On the night of September 30, 1965, and in the early morning hours of October 1, life changed violently for the 107 million people of Indonesia. Before dawn six top army generals were murdered in a failed leftist coup that became known as the Gestapu. In the next days, the senior generals who survived the coup launched a massive retaliatory purge of the huge Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which they accused of perpetrating the assassinations. President Sukarno, who had become allied politically with the Communists, was rendered powerless. He had been the unchallenged ruler of Indonesia for two decades. In the army purge and its aftermath, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people were killed. The victims included hundreds of thousands of members of the Communist Party and those seen as associated with the PKI. Many thousands of others died in sectarian violence unleashed in the chaotic power struggle.
The elimination by the army of the PKI as a force in the southern archipelago, which extends for 3,500 miles over more than 17,000 islands, profoundly altered the balance of power in East Asia. It thwarted Sukarno’s plans and those of his Communist allies for transforming Indonesia into a “People’s Democracy” aligned in a “Jakarta-Peking-Hanoi Axis” which would dominate Southeast Asia. It also ended Sukarno’s armed confrontation with the British-founded government of Malaysia, which he had opposed as nothing more than Western colonialism.
In July 1966, I traveled through the islands of Java and Bali piecing together a chronicle of the events leading to the Gestapu murder of the army generals and the horrific aftermath—one of the greatest massacres in history. The execution of Communists had not yet ended, and the jails were still crowded with the army’s captives. Thousands were dying of maltreatment. Returning to Jakarta after touring the blood-drenched villages, I became a witness to the end game being played out in the ousting of Sukarno from power by the army. The political drama unfolded vividly for me as an onlooker at a strange evening reception given by President Sukarno on July 27 in the great hall of the Negara Palace for an assembly of Indonesian generals, government officials, and a few foreigners.
Under the crystal chandeliers of the great hall, President Sukarno stood in his stocking feet on a Persian carpet exhorting the Indonesian elite assembled before him to obey “all my teachings.” A year earlier during the Independence Day celebration, I had watched in Merdeka (“Freedom”) Square as more than 100,000 of his people cheered the “Great Leader” wildly as he proclaimed a new “anti-imperialist axis” linking Indonesia to China, North Vietnam, and North Korea. The United States, Britain, and other Western powers must “get out of the whole of Southeast Asia altogether,” he had shouted.
Now, gazing wild-eyed about the glittering Negara Palace hall at the Indonesian officials, many of whom were deliberately slighting him by turning their backs or chatting with each other, the sixty-five-year-old president, flushed and infuriated, cried out that he still held supreme state authority. Out of him poured a storm of epithets about Western neocolonial plots and the need to continue Indonesia’s armed confrontation with Malaysia. He reiterated his demands for adherence to policies he had put in place before the events of September 30: creation of the Jakarta-Peking-Hanoi Axis; rejection of all Western financial aid; and continued boycott of the United Nations, from which he had withdrawn his nation.
But as the palace scene conveyed, the political landscape had changed radically. The army under the command of General Suharto had assumed absolute power. The right-wing generals had put down the Movement of September 30, the political coalition of Sukarno and other leftist politicians, accused of inspiring the Gestapu coup.
Sukarno, once worshiped as a demigod by most Indonesians, was now a virtual prisoner, under close guard at his palace at Bogor, forty miles south of the capital. But still Sukarno clung defiantly to the outer trappings of power. The army hesitated to use force to eject him formally and publicly from the presidency, since in some regions of the islands the people still idolized him as the “Great Leader of the Revolution.” Displacing him forcibly would risk civil war, army officers told me, even though they were denouncing and plotting against him. Thus the scene being played out on this night in the Negara Palace—full of hidden implications, expressed in the subtle Javanese style in whispers and glances—mirrored the historic juncture at which the Indonesian nation was poised in the struggle for ultimate power.
Standing erect directly before Sukarno’s palace dais and looking up at him were General Suharto and the two other Indonesian leaders, who made up the triumvirate now effectively ruling Indonesia. They frowned and stirred uneasily, glancing at each other, as they listened to Sukarno’s outburst. Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX, the leader of Central Java and the minister of economic affairs, did not betray his concern openly, although he was dismayed by the president challenging his plan designed to rescue the nation from disaster. Only a few people in the room knew that the sultan had privately approached the United States and the “Tokyo Club,” a consortium of non-Communist nations to which Indonesia was heavily in debt. He had asked for a loan of $500 million to halt the runaway inflation and so retrieve the country from its economic disorder. The sultan had been told that until Sukarno ceased his hostile polemics and ended the armed confrontation with Malaysia, he could not expect Western countries to act on requests for large-scale aid. At the time, about 7,000 British and 2,400 Malaysian soldiers were fighting off raids into Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo) by guerrillas armed and trained under Sukarno’s direction. The appeal to desist from such guerrilla raids made to him personally by Robert Kennedy during their meeting in Tokyo in January 1964 had been unavailing.
Gazing up at the raging Sukarno, Adam Malik, the foreign minister, was less able to conceal his fury. By his antics, Sukarno was undermining Malik’s plans for a rapprochement with the United States, ratification of the agreement reached in June in Bangkok to end the Malaysian confrontation, and his yet unannounced intention to reseat Indonesia in the United Nations. Malik, as he told me later in the evening, whispered to the impassive army officer at his right: “Shall I walk out or not?” The officer beside him was General Suharto, the army chief, who on March 11 had compelled President Sukarno to surrender executive power to him. “Be patient,” the general replied. The peppery foreign minister shrugged and obeyed.
With a last angry glance about the hall, Sukarno put on his shoes and stalked out. It was his custom at some ceremonial occasions to take off his shoes while holding forth. General Suharto watched the president exit and then, turning to Malik, asked him to circulate about the room and advise the diplomats and other foreigners present to ignore Sukarno’s tirade and reassure them that he would act within two weeks to restore de facto relations with Malaysia.
Several weeks before the palace episode, Sukarno had been publicly humiliated by the nation’s People’s Consultative Congress. The Congress was summoned by its chairman, General Abdul Haris Nasution, who alone among the seven senior generals targeted in the Gestapu putsch had managed to escape when the death squads descended on their homes. It convened as street demonstrations were being staged throughout the capital by Kami, the militant anti-Communist student organization, demanding the formal ouster of Sukarno as president. Responding to the outcry, the Congress scrapped the designation of Sukarno as “President for Life” and ratified the March 11 delegation of executive power to General Suharto. It approved of the army chief’s dissolution of the Communist Party and the ban on propagation of Communism and Marxism-Leninism. Elections were to be held within two years. In foreign policy, the Jakarta-Peking-Hanoi Axis with its tie to North Korea was junked, and the country returned to its previous nonaligned status. As for the formal removal of Sukarno as president, General Suharto quieted the students by saying: “It is not yet time.”
When Sukarno went to Merdeka Square on August 17, 1966, for his annual Independence Day speech, his reception was very different from what I had witnessed the previous year. This time, when he told the massed thousands: “I am your great leader . . . Follow my leadership, obey my directives,” the crowd booed, and some one thousand students left the stadium shouting denunciations of him. In his speech, Sukarno unconvincingly deplored the killing of the six generals. The next day the Kami student groups, other mass organizations, and newspapers in West Java responded by demanding that Sukarno explain what he knew about the murders.
The September 30, 1965, putsch had its origins in the rivalries between two political blocs. One was the right-wing army generals, headed by General Nasution, the defense minister, and General Achmad Yani, the chief of staff. The generals confronted a coalition of leftist politicians led by Sukarno. The coalition embraced in the first instance D. N. Aidit, leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, which claimed a membership of 3 million. The party was affiliated with front organizations with a total membership of about 18 million, among them the highly militant Pemuda Rakyat, a youth organization of some 2 million, and Gerwani, a women’s organization also of about 2 million. Affiliated also were some 12 million members of peasant and trade union organizations. Other key members of Sukarno’s political coalition were Dr. Subandrio, the pro-Peking foreign minister, who was the president’s closest adviser, and the chief of the Indonesian Air Force, Marshal Omar Dhani.
The alliance between Sukarno and Aidit had been forged four years prior to the September 30 crisis. It was then that Sukarno, impatient with the inefficient and corrupt political parties with which he had been associated, turned to the Communists. He was persuaded by Aidit that the PKI, while leaning to Peking, would remain independent in the international Communist movement and that the party would be willing to share power with the Nationalist politicians. A professed Marxist himself, Sukarno was drawn to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of the PKI. He saw in its dedicated leadership and its mass organization techniques the means of building the socialist “Greater Indonesia” he had long envisioned. Steadily, up to September 30, Sukarno fostered the growth and influence of the Communist Party. He compelled the right-wing generals to accept his principle of “Nasakom,” unity based on a front of Nationalist, religious, and Communist forces. Under his patronage, the Communist Party was able to set up the most pervasive political organization in the country. It took control of many local governments, successfully infiltrated the air force, and indoctrinated some army officers. Sukarno brought Aidit and his chief lieutenants into his cabinet as ministers without portfolio. Only the top army generals, notably Nasution and Yani, blocked the formation of a Nasakom cabinet. Sukarno intended that the cabinet would be one in which the Communists would rule as ministers with executive power preparatory to Indonesia’s entry into a “Socialist stage.”
In early 1965, Sukarno began to foster what he called the Jakarta-Peking Axis and spoke of extending it to North Vietnam and North Korea. Subandrio, the foreign minister, accompanied by senior military advisers, arrived in Peking on January 23, just twenty-three days after Sukarno announced that he was withdrawing Indonesia from the United Nations. Subandrio met with Chinese leaders, including Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, and Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, and at the conclusion of the talks, a joint statement was issued expressing “a mutual desire to strengthen friendly contacts in the military field.” The statement reaffirmed opposition to the founding by Britain of Malaysia through the merger of Singapore and Malaya, the policies of the South Vietnamese government, and the American stand in the Vietnam War. It was during those talks that Zhou Enlai endorsed a proposal by Aidit for the creation in Indonesia of a “Fifth Force” of millions of Indonesians in a People’s Militia and offered to supply it with 100,000 small weapons. It would obviously be a force to counter the power of the army and its right-wing generals. Chen Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, traveled to Jakarta to confer with Sukarno and attended the Independence Day celebration in Merdeka Square. I glimpsed Chen Yi as, with hands clasped across his ample middle, he fell asleep in the hot sun while watching a two-hour “People’s Parade.” In his speech that day Sukarno publicly put forward the idea of a “Fifth Force” and soon after secretly dispatched Marshal Dhani, the air force commander, to Peking to arrange the delivery of the arms promised by Zhou Enlai.
It was later that month that rumors spread that Sukarno, then sixty-four years old and troubled by a persistent kidney ailment, had become seriously ill, and both the army and the Communists began to prepare for a showdown over the anticipated succession. The army managed to stall the Sukarno-backed proposal for a political Fifth Force and blocked the delivery of the Chinese weapons promised by Zhou Enlai. The army leaders knew the PKI intended to employ Sukarno’s proposed Fifth Force to broaden its power base in the country for an eventual bid for total power. They were aware that the PKI had begun secretly training its own militia at Halim Air Base near Jakarta, making use of a small number of weapons smuggled in from China and other clandestine sources. Hundreds of trainees were drawn from Pemuda Rakyat, the Communist youth organization, and Gerwani, the Communist women’s organization.
It was in this increasingly tense atmosphere that the September 30 Movement was born. Determined to go forward with the creation of the Nasakom cabinet he envisioned, Sukarno raged against the generals for obstructing his plans. Aidit and Subandrio together with other leftist politicians listened attentively as did Marshal Dhani, who had arranged the secret training of Communist militia near the Halim base. At the meetings a plan to eliminate those of the army who were opposing Sukarno’s goals began to take shape. What the conspirators planned, I was told as I reconstructed the events, was not to be a coup d’état, that is, a seizure of total control of the government, nor was an immediate Communist takeover of Indonesia planned. Instead, the plotters intended to bring about a political power shift to the left. Those obstructing Sukarno’s program for a Nasakom cabinet— that is, the top right-wing generals—were to be purged, somehow put out of the way. This move supposedly was also intended to forestall any possible attempt by a newly formed Council of Generals to seize total power. The purge of the generals would upset the existing delicate power balance between the army and the Communist Party, which Sukarno had previously fostered, but the president had been convinced by Aidit that the PKI would be content to share power. Was that an accurate appraisal of Aidit’s intentions? In an interview in his Jakarta office, six weeks before Gestapu, I asked Aidit if his acceptance of Nasakom was a tactical move to gain power or a doctrinal adaptation of his Communist Party to Indonesian realities. “We remain Communist,” Aidit replied, “but we have to be tolerant of nationalism and religion.” But the PKI leader also said that his party would remain free to act as it deemed necessary. He did not exclude the possibility that it might follow the example of some European Communist parties and exploit creation of a national political front as a vehicle for the eventual assumption of supreme power.
The September 30 Movement conspirators who had become committed to serving Sukarno by purging his army opponents conferred secretly for weeks in Jakarta. Two of Aidit’s aides participated, Supono and a mysterious “Sjam,” who was believed to be Tjugito, a member of the party’s Central Committee. Also drawn in were Mustafa Sjarif Supardjo, a brigadier general commanding a division in West Java, and Lieutenant Colonel Untung of Sukarno’s Palace Guard. The plotters decided to go forward in their move against the generals on the night of September 30. Two days prior, Foreign Minister Subandrio left for the island of Sumatra on what was described as a speaking engagement. He would be safely distant if the plot went awry.
The command post for the purge of the generals was the Halim Air Force Base, which was under the personal command of Marshal Dhani. At about 10 P.M. on September 30, trucks loaded with troops arrived at the base, and shortly thereafter General Supardjo and Colonel Untung, who were charged by the conspirators with actually carrying out the coup, arrived by jeep. At about 3:30 A.M., seven squads made up of members of the Presidential Palace Guard and the Pemuda Rakyat, the Communist youth organization, under the command of Lieutenant Arief, set out in trucks to seize the seven senior army generals in their homes. Before leaving Halim, the squads were told in a briefing that a Council of Generals backed by the American CIA intended to overthrow Sukarno and the Great Leader’s revolution. They were to arrest the seven generals, telling them that they were wanted immediately at the presidential palace for a meeting with Sukarno. The generals were then to be brought back alive or dead to Halim before being taken to nearby Lubang Buaja—the Crocodile’s Hole—the area in which members of the Communist youth organizations had been undergoing military training.
At about 4 A.M., the squads descended on the homes of General Nasution, the minister of defense, General Yani, the army’s chief of staff, and the other five generals. Although the generals had received warnings weeks before of the possibility of a move against them, the houses inexplicably had no special security arrangements. Sentries at the homes of Nasution and Yani were easily overpowered. Yani and two other generals who tried to fight off the attackers were killed, and three of the four other generals, among them Major General S. Parman, chief of intelligence, were taken alive. Those still alive and the bodies of the dead were taken in a truck to the Crocodile’s Hole. There, an apparently uncontrolled frenzy took place. The living generals were tortured and killed, and the bodies of all six were dumped at the site into the well, which was covered up with debris. Participating in the murderous orgy were members of Gerwani, the Communist women’s organization. What transpired was evident by the condition of the severely mutilated bodies, which were discovered and brought to the surface by frogmen on October 4. The body of Major General Suprapto, a deputy chief of staff, who was taken alive to Crocodile’s Hole, according to an official medical report, bore thirty wounds, including broken bones, bullet wounds, and knife thrusts. Some of the generals were said to have had their eyes gouged out.
Despite the elimination of the six, the purge was, in fact, badly bungled and fatally so for the perpetrators. The key target of the death squads, Defense Minister Nasution, the top general, escaped. When the raiders broke into Nasution’s home, as his wife stalled them by slamming doors shut ahead of the intruders, the general slipped into the courtyard, climbed over a wall into the neighboring garden of the Iraqi ambassador, and despite a fractured ankle managed to limp away. In the melee the raiders shot Nasution’s sister and his five-year-old daughter, who was in her arms. The child died later in a hospital. The PKI was to pay an incalculable price for the murderous assault on the Nasution family. It was General Nasution before all others among the generals who pressed for the subsequent massive purge of the Communists. He was present when the frogmen brought up the remains of his murdered fellow generals.
Sukarno arrived at Halim in the late morning of October 1 after spending some time at the house of Dewi, his Japanese wife. Awakened at 6 A.M. with news of the attack on Nasution’s house, he set out for Halim, stopping over at the home of another wife, Haryati, before going on to the air base. According to the testimony much later before a military court trying Major Sujono, the commander of the ground forces at Halim, Sukarno first went to the operations command center and then to a house which had been prepared for him. Soon after, General Supardjo, the military chief of the plotters, arrived at Halim and went to President Sukarno to report. Major Sujono said he and others stood outside the house and watched through a window. He said he saw the president pat Supardjo on the shoulder, apparently approvingly. Supardjo then emerged from Sukarno’s quarters and called out to Colonel Untung, saying: “The president has given his blessings and in a little while, a statement executed by the president himself declaring his support will be announced.” Later in the day an announcement was made on Jakarta Radio of the formation of a Revolutionary Council. The broadcast, made in Untung’s name, said that a number of generals had been purged to forestall a counterrevolutionary coup by the Council of Generals planned for Armed Forces Day, October 5. The broadcast did not cite any approval of the coup by Sukarno, who by that time must have been made aware that General Nasution had escaped.
The plotters made two fatal blunders. One was the failure to capture Nasution and the other their apparent decision not to put General Suharto, commander of KOSTRAD, the Strategic Army Reserve, on the list of those to be purged immediately. Suharto returned to Jakarta the morning of October 1 from a fishing trip and became aware of what was transpiring from the radio broadcasts of the Revolutionary Council. He learned that Colonel Untung had brought two Communist-infiltrated battalions, the 454th and 530th paratroops from Central and East Java, into the city on the pretext of participation in the celebration of Armed Forces Day. Their mission was to seize the radio station, which they did, and take control of Merdeka Square in the center of the city. One phase of the plot went awry with a comic aspect. Only the senior officers of the two battalions knew of the plot, and they neglected to tell the troops of the agreed password for effecting liaison with the allied Communist groups. When the Communist youth units summoned to the capital arrived at Merdeka Square and shouted the password at Untung’s battalions, the puzzled troops responded by arresting the lot. The youth group was unarmed, since Colonel Untung had been unable to deliver arms, as promised.
General Suharto acted decisively as soon he became apprised of what was transpiring in the capital and at the Halim Air Base, where Marshal Dhani had assembled his forces. Suharto went to his KOSTRAD headquarters and rallied loyal elements of the armed forces and police. He managed to persuade the 530th Paratrooper Battalion brought to Jakarta by Untung to defect to him while the colonel’s other battalion fled to Halim to join Dhani’s troops. Suharto located General Nasution, who was still being hunted by the death squads. He put Nasution under protective guard and offered him command of the army. When the injured defense minister declined, he took command himself. Later, he would nudge Nasution aside entirely as he took full political power. By 8 P.M. Suharto was in control of Jakarta and preparing to move against the Halim base. His problem became more complex when he learned that Sukarno was there. He contacted the base and asked that the president leave before he attacked. Sukarno delayed, uncertain as to where he should go. The plotters urged him to go Madiun, a city in the western part of the province of East Java where the 1948 Communist uprising took place, apparently thinking that with the presence of Sukarno they might be able to reorder their forces. Sukarno was dissuaded by others who felt he would be endangered, and when Sukarno’s wife Dewi arrived at Halim, he left with her in her car for his palace at Bogor. At dawn, Suharto’s commandos assaulted the base and after brief skirmishing occupied it. Before the base fell, Marshal Dhani flew off to Madiun, while the remnants of his troops fled hoping they could make their way to Central Java.
On the morning of October 2, the official PKI newspaper, Harian Rakyat, committed a monumental blunder which provided the army with public justification for its bloody purge of the Communist Party. The newspaper was circulated on the streets of Jakarta with an editorial registering approval of the Gestapu plot. Apparently, the paper had been printed and circulated before the editors became aware that General Suharto had already in effect put down the September 30 Movement. The editorial stated:
It has happened that on the 30th of September measures were taken to safeguard President Sukarno and the Republic of Indonesia from a coup by a so-called Council of Generals. According to what has been announced by the September 30 Movement, which is headed by Lieutenant Colonel Untung of the Tjakabirawa battalion, the action taken to preserve President Sukarno and the Republic of Indonesia from the Council of Generals is patriotic and revolutionary . . . But, however, the case may be [that] this is an internal Army affair. On the other hand, we the people, who are conscious of the policy and duties of the revolution, are convinced of the correctness of the action taken by the September 30 Movement to preserve the revolution and the people . . . We call upon the people to intensify their vigilance and be prepared to confront all eventualities.
The editorial effectively sealed the fate of the PKI leadership. Before his escape to Madiun, Dhani provided Aidit with a plane for a flight to Jogjakarta in Central Java. The PKI leader had arrived at Halim before midnight and had been present in the morning when General Supardjo briefed Sukarno. Aidit landed in Jogjakarta at 2 A.M. on October 2. Just before his arrival, Brigadier General Katamso, the army commander for the city, and Colonel Sugigsono, his deputy, were assassinated, and pro-PKI elements had taken control. Aidit told the local PKI leaders that Sukarno would arrive in the city soon to address a mass demonstration. Presumably, he expected Sukarno to proclaim his support for the September 30 Movement. But with the failure of the putsch in Jakarta, the Communists soon lost control of Jogjakarta to the army, and Aidit fled the city. In Surabaya, the big coastal city in East Java, another PKI stronghold, there was no Communist move of any consequence to take control. I was told there that a lieutenant and a squad of six men did go to the unguarded radio station, where they broadcast a “Revolutionary Proclamation.” When the surprised army commander in the city became aware of the Gestapu coup, he arrested the lieutenant, who was subsequently shot.
On November 21, Aidit was captured near Solo, forty miles northwest of Jogjakarta, and executed the next day. When I traveled through East Java in July, I interviewed the army commander, General Sumitro, and asked him about the execution of the Communist leader. He would only say for the record, “You can be sure of one thing. Aidit is dead.” I was given, however, by members of his staff details of Aidit’s last hours. On November 21, 1965, at 9 P.M., the Indonesian military police ripped open a bamboo cupboard in the corner of a shabby bungalow near a railroad track, on the outskirts of Solo. They confronted a crouching fugitive, who arose, faced the guns, and said: “I am Aidit.” The Communist leader was interrogated briefly by a military police major and then asked to write a statement. He wrote until nearly 3 A.M. and then told the major: “I want to go to Jakarta. Can you help me?” The major replied that he was agreeable but they would first have to go to Sema-rang, the regional military headquarters. From there they could go by plane to Jakarta. Aidit was then put in a jeep and driven northwest on the road to Semarang. In the hills near Boyolali, the major halted the jeep at a desolate spot and told his prisoner to get out. Aidit was said to have exclaimed: “What is this? This is not legal!” Before he was shot, Aidit was said to have shouted: “Long Live the PKI.” He was buried in an unmarked grave. The details of Aidit’s execution and his last testament were not officially published.
When General Suharto assumed full executive control of the country on March 11, he promulgated a ban on the Communist Party. It was only a gesture for the record, since the massive purge of the Communists had already begun in late October. Commando units were then sent knifing through the Communist strongholds in Central and East Java. General Sumitro, the East Java commander, told me that Suharto had issued a detailed order in mid-November that the Communist Party should be destroyed “structurally and ideologically.” Staff officers had visited the area commanders in early December to make sure the instructions had been understood and executed. “Most local commanders did their utmost to kill as many cadres of the Communist party as possible,” the general said. Recalling the 1948 Communist uprising at Madiun, which was also crushed by the army, Sumitro repeated what I had heard from army officers throughout Java: “They tried it at Madiun, and again in Jakarta, and we are not going to let them try it again.” Sumitro added: “The PKI was able to make a coup in Jakarta, but they did not move all over the country because they had no weapons. If Aidit had been allowed to organize his Fifth Force and equip it, he would have moved to take over in Central and East Java.”
Whatever the degree of complicity and intentions of the PKI in the September 30 Movement and in the Gestapu killings, and whatever Aidit may have planned, the end effect was that it gave the army the rationale for carrying out the total destruction of its long-standing political enemies. In Jakarta, the army executed members of the PKI’s Politburo and Central Committee. Njoto, the deputy chairman, was arrested by military police as he was leaving Subandrio’s home in Jakarta and later shot, as was the third ranking member of the Politburo, Mohammed H. Lukman. Among others executed, accused of being ringleaders in the attempted coup, were General Supardjo, Colonel Untung, and Marshal Dhani. Foreign Minister Subandrio was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted, and he spent the next twenty-nine years in prison.
Estimates of the number of people killed in the aftermath of Gestapu ranged from 500,000 to 1 million. My own estimate was 750,000, based on authoritative surveys conducted by university student organizations in October 1966 and checked by my Australian assistant, Frank Palmer, with Suharto’s aides and army sources. But it will never be known precisely how many thousands of members of the PKI, their sympathizers, and families were killed. My estimate includes thousands murdered in criminal sectarian violence, many of them members of the large Chinese community, which was despised by many Indonesians. Many murders were committed by Indonesians who exploited the purge-incited chaos to exact vengeance in personal vendettas or simply for material gain.
Foreigners resident in Indonesia for decades were unable to make sense of the nature of the violence in all its hideous aspects. They spoke to me of how it seemed to be completely at variance with the gentle nature of the people, particularly the Balinese. Some said the populations may have been inflamed by highly colored stories of sexual mutilation of the slain generals. One of Indonesia’s most distinguished writers, recalling his own moment of blood anger, said: “There is a devil in us and when it gets loose, we can run amok en masse.” Many who participated in the killings of Communists justified their acts by saying, “It was them or us.” I heard stories in cities and towns alleging that graves had been dug by the Communists before September 30 to receive the victims of an impending coup d’état. Lists were said to have been seized from Communist Party files naming army officers, religious leaders, local officials, and foreign missionaries to be executed. Boxes of instruments to pluck out eyes in the torture of prisoners were said to be found in the possession of Communists. Some of the stories seemed to have been spun out of a need to rationalize the mass killings. I did not come upon any persuasive evidence that the Communists possessed large stocks of weapons or were planning an immediate general uprising.
As I traveled through Java and Bali, there seemed to be no end to the killing. Many Indonesians whose relatives and friends had been slain were intent on collecting blood debts. The jails were jammed with people charged by the army with association with the PKI. The attorney general, Major General Sugiharto, told me he hoped to release about 120,000 detainees, many held in overcrowded prisons on bare subsistence rations, by the end of the year. At Solo in Central Java, Colonel Wibhawa said he had arrested 10,000 people in his region alone and was “still mopping up.”
Army leaders told me that most of the killing of Communists was done by the aroused population. But in my tour of the former centers of Communist influence, I found either that most executions were carried out directly by the military or that the army incited the populations to do the killing. At some centers near Solo the military was staging executions without trial of selected Communists. The military executed its condemned by shooting, but the population was left free to behead victims or disembowel them with knives, swords, and bamboo spears, often with prior rituals of extreme cruelty. In the Banyumas region of southern Central Java, the politically inspired killings had evolved into guerrilla class warfare, with debtors eliminating their creditors, and rural tenants killing landlords.
In East Java, where estimates of the number of killings ranged from 100,000 to 300,000, most of the executions of Communists took place in the district of Kediri, which had been dominated politically by the Communists. The systematic execution of Communists was organized by the military commander, Major Willi Sudyono. His brother, Lieutenant General Sutoyo, was one of the six generals killed in the Jakarta putsch. There were religious as well as political motives for the population’s participation in the killings carried out in Kediri, the center of Muslim religious instruction in East Java. Even before September 30, there had been clashes between Communist youth groups and Ansor, the youth organization of the Muslim Scholars Party. In the purge of the Communists, most of the killings were done by army-trained squads of Ansor, mainly youths in their teens and early twenties who were students at the Muslim university and religious schools in the Kediri district. Haj Marcus Ali, the fifty-seven-year-old religious leader of the district and a top leader of the Muslim Scholars Party, told me that Ansor had “fulfilled the command of the army” and that the “killings were the will of God.” He said that 20,000 Communists had been killed in the Kediri district. Asked if there had been any resistance in the villages, he said he knew of fifteen members of Ansor and one army man who had been killed in the mop-up. He said he had two complaints against the Communists: they had offended Muslims, and they had taken “one-sided action” in their enforcement of land distribution and crop-sharing laws. In Central Java, where estimates of executions ranged from 50,000 to 300,000, members of the Nationalist and Muslim Scholars parties had also joined the army as executioners.
Apart from the Jakarta area, there was no mass killing in West Java, where there were no major centers of Communist influence. But reports from Sumatra and other islands of the archipelago, which I did not visit, told of purges that took many thousands of lives. In North Sumatra, I was told, hundreds were massacred in the Medan region, among them many Chinese merchants and their families. Mobs swept into the Chinese quarters, looting and killing.
On the idyllic island of Bali, when I arrived, the smell of death no longer hung heavily in the villages built with red-stone Hindu shrines at their centers. Once again, the people were going out to fish in the sea where not long ago hundreds of bodies floated on the waters torn at by the creatures of the depths. Maiden dancers, their black tresses plaited with fragrant white blossoms, danced entrancingly to the drums and gongs of the gamelan orchestras and tossed petals of hibiscus to me. Balinese smiled gently in response to my questions, saying that the terrible happenings were a “family affair” and they hoped American tourists would come back again, now that the Communists were gone. Yet the wounds festered amid the beauty. The prisons in Denpasar were still crowded. It was easy to rent a house because so many houses had been used by the army as depots for the rounding-up and execution of Communists. The Balinese, fearful that the spirits had not been exorcised, would not live in them. In Negra, there was one house where 300 Communists were said to have been shot. The well in the garden was stuffed with bodies. Children whispered about the fate of their teachers. Some 2,000 teachers were said to have died in the massacre. Most of the island’s teachers, unable to live on their monthly pay because of the inflation, had joined Communist organizations seeking relief from their poverty.
No one knows precisely how many men, women, and children were slain on Bali. Estimates ranged from 20,000 to 100,000. Foreigners who lived on the island were convinced that about 50,000 of the population of 2 million had been killed. The army began its round-up of Communists at the end of October 1965, and it continued until mid-January. The army had required Communist Party officials before September 30 to hand over lists of members of the party and its affiliate organizations. Most of those on the lists were subsequently hunted to be killed. When I asked Parwanto, the prosecuting attorney of the Bali government, if there was any legal basis for the killings, he replied: “It was a revolution.”
Most of the killings were carried out by army-selected civilian executioners who were known as Tamins. They were young men who were given loose black shirts and black trousers to identify them. They operated in teams, usually by night, and apparently met little or no resistance from the terrorized villagers. There were reports, which I could not confirm, that whole villages were wiped out. One responsible Balinese told of what happened to his typical village of about two thousand persons. Twenty-seven Communists had been killed there. The village headman, who was a member of the party, hanged himself. Others took poison. Some escaped. That evidently was the pattern for the several thousand villages on Bali.
The largest scale of killings occurred in the Jembrana Regency in the western part of the island, a center of Communist influence. There, the palace of the rajah of Negara, one of the eight traditional kings of Bali, was destroyed because he had allowed PKI members to meet on his grounds. His son, the pro-Communist governor of Bali, was in jail in Jakarta at the time. Eyewitnesses said the rajah’s retainers were dragged from the palace to have their bowed heads crushed by rocks hurled by the mob. The rajah died as his palace was being sacked by the mob, and members of his family were slaughtered.
Describing the Ansor squads, a Christian pastor said: “We always wondered if they would eventually turn on us.” The pastor told of listening in helpless agony to the cries for help in the night as Ansor squads pursued fugitives through the streets, and hearing the thud of great peasant sickles as the executioners slashed their victims to death. Toward the end of the mass killings, when whole families were sometimes put to death at one time, the Ansor executioners began to wear masks. There were often instances where men were killed who were mistaken for Communists or denounced because of some personal grudge. Old scores were settled under political pretexts. On the first day of the mass killings, one army officer in civilian dress cheerfully left Kediri city carrying a machine gun to shoot squatters who had refused to get off his untilled land.
After the interview with the Christian pastor I returned to the hotel where I was staying, an elegant hostelry built for tourists vacant except for Frank Palmer, my assistant, and me. I lay awake that night unable to shut out the ghastly accounts of the massacres. The stories of the descent of the Tamins on the frightened people in villages evoked vividly for me the memory of what my mother, Anna, had told me of the pogrom carried out by Cossacks against the Jews in her Ukrainian village. My mother was born in the ghetto village of Zamerhover. Her father, Morris, was a peddler. He would hitch up his horse cart, go out to the countryside where he would buy vegetables from the peasants, and then sell them to the people in the village. The family lived in a small cottage heated by wood in a brick wall stove. One morning mounted Cossacks raided the village. They were looking for loot, and they were seizing young men for the czar’s army. Gazing out the cottage window, my grandmother, Pearl, saw that her sixteen-year-old son, David, who had been standing by the road, had been seized by two Cossacks. As my mother, then six years old, watched through a window, Pearl ran out, tore David from their hands, and he ran off. But Pearl was then struck down by baton-wielding Cossacks and trampled by their horses. The family carried her into the cottage, where she died with my mother weeping at her bedside. She was not the only Jew who died in the pogrom that day. What moved men to inflict such atrocities on innocents? It was a question I asked myself repeatedly that night and then over the next years as genocidal massacres were carried out in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Africa, and the Middle East.
I did not detect any visible signs of remorse among those who did the killings in Bali, what until then was seen as the “island paradise.” During religious festivals in Bali the young, black-clad executioners bowed before chanting Hindu priests who cleansed them of the taint of the blood of the tens of thousands they had slaughtered. The executioners marched proudly in parades. Their black garments were the vogue for many youngsters.
Amid all the carnage, I still came upon plain evidence in Central and East Java of continuing support for Sukarno, which gave the army reason enough for hesitancy in abruptly ousting him. Driving east out of Jakarta, passing through prosperous West Java, the army’s political stronghold, I entered Sukarnoland. Here in Central Java and in East Java, where some 50 million of Indonesia’s 107 million people lived, I found that the mystique of the “Great Leader” still prevailed. The rice paddies and plantations were tilled mostly by subsistence-level farmers, and although his Communist allies were no longer in power, the farmers continued to look to Sukarno as the father figure. After the army purge the regions had come under the control of the Nationalist and Muslim Scholars parties. The two parties, as a buffer against domination by the army, had joined in tacit political alliance with the beleaguered president.
Driving along the roads bisecting the farmlands and wending about the mist-capped volcanic mountains, I saw signposts everywhere bearing slogans hailing Bung Karno—”Brother Sukarno.” His photograph hung on arches in the villages and on the bamboo walls of the peasant huts. They were displayed in the limestone houses of officials and in the Chinese shops of Jogjakarta, Solo, and Surabaya. Educated Indonesians in those cities told me they knew of Sukarno’s collaboration with the Japanese in World War II, his assignment of Indonesians to the death labor camps, his political links to the Communists, and his notorious dalliance with women. Yet, they said, Sukarno had given them an ideology, a national identity, and the dream of a “Greater Indonesia,” which made him the linchpin of the some three hundred ethnic groups living in the vast archipelago. In Surabaya, a professor of medicine said: “Sukarno is like a great mystical tree and we need him.” In Jogjakarta, a prominent and well-informed Indonesian said: “If something happens to Sukarno in Jakarta, there might be civil war.” Sukarno’s continued influence extended beyond to the island of Bali, where, I was to learn, the people were swayed more by the fact that the president’s mother was Balinese than by the vagaries of his politics.
In the aftermath of the Gestapu, Sukarno exploited to the hilt this continued reverence for him. In his private sparring with General Suharto and Foreign Minister Malik, he sometimes hinted that he might incite civil war in Central and East Java if he was crowded too much by the army. Once, Malik recalled, he had angrily snapped back at the president: “All right, go to Central Java and start a civil war, and see who will win.” Yet General Suharto continued to move cautiously, fearful of civil strife, weighing a constitutional solution whereby the president would accept a figurehead role and bestow legitimacy on an army-run regime. The army did not challenge the president directly to explain publicly his role in the plotting of the September 30 Movement and the Gestapu. Even some of his enemies who knew the answer remained silent perhaps because they felt that preserving the image of the founder of Indonesian independence was more important than exacting vengeance. Certain facts were plain. Sukarno wanted the generals Nasution and Yani and their deputies out of the way so he could replace them with pliant military men who would not obstruct his plans for a Communist-led Nasakom cabinet that would bring about his socialist “Greater Indonesia.” The president knew that Aidit, Subandrio, and other leftist politicians, Dhani, and some army officers loyal to him personally were planning action to satisfy his wishes. But the secret is buried as to whether he intended that the seven targeted generals be killed.
In 1967, the People’s Consultative Congress, faulting Sukarno for failing “to meet his constitutional responsibilities,” ousted him from the presidency and replaced him with General Suharto. The Congress heard Suharto testify that Sukarno was not “the direct instigator or the mastermind” behind the Gestapu plot. But Sukarno was found guilty to the extent that Suharto was able to keep to keep the “Great Leader” under house arrest until his death in 1970.
There have been suggestions that the U.S. government and its agencies played a clandestine role in bringing about the Communist debacle. There is no question that the CIA in cooperation with British and Australian operatives was providing support and encouragement to the anti-Sukarno factions before September 30. There was reason enough for the opposition to Sukarno, given his confrontation with Malaysia and the anti-Western policies he was fomenting elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The Johnson administration was concerned that Sukarno’s pro-Communist stance in the southern arc might eventually affect the American war effort in Vietnam. According to CIA documents, declassified in later years, the American Embassy may have been involved in the transfer of funds to anti-Sukarno factions in the army. There was also a suggestion by some academic researchers, which I found naïve, that the CIA, which kept lists of the membership of the PKI, had turned them over to the army for use in the purge. The PKI operated mainly in the open as a legal political party enjoying the encouragement of Sukarno. The leadership was well known to the army. The army had kept a wary eye on the membership of the PKI and its affiliated organizations from the time of the Communist uprising in Madiun in 1948. The CIA officers, who operated under the cover of the embassy, did not have to use cloak-and-dagger methods to obtain the names of those in the leadership. They needed only to buy a subscription to Harian Rakyat, the official PKI newspaper, which did not hesitate to publish names. During the purge of the Communists, the army and its collaborators did raid local offices to obtain lists. I detected no evidence in Jakarta or in the former Communist strongholds in Central and East Java or in Bali of any direct American involvement in the political confrontation leading up to the Gestapu coup or in the army counterthrust and purge of the PKI. Marshall Green, the American ambassador, making a point of staying clear of the confrontation, confined himself in retrospect to stating in a meeting with correspondents: “The United States military presence in Southeast Asia emboldened the army, but it had no decisive effect on the outcome. It is perhaps better to look at it in negative terms. If we hadn’t stood firm in Southeast Asia, if we hadn’t maintained a military presence, then the outcome might have been different.”
Ironically, Sukarno in death exacted revenge against Suharto, his warden. In 2001, his daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, was elected president of Indonesia. Her pedigree was undoubtedly a factor in her victory. In the years prior to her election she became a symbol of the resistance to Suharto’s autocratic and corrupt rule and played a part in forcing his resignation as president in 1998. Suharto was charged with embezzling as much as $15 billion in public funds on behalf of his family and friends. His trial on corruption charges was suspended in September 2000 when judges ruled that the former president was not medically fit to stand trial. His lawyers successfully withstood the pressure for a trial up until his death on January 27, 2008. As he lay dying in a Jakarta hospital, a parade of Indonesia’s elite, including President Yudhoyono, visited his bedside in what seemed to be a compassionate spirit of forgiveness for the years of his corrupt and brutal repressive rule. It was recalled that Suharto had given Indonesia some years of economic stability following the turmoil of Sukarno’s demise. As for Sukarno’s daughter, Megawati, her fame was short lived. After an undistinguished term of office as president, she was defeated in 2004 in a landslide election by a former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Her defeat closed the book on the faded Sukarno mystique.