malaysia. Kemal Idris is thought to have been against the proposed invasion, and was later said to have done what he could to delay it. 21
Certainly no love was lost between Kemal Idris and Sukarno. And by March 1966 Kemal Idris was in effective command of the army's crack units in Jakarta.
The other principal activist officer was Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, commander of the elite Paracommando Regiment, which was at the core of Kemal Idris's reserve forces. Sarwo Edhie was born in Central Java and had his early career in the Diponegoro Division. He stood in the jago or "fighting cock" tradition of the region and was early drawn to more adventurous pursuits. He was trained as a paratrooper and, in 1957, led a daring raid on a rebel-held airfield in Sulawesi. On October 1, 1965, by his own account, he had asked permission of Nasution and Soeharto to lead the predawn raid on the air base to which Sukarno and the Communist party leaders had fled. He also personally led one of his battalions in putting down the army rebellion in Central Java in late 1965, and trained and armed the youth groups responsible for much of the killing there. Later, he captured headlines in Jakarta when he went to the University of Indonesia, addressed a student rally, and, in a further show of support, registered himself as a student. 22
Both men said later that, along with Maj. Gen. Hartono Rekso Dharsono, the commander of the Siliwangi Division, they had wanted to depose Sukarno as a prelude to a thorough reform of the political system. Kemal Idris said that the main purpose of the troops in the square was to frighten the president. Both men said they also thought they might be able to arrest a few cabinet officers as the men came out of the cabinet meeting; Soeharto had told them to arrest certain Sukarno cabinet officers when they had the opportunity, but had left it to them as to how to proceed. The two officers also claimed they had not been ordered to put the troops in front of the palace on March 11; both said they had decided it on their own. They also said they did not give details to Soeharto beforehand. 23 It is inconceivable, however, that Soeharto did not know what was afoot. Both Ali Moertopo and Yoga Sugama, intelligence officers who were reporting to Kemal Idris at Strategic Reserve headquarters, were Soeharto aides from Diponegoro days, and undoubtedly were keeping him fully informed.
The principal aim of the anti-Sukarno officers, then, was to follow up Soeharto's warning to Sukarno five days earlier, and to make the point more strongly that his personal security could not be guaranteed by his own security guard, but only by the leadership of the army itself. That accomplished, talks would no doubt ensue. Soeharto would be able to say that the troops were not there on his orders, that some of his hot-headed officers were threatening to take action against the president, and that he could not predict what they might do next unless the president were to demonstrate greater confidence in him and give him a wider mandate. And there was a good deal of truth to this view of the situation.
The Letter of Instruction
The message the three generals took to Bogor, then, was that Sukarno had to give Soeharto increased executive authority if he was to keep the army in line. If not, Soeharto would not accept responsibility for what might happen.
The three do not seem to have been especially qualified to serve as "king makers." What seems to have led to their selection was their presence at the palace that morning when Sukarno had fled. The three also were on good terms with Sukarno.
Amir Machmud was the Jakarta area commander at the time. He was a Sundanese from West Java, where he had helped put down a rebellion that had aimed to establish an Islamic state, and later served under Soeharto in the West Irian campaign. He had the reputation of being equidistant between Sukarno and the hard-line Nasution camp. When Sukarno had complained to him back in January about the increasingly aggressive student demonstrations, Amir Machmud issued orders that in the future they were to be "chanelled through the proper authorities in an orderly and proper way." 24
Basuki Rachmat was a politically experienced man who had helped to run the martial law authority under Nasution's direction after 1959, and was the commander of the Brawijaya Division of East Java on October 1. Visiting in Jakarta at the time, he had quickly come to Soeharto's support. He was named Minister of Veterans Affairs in the Sukarno cabinet of a hundred, from which Nasution had been excluded. He was seen as a moderate reformer who was probably willing to see Sukarno remain as head of state, but with some curtailment of his decision-making powers. He also had a reputation for keeping his own counsel. He was the senior member of the group and, according to Amir Machmud, Soeharto initially thought of sending him to Bogor alone. 25
Andi Muhammad Jusuf was a titled aristocrat from Bone in Sulawesi, a man long experienced in politics. When his own former superior officer in Sulawesi had gone into rebellion in the 1950s, Jusuf supported the army leadership in Jakarta and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a truce. When the Communist party launched a verbal attack on General Nasution and others in 1960, and the army had rounded up the entire Central Committee "for interrogation," Jusuf was one of the commanders in the "outer islands" who used the occasion to ban the party in his area. He was in 1966 the Minister of Basic Industry in Sukarno's cabinet. In addition, he had a brother-in-law who was a member of the palace staff, and for this reason it was thought that his going to Bogor would "ease the way" for the group. 26
Only Amir Machmud has spoken for the public record on the origin of the "letter of instruction." According to his accounts, Soeharto had asked the three generals to assure Sukarno that the army commander could bring the security situation under control if the president would place full confidence in him. Sukarno is said to have been extremely angry at the start of the discussion. He accused the army leaders of failing to follow his orders to control the students and their own troops. Moreover, he asked, what more did he need to do to show his confidence in Soeharto? According to Amir Machmud, the letter was his own idea. Basuki Rachmat wrote out a draft. Sukarno met with Subandrio, Leimena, and Saleh, heard their opinions, then retired to his study for an hour before sending the draft back with proposed changes. Basuki Rachmat wrote out a final draft. What changes were involved in these several drafts is unknown. Sukarno then met in a reception room with all six men, asked to have the letter typed on his letterhead, and signed it. 27
General Nasution later remarked that the three generals realized only on the trip back to Jakarta that the letter constituted a transfer of power. It is highly unlikely, however, that either Sukarno or Soeharto failed to realize the import of what was involved. Sukarno and his advisers might have seen the letter as assuring their personal safety and buying time to rebuild their political forces. The letter was brought from Bogor directly to Soeharto's home. Soeharto then went to Strategic Reserve headquarters, where his staff assembled and the letter was read. It was quickly decided that the letter was enough to enable Soeharto to ban the Communist party.
Sukarno soon made it clear that he did not construe his letter as having given Soeharto authority to act independently. He issued a statement that he was responsible only to the Assembly that had elected him president for life and to Almighty God. He issued "commands" and in other ways attempted to exercise the powers and prerogatives of the presidency. But he did not rescind the letter. And his efforts to restore his position were met with a slowly diminishing response from his supporters in the army, the other armed services, and the political parties. Trials of coup plotters, Communist party leaders, and former cabinet officers reflected badly on Sukarno. And Soeharto was no longer to be outmaneuvered. The letter gave him only a thread of legitimacy, but with patience and persistence he slowly reined the president in.
On June 21, 1966, a Provisional Consultative People's Assembly confirmed the transfer of authority of March 11, making it impossible for Sukarno to revoke it, and called on Sukarno for an explanation of his actions in connection with the September 30 Movement. On March 12, 1967, the Assembly revoked Sukarno's title and powers and appointed Soeharto acting president. On February 28, 1968, the Assembly appointed Soeharto president pending elections.
Thus the long history of Indonesian army contention with the country's civilian leadership reached an end. That history had included kidnappings and arrests of cabinet officers, and at least one kidnapping of a prime minister. The motives were sometimes personal. But the central theme was corporate. Army commanders, not the least of them Nasution, had stood for an army role in national policy-making ever since 1945.
Yet the army leaders were not much different from the civilian leaders with whom they had contended. By the 1960s, even a sympathetic observer concluded that army officers, being involved in current politics as they were, had acquired the political habit of settling for small gains and individual rewards. They had failed to close ranks, just as the political party leaders had, and failed to use their collective strength to create a strong and effective government. Material corruption and moral deterioration were as widespread within their own ranks as among the rest of the elite. 28 Now they were left to decide the future course of the government.
The Question of Succession
It was not clear at the beginning of these events that Sukarno would be removed from the presidency. There was a good deal of indirect evidence to link him with the September 30 coup attempt, and many members of the elite later concluded that he must at least have known that something of the kind was going to occur. On the other hand, his position was almost sacrosanct, and the constitutional situation was delicate. If Sukarno were found guilty of having broken the laws of the nation the previous September, the validity of his delegation to Soeharto in March 1966 would be open to question. Also, having forestalled an unconstitutional military push, most of whose leaders had previously served under his own command, Soeharto had to avoid even the appearance of unconstitutional action on his own part. Soeharto seems to have entertained for some time the possibility of Sukarno's remaining as titular head of state. The man continued to enjoy strong support among the population, especially in Java, and among some elements of the armed forces. When the Parliament adopted a resolution early in 1967 calling for Sukarno's trial, Soeharto opposed it on the grounds that the evidence was not sufficient to charge him. But it was not in Sukarno's character to accept a ceremonial role, and as the months passed he made that abundantly clear.
A further consideration was that the only likely candidates to succeed to the presidency in the early months were General Nasution and the Sultan of Jogjakarta, and neither showed any serious taste for the prospect.
Nasution has been seen by many commentators as indecisive, especially at times of crisis. He had given important political support to Soeharto by coming to his headquarters on the afternoon of October 1, his leg in a cast, and indicating his approval of Soeharto's actions of the day. Some felt this merely reflected Nasution's reputation as a stickler for regulations: Soeharto was the officer in line to act for Yani in his absence. But it was well known in army circles that the two men were not close--that Nasution had relieved Soeharto of his divisional command over charges of corruption. Nasution also was vastly more experienced on the national political scene, and had a much clearer sense of direction than Soeharto did at this point; he had put some stiffening into Soeharto's position more than once before March 11. But because he was experienced, he must also have known that as a Sumatran he would not be acceptable to the Javanese commanders who dominated the army, or the Javanese politicians who dominated the civilian elite. As a confirmed Muslim, he also knew he would be viewed with some suspicion by the abangan element among these same men. 29 So Nasution, outmaneuvered by events, chaired the Congress that stripped Sukarno of his titles and installed Soeharto in his place.
The Sultan had been a national hero from the time he declared for the revolution against the Dutch and gave sanctuary to the revolutionary leaders in his capital, the city of Jogjakarta, in Central Java. He was briefly active in national politics in the early 1950s; as Minister of Defense, he had supported Nasution's plan to demobilize large numbers of soldiers and use scarce resources to build a modern army--a plan rejected by politicians who stood to lose constituencies of military groups with ties to themselves. The Sultan then retreated to private life, except for the ceremonial tasks of his inherited office. His strength in 1966 was that he had the aura of royalty about him, had been neutral in the political wars of the previous decade, and was revered by many of the common people of Java. The Sultan told one supporter that although he knew Sukarno had to go for the good of the country, he simply could not bring himself to take part in his downfall. 30 He also observed to an aide that the army generals were not the people pressing him to take the presidency. 31 So the Sultan also hung back, served for a time with Soeharto as a member of a short-lived triumvirate, and later served as his vice president.
Soeharto also had reason to hesitate. Aside from the constitutional element, he might well have shared the Sultan's scruples, and indeed close associates were to say much later that Soeharto eventually did feel a burden of guilt over his role in Sukarno's fall. 32 Also, having had no previous role in national politics, he was almost unknown outside army circles, and it was some months before people prominent in the political life of the capital concluded that Soeharto was the man to succeed to the presidency. Nor was much known about him. A naturally reticent man, he kept his opinions largely to himself. When he finally consented to the writing of a biography, his biographer had to inquire how he preferred to spell his name. 33
Clearly the country was going to have to get used to a very different kind of leader.
Soeharto and the Army
The first insight into Soeharto that was made clear on March 11 was that the army had been more than his career. It had been his family--or, more accurately, it had given him the warmth and security his family never did.
Soeharto was born the son of a village official in Central Java in 1921. His father was responsible for the village irrigation system; not a small thing, as the position gave its holder the right of use of two hectares of village-owned rice land, enough to provide considerable economic security and social position in village society. But Soeharto had an unsettled childhood. His parents separated when he was only forty days old, and he lived with one, then the other, and later with a series of relatives and family friends. One of these, with whom Soeharto went to live at age fifteen, was a dukun , a traditional healer and seer, as well as an irrigation official like his father. Soeharto also managed to get a junior high school education.
Soeharto served briefly as a policeman toward the end of the Dutch period, reaching the rank of sergeant. He later enlisted in the Japanese-sponsored army of Indonesia, where he reached the rank of lieutenant. Not long after the Japanese surrender, he was a young officer in the new Indonesian revolutionary army that was to be his home. Here he performed well, reportedly led a famous attack on the city of Jogjakarta while it was occupied by the Dutch, and was a lieutenant colonel by the time independence arrived. He married well in the meantime, into the family of a wedana, a rather high official in the traditional administrative hierarchy of Java, with ties to the royal family of Solo. He thereafter spent the bulk of his peacetime career in the ranks of the Diponegoro Division.
The Diponegoro Division in which Soeharto spent his early adult years was widely regarded as the most traditional of the major divisions of the Indonesian army. Responsible for the territorial defense of Central Java, its officers and staff were exclusively natives of the region. Noted particularly for its loyalty to Sukarno and other Javanese nationalists, the Diponegoro provided the troops that put down rebellions in Sulawesi and Aceh in the early 1950s and those that occupied West Sumatra after the rebellion of 1958. In 1956, at the age of thirty-five, Soeharto became the division's commanding officer.
Commanders of Indonesia's territorial divisions were not far removed from local political and economic affairs. At the end of 1957 the nation was already under martial law when radical unionists took over Dutch-owned enterprises throughout the country. Nasution, as martial law administrator, ordered the army to bring them under government control. Army involvement in economic activity was now enormously extended. Soeharto oversaw the confiscated enterprises in Central Java, and controlled the trade that passed through the port city of Semarang, where his headquarters were located. Soeharto also began at this time to work together with local Chinese businessmen, among them Liem Sioe Liong, protecting the smuggling of scrap metal to Singapore and the import of cloves for the local kretek or "spiced cigarette" industry. From such sources, Soeharto obtained funds to supplement his official budget and assure the minimal welfare and loyalty of his troops; it was a pattern widely followed among regional commanders at the time. During this same period he also watched the rapid growth of the Communist party in Central Java, and established close relations with men in the conservative wing of the National Party there, including Hadisubeno, the mayor of Semarang.
Soeharto was abruptly relieved of his command by General Nasution, then the army chief of staff, in 1959. A former aide to Nasution, who was carrying on an anticorruption campaign at the time, has said Nasution was concerned that Soeharto was engaging in too much fund-raising and was setting a bad example for others. 34 A former aide to Soeharto has said the issue was not the fund-raising itself but how much was being passed on to army headquarters in Jakarta. 35 A senior officer who was a liaison between the two men in 1966-68 was inclined to dismiss the incident as unimportant. The significant difference between the two, he said, was in their personalities and their political philosophies, and while Soeharto was leading the executive branch of government and Nasution was chairing the Consultative Assembly, he and several others had been obliged to work unceasingly to bridge the constant gaps in perception and style between the two men. 36
Whatever the truth of the matter, the break in Soeharto's career had two significant outcomes. One was that he spent a year-and-a-half at the Staff and Command School in Bandung, where he became acquainted with fellow officers from other divisions around the country who were to stand by him in 1965-66. (One member of the class was Sutojo Siswomihardjo, who was one of the six generals killed on the night of the attempted coup.) The other outcome was that Soeharto was subsequently available for staff assignments in Jakarta.
From here on, Soeharto was largely the recipient of good fortune. He was first placed in command of the 1961-63 campaign to obtain control of West Irian, or Western New Guinea, from the Dutch. The forces available to him were appallingly ill prepared, his initial losses were high, and he was saved from having to launch the invasion Sukarno wanted by the intervention of the United States. John F. Kennedy was determined to deny Sukarno's Indonesia to "the international communist camp" and put considerable pressure on both parties to agree to a negotiated settlement. 37 Soeharto did gain significant experience from the West Irian episode, however. He learned that the navy and air force were not up to supporting an invasion, such as was later proposed across the Straits of Malacca into neighboring Malaysia. He also learned that the international environment was strategic in shaping the framework within which large domestic decisions had to be assessed--decisions such as those he later faced in setting about to rehabilitate the economy.
By the middle of 1964, as head of the army's Strategic Reserve Command, Soeharto was already advising the army commander, General Yani, against the transfer of loyal units from Java for the invasion of Malaysia. Before the year was out, Ali Moertopo, Soeharto's intelligence officer, was in secret contact with the Malaysian army leadership. 38
So Soeharto was no ordinary soldier when he made the most important decision in his life on the morning of October 1, 1965. But that he was an army man through and through was made clear on the following March 11. No civilian played any role whatever in his actions on that day. It was an army exercise from beginning to end.
Soeharto and Javanese Culture
Yet, the army leadership was hardly of a piece. It was equally significant that Soeharto was a product of the Dipenogoro Division, and Javanese to the core. Consider the following: Soeharto never differed with Sukarno in public, with the one exception of his speech at the exhumation of the bodies of his colleagues. He accomplished the transfer of executive authority without any direct orders to his officers to station troops in the square. He extracted from Sukarno a written document, signed by Sukarno and addressed to himself, that gave him the authority he sought. It was a masterful display of power as it was understood in the political culture of Soeharto's native region. Soedjatmoko, the most prominent Indonesian intellectual of recent decades, has written of this culture:
A central concept in the Javanese traditional view of life is the direct relationship between the state of a person's inner self and his capacity to control the environment. Inner perfection, reached through detachment and the control of one's emotions and reactions, radiates, through the inner stillness thus acquired, to the world and influences it. And as social hierarchy is seen as a reflection of the cosmic order, one's place in the hierarchy reflects the degree of inner perfection and power one has achieved. At the apex of this hierarchy stands the ruler, who rules by divine sanction and whose state of inner development is reflected in the condition of his realm. 39
This intense focus of attention on the psychic state of the ruler inevitably cast Soeharto's contest with Sukarno in terms of his own inner harmony with the cosmos. Thus, soon after he received the March 11 letter from Sukarno, Soeharto submitted himself to a ritual purification by bathing to prepare himself for the final confrontation. The ritual was arranged by Soedjono Humardani, Soeharto's long-time army aide, and a man immersed in the pre-Islamic religious beliefs and practices of central Java. The ritual was conducted by a mystic teacher known to Soeharto from his Semarang days. As word of the event circulated, friends and acquaintances of Soeharto concluded that he was ready to seek the presidency. 40
This personal preparation aside, Soeharto also had to adopt a public persona that could help explain, especially to long-time Sukarno supporters in central Java, who Soeharto was and what he stood for. The decision of Soeharto aides to label the March 11 letter from Sukarno as Super-Semar was designed to identify Soeharto with one of the most revered figures in the Javanese wayang .
The principal stories of this musical drama are drawn from the Ramayana and Mahabarata epics. Semar does not appear in the Indian originals of these epics; he must have been added after the arrival of the stories in Java, and thus is a legitimate, and possibly ancient, folk figure. He is not much to look at: short, fat, flat-nosed, old, with an enormous rear end and a bulging paunch--at first glance, a grotesque clown. But Semar wears a checkered hipcloth that is a visible sign of sacredness.
Claire Holt wrote of Semar in the 1960s:
Semar is not only loved, but revered and regarded by some as the most sacred figure of the whole kotak , or wayang set. He appears on the screen precisely at midnight, preceded by gara-gara , (signs of ) 'ominous manifestation,' when danger is greatest, the distress of his master deepest, and when help is essential.
She went on to say that he and his sons are regarded by some as
the voice of the simple village folk, with all their strength, misery, and wisdom. Without them a princely master is unthinkable; without their support, advice, and succor, he may be lost. Semar, who is never in the wrong, is particularly powerful. Of all the wayang heroes he alone dares . . . to remonstrate with the gods . . . and may even force them to act or desist. 41
Semar was thus an idiom for the role Soeharto saw for himself and asked both the elite and the common people to accept: Semar as the voice of the common man, the peasant, the realist, concerned about the here and now; Semar as the loyal servant of a kingly master, observant of his own lowly status, yet able to bend even the gods to his will; Semar, the mystic restorer of peace to a divided land.
If there was an element of manipulation in the choice of Semar as a political idiom, one nevertheless should not suppose that Soeharto himself was motivated by a cynical disregard for the source of his own power. On the contrary, he was genuinely coming to believe that fate had selected him to lead the nation. Why else had he been spared on the night of the coup? Why had he succeeded in putting down the attempt without firing a shot? Why had he obtained a grant of authority from Sukarno with only a threatening show of troops? Something of the sort seems to have been at work as he faced the task of rebuilding the economy, for he now exhibited unusual self-confidence. With no more than nine years of indifferent rural schooling, Soeharto set about to surround himself with some of the best-educated minds in Indonesian society.
Note 1: Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia , p. 137. Back.
Note 2: Ibid., pp. 138-39. Back.
Note 8: Ibid., pp. 166-67. Back.
Note 11: Ibid., pp. 174--82. Back.
Note 13: Ibid., pp. 184-85. Back.
Note 14: Ibid., p. 186, n. 10. Back.
Note 16: The student role in the events of 1965-66 is treated briefly in many accounts of the period. An extended account can be found in Raillon, Les Etudiants Indonesiens et l'Ordre Nouveau Back.
Note 17: Personal interview, June 6, I983. Back.
Note 19: Personal interview, June 16, I983. Back.
Note 21: Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia , p p. 72-73. Back.
Note 22: Apa & Siapa , 1981, pp. 856-57. Back.
Note 23: Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia , pp. 189-90. Back.
Note 25: Ibid., pp. 189-90. Back.
Note 27: Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval , pp. 235-36; Polomka, Indonesia Since Sukarno , p. 89; Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia , pp. 190-91 Back.
Note 28: Pauker, "Role ofthe Military." Back.
Note 29: Penders and Sundhaussen, Abdul Haris Nasution , pp. 232-33. Back.
Note 30: Personal interview,June 11, I983. 31. Personal interview, June 13, I983. Back.
Note 31: Personal interview, June 13, I983. Back.
Note 32: Personal interview, June 6, 1983. Back.
Note 33: Roeder, The Smiling General , p. 2. Back.
Note 34: Personal interview, July 20, I983. Back.
Note 35: Personal interview, July 21, I983. Back.
Note 36: Personal interview, June 14, 1983. Back.
Note 37: Schlesinger, A Thousand Days p. 533. Back.
Note 38: Personal interview, July 16, I983. Back.
Note 39: Soedjatmoko, Indonesia: Problems and Opportunities and Indonesia and the World , p. 66. Back.
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