Not far from the cheeriness of Taman Mini is another memento of the Suharto era, quite different in tone. The name of the place, Lubang Buaya (meaning “Crocodile Hole”), preceded the grim events that took place there on October 1, 1965, but no propagandist could have devised a more sinister one. It was here that three abducted army generals, the bodies of three others, and an aide mistaken for the army chief, General Abdul Haris Nasution, were taken by mutinous troops.
Visitors to the Crocodile Hole peer through the windows of the hut at a life-size tableau of the living captives, bloodied and tied to chairs as frenzied interrogators in red scarves stand over them with raised rifle butts. They look at the well, where the seven bodies were dumped that day; fake blood drips down its rim. They walk across to a large monument: a vast bronze garuda—a mythical eagle, the national symbol—soaring over the defiant figures of the murdered officers.
This is the defining story, the creation myth, of the New Order regime, which had its origins in steps taken after that day by Suharto and the military. The army leaders, the story goes, men defending the nation and following their president’s directives, were callously murdered during a coup instigated by the PKI, which was fortuitously foiled because the conspirators had failed to target the little-known General Suharto, who then stepped up to take control.
To emphasize that this atrocity was not an aberration, an adjacent Museum of PKI Treachery has forty-two dioramas that depict various episodes, such as the Madiun uprising, in which communists tried to overturn the course of the Indonesian nation and its values. The PKI’s uprising against the Dutch in 1926 is not mentioned.
The story has been picked apart by scholars outside Indonesia, as we shall see, along with the portrayal of the subsequent mass killings and arrests of the PKI membership, and its characterization as something like a natural disaster, a volcanic eruption or a tsunami that resulted in a kind of catharsis. The surprising thing is that—fifteen years after the repudiation of Suharto, the embrace of reformasi (reformation), and the return to electoral democracy—the myth survives largely uncontested within Indonesia. Busloads of children still arrive at Lubang Buaya for indoctrination, and every year on October 1, the president and senior officials still come here to hold a solemn commemoration.
It is not hard to see why the events of 1965–66 were seen as the virtually inevitable consequence of what had happened since independence, a result of the behavior of narrowly experienced politicians and their followers, all striving for survival and advantage in a system that constantly changed shape, wherever it had much shape at all. Nor is it hard to see why Indonesia’s new government and its Western and regional supporters would have largely accepted that notion of inevitability and avoided blame, immediately looking to the future.
Later writings about the 1950s certainly have the note of failure and retreat, from Feith’s The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia, the definitive study of the country’s politics, to Twilight in Jakarta, a novel by the periodically detained newspaper editor Mochtar Lubis, which was published abroad in 1963.
But it started out optimistically, with the 1945 generation of leaders and foreign volunteers, like Feith, who were out to show that an independent Indonesia could work. The 1945 constitution had been hastily proclaimed in emergency conditions, and it was replaced by a new provisional constitution that set out a government responsible to a parliament, the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR, People’s Representative Council), and a president whose role would be largely ceremonial, aside from inviting party leaders in the DPR to form governments. It resembled, perhaps unconsciously, the Dutch parliamentary system, with Sukarno reluctantly filling the role of Queen Juliana.
Membership of the parliament was allocated on a notional estimate of relative popular support, with the largest blocks given to Masyumi, the Islamist party of the more devout, and the PNI, the perceived inheritor of the Sukarnoist nationalist tradition, which, with Sukarno now standing aloof from party politics, was being led by Javanese priyayi figures. The Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI, Socialist Party of Indonesia), led by Sutan Syahrir and supported by many intellectuals, and the PKI, which was reforming itself after the Madiun setback, had smaller blocks, and a large quota was shared among many smaller parties and prominent individuals.
A rotation of governments followed, which formed around leaders from Masyumi or the PNI. Suspicious of the international economic order, they wrestled with attempts to put more substance into independence, given that big American and Anglo-Dutch companies ran the oilfields, Dutch enterprises owned and ran the banks, plantations, and factories, and ethnic Chinese dominated the middle strata of commerce. Schemes to promote indigenous entrepreneurship were subverted by “Ali Baba,” or dummy, partnerships, which had a pribumi (ethnic Indonesian) as a front man in order to hide a Chinese operation.
It was a heady time and today is viewed with much nostalgia. The new elite moved into the large houses vacated by the Dutch, as protected tenants on rents that became low over time. The round of cocktail parties and dinners resumed, with foreign embassies competing for influence and cachet. The formation and disintegration of coalitions, the maneuverings of army factions, and the schemes and love life of Sukarno all provided endless material for gossip. The ruling coalitions packed the civil service with their clients, who worked alongside the newly educated and the demobilized freedom fighters. There was no money to pay adequate salaries, and petty corruption exploded. Jakarta financed itself by printing money.
The armed forces remained barely under the control either of the civilian government, being chiefly loyal to Sukarno or to Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX during his spell as defense minister, or of their own commanders. In 1952 General Nasution pushed a scheme to halve the army’s numbers to 100,000 men and rashly mounted a show of force outside the presidential palace to press the argument. Sukarno suspended him for three years. In 1956 Nasution was back in command and forestalled a march on Jakarta by his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Zulkifli Lubis, the head of a column of the new Special Forces. In 1960 an air force officer, Evie Mauker, outraged by Sukarno’s advances to his sister during a lineup of beauties in regional costumes (known in Jakarta circles as the “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika routine,” suggesting that the president would choose “one from many”), took off in his MiG-17 jet and strafed the presidential palaces in Jakarta and Bogor.
It was not entirely a lost era in terms of social progress. The numbers of children getting at least a few years of education grew, and by 1961 the literacy rate for the population over ten years of age had reached nearly 47 percent, in contrast to the 7.4 percent adult literacy rate last recorded by the Dutch. Newspaper circulations also grew strongly, some of which served as party or institutional mouthpieces, while others reflected broader political and social attitudes.
In the background, though, was a population growing so rapidly that it threatened to overwhelm any gains. Rural poverty deepened in Java as villagers shared farming resources in what became known as “involution”: more and more minute subdivisions of land, as described by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Landlessness grew, and the landless moved into cities, living in squatter settlements and eking out a living as peddlers, coolies, pedicab drivers, domestic servants, touts, and prostitutes. Jakarta’s population grew from under 1 million at independence to 3 million in the early 1960s.
The parliament eventually got around to holding Indonesia’s first elections in September 1955, and another vote for a new constituent assembly followed in November that year. The electorate was widely divided. The PNI gained the largest vote, but that still only amounted to 22.3 percent. Masyumi was next with 20.9 percent, while a second Muslim group, the Nahdatul Ulama (NU, Muslim Scholars’ League), a mass organization appealing to conservative Muslims in rural Java, gained 18.4 percent. Among the “modernizers,” the shock was the rise of the PKI, which gained 16.4 percent of the vote, and the small following, just 2 percent, of the Socialists, the party seen (outside Indonesia, at least) as being the most pragmatic and as having “realistic” economic thinkers. When provincial assembly elections were held in 1957, the PKI emerged as the biggest party in central and eastern Java, winning 34 percent of the vote.
The inflation set off by Jakarta’s deficit financing, along with the reliance on an artificially high exchange rate to help imports keep flowing into the elite circles of Java, was increasing the economic stress on the more export-oriented outer island regions. Many military commanders and their local business circles traded commodities directly into Singapore and Manila. An attempt by General Nasution to crack down on such freelance business and to reassign suspect officers led in December 1956 to a rebellious colonel, Maludin Simbolon, seizing control of North Sumatra and its rich oilfields. In March 1957 the commander of the East Indonesia military region, Lieutenant Colonel H. N. V. Samual, declared martial law and proclaimed a “Universal Struggle Charter” (known as Permesta, its Indonesian acronym) to “complete” the Indonesian revolution.
This defiance of Jakarta might have been subdued had Sukarno heeded the calls of Nasution, Masyumi, and other groups and installed the respected Hatta, who had recently resigned from the vice presidency in a sign of displeasure, to lead a new nonparty government and begin the reform process. Instead, the rebellion expanded, and in February 1958 its leaders proclaimed the PRRI, or Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia, with its headquarters in Bukkittinggi, West Sumatra.
The Sulawesi rebels linked up, and noted figures from Masyumi, such as Mohammed Natsir, and the economics professor Sumitro Djojohadikusumo of the Socialists joined its cabinet. The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was tempted by the chance to divide an Indonesia it saw as drifting into communist hands and began covertly supporting the rebels, shipping in arms and trainers from the British base in Singapore and from its own bases in the Philippines, Guam, and Taiwan. An air wing with mercenary pilots flying B-26 strike bombers operated out of rebel-held Manado in the north of Sulawesi, although its cover was blown when an American pilot was shot down over Ambon in May 1958.
The Indonesian military had reacted to the declaration of the PRRI with ferocity and efficiency and within a few weeks had seized the Sumatran oilfields by means of parachute and marine landings. The rebellion simmered on until its commanders surrendered in 1961.
Sukarno, meanwhile, had been voicing his dissatisfaction with the parliamentary system and floated his idea of a turn to Demokrasi Terpimpin (Guided Democracy), in order to restore what he saw as a more acceptable and culturally suitable process of consultation and mutual self-help. Indonesia’s failure to win a UN vote calling on the Netherlands to negotiate the “return” of New Guinea sparked a nationalist backlash. Indonesian workers seized Dutch enterprises and plantations, and thousands of Dutch citizens still working in Indonesia were ordered to leave.
This provided a means for Sukarno and the army to move to the center of power. Nasution installed army officers to run the seized Dutch enterprises, creating an independent revenue base. He announced a new “middle way” doctrine for the military’s relationship with the state: it would be involved in political and administrative affairs but would not take over government, per se. Sukarno’s decision to take New Guinea by force led to the acceptance of a massive credit from the Soviet Union to buy tanks, warships, submarines, and advanced combat aircraft.
Nasution had also urged Sukarno to cut through the muddled parliament and constituent assembly, which was still bogged down in arguments over Pancasila and the Jakarta Charter, and to do this by restoring the revolutionary constitution of August 1945. Sukarno was receptive and did this in June 1959 by proclamation, giving himself sweeping presidential powers that accorded well with his notion of Guided Democracy. The constituent assembly was dissolved. The parliament helped seal its own fate by agreeing to postpone elections due that year, and it, too, was wound up in 1960, replaced by a selected echo chamber. The two parties that had been most supportive of conventional mixed public-private economic policy, Masyumi and the PSI, were banned outright because of their involvement with the PRRI/Permesta revolt.
Sukarno was again hammering the theme of his Bandung days in the 1920s: the synthesis of nationalism, religion, and communism that he called Nasakom (from nasionalisme, nationalism; agama, religion; and komunisme, communism). As we have seen, his leadership was understood to be harking back, whether consciously or not, to precolonial patterns of kingly rule. Energetic sculptures of protean figures grasping fire went up around Jakarta. The money from Japanese war reparation funds—which also resulted in a new Japanese wife for Sukarno as a deal sweetener—was spent on building luxury hotels in Jakarta and Bali.
The American scholars who had studied the emerging nation since the 1940s were inclined to be forgiving. “Perhaps our basic error all along has been to examine Indonesia with Western eyes,” mused Harry J. Benda in 1964. Specialists had fallen into asking, “What’s wrong with Indonesia?” and were conducting an “agonising search” for the entrepreneurial middle classes in Southeast Asia and for “problem-solvers” in general. But “solidarity-makers” seemed to represent a specifically Javanese culture; their “Hindu-Javanese world” looked remarkably resilient. Instead of asking why democracy failed in Indonesia, the question should have been “Why should it have survived?”
Another scholar, David Levine, wrote that, in fact, nothing had “gone wrong” in Indonesia: “Given the colonial legacy and the lack of a true social revolution, things could hardly have gone any other way.” Even Feith, the author of what seemed a lament for constitutional democracy, noted that American scholarship had tended to look with favor on figures like Hatta and Syahrir as pragmatic, realistic, and forward thinking, and more critically at Sukarno as nativist, demagogic, and a diversion from the country’s real problems.
Less sympathetically, there were questions about the Indonesian leaders’ three years of tutelage under Japan. Had its version of fascism, nestled within the imperial cult, not encouraged the drafters of Indonesia’s constitution to think in terms of the national “family,” national “spirit,” and consensus formation, rather than paying attention to outright argument and to the checks and balances of power? Even so, and despite the banning of the more reform-minded parties and the jailing of individual critics, such as Mochtar Lubis, Sukarno’s Guided Democracy was seen as essentially pluralistic. And with the communists apparently headed for greater success at the polls, Washington’s support for electoral democracy was waning.
But the elements supporting Nasakom and Sukarno were polarizing. The military had used its Soviet equipment to needle the Dutch forces in New Guinea. Strings of commandos had been dropped in the jungles, though many of them were rounded up by unsympathetic Papuans; the rest were struggling to survive. It appeared that Moscow and Beijing were winning the international competition for influence over a country that sat at the gateway of Southeast Asia.
The new administration of John F. Kennedy jumped into the fray, telling the Dutch that they couldn’t win in the long run—a repeat of the US pressure in 1949. The Dutch agreed to leave in October 1962: after a face-saving UN interregnum of seven months, the territory would be turned over to Indonesia on May 1, 1963, with Jakarta promising to conduct an “act of free choice” among the Papuans by the end of 1969, in which they could decide whether to stay part of Indonesia or become independent.
After the debacle of the CIA’s support for the PRRI/Permesta rebellion, the policy makers in Washington decided it was pointless to promote a division in the Indonesian army, which had anticommunists on both sides. Nasution’s new Dwifungsi (Dual Function) doctrine accorded with the evolving US Army scheme of “civic action,” whereby third-world armies would be encouraged and trained to carry out village-level development works, in order to counter the grassroots mobilization of the population by local communist cadres. Their senior officers would be encouraged to undertake broader nonmilitary education, in subjects such as economics and international relations, to prepare them for roles in government. The United States began a program that aimed to educate the Indonesian military in its way of thinking, bringing some 2,800 Indonesian army officers—more than a fifth of the officer corps—to Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth for long residential courses. One American-trained officer, Colonel Suwarto, took this indoctrination back to the Indonesian army’s senior staff college in Bandung, known as Seskoad, where it was integrated into the studies of middle-ranking officers headed for senior commands.
But it was a hard game to play. In 1963 Sukarno’s government announced that the big foreign oil producers—Caltex, Stanvac, and Royal Dutch Shell—that had been left out of earlier localization policies would henceforth be contractors to one of three state oil companies. The existing fifty-fifty split of profits would change to sixty-forty in Indonesia’s favor, and restrictions would be placed on local product distribution. New concessions to small independent oil companies upped the ante, and the threat of outright appropriation was voiced. The squeeze was seen as a crisis of the relationship at the highest levels in Washington, but eventually strategic considerations outweighed the corporate pain. The oil companies signed up.
Meanwhile, Sukarno had signed off, from Tokyo, on a package of fiscal austerity that was meant to prepare Indonesia to receive large amounts of aid from the International Monetary Fund, the United States, and whatever other allies it could bring into the arrangement. It was the conventional “structural adjustment”: reduction of price controls and subsidies, removal of export taxes, a realistic exchange rate, and budget cuts. The measures set off price increases that ranged from 200 to 500 percent in many staple items, resulting in protests from many quarters.
Just as this painful preparation for the aid package set in, Sukarno embarked on a fresh campaign, his Konfrontasi (Confrontation) of the new Malaysian federation being formed by Britain out of its various protectorates and colonies in Southeast Asia. There had been the idea of a UN consultation in North Borneo about their peoples’ agreement with the idea, which might have placated Sukarno’s suspicions about a Nekolim (neocolonialist and imperialist) maneuver. But the British, anxious to reduce their military burden east of Suez, and the headstrong leaders of Malaya and Singapore (Tunku Abdul Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew, respectively) made it clear they were going ahead anyway. When Abdul Rahman declared the new federation on September 16, 1963, officially organized rioters in Jakarta promptly burned down the British embassy, while Sukarno banned all dealings with Malaysia (which then included Singapore, Indonesia’s main trade gateway). Kennedy’s aid initiative foundered, although limited programs of assistance to the Indonesian military continued.
Sukarno’s Guided Democracy now careered around the international skies like a missile with its gyroscope disabled. Infiltration and raids into Malaysia stepped up, drawing countercampaigns from Britain and its commonwealth partners. Sukarno proclaimed a new power axis with China, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. He told the United States, in front of an audience that included the US ambassador, Howard Jones, to “go to hell with your aid.” After China exploded its first nuclear device in 1964, he suggested that Indonesia might soon do the same.
The PKI’s leadership, under Dipa Nusantara Aidit, was stepping out from under the Nasakom umbrella. Its artistic organization, Lekra, hounded intellectuals of a liberal persuasion who were deemed insufficiently revolutionary. The PNI was persuaded to purge its conservative elements. In 1964 the PKI launched its aksi sepihak (unilateral action) campaign to implement a land reform law that had been passed in 1960. The law mandated the transfer of landholdings above a certain size to the landless and put a limit on the portion of crop payable to landlords.
The occupation of large landholdings and parts of plantations brought the PKI’s mass organization, Barisan Tani Indonesia (the Indonesian Peasants’ Front), into direct conflict with a rural class of landowners in Java and the army managers of plantations. That most PKI followers in Central Java and East Java were from the abangan (fairly nominal) stream of Islam, while the landlords were often from the santri (devout) stratum, if not members of the local pesantren (Koranic schools), sharpened the conflict. The backlash against the “godless” communists turned violent.
Sukarno stepped in at the end of 1964 to moderate the rural conflict. But the UN General Assembly’s election of Malaysia to a seat on its security council sent Sukarno to a new level of fury in January 1965. He withdrew Indonesia from the United Nations and approved the training and arming of a “fifth force” of civilian volunteers (in addition to the army, navy, air force, and police).
The Year of Living Dangerously, which Sukarno had announced on Indonesia’s national day in August 1964, was becoming just that. Events were taking a dramatic, deadly turn; nearly fifty years later, historians and even the surviving participants are still trying to untangle them. In two nights in Jakarta, a series of abductions, murders, troop maneuvers, radio broadcasts, arrests, threats, and bluffs changed the strategic settings of the biggest country in Southeast Asia. Like the sprawling city at the time, which was mostly lit dimly by kerosene lamps and an unreliable electricity supply, the shadowy period has spawned all kinds of theories and conspiracies. Was the pivotal event an attempted communist coup, a fake one, or neither? Were the key participants idealists, dummies, or dupes? Was the instigator working for the PKI or for the army? How was it that the senior general who had been left off the hit list reacted with such “uncanny efficiency” to take power? Was it all planned?
From all the records, including declassified diplomatic archives in Washington and London, the events of January 1965 had inspired the Indonesian army to intensively plan for a showdown with the PKI. In response to the threat of Sukarno’s “fifth force” to their monopoly of armed force, the US-trained army chief, General Achmad Yani, and four of his senior generals, all strongly anticommunist, began discussing how to meet the looming PKI challenge. Over the next two months, their plan took firm shape. The army would not mount a crude coup d’état against Sukarno: he was simply too popular. Nor would it strike preemptively against the PKI, which would risk Sukarno’s opposition. Instead, as American and allied diplomats reported, the generals’ plan was to be ready with a countercoup if and when the PKI made a move—as the army hoped it would.
By May, rumors of a pro-Western “Council of Generals” reached Sukarno, and he called in Yani to explain. The general said the rumors must be referring to a promotions committee. Midyear, the foreign minister, Subandrio, brandished an intercepted telegram said to be from the British ambassador, which referred to “our local army friends” and some unspecified secret “enterprise.”
According to a highly plausible reconstruction of events by an American scholar, John Roosa, the PKI’s chairman, D. N. Aidit, around this time called in his chief secret agent. Kamaruzaman, then aged forty-one and known generally as Sjam, was a man of Arab descent from the North Java coast; after a comparatively good education, he had been a trade union organizer on the Jakarta docks following independence. Aidit, who had emerged from hiding in 1951 and taken the PKI leadership, assigned Sjam to what became the PKI’s special bureau, keeping watch on the army. Sjam took up cover as a small businessman. He reported directly and only to Aidit.
By August 1965, Sjam was reporting that Yani and his right-wing generals were planning a coup. The annual Armed Forces’ Day parade in Jakarta on October 5, when battalions and tanks were assembled in the capital, loomed as an obvious occasion on which it might be launched. Sjam had also identified and made contact with a number of middle-ranking officers who were alarmed at this prospect. Aidit grew increasingly attracted to the idea of an internal army putsch by these officers to remove the plotting generals. The move would not be seen as a PKI operation and would, he hoped, be endorsed by Sukarno and might result in a new, more “progressive” army leadership.
So the plot for the 30 September Movement was hatched between the left-wing officers and the PKI spy. Sjam assured Aidit of its sound military planning and gave the officers the impression that high-ranking officials of the PKI had decided on a decisive blow. Both claims were incorrect.
The officers moved late on the night of September 30, assembling small numbers of troops at Lubang Buaya, then an unpopulated stretch of rubber trees on the edge of the Halim air force base. In a camp there over the previous six months, several hundred members of the PKI women’s movement, Gerwani, and its youth wing, Pemuda Rakyat, had been given some basic military training by the air force as part of efforts to create the “fifth force.” Sjam, another member of the PKI special bureau, and the three leading rebel officers made their headquarters at the house of an air force sergeant at the air base. Aidit and his immediate PKI staff awaited developments in another house on the base, half a kilometer away.
At about 3:15 on the morning of October 1, trucks containing seven teams of soldiers left Lubang Buaya and headed into the city, storming into the homes of the sleeping generals who had been identified as members of the coup-plotting council. Resistance came at the houses of Yani and two other generals, and they were shot dead. The defense minister, Nasution, jumped over the back wall of his garden and managed to hide. A bullet killed his five-year-old daughter, and an aide was mistakenly arrested in his place. Three other generals were taken alive. By about 5:30 a.m. the bodies and the captives were back at Lubang Buaya.
Meanwhile, two army battalions, which had been called in from East Java and Central Java to take part in the upcoming Armed Forces’ Day parade, were ordered out of their temporary camps by middle-ranking officers and deployed around Merdeka Square, the vast park in the center of Jakarta’s government district. They took up positions on three sides of the square, controlling the presidential palace, the national broadcaster, Radio Republic Indonesia, and the central telephone and telegraph exchange. Dozens of PKI youth were called in to assist.
At 7:15 a.m. the radio station broadcast an announcement: the 30 September Movement, led by a commander of the presidential guard and well-known hero of the New Guinea campaign, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, had arrested several generals, known for their dissolute lifestyles, in order to preempt a “counterrevolutionary” coup that was planned for October 5. The aim was to protect Sukarno and his goals.
But the operation was already unraveling. Roosa has argued that the generals were not meant to be killed but to be paraded and humiliated in front of Sukarno, in the manner of the patriotic kidnappings of wavering leaders during the independence struggle—including of Sukarno and Hatta themselves in August 1945. Instead, the 30 September Movement had the bloodied bodies of Yani and two others. At some point, it was decided to execute the four captives, as well, and dump all the bodies in the well at Lubang Buaya.
Outside Jakarta, the only military units to join the movement later in the morning were from the Central Java command, where middle-ranking officers seized control in Semarang, Yogyakarta, Solo, and Salatiga. Only in Yogyakarta did PKI organizations turn out in support.
In addition, the president was missing—he was not at the palace. After a long speech the previous evening, he’d gone to spend the night at the home of his third wife, the Japanese-born Dewi. When he woke the next morning, aides told him of unidentified troops around the palace. Sukarno moved to the house of his fourth wife, Harjati, and then, toward midmorning, to the Halim airfield—not because he knew it was the 30 September Movement’s base but because it was his default place of retreat in times of crisis, since a special aircraft was always at his disposal.
At the house of the base commander, Sukarno learned more about the events of the day from the most senior officer involved, Brigadier General Supardjo, a late addition to the movement. The air force chief, Marshal Omar Dani, had meanwhile spent the night at the base trying to find out what was going on. He and other air force officers, from a service known for its sympathies with Sukarno’s anti-Western policies, had cheered the radio announcement.
By early afternoon, according to testimony by Supardjo and Omar Dani at their trials, Sukarno had deduced that the generals were dead. He asked Supardjo to call the movement off, fearing a left-right conflict that would open Indonesia up to dismemberment by neocolonialist forces.
The coup leaders debated what to do. The army officers deferred to Sjam, assuming that he was part of a bigger scheme. Sjam himself desperately tried to keep his collapsing movement together. Possibly he was the instigator of three further radio broadcasts, which dissolved the existing cabinet under Sukarno, announced the membership of a broad-based revolutionary council, and, bizarrely, abolished all military ranks above lieutenant colonel.
The commander of the army’s strategic reserve, or Kostrad, Major General Suharto, was not targeted, even though he usually stood in as acting army chief when Yani was aboard. Nor was the Kostrad headquarters, which was located on the fourth side of Merdeka Square, seized.
By 6:30 on the morning of October 1, Suharto was at Kostrad, assessing the reports of shooting and spilled blood at the missing generals’ homes in the nearby suburb of Menteng. He concluded that Yani was dead and took over his position, with the assent of other generals who had made contact during the morning. However, he had ignored a verbal message from Sukarno appointing another general as army chief and prevented that general from going to see the president.
In the early afternoon, Suharto sent an ultimatum to the troops across the square to surrender or face attack. The East Java battalion came over to Kostrad, while the Central Java battalion boarded trucks and retreated to Halim. By early evening the square was in Suharto’s control, and the radio station was playing his message that the 30 September Movement had been put down. The army’s best-trained troops, the Special Forces, were sent to seize control of the Halim air base and its surrounds.
At 8 p.m. Suharto advised the president to leave the base for his own safety; Sukarno drove off to the palace at Bogor, the town at the foot of mountains just south of Jakarta. The leaders of the 30 September Movement sneaked away during the night. Sjam, Colonel Abdul Latief, and Supardjo went into hiding in Jakarta. Untung took a train to Central Java. Aidit was given an air force plane to reach Yogyakarta. When the Special Forces, under their fiercely anticommunist commander, Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, arrived at Halim and Lubang Buaya in the early hours of October 2, they met only desultory resistance from leaderless troops and civilians.
A rising smell from the sealed-off well and interrogation of captives at Lubang Buaya soon indicated where the generals’ bodies were. Suharto came out in person to supervise the retrieval. By then he’d gotten a signed instruction from Sukarno to restore order. The Armed Forces’ Day parade was replaced by a grim funeral procession through Jakarta.
That same day, Suharto and the other generals decided that this was all the excuse they needed to smash the PKI—to the relief of the CIA station chief, Hugh Tovar, who’d been worried that the army might miss the opportunity.
The campaign did not visibly get started until mid-October, by which time it was quite clear that the PKI had not even tried to call out its supporters en masse. The civilian PKI involvement in the 30 September Movement had been limited to the few hundred Gerwani and Pemuda Rakyat members at Lubang Buaya and the communications facility on Merdeka Square, as well as those who had rallied in Yogyakarta. The PKI’s top leadership was nowhere to be seen. The party’s newspaper, Harian Rakyat, had cautiously backed the movement in its last edition, printed in the night of October 1, but painted it as part of an internal struggle within the army.
As soon as the generals’ bodies were brought to the surface on October 2, the propaganda writers on Suharto’s intelligence staff swung into action. The generals had been tortured, emasculated, and killed by naked, frenzied Gerwani members, who, during the training at Lubang Buaya, had been given stimulant drugs and encouraged to take part in sexual orgies by their PKI superiors. Autopsies later tabled in trials showed no evidence of this, but the misinformation and “psywar” created the impression that the PKI’s perfidy and inversion of the natural order extended down to its rank-and-file members.
Across Indonesia, district army commanders called in PKI members and mass organizations, and went around to houses with lists. Leaders were put in trucks, taken to fields, and shot on the edges of mass graves. Hundreds of thousands of others were taken to temporary prison camps.
In Central Java, senior commanders had rallied powerful armored and other units against the 30 September Movement and smashed its grip on the major cities by October 5. Sarwo Edhie Wibowo arrived in Semarang with commandos of the Special Forces. They quickly put down a strike by railway workers and then drove their armored cars and trucks into Central Java, machine-gunning any protesting PKI supporters. In Solo, where PKI supporters continued to come out in protest, Sarwo Edhie’s troops ran quick training courses so that army-friendly groups could make arrests and perform executions. Elsewhere in Java, the Muslim organization that had battled the PKI over land reallocation the previous year was given the green light to begin sweeps against party supporters. The santri (devout) young men who walked through their villages to the mosque in green sarongs and black fez-type caps became members of death squads at night, calling their mostly abangan (nominally Muslim) PKI neighbors out to local fields or river banks and then killing them with knives and blows.
Colonel Kemal Idris, the army’s anti-Malaysia commander based in Medan, North Sumatra, had begun rounding up and executing known PKI leaders in the region almost as soon as he heard the Untung broadcast. Here, the army subcontracted some of the killings of the PKI’s rank and file to members of an army-sponsored youth movement, Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth), which was headed by a former boxer, Effendi Nasution. Many of its city members were street thugs who made money from systematic ticket scalping at Medan’s cinemas. Across the street from the movies, they began butchering actual or suspected PKI members. In Bali, the killing started on a large scale after the arrival of Sarwo Edhie’s Special Forces in December 1965 and at times took on the character of Hindu ritual sacrifice.
That month, Sukarno spoke out against the killings, which he put at 78,000, berating his people for “running amok like monkeys caught in the dark.” But the “mouthpiece of the revolution” was cut off from the microphones and radio stations on which he was a spellbinder, and the newspapers were being told to downplay anything he said. The killings went on. The rivers of Java choked with bodies.
Nor were the Western powers interested. The killings were just what they wanted. It was a turn in the tide in Southeast Asia, the “best news” for a long time, as Time magazine commented. In mid-October the army was helpfully advised that the British would not attack while it was otherwise engaged with the PKI. On November 4, 1965, Ambassador Marshall Green reported to the US State Department that even the PKI “smaller fry” were being “systematically arrested and jailed or executed.” Green had assured the army that America was “generally sympathetic with and admiring of what they were doing.”
British operatives in Singapore stepped up “black propaganda,” spreading stories in the media about caches of arms smuggled in from China to the PKI. The US embassy’s political section handed the Indonesian army a list of several thousand names, all members of PKI cadres. Partly thanks to a radio communications network rushed out to help the Indonesian army, US intelligence was able to listen in to commands from Suharto’s intelligence section about which PKI members were to be executed on the spot and which were to be brought in alive. Almost certainly, an instruction would have come to execute Aidit, who was shot after being captured in a village on the slopes of Mount Merapi in November, thus removing both the PKI’s most charismatic figure and his testimony.
The wave of killings abated around March 1966. By then, the few American and other journalists allowed to travel around Java and Bali were putting their estimates of the dead at about 400,000. Others thought that conservative, and a later tally by the army’s internal security command put the number across Indonesia at 1 million killed. More than 600,000 had been arrested. The West still didn’t care—the massacre was put down to the irrational Malay tendency to run amok or the inevitable collision of santri and abangan social groups in a time of political change. The role of the army in stirring up the violence, and in directing and sustaining the killings, was played down. “With 500,000 to one million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to say a reorientation has taken place,” the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, noted with evident satisfaction in July 1966.
The surviving senior leadership of the PKI and the leaders of the 30 September Movement were put through show trials in an “Extraordinary Military Court.” None was acquitted. Death sentences were handed down and promptly carried out by firing squads.
Strangely, the mysterious Sjam and two other PKI Special Bureau operatives were kept on death row until 1986: Sjam still hoped he could spin out his story to stay alive but was eventually executed. Other senior figures, such as Abdul Latief and Subandrio, emerged from imprisonment toward the turn of the century, adding little new to the story—except Latief’s assertion that he’d told Suharto about the plot beforehand and believed he’d assented. The very elderly Subandrio claimed that Untung hoped to the end that Suharto would save him.
The conspiracy theories persisted even beyond Suharto’s eventual removal from power. Untung had been close to Suharto. Was he an agent provocateur, perhaps unwittingly? Was Sjam a double agent for the army, pretending to be Aidit’s spy? But why would the army chiefs put their own lives on the line? Suharto later emerged as a masterly political figure, but could he and his staff, at that time, really have conceived and executed a plot so diabolically clever?
Unless some confession emerges unexpectedly from the Suharto group, John Roosa’s thesis and parallel work by Bradley A. Simpson, drawing on US and British archives, suggests that Suharto was versed in the army’s countercoup planning and promptly put it into action on October 1. Though not trained in America, Suharto would have been fully briefed on Yani’s plans. Before moving into senior commands, he had gone through the indoctrination on civic action and governmental roles under Colonel Suwarto at the staff college in Bandung. He stepped up and pushed Nasution aside.
By March 1966 Suharto had finessed his political master, Sukarno. On October 2, 1965, he went to meet Sukarno and addressed the army leadership issue head-on. He offered to unwind all the measures he’d taken since the previous morning. Sukarno demurred. The other, less anticommunist general Sukarno had preferred, Pranoto, was given an administrative command (and was later jailed for twelve years by Suharto); Sukarno gave Suharto written orders to “restore order.” It became the mandate he was looking for.
Backed by student protests organized by the army, Suharto faced down Sukarno and his cabinet at critical points. When ministers met to discuss nationalizing the oil industry in December 1965, Suharto arrived by helicopter, strode in, and warned them against making “precipitous” decisions. In January 1966, under the watchful eye of the Special Forces, the American-educated economists of the University of Indonesia held a seminar over several days outlining their plan to rescue the economy from its collapse. Sukarno responded by announcing his own new cabinet. Demonstrations and counterprotests swept the city, with foreign embassies under attack from different sides. It was orchestrated chaos.
Sukarno retreated to his palace at Bogor. On March 11, 1966, three of Suharto’s senior generals arrived and handed him a draft letter of decision, transferring all executive powers to Suharto. The terms of the discussion have not been revealed—at least, not in any credible sense. It was what the political scientist Harold Crouch identified as a “disguised coup,” and others as the culmination of a “creeping” encirclement of Sukarno.
After that, Suharto moved quickly. He banned the PKI formally on March 13 and followed up by arresting fifteen of Sukarno’s ministers, including the most senior, the foreign minister, Subandrio. Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX and the wily anticommunist Adam Malik were drafted into an emergency cabinet.
Through the year, Suharto wound back Sukarnoism. In August he sent word to Malaysia that Konfrontasi was over. A trial of the central bank governor gave him a platform from which to reveal the hidden costs to the state of the president’s amours. The cabinet was broadened to include the University of Indonesia economists, under their former dean, Widjojo Nitisastro. In early 1967 pressure was stepped up to force Sukarno out.
In March, a thoroughly intimidated and controlled Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (MPR, People’s Consultative Assembly), the repository of sovereign power in the Indonesian system, transferred authority to Suharto as acting president. A year later, the same body voted him into a full presidential term of five years.
Sukarno was sent into a bitter and lonely retirement. The withdrawal of public attention and contact with crowds, not to mention the four-month separation from his family during a period of interrogation in about 1965—the kesepian, or isolation, that can be a cultural torment for the Javanese—saw his spirit wilt and his body succumb to illness three years later.
After a terrible transition, which was quickly pushed to the back of their consciousness, the pragmatists, the realists, the exporters, and their Western backers had finally got the kind of leadership for Indonesia they had long wanted.