When the army assumed power in Indonesia, it was reluctant, for reasons already explained, to oust Sukarno completely. The argument was that it could not afford to do without him, albeit in a figurehead role. But by now, many Indonesians had come to the conclusion they could not afford to go forward with him.
His August 17 speech, and other, similar, outbursts threatened to sabotage all that the new order was trying to achieve. The students of Djakarta demanded his dismissal. They were supported by individual generals who urged Suharto to act firmly against Sukarno once and for all.
Suharto was no less disillusioned with the President than they. There were rumors several times that his patience was almost at an end and he was near to sending Sukarno flying out of the country to exile. But in fact Suharto kept to a moderate course. Though there were generals urging him to get rid of Sukarno, there were others with strong personal allegiance to the President. Aside from differences within the army, there was the fact that the marine corps and elements of the police, air force, and navy were firmly loyal to Sukarno. Outside the armed services there was division of opinion, too. The big Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), founded by Sukarno himself in 1927, had come out with a pledge of support for him despite serious internal differences of its own. The clash between pro- and anti-Sukarno students in Bandung, as well as tension elsewhere, underlined Suharto’s fears that firing the President might spark civil war.
Proponents of the Suharto policy argued that the new leadership was making impressive progress despite Sukarno’s heckling. It was an argument of considerable validity. As thousands of students marched at the end of September to keep a night long anniversary vigil beside the well at Lubang Buaja, it was clear that Indonesia had become a changed country in the year since the army’s generals were done to death there.
Twelve months before, Indonesia was swept by a campaign of poisonous hatred toward the West. British and American diplomats locked themselves in their offices as Indonesia rushed past pell-mell in a Communist-encouraged slide toward the left. Sukarno had whipped the country into war fever over Malaysia, implying that Indonesia’s real enemies lay in Washington and London. In petulant isolation, Sukarno had withdrawn Indonesia from the United Nations and the world community. Not even toward Moscow, which had poured millions into Indonesia’s military establishment, was there much cordiality. Instead, it was to Peking, and the most militant apostles of Communism, that Sukarno looked for his inspiration.
Now, a year later, and not much more than six months since Suharto had acquired executive power from Sukarno, Indonesia was back in the United Nations, and the war with Malaysia was ended. The country had certainly not become a satellite of the West, but it had pulled back from Communist China’s embrace to a more genuinely non-aligned stance. The Communist Party was crushed. The wind of reason was blowing through the corridors of government, and if stability was a long, long way away, the new leadership had given many indications that it was serious about attempting the grueling climb back to it.
Sukarno himself, Suharto’s supporters argued, was boxed in. He had been stripped of his power. Now his influence was being eroded by a carefully graduated campaign designed to discredit him. A prominent factor in the campaign was the September trial of Jusuf Muda Dalam, the former governor of the Indonesian state bank, who had been swept up with former Foreign Minister Subandrio and a string of other wanted cabinet ministers in the army’s series of March arrests.
In court, Dalam told a story of easy money and easy women that was immediately the hottest gossip of Djakarta. A parade of Indonesian movie actresses, pretty secretaries, and singers peeled away the layers of a national scandal that eventually laid bare the dolce vita of Sukarno’s administration. A shapely girl who won Sukarno’s favor, the country learned, could bustle along to Dalam and acquire credits and import permits worth huge amounts. It was not a question of thousands of dollars, but millions, which had been swindled and misappropriated. Besides his massive mismanagement of state funds, Dalam was charged with having six wives instead of the four allowed by Moslem law. As also was made clear, he maintained more than twenty mistresses about the country.
Sukarno’s name was mentioned several times during the trial. Fascinating were some of the stories which emerged. One businessman related how Sukarno had given him a special deferred payment license, worth about $10,000,000, to import yarn. In return, he said, he gave the President $600,000. Though Sukarno did not appear at the trial, he admitted the deal in a public speech, but said he had planned to use the $600,000 to build a planetarium for the Indonesian people. As a matter of fact, he added, he had also wanted money to build a large theater.
Many Sukarno critics, however, felt that evidence of Sukarno’s involvement was not pressed at the trial, and that the judges backed away when they could have gone further.
Despite the army’s assurances, the anti-Sukarno students watched the President’s continued maneuverings with suspicion and apprehension. They listened to him declaring, “I am a Marxist. Marxism is in my chest,” although the People’s Consultative Congress in July had banned Marxism. They listened to him insisting on the old formula for Indonesia of Nasakom—nationalism, religion, and Communism—although Communism had similarly been outlawed. “We don’t have to call it Nasakom,” Sukarno announced grandly. “We can call it Nasasos [for nationalism, religion and socialism].” But, he added, “these three factors are still essential.” They listened when he warned that the imperialists were behind the campaign to make him step down, and that snipers were waiting to kill him, apparently under orders of the American C.I.A. It was a charge for which he produced no evidence, of course. The students knew, too, that the campaign to remove him was inspired not from outside Indonesia, but from within.
Meanwhile, he consistently contradicted Foreign Minister Malik’s assurances to the outside world. When Malik, for instance, announced in New York that Indonesia would honor its pledge to hold a plebiscite in West Irian in terms of its international obligations, Sukarno denied it.
For the students opposed to him this was not good enough. They poured on the pressure to get rid of him. KAPPI, the high school students’ action front, in a public statement called him “a bloody liar, twisting the facts of history.” Indonesians, the statement continued, “are condemning the Marxist Sukarno who has deviated from the revolution and is dreaming in broad daylight. He only thinks of himself, turns his people into slaves, and organizes lavish parties for himself and his closest associates.”
At a KAPPI rally, student leaders shouted, “Do you know that Sukarno gave the order to kill the generals?” They charged that Sukarno’s politically conscious second wife, Hartini, installed in the Bogor palace, had subversively channeled funds to Communist Party officials who had gone underground in Central Java after the coup.
Criticism of the President now thundered in hourly from the students and other anti-Sukarno factions. They demanded that he explain Indonesia’s economic collapse and his links with the 1965 coup attempt. From South Celebes came a call from five student action fronts that he stand trial. A Moslem student association urged that he leave the country “because he calls himself a Marxist at heart.” Others demanded a ban on publication of his writings. One student organization criticized Sukarno’s art collection and asked the new leadership to remove all nude statues from his palaces, because they were “clashing with the rules of morality in Indonesia.” KAMI suggested the withdrawal of banknotes and postage stamps bearing Sukarno’s picture. The KAMI newspaper explained that it was “disgusting to lick the reverse side of President Sukarno’s picture for anyone who wants to send mail.” The anti-Sukarno newspaper Karya Bhakti stated flatly that Sukarno was involved in the Gestapu movement. “Bung Karno,” said the paper, “obviously violated military laws by committing desertion, by going over to the enemy not for fear or because he was forced to do so, but because Bung Karno was himself the leader.” It concluded ominously, “The punishment for desertion is death.”
The vehemence of this campaign put the alliance between the students and the military men to severe strain. The students wanted immediate action to depose Sukarno. The army command sought much more gradual and cautious movement. The next step in Suharto’s plan was the trial of ex-Foreign Minister Subandrio. With dramatic flair, the army scheduled the trial for October 1, a year to the day after the murder of its generals.
But even as the Subandrio trial got under way, thousands of students staged a massive demonstration outside the presidential palace. If Sukarno failed to give an account of events leading up to the 1965 coup, they threatened, they would storm the palace and occupy it. Though the army had long been sympathetic to the students, it was not prepared to allow this. Orders went out that the student masses were to be dispersed. The man charged with the assignment was Major General Kemal Idris, the KOSTRAD chief of staff, who ironically was one of the anti-Sukarno students’ heroes.
Later he told me his side of the story. “It all began with a ceremony at KOSTRAD headquarters,” he explained. “A delegation from KAMI was due to attend, but I heard that the students planned to come in force. We’d been keeping them away from the President’s palace, but KOSTRAD headquarters is close to the palace, and they thought if they could get a few thousand students to KOSTRAD, it wouldn’t be difficult for them to go on after our ceremony to demonstrate outside the palace.
“I got hold of the student leaders and told them the army just wouldn’t stand for anything inside the palace. But they said they only wanted to put up pictures of our murdered generals outside the palace. I agreed to let them do that, provided there was nothing else.
“Well, they put up their pictures, but then they camped there, right outside the palace. Suharto got on the phone to me and told me I had to clear them. ‘Why me?’ I asked him. ‘Because,’ he told me, ‘the whole thing started with your KOSTRAD ceremony. So you’ve got to move them out of there.’”
General Kemal Idris gave a little smile as he recalled his predicament, and then continued the story, ‘I called the student leaders over and said, “Be reasonable. I’m under orders to get you out of there, but I’d rather you do it yourselves. Now, I’ll give you twenty-four hours. If you haven’t moved by then, I’m going to have to act against you.’”
“Next morning,” he said, “they were still there. This time I told them if they hadn’t moved in an hour, my troops would go into action. I waited four hours, but they still hadn’t budged. There was nothing for it, then. I told the commander of my soldiers there not to fire. The soldiers were to use rifle butts, and if they had to use anything more, bayonets. It was a bad business, but it had to be done.”
The business was done, and dozens of students were wounded as the soldiers charged them. There were screams and chaos as the first line of students, some of them girls, buckled under the glittering line of bayonets. Students were slashed, and others were battered with rifle butts.
For both students and soldiers it was a moment of great anguish. Yet despite the injuries, there was remarkably little ill-feeling afterwards. Said one student, “I guess we had it coming. But we’ll go on with our campaign.” For its part, the army leadership was publicly apologetic, but still determined that student demonstrations would be kept under control and that students would not be allowed to occupy the presidential palace.
“We want to work closely with the students,” one general told me, “but they can’t take over. They’ve got to understand that we’re in charge, and we must decide how the game is to be played.”
The next card in the army’s game was the Subandrio trial, but despite the big build-up, it proved something of a disappointment to those expecting dramatic revelations. The former foreign minister was charged with plotting against the government and subversion, but as the evidence developed, it seemed mainly to prove what everybody knew, namely that Subandrio had helped Sukarno swing the country’s foreign policy to close alliance with Peking. Although this was now unpopular, Subandrio’s lawyers argued that it was not illegal at the time he did it. The prosecution, however, demanded, and eventually got, the death penalty for Subandrio on the grounds that all this represented “crimes against the state.”
In a Western court of law the evidence against Subandrio would have seemed scant and circumstantial, but it was, of course, a political trial, and Subandrio’s real crime was that he was a key figure in Sukarno’s “old order.”
At one stage the prosecutor charged Subandrio with being an “old order” architect. Subandrio replied that he was “too small for that title. Only a greater man deserves it. I was only an assistant of the President.”
Subandrio’s comment raised the great unanswered question of the trial, namely, if Subandrio was being tried for implementing these policies, what about Sukarno, whose policies they really were?
Nevertheless, Subandrio remained reasonably loyal to the President throughout. He admitted he had received reports of a pending Communist coup, but said flatly he had not passed them on to the President. Nor was any evidence produced directly linking Sukarno with the coup. In fact, the military tribunal heard a statement from Sukarno read out in which he specifically denied foreknowledge of the coup or of the training of Communist assassination teams at Lubang Buaja.
There were some fascinating aspects to the trial. Evidence emerged, for instance, of Aidit’s correspondence with Sukarno after the coup, when Aidit was hiding in Central Java. Questions were raised about Subandrio’s calm reaction to the coup, when he got news of it in northern Sumatra. But though these had a bearing on the possible foreknowledge of, and involvement in, the coup of both Sukarno and Subandrio, they raised only suspicions and produced no facts.
At the trial’s end, those who had anticipated that Sukarno himself would stand convicted of a master participating role in the coup were disappointed.
When Foreign Minister Malik returned home in November after his world travels, he could scent mischief. Besides foreign policy, he had been given broad responsibility for political affairs at home. In both tasks he was suffering from Sukarno’s maneuvering, dabbling, contradicting. Malik, a direct and spunky little Sumatran, did not share Suharto’s apparent confidence that the new leadership could glide on with Sukarno neatly trussed up in a figurehead role. “I’ve known Sukarno for 30 years,” Malik told a friend, “and if he’s allowed room to maneuver, he’ll use it. That’s just the way he is.”
Thus the problem of “dualism” in Indonesia’s leadership had to be resolved, declared Malik. It was a polite way of suggesting Sukarno had to go. One way would have been for the President to take a long foreign trip. It was suggested that he might like to fly off to Tokyo, where his Japanese wife, Dewi, had gone to prepare for the birth of a child. Those who thought presidential travel might be the ideal answer to the problem speculated that after the baby’s birth he could go on to Vienna for a medical checkup, perhaps spend a little while in Europe. Then somebody discovered that Sukarno had been invited to visit Cairo, and that a visit with President Nasser might be the solution. The reason for the invitation was something of a mystery—until someone remembered that Adam Malik had included Cairo on his recent itinerary. When Malik politely inquired of Sukarno whether he could inform Nasser of his acceptance, however, Sukarno gave the foreign minister a knowing smile and declined.
If Sukarno refused to throw in the towel so easily, however, he was soon to face a new assault. In December came the trial of former air force chief Omar Dhani. As with previous sessions of the mahmillub, or military tribunal, trying those involved in the 1965 coup, there was tight security. Roads were blocked off for hundreds of yards around the square white building used for the sessions. Tanks and armored cars were drawn up defensively. Troops checked the documents of anybody entering. Key witnesses, and the accused, were driven to the sessions in bullet-proof military vehicles.
Dhani had been at Halim air base during the crucial hours of the coup. Now, from his own testimony and that of witnesses, there began to emerge the clearest picture yet of the sequence of events there, and of Sukarno’s own actions. This time, there was no reticence on the part of the prosecution or the military judges in extracting information about the President’s behavior. The trial was broadcast live. The listening nation discovered that when General Supardjo, one of the ringleaders of the coup, reported to Sukarno about the arrest and death of the army’s generals, the President accepted the news with remarkable equanimity. He did not order Supardjo punished, or the co-plotters arrested. In fact, there was the suggestion that he may even have given Supardjo a congratulatory pat on the back.
There was also Dhani’s revelation that he had talked with the President on the eve of the coup, warning him of trouble, and that Sukarno knew Supardjo was in town, having secretly left his post in Kalimantan—a fact that had been withheld from the then KOSTRAD commander, General Suharto.
Another startling piece of information that emerged from the trial was that Dhani in the very month before the coup had flown secretly to Peking, using Sukarno’s personal plane. His mission had been to try and tie up, among other things, the delivery of 100,000 small arms to Indonesia—a transaction that was not to be brought to the attention of the army or regular defense ministry channels.
For his part in the coup, Dhani, as expected, got the death sentence. But now for Sukarno, wily though he might be, the end was also drawing near. Like hounds on the hunt, his critics began to close in. He was subjected to increasing pressure. Some wanted him tried. Others wanted him brought before an investigating session of the People’s Consultative Congress. Still others were prepared to settle, at least initially, for an explanation of his role in the coup, which in fact had already been requested by the Congress.
Fifteen months earlier, generals and cabinet ministers had turned somersaults at the crook of Sukarno’s little finger. Now he was the subject of widespread contempt and ridicule.
At a major Moslem celebration he was called by one speaker a “humbug.” It was very difficult, the speaker went on, “to include him among genuine Moslems, because he can be classified only as a hypocrite.”
Mochtar Lubis, the journalist freed from Sukarno’s jails, went on an Asian speaking tour and talked frankly and critically about the old order. In Tokyo he bluntly criticized some Japanese who had “supplied Indonesian leaders with money and women.” To make sure nobody missed the point, the armed forces Daily Mail in Djakarta ran its report of the speech next to an item about Sukarno’s Japanese wife Dewi.
Even Dewi herself had some admonishments for her husband. In an interview with a Dutch newspaper she was quoted as saying, in Tokyo, “I have long since warned him. I tried to explain that he would make a mistake if he continued to be angry and stubborn. But he is a man of political principles who does not know of retreat. He does not like compromise.
“I told him, ‘Others have principles, too, but they are far more diplomatic. You, too, must be like that. If not, you will not advance. Why, if you make speeches, must you always put forward questions of malicious jealousy? That’s why you always create jealousy.’
“Sukarno lost contact with his people. He does not know what is in the mind of the people, what they feel, say, and want for their individual and family lives,” she concluded.
There was even an extraordinary public debate in Djakarta newspapers as to whether Sukarno, the head of state, had raped a 14-year-old girl on one trip abroad. There were statements from the foreign ministry, and the palace, and even one from Sukarno himself, denying it. Foreign Minister Malik said he was asking Indonesian embassies abroad to look into reports of Sukarno adventures in countries where the President had traveled.
Much more ominous was the statement of the chairman of the Indonesian Lawyers’ Association. After examining the evidence at the Dhani trial, he concluded that Sukarno had encouraged the coup movement. If others had been given the death sentence for encouraging the coup, he said, “the same thing should apply to Sukarno.”
As 1966 drew to its end, the commanders of the army, navy, air force, and police issued a joint statement. The armed forces, they said, would “take firm steps” against anybody, no matter who, who tried to deviate from the constitution, or who refused to implement the decisions of the People’s Consultative Congress. The decisions the military leaders had in mind, of course, were those of the previous July curbing Sukarno. The offender at whom they aimed their statement was the President himself. After issuing the statement, the military leaders went into a series of meetings with Sukarno.
If it all seemed a little vague, KAMI, the university students’ action front, left little doubt about what it thought needed discussing. Welcoming the armed forces statement, KAMI called on the military men “to discipline Bung Karno, who so far has shown neither intention nor willingness to implement the decisions of the People’s Consultative Congress.” Sukarno had failed, said the students, to account for the economic and moral deterioration of the country, while “juridical facts” had shown him to be involved in Gestapu. KAMI urged the armed forces to “curb the activities and speeches of Bung Karno.”
As the conferences with the military leaders progressed, it became clear that Sukarno was still in no mood for surrender. At one stage, according to one of the participants, he angrily threatened to dismiss the cabinet, block any session of the Congress, fire almost everybody, and plunge the country into chaos. The military men responded in pointed manner. They staged a show of force, in which units from all services rumbled into Merdeka Square and up to the front gates of the presidential palace.
Two days later, Foreign Minister Malik emerged from a joint session between Sukarno, the cabinet, and the military leaders, and said, “After the New Year, the Congress and the people will have their way.”
Malik had earlier casually remarked to Indonesian reporters that unless the political crisis were resolved, it might not be possible to prevent students demonstrating in the streets again.
Sukarno thought things over. As 1967 dawned, he indicated that he would comply with the request from the People’s Consultative Congress for some explanation of the circumstances surrounding the coup, and the country’s economic and moral decline. When the explanation came, however, in a written statement on January 10, Sukarno airily dismissed suggestions that he was in any way responsible for any of the country’s ills.
The arrest and murder of the generals, he said, was a “complete surprise” to him. The whole affair had been caused by a “conjunction of three causes.” The first was the “wrong way” taken by the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party. The second was the cunning of Necolim (Western) subversion. The third was the involvement of people who were “nuts.”
In his statement he asked why he was the only one called upon to account for the coup. What, he asked, about the responsibility of General Nasution, who was minister of defence and security at the time? As for the economic crisis, he declared it was unfair to make him alone responsible. The trouble was not the fault of one person, but the result of actions taken by the “whole of government apparatus and society.” As far as the nation’s moral decline was concerned, again he denied that he alone should be held responsible. This was the result, he explained, “of the behavior of a society as a whole.”
Sukarno’s statement was, of course, unacceptable to his critics. Thousands of students gathered in the streets shouting, “Hang him, hang him!” At one rally, a speaker explained that resignation would now be too mild a punishment for the President. “We want him to be hanged in public,” he shouted, “because he was the mastermind behind the 1965 abortive Communist coup.” Many demonstrators carried banners, some reading: “January is ringing the death knell to the old order and its main architect, Bung Karno.”
Two days after Sukarno’s cavalier statement of “explanation,” the army announced a dramatic haul. At 5:30 in the morning of January 12, troops captured General Supardjo, one of the leading plotters in the coup, who had managed to evade arrest for more than fifteen months. Arrny sources said he had been picked up in the Lubang Buaja area, at Halim, not far from the spot where the generals were murdered and buried.
Supardjo had been the coup leaders’ liaison man with the President. He, perhaps better than anybody else, knew exactly what was Sukarno’s involvement in the plot. The timing of his arrest, two days after the President’s exasperatingly inadequate “explanation” to the Congress, might have been pure coincidence. On the other hand, army sources admitted that troops had been shadowing Supardjo for three weeks prior to his capture. Some observers speculated that Sukarno’s non-explanation might have been the last straw for the army and that army leaders now had determined to throw the book at the President.
The ferocity of attacks against him, plus the arrest of Supardjo, may finally have convinced Sukarno that the game was up. In one little speech in striking contrast to the arrogance of his earlier “explanation,” he said: “There is no human without faults.” He asked “the Indonesian people and even the whole world” to forgive his “conscious, as well as unconscious, faults.”
But it was too late. On January 20, leaders of the People’s Consultative Congress announced that the Congress would meet in full session to consider the problem of the President. On January 23, General Suharto told army officers there was a limit to his patience and that he would take strong action against any person who failed to follow Congress decisions. On January 24, the Djakarta garrison commander, General Machmud, went on the radio and announced he was ready to arrest President Sukarno, if given the order.
The army was now busy interrogating General Supardjo. He defended the President, insisted that there really had been a Council of Generals, and denied that he had been a key figure in the assassination plot. But from the investigation the army extracted some fascinating details. It learned, for instance, that Supardjo while hiding had received at least one letter from Sukarno apparently urging him to marshal pro-Sukarno groups.
The manner in which Supardjo had escaped detection for so long after the coup was also interesting. Apparently, he had been most of the time in Djakarta. Various people in whose homes he had hidden now declared under interrogation that he had carried a letter from Sukarno asking everyone to give the bearer protection. A corporal who gave Supardjo refuge in his home said he understood that Supardjo was “Sukarno’s man.”
Again there was corroboration of that shoulder-patting incident between Sukarno and Supardjo. Supardjo’s version was that Sukarno, when he clapped him on the shoulder after being told of the generals’ fate, said, “That sort of thing will happen in a revolution.”
Supardjo’s trial was scheduled for February 23. During the preceding week, Suharto began a flurry of showdown meetings with his own advisers, the military leaders, and Sukarno. The atmosphere was grim and tense. Finally, on the eve of the Supardjo trial came the terse announcement that Sukarno, “after realizing that political conflict in the country needs to be ended for the sake of the people, the state, and the nation,” was transferring “the authority of the government” to General Suharto.
About the handover there appeared to be contradictions. Since March 11 of the previous year, for instance, Suharto had already had executive power. In one sense, the new development seemed only to be underlining the existing situation. There was speculation about a secret deal in which Sukarno, in exchange for his agreement to the transfer, had extracted a guarantee from Suharto that he would not be brought to trial.
But all this was soon to be overtaken by the climactic session of the People’s Congress that began March 7, 1967. In the Istora Hall at Senajan, where Sukarno had so often whipped up the masses with his oratory, there was this time no Sukarno, not even a picture of him, as the delegates gathered soberly to go about their business. With the exclamation “Bismillah!” (“In the name of Allah!”), General Nasution, the Congress chairman, opened the session.
General Suharto delivered an hour-long speech in which he seemed to be calling on the Congress to get rid of Sukarno without excessive humiliation. The decision had to be reached, he said, “authoritatively, but tactfully.” Suharto in his speech criticized Sukarno’s defense and protection of the Communist Party. But he declared that “unless there are indeed still facts we haven’t been able to find until this very day,” it did not appear that Sukarno was “the mastermind, or even an important figure” in the Gestapu plot. Undoubtedly, Suharto was inspired to this moderate speech, defensive of Sukarno, by his concern lest civil war be touched off by any harsh action against the President.
But it also put the onus for action squarely upon the Congress members. Nobody later could say that Suharto had led the attack on Sukarno, or that the President had been toppled by military maneuver that was unconstitutional.
While the Congress was scheduled to finish its deliberations on March 11, there was bitter wrangling between hard-line opponents of Sukarno, who wanted to press the campaign against him to the hilt, and those apparently heeding Suharto’s appeal who wanted Sukarno let down lightly. There was no disagreement over Sukarno’s ouster. The argument was over the manner in which it was to be effected.
Finally, after taking an extra day to agree, the Congress on March 12 stripped Sukarno of all his powers, without actually stating that he had been sacked. The question of trying him was left to General Suharto. Suharto was sworn in as Acting President.
In official terminology, the Congress announced that Sukarno had “failed to meet his constitutional responsibilities.” Therefore Congress “withdraws its mandate” from him, “and all his powers.” The Congress said Suharto was appointed Acting President until a new president was elected by Congress after general elections (scheduled for 1968). The solution to the “judicial problem involving Dr. Sukarno” was entrusted to the Acting President. Meanwhile, Sukarno was-”banned from political activities” until the elections.
To the perspiring correspondents from abroad it seemed an odd way to change rulers. They pressed for a straightforward interpretation and clearcut confirmation that what they thought had happened had actually happened. But as Indonesia’s smiling new leaders explained, this was the way things were done in Indonesia.
There was, however, no doubt about it. For Sukarno this was the end of the political road. Finally he had been dragged down by the sequence of events triggered on that night in 1965 when the murder gangs set out to exterminate the army’s generals.