While Djakarta was the focal point of the Gestapu operation, the plotters had also struck in various other parts of the country.
In the north of Sumatra, the Communists were fairly well organized. They had the support of a governor who was an undercover member of the party. But any plans they had laid to secure northern Sumatra for the Gestapu were foiled by the lightning impulse of Brigadier General Kemal Idris, who was then in the area with a division under his command.
Kemal Idris is a youngish, courtly general with the faintest trace of a lisp when he speaks in English. But he has a reputation for swift and decisive action. There was no hesitation on his part as he got the first news of the coup on the morning of October 1 at his base at Tebintinggi, some 60 miles southeast of Medan, Sumatra’s biggest city.
Today he admits he moved without orders. “I told my men to seize members of the Communist Party before I had any authority to do so,” he says. “Their initial orders were to clean up the Communists within a five-kilometer radius of their positions. But they completed the assignment so fast that they spread outwards, still farther afield.
“Some of our troops were disloyal. We had a brigade commander and a number of officers involved in Gestapu. But we moved so fast, they were unable to react.”
With his troops already in action, Kemal Idris managed to contact General Suharto in Djakarta. Kemal Idris asked permission to take his division and move on Medan. At first, Suharto demurred. Though Kemal Idris did not himself tell me this story, Suharto apparently was concerned lest Malaysia take advantage of the situation in Indonesia to launch an attack across the Malacca Strait on Sumatra. Incredible though this seems, Suharto at that moment apparently considered Malaysia capable of such action and did not want a whole division committed against the Communists in Medan.
Thus Kemal Idris moved out at the head of a battalion and into Medan. There, as eyewitnesses tell it, he burst into government offices with pistol in hand to find some army officers furiously typing away at Gestapu directives and propaganda. To the head of one of these officers he put his pistol; then he looked around and shouted the question, “Are you for or against Suharto?”Support for Suharto was suddenly a hundred percent. The Gestapu documents swiftly disappeared. Kemal Idris had Medan under his control.
Now he contacted Suharto again. This time he got permission to use his division to “clean up” Communists. Nobody needed to spell out what “cleaning up” meant. One reliable source close to Kemal Idris says that the army killed twenty percent of the rubber plantation workers in the Medan area in those days of bloody retaliation succeeding the coup attempt.
On Indonesia’s outlying islands there were sporadic, but apparently ill-coordinated, Gestapu incidents. In Borneo, young Communists made a vain attempt to set fire to a Shell Oil Company refinery. On Timor, high officials were assembled with their wives for a special briefing outside Kupang, the main town, to last several days. They thought it odd that the only important group absent was the Communist Party. But if it was a plot to move against those officials so conveniently collected together, it failed, for local army units balked and refused to align themselves with Gestapu.
Meanwhile, on the island of Flores the chief of police stumbled on a rallying Gestapu force by extraordinary accident. Driving home, he absentmindedly overshot his own driveway and went on up the road round a bend to meet the hastily gathered Gestapu supporters coming the other way. He wheeled round and raced back to alert loyalist military units.
In the central region of Indonesia’s major island of Java, however, the Gestapu made a formidable stand. Central Java was the stronghold of the Communist Party. It had too many people on too little land, and it was easy prey for the Communists with their heady promises of land reform. It was to this region that Aidit fled in the early hours of October 2 after the collapse of Gestapu in Djakarta. The plane provided by Omar Dhani landed him at Jogjakarta, and he was soon huddled in conference with Communist officials, local Communist mayors, and the pro-Communist acting governor of Central Java.
For Aidit the selection of Central Java as a place for retreat was obvious and sound. In addition to the party strength there, the Communists had successfully infiltrated the Diponegoro division of the army (so named after a l9th-century Javanese hero), which was stationed in Central Java. Four of the division’s battalions had allied themselves to the Gestapu banner and were in revolt. For Suharto and his loyalist officers, Central Java was to present their most serious challenge outside Djakarta.
The divisional commander got the first news of the Gestapu operation by radio early in the morning of October 1. Brigadier General Surjo Sumpeno was sipping coffee with his wife in his quarters at the divisional headquarters of Semarang, a pretty town on the northern coast of Central Java, near the Java Sea.
As he recalls the story today, he “immediately had a feeling something was wrong.” He knew, he says, “there was nothing to this Council of Generals.”
His first action was to summon local officials and officers in his divisional command to a meeting. He urged them to stay calm until the situation was clarified. One of his officers at that meeting was Lieutenant Colonel Usman. Ordinarily, Usman never wore side arms, but General Sumpeno recalls noting with brief curiosity at the time that on this occasion Usman arrived wearing a revolver.
After the meeting, General Sumpeno issued a statement to the public asking them to be quiet, not to take any unusual action by themselves, and to await further orders. Then he set off, in his Russian-made jeep, for Magelang on the road leading south to Jogjakarta, the cultural center of Java and one-time seat of government during the early days of the Indonesian republic. At Magelang was the military academy, and the General wanted to brief his officers there on the situation. To kill two birds with one stone, he asked the regimental commander from Jogjakarta, Colonel Katamso, to drive in to Magelang and attend the same briefing.
By now, Suharto’s forces in Djakarta were moving. Over the military radio network came a message for General Sumpeno clarifying the situation somewhat and indicating the source of opposition. To his Semarang headquarters Sumpeno therefore sent a top-priority message confining all troops to barracks until he could confirm their loyalty.
After the Magelang briefing, the general decided to make a detour on his way back to headquarters via the garrison town of Salatiga to brief his officers there. Bouncing along in his jeep, he accidentally switched on a transistor radio he had borrowed from his chief of staff and brought with him. The accident produced ominous news. Over the local radio station he heard the announcement that officers of his command sympathetic to Gestapu had seized control of his divisional headquarters.
They were urging fellow Gestapu supporters to set up re volutionary councils throughout Central Java. Who were the officers heading this disloyal movement? The same Lieutenant Colonel Usman who had come wearing a revolver to General Sumpeno’s briefing earlier and Colonel Suherman, the division’s intelligence chief. Ironically, Suherman had only recently returned from a training course at Fort Leavenworth, in the United States.
General Sumpeno decided to race on to Salatiga. What he did not know was that troops of his 73rd Regiment based there had already gone over to the Gestapu. After he entered a building in the military compound, Gestapu troops surrounded it. A captain confronted him and announced, ‘General, I have to arrest you.’
But the captain must have been either nervous or remarkably slow-witted, for the general was able to bluff his way to escape. Some Indonesian newspapers later carried a story that had General Sumpeno announcing to the captain that under arrest, or not, he was thirsty and wanted some tea. According to this story, the captain obligingly left the room, and the general jumped out of the back window and got away.
Sumpeno himself, however, laughs off this story as newspaper exaggeration. What really took place, he says, was a brief battle of wits between himself and the young captain. “I looked at him firmly,” he says, “and told him ‘I know much more than you about what is happening. I know the whole situation about the Revolution Council. Don’t you think that I, as a general, am in on everything and know what is going on? Now you are ordered to stay here with your troops. I must get on.’”
Apparently the confused captain assumed Sumpeno was in secret league with the plotters. At any rate, he let the general get away.
With this successful little confrontation, Sumpeno may have saved his own life. If he had been kept prisoner, he might well have suffered the same fate as his unfortunate regimental commander in Jogjakarta, the same Colonel Katamso he had earlier summoned to his briefing at Magelang. For even as that briefing was ending, disloyal troops of Katamso’s 72nd Regiment seized control in Jogjakarta in the name of Gestapu. Their leader was a Major Muljono who ordered both Katamso and his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Sugijono, arrested. Later they were put to violent death. According to trial evidence later, an army sergeant smashed Katamso’s head in with a mortar barrel. His chief of staff was similarly attacked and finished off with a big stone. Three weeks later, their bodies were discovered by loyalist troops in shallow graves at an army installation not far from the city.
With their commander murdered, the mutinous troops in Jogjakarta issued weapons to civilian sympathizers. The Communist Party called out 25,000 members for a rally pledging support to Gestapu. But despite this initial show of strength, the morale of the Gestapu forces sagged badly as news began to flow in from Djakarta that Suharto was in complete control.
The Gestapu leaders in Jogjakarta fled, and the rank and file collapsed. By October 5 the city was back under the control of loyalist forces under the command of one of Sumpeno’s officers, Colonel Widodo, who arrived at the head of a column of tanks.
Sumpeno himself had retaken his divisional headquarters at Semarang even earlier. After escaping from Gestapu clutches at Salatiga, he ordered up a tank battalion from Magelang. With the guns of his tanks to underline his authority, he made a confident reentry into Semarang in an Opel car on October 2. By midday the local radio station was canceling out all the announcements of Gestapu and broadcasting a message of loyalty to the President and orders to follow the commands of General Suharto.
Though forces loyal to Suharto had now retaken the divisional headquarters at Semarang, and Central Java’s most important city of Jogjakarta, the Gestapu supporters were still putting up a fight in the string of Communist-dominated villages that lay between them. Central Java is dotted with growling volcanoes, and because land is so precious, the peasants’ plots ramble up over their foothills despite the destruction and heartbreak that occasionally come roaring down from the craters above.
Now, as they retreated, the Gestapu leaders took to the villages on the slopes of Mount Merapi, the great blue, often cloud-girt, volcano that soars upward above the Central Javanese plain. Like giant reflecting pools, the flooded rice paddies mirror its looming bulk for miles around. In those days, wherever Mount Merapi’s shadow fell could be counted safe territory for the Communists.
The most solidly Communist town of all in the area was Solo, also once known as Surakarta. With the support of the town’s Communist mayor, Utomo Ramelan, Gestapu forces there had broadcast their support for the coup attempt. There followed confused skirmishing between army troops, air force units, police, and student military organizations, all of differing loyalties.
After his initial landing in Jogjakarta, Aidit criss-crossed safe Communist territory trying to coordinate his forces, but for his headquarters he chose a hiding place in Solo.
The Gestapu leaders in Semarang, Colonel Suherman and Lieutenant Colonel Usman, fled with other disloyal officers to the Mount Merapi area, but in December General Suharto announced they had been shot and killed in a fire fight with security forces.
Of the Djakarta ringleaders, General Supardjo managed to evade capture the longest. He was not arrested until early in 1967, in Djakarta itself. Colonel Latief was captured a few days after the coup on October 9. According to the Siliwangi troops who took him, he was in the bath at his wife’s house in Djakarta when they surprised him. They say he resisted and they had to open fire, wounding him in the legs.
Lieutenant Colonel Untung was captured in a bizarre incident near his home town of Tegal, Central Java, on October 11. He had deserted other members of his Tjakrabirawa battalion as para-commandos closed in on them and was trying to make a getaway alone by bus. Apparently he was seeking refuge in Tegal itself, for he had asked the bus driver to stop there. But though the bus had its Indonesian nickname for “Lucky” painted on its side, it was unlucky for Untung, whose own name, by even stranger coincidence, is the Indonesian word for lucky. Despite his identity papers stating his name was Bambang and that he lived in a suburb of Djakarta, two soldiers traveling in the bus recognized him and kept him under surveillance. Untung must have sensed this, for he suddenly leaped out of the bus as it passed through a village at the approaches of Tegal. The soldiers leaned out of the window and yelled the Indonesian equivalent of “Stop, thief!” The villagers took after Untung and seized him, holding him until the bus could stop and the two soldiers could come panting up to arrest him.
They summoned help, and Untung was returned to Djakarta with an escort of tanks and armored cars. There he was placed under heavy guard, and his interrogation was begun. At first he would say nothing, only demand that he be taken to Sukarno. Later he began to make his statement. Upon his return to Djakarta, his face and one side of his head were badly bruised. According to his captors, he came by these injuries because he crashed into a telephone pole as he jumped from the moving bus just before his arrest at Tegal. The injuries were no longer visible by the time he stood trial.
Though some of the coup leaders had got away and were trying to rally their supporters in Central Java, they were soon to face the vengeance of the army’s elite shock troops, the RPKAD para-commandos. For two weeks after the October 1 coup attempt, the para-commandos were busy in the Djakarta area. They had taken Halim for Suharto and been given various other key assignments in the anti-Gestapu cleanup.
But after Suharto had consolidated his hold on the capital, Colonel, now General, Sarwo Edhy, the RPKAD commander, went to him and asked that his red-bereted para-commandos be ordered to Central Java. Suharto agreed. On October 17, the regiment climbed into its trucks and rolled out of its base near Djakarta for an intentionally ostentatious parade through the countryside into Central Java.
Next day they arrived in Semarang and set up headquarters. As if to celebrate their arrival, anti-Communist demonstrators promptly burned Communist Party headquarters in the town to the ground.
The para-commandos are the swashbuckling glamor boys of the Indonesian Army. Since the coup, they have become the heroes of the anti-Communist forces. Though since transferred to a broader command, Sarwo Edhy, their then commander, is a hero of the students.
Long after the event, picking his words carefully in English, he told me, “When I asked Suharto to send me to Central Java, I was not seeking glory. The idea behind the march was to raise the spirits of the people. We wanted to put up placards demanding the crushing of the Communist Party. We wanted to show the people they were supported against Gestapu. We wanted to tell them who was behind Gestapu.” Then, with a smile, “We wanted to do this in terms of President Sukarno’s words. He had said, ‘Give me the facts, and I’ll give you a political solution.’ Well, we wanted to create in people the courage to fight Gestapu, and to gather the facts.”
Months after the event, in the orderly atmosphere of General Sarwo Edhy’s office, the words seemed reasonable enough. From time to time, as he went over the details of his Central Java campaign for me, the general would trace a route with his baton on a wall map, or pore over his diaries to check a date or a unit’s movement.
Yet unspoken between us lay the knowledge that the real purpose of his assignment in Central Java had been the extermination, by whatever means might be necessary, of the core of the Communist Party there. It was a mission successfully accomplished.
In the green rice paddies around Mount Merapi the para-commandos gave little quarter. On one occasion, Sarwo Edhy himself was on the scene when an armored car heading a column was halted at the approaches to a village that was threatening to resist. Women members of the Communist Gerwani organization danced out into the road, turned around, and bared their posteriors to the troops in a gesture of insult. Sarwo Edhy did not hesitate. Tersely he ordered the gunner in the armored car, “Shoot them.” The gunner obeyed the command. Then some of the villagers surged forward in protest. The gunner looked at his general for instructions. “Shoot them, too,” was the command. After the guns had stopped chattering, Sarwo Edhy gave the villagers one hour to turn in their weapons. From the scene they had just witnessed, they knew he would deal ruthlessly with resistance. The weapons were handed over, the village did not fight, and the power of the Communist Party there was broken.
One of the first things Sarwo Edhy did in Central Java was to set his men hunting for the bodies of the Jogjakarta regimental commander and his chief of staff. “We wanted to find them for psychological reasons,” explains Sarwo Edhy. “We had to produce the bodies and say to our people and troops, ‘Here are your heroes. Here is the evidence of what the Gestapu has done.’”
When the bodies were found, in shallow graves not far from Jogjakarta, the army ordered a military funeral with all pomp and splendor. As many units as possible were to attend. Prominent would be the para-commandos, riding in a show of strength as well as demonstrating their respect.
But on October 22, as Sarwo Edhy was readying his men for the funeral, he was given an urgent message: there was trouble in the area of Bojolali and Klaten. Though the funeral of the murdered officers went on, the para-commandos were pulled out of the ceremonial parade. Instead, they tumbled into their trucks and went roaring off to action.
It was an action that proved to be the Communists’ last major attempt at a comeback. In villages throughout the area the Javanese drums had rapped out the order for a general offensive against the anti-Communists. Trees were felled and used to block roads; telephone lines were cut. Communist youth gangs attacked police stations and army compounds, presumably in a desperate bid to gain weapons, for they were often armed only with knives and sharpened bamboo stakes. Anti-Communists were kidnapped and killed, their homes set on fire. According to Sarwo Edhy, in the town of Solo itself, anti-Communists were killed by the hundreds, houses were burned, and there were many calls for help.
But the offensive was short-lived. The Communists themselves took many casualties. The para-commandos were quickly on the scene. They rumbled into Solo and secured key installations in the town. On October 23, the Gestapu forces surrendered.
In terms of large-scale, organized military resistance, the Communists were finished in Central Java. True, there were clashes for weeks to come. Even in November, army authorities were reporting kidnappings and killings by Pemuda Rakjat gangs of Communist youth. But these were isolated incidents and not part of a general Communist offensive.
Now the para-commandos embarked on their task of “cleaning out” the Communists. As Sarwo Edhy explains it, the area was too big and too crowded for him to distribute his forces effectively.
“We decided,” he says, “to encourage the anti-Communist civilians to help with the job. In Solo we gathered together the youth, the nationalist groups, the religious [Moslem] organizations. We gave them two or three days’ training, then sent them out to kill the Communists.”
Thus began Indonesia’s post-coup blood bath.