Within hours of assuming his new authority, General Suharto fulfilled the first of the three demands that had inspired the students to their vigorous campaign of protest. He formally banned the Communist Party, a step that Sukarno had dallied over and failed to take.
It was the easiest of the demands to meet. The party was cowed, its apparatus smashed, many of its leaders missing or dead, its reputation discredited. The two remaining demands were more complex. One was for the purging of pro-Communists from Sukarno’s cabinet, including the dismissal of Foreign Minister Subandrio. The other was for the lowering of prices.
Suharto moved first toward cleansing the cabinet. But he took a week to lay his plans, and in Djakarta these were days of doubt and impatience for the students. Sukarno had given Suharto sweeping power, but the students wanted it demonstrated. Subandrio was sheltering under Sukarno’s wing, first at Bogor, to which Sukarno had returned after his meeting with the military leaders in Djakarta on March 12, and then later at the palace in Djakarta after the President had again returned to the capital. The students wanted Subandrio not under the President’s protective wing, but under lock and key. As long as he was allowed freedom of maneuver, they argued, he was highly dangerous.
The army was reassuring, asserting that it had everything under control. It urged the students to be patient. But Sukarno was acting suspiciously unlike a man who had quietly accepted the transfer of his authority to Suharto. Within days of the hand-over, he was proclaiming that he was answerable only to God and the People’s Consultative Congress. He tried to subvert individual generals from Suharto’s cause. In that anxious week I came upon reliable information that he was secretly inciting factions within the marine corps, the police, and the air force to act against the army. The incitement failed to stir these forces, and the army command, which must have been aware of all this maneuvering, remained unruffled and confident.
Finally Suharto dispatched the same three generals who had confronted Sukarno at Bogor the previous week to Bogor once again to tell the President he was required in Djakarta, and to accompany him back to the capital.
Many months later, one of the generals recounted to me a curious incident that took place that day, which smacked suspiciously of an attempt by Sukarno’s guards to seize the three generals and hold them as hostages.
“At first when we arrived at Bogor,” said my informant, “the President was willing to come back to Djakarta. But as he was dressing, he got a message from one of his cabinet ministers warning him that when he returned, army leaders would be waiting for him and would force him to dissolve the cabinet.” The cabinet referred to was, of course, the one to which the students were so opposed.
My informant went on, “The President asked us about this, but we denied it. Finally he agreed to come, and called General Sabur [the commander of the palace guard] to make the arrangements. Sabur said that we three generals must fly in the Sikorsky jet helicopter ordinarily used by the President. The President was to fly in another helicopter, and some of his aides and ministers in a third helicopter.
“We got into ours, but the pilot said he couldn’t start the engine because it had suddenly developed generator trouble. So we got out, and as we did so, we saw the President’s helicopter taking off. Then we tried to use another helicopter standing nearby, but the pilots said there was no gas for it. By now we were suspicious. And with reason, for as we stood there, we noticed the Tjakrabirawa, the palace guard, closing in on us.
“One of the other generals said, ‘Quick, there’s a car. Let’s take it and get out of here.’ We jumped in and raced away past the Tjakrabirawa As we got to the palace gates, we saw they were closed, but one of my colleagues leaned out of the window and bawled ‘Open the gates!’ without stopping. The soldiers did, and we went as fast as we could back to Djakarta. On our arrival there, as we raced to the palace, we saw on the grass outside it not only the helicopter the President had flown in, but also the same Sikorsky that was supposed to have had engine trouble a little while before, and from which we had had to get off.”
The actions of the presidential guard, as related, certainly sound suspicious. The general who told me the story said he was “really frightened” by what happened—much more so than he was when he had had to confront the President the previous week. Was Sukarno in on the ploy, or was this simply a maneuver by the palace guard? Did the guards mean to do the generals physical harm, or simply hold them hostage? If the latter was the idea, was it simply to ensure that the President arrived safely in Djakarta, or were the generals to be used as pawns in a bid to hold off dissolution of the cabinet? Probably these questions of minor historical interest will remain unanswered. The generals did get away, and the incident was soon to be overshadowed by much more dramatic events. For Suharto was now ready to fulfill the second of the students’ demands, the demand for action against those cabinet ministers considered politically objectionable.
At 5 A.M. on March 18, troops loyal to General Suharto took up positions around the presidential palace. Once again, Sarwo Edhy’s para-commandos came to the fore. This time they wore their red berets.
Charged with responsibility for the arrest of Foreign Minister Subandrio, who had sought security in a guesthouse within the palace grounds, was the Djakarta garrison commander, General Amir Machmud. Also scheduled for arrest, at other locations throughout the city, were other wanted cabinet ministers.
With guns trained on the palace, tanks positioned to assault it, and the para-commandos encircling it, Sukarno had little room for maneuver. He agreed to come out, leaving Subandrio behind. One source, however, says that he whispered to General Machmud, “Amir, do not kill him [Subandrio].”
General Sabur, the palace guard commander, came out of the palace to consult with General Sarwo Edhy on tbe details of the President’s departure. As Sarwo Edhy tells the story, Sabur announced that Sukarno would leave by helicopter, but Sarwo Edhy was having none of that. Any helicopter that left the palace that morning would be “shot down for security reasons,” he told Sabur. Finally the two generals agreed that the President would leave the palace by car, alone in it except for his driver. This Sarwo Edhy insisted upon in order to make certain that Sukarno did not try to smuggle out the wanted Subandrio.
It was in this manner that Sukarno did leave the palace. A block away, however, he was stopped by the para-commandos, acting on Sarwo Edhy’s explicit orders. The President was ordered to alight while the troops searched the presidential limousine to make sure Subandrio was not hidden somewhere in it. Explosively, Sukarno refused to get out. After some parleying, there was a compromise in which the back door of the car was briefly opened. For Sukarno, who had declared adamantly throughout the months that he would not fire, or get rid of, Subandrio, it was a humiliating experience.
With the President out of the palace, Suharto’s troops swiftly picked up an unresisting Subandrio, and through the day arrested another fourteen cabinet ministers. Highest ranking after Subandrio was third Deputy Premier Chairul Saleh. The list of ministers included Sumardjo (basic education) and Setiadi (electricity), both of whom had been particularly strongly criticized by the students, and Sjafie (security affairs). Also arrested was Jusuf Muda Dalam, governor of the Indonesian state bank.
As always in times of Indonesian crisis, troops occupied all key installations, cable and telephone communication with the outside world was cut off, and the airport was closed, but by nightfall Djakarta radio was broadcasting an announcement from General Suharto that the fifteen ministers were in “protective custody.” New appointees, said Suharto, had been selected to fill temporarily the ministerial posts now vacant. Most notable was the appointment of Adam Malik as acting foreign minister in Subandrio’s stead.
Now the students were convinced that victory was really theirs. Two of their three demands had been met. The Communist Party had been banned, and ministers they considered pro-Communist or linked with the Gestapu movement had been expelled from the cabinet. At the University of Indonesia there was a great victory feast to which thousands came.
In the next week, Suharto and his followers hammered out with Sukarno a compromise cabinet reshuffle that was announced March 27. The new cabinet would have twenty-four full ministers, with deputy ministers under them, but there would be an inner cabinet of six deputy premiers. Three of them—Johannes Lemeina, Idham Chalid, and Ruslan Abdulgani—were holdovers from the previous cabinet. The other three were Suharto himself, Adam Malik, and Sultan Hamengku Buwono, the Sultan of Jogjakarta. Despite his feudal title, the Sultan was a good nationalist who had been active in the revolution against Dutch colonial rule and had gained national respect. Now, he had been picked as the man to put Indonesia’s crumbling economy somehow back on its feet. He was given charge of economics, finance, and development.
Few people thought the new cabinet was ideal. Suharto himself admitted it represented only “the maximum possible progress in the first stage.” Said one newspaper, “We are still far away from our goal, but the first sign of victory is in sight.” Commented another, “This is the maximum that can be achieved in the present situation.” But it represented a major improvement over the previous one appointed by Sukarno, and the assumption was that it would be replaced by something better, once Suharto had consolidated his position.
If the cabinet changes were not all that the students had hoped for, they nevertheless placed in key roles three men who were to be the guiding triumvirate of the new order in Indonesia in the months to come.
Suharto was to use his new powers and his military forces to maintain security and prevent any Communist resurgence. The Sultan of Jogjakarta was to divine, and try to rectify, the country’s economic ills. Malik was to handle foreign policy, but also keep a hand in political affairs at home.
The three tasks were intertwined. With security relatively assured, the most awesome challenge confronting the new leadership was to save the sagging economy from total collapse. This required drastic measures. Most obvious was an austerity campaign at home, but this was far from enough. Indonesia had to have emergency help from abroad, and quickly. Clearly such aid could not come from Communist China, which was snapping and snarling almost daily at the new administration in Indonesia. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s relations with the Soviet Union were correct, but cool, and, anyway, Indonesia was already over its head in debt to Moscow, so that not much could be expected from that direction. The aid Indonesia had to have could come only from the non-Communist world—Japan, Europe, the United States. But to get help from those quarters, Indonesia would have to give evidence of reform and a return to political stability. This evidence of good intentions could most dramatically and swiftly be produced by shifts in foreign policy, so Foreign Minister Malik set out to convince the world of his country’s intention to climb back to international respectability. In fact, Suharto, the Sultan, and Malik were now engaged in a reversal of Indonesia’s policies as they had been under Sukarno.
The facts of Indonesia’s economic crisis, as the new leaders began to dig into them, proved chilling. Prices had gone up more than 500 percent in 1965. Now the Sultan calculated that, despite the students’ third and unfulfilled demand, that prices be lowered, they would in fact go up by about 1,000 percent in 1966. The cost-of-living index had climbed from a 1958 base of 100 to 90,000 by the time the Sultan assumed his post as cabinet minister in March, 1966.
When the new men took over, they inherited foreign-currency reserves of about $8,000,000. But the country’s foreign debts were more than 300 times this amount—some $2,500,000,000. Interest and repayment charges on these debts due in 1966 totaled about $675,000,000, but earnings from exports were steadily sinking and looked as though they would raise only about $360,000,000 during the year. Most of this would be gobbled up by emergency imports, with little to spare for debt repayment.
Meanwhile, industry was working at less than 20 percent of capacity, and the population was increasing faster than food production. Clearly, if Indonesia were a company, it would be in the bankruptcy court.
The new leaders went on an ostentatious cleanup campaign designed to impress countries from whom help was desperately needed. Sukarno’s palace guard, the Tjakrabirawa, was disbanded. Communist members of the People’s Consultative Congress were formally barred from their seats—if, indeed, any of them had dared show up to claim them. Malik began a screening campaign in the foreign ministry at home and started bringing key Indonesian diplomats back to Djakarta for interrogation about their political views. The Indonesian Ambassadors in Hanoi and Peking refused to obey the come-home orders and were promptly fired. Other Ambassadors resigned, rather than face Malik’s questioning.
Then Malik started talking about renewed cooperation with various United Nations agencies and dropping hints that Indonesia might return to the United Nations itself.
Despite rumblings from Sukarno that Indonesia’s policies remained “unchanged,” Malik’s public actions and private assurances were carefully noted in Tokyo, Washington, London—and presumably in Peking and Moscow, too. The new Indonesian leadership wanted to move discreetly, for though it sought to show that it had pulled back from Communism’s embrace, it did not want to suggest that Indonesia had suddenly become a handmaiden of the West. Nor had it. The policy was to be genuinely one of nonalignment.
In Washington, too, the approach to helping Indonesia was kept sensibly low-keyed. But the help was needed, and so in April came the quiet announcement that the United States would extend to Indonesia an $8,000,000 credit—not a gift—for the purchase of rice. Even Britain, which had maintained 50,000 troops in Malaysia in defense against Indonesia’s confrontation, gave Indonesia £1,000,000 ($2,800,000) of emergency aid. Theoretically, there were no strings attached to the British gift, but it could not have been made, of course, without the substantial decline in Indonesia’s military activity against British and Malaysian troops that had taken place in the preceding months. It was clearly intended to encourage a formal end to confrontation.
With the new leadership in Djakarta, Britain’s desire for an end to the idiocy of confrontation found a sympathetic echo. Foreign Minister Malik had soon determined that Indonesia’s pocket war with Malaysia was a pointless, Sukarno-inspired extravagance the country could not afford. Internally, there was the cost of maintaining troops on the alert in remote border areas. Externally, the image of Indonesian belligerence against little Malaysia had cost it millions of dollars in loans, investment, and aid that had been choked off until Indonesia leaned toward more rational policies.
Initially, Malik had to move cautiously on the issue of peace with Malaysia. Confrontation had after all been the cornerstone of Indonesia’s foreign policy. Sukarno had whipped his country over the years into a frenzy of anti-Malaysian feeling. Indonesian paratroopers had been dropped over the Malayan peninsula, Indonesian saboteurs had exploded bombs in Singapore harbor, Indonesian jungle troops had ambushed Malaysian and British forces in Borneo. In Djakarta, huge posters had savagely caricatured the Malaysian leaders, and massive rallies had called for their blood.
So the new leaders at first paid lip service to the confrontation policy, and pledged that it would continue. In the new cabinet announced in March, General Nasution was even brought back as deputy commander of KOGAM, the Crush Malaysia Command.
But the starkness of the economic crisis outweighed the political risks attached to peace moves. In May, Sultan Hamengku Buwono succeeded in extracting a $30,000,000 loan from Japan. It would tide Indonesia over with emergency imports, but much more dramatic assistance than that was needed. Before it could start flowing, Indonesia would need to have made peace with Malaysia.
As the month drew to an end, Malik flew with an Indonesian negotiating team to Bangkok, the city of golden spires and tinkling temple bells, in Thailand, there to meet with a Malaysian delegation headed by Deputy Premier Tun Abdul Razak. The Indonesians went despite sputtering protests from Sukarno back in Djakarta. But to make sure the Malaysians understood that the new leadership in Djakarta was serious about peace, Suharto dispatched, on the eve of his negotiating team’s departure for Bangkok, a military goodwill mission to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. It was a historic little scene as the Indonesian airliner touched down and high-ranking officers who had been conducting the confrontation campaign set foot on the soil of the nation they had in theory been trying to “crush.”
But they came in friendship, and as Tun Razak told one reporter at the Bangkok negotiations, “That mission really paved the way for these talks, and provided the right atmosphere. It was a real demonstration of sincerity on the Indonesians’ part. Because of the visit, we clearly assumed they were sincere in wanting to bring about peace.”
The Bangkok peace talks did not end in quite the same rosy glow as they began. The participants refused to admit that confrontation had officially ended. Instead, they said they were taking back peace proposals to their respective governments for ratification. Part of the hedging seemed to be intended to provide some face-saving for Sukarno. After three years of sputtering war, the Indonesian delegation had to preserve the appearance of some negotiation and bargaining at the peace table.
There was some negotiation about sampling of public opinion in Malaysia’s two Borneo territories of Sarawak and Sabah. Sukarno had consistently opposed the inclusion of these two territories within Malaysia and had demanded a new referendum to determine whether the people really wanted to be part of Malaysia. Malaysia argued that opinion had already been adequately tested under United Nations supervision. At the Bangkok negotiations Malik waived Sukarno’s long-standing demand, but discussion lengthened over some suitable alternative.
However, at the end of the talks, as Malik and Tun Razak clinked celebratory glasses and linked arms and beamed at the photographers, it was obvious that confrontation was all but over. During the three years of hostility, Indonesia had lost 580 men killed, while 220 were wounded and 750 captured by Malaysian and British forces. The Malaysians had lost 82 dead, the British 22 soldiers killed, the Gurkha troops under British command 39 killed, and the Australians and New Zealanders 5 killed.
Although a formal peace treaty would not be signed for another two months, the fact that confrontation had been brought to an end in defiance of Sukarno’s wishes was striking evidence of his political eclipse. His wings were now literally being clipped. His helicopters were no longer available, except for trips approved by Suharto. He was not allowed to slip away to Central Java, where he might stir up trouble. Telephone calls out of the palace were controlled, and his visitors regulated.
Though he had been stripped of his power, the army treated him courteously, if firmly. Malik and Sukarno frequently exchanged heated words at private sessions of the cabinet, but others present say that Suharto, perhaps with his Javanese antipathy for strident scenes, engaged in no tablet-humping or angry harangues.
There were other, extremely practical, reasons why Suharto elected to retain Sukarno in what was supposed to be a figurehead presidential role. First, the President was a useful political lightning rod, who could be used to deflect criticism that might otherwise be directed at the army itself. Suharto was acutely conscious of the fact that the third of the protesting students’ demands—the lowering of prices—was unfulfilled. To retain the sympathy of the students, and broaden its political support among the people, the army was under pressure to produce swift progress on the economic front, now that it was in charge. Yet as the army dug deeper into the facts of the economic mess, it could see that far from being able to lower prices, it would have to live with increases in the cost of living, no matter how efficiently it could administer the country. In the eyes of visiting experts and of economists at the University of Indonesia, about the best the new leadership could hope for over the next two or three years was an inflation rate of 30 percent a year.
It was not inconceivable that the students who had so wildly cheered Suharto’s assumption of authority in March might in several months’ time be out on the streets again demonstrating against lack of progress in the economic field. If Sukarno were deposed, the army would have to bear the full brunt of that criticism.
Then again there was Suharto’s own genuine insistence on constitutionality and dignity in the handling of the President. Privately he told friends he wanted no Latin American-style power takeover in Indonesia. If the army simply fired Sukarno, he argued, then that would set a precedent for the future. Anybody disenchanted with successive leaders could oust them with similar lack of legal process. If the President was to be dismissed, then it must be by constitutional means.
Suharto argued for the resuscitation of the 1945 constitution and the reactivation of the People’s Consultative Congress (MPRS) as a genuine policymaking institution. Though Sukarno’s gradual assumption of power over the years had blurred the original concept, the Congress was supposed to be the supreme constitutional authority in Indonesia, to which the President was subservient. In practice, Sukarno had vested all policymaking authority in the hands of the President, himself. Now the army argued for reversion to the original concept under which the Congress would determine constitutional matters and set broad guidelines for Indonesian policy, while the President, his cabinet, and the parliament would execute the administrative details of such policy.
Another restraint upon Suharto in his dealings with the President was his own patriotism and national pride. True, the outside world had to be convinced that Indonesia had embarked upon more reasonable policies, but Suharto hoped to avoid presenting the world with the spectacle of Sukarno’s political crucifixion. Sukarno was, after all, the father figure of the Indonesian revolution. He had played a major role in giving Indonesia pride, unity, and independence. In all these things, Indonesians still believed. For them to face up to Sukarno’s shortcomings and admit that their demigod was human and vulnerable, after all, had been a traumatic experience. Now Suharto sought to retire Sukarno with relative dignity and avoid further humiliating of Indonesia’s image abroad by humiliation of the man who had been Indonesia’s voice for two decades.
Beyond this there was yet another important factor, namely, that Sukarno retained blocs of genuine political support, particularly in Central and East Java. His provocative dismissal could spark violence among his still considerable supporters, perhaps even civil war.
Despite the impatience of students and even of some of his own generals who wanted the President fired, Suharto set about the difficult and dangerous task of destroying Sukarnoism while retaining Sukarno.