Indonesia's former president Suharto took many secrets with him to his final resting place on his death in late January. But none were arguably as important as the unanswered questions about his role in the attempted 1965 coup d'etat - portrayed at the time as being masterminded by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) - and how he leveraged those events to maneuver into power, replacing the left-leaning president Sukarno. The official version of those events, which later underpinned the legitimacy of his rule, was that Suharto saved the day for the country after six of the country's top generals were horribly murdered early in the morning of October 1 by communist plotters.
Then the head of the military's Jakarta-based strategic reserve, Kostrad, and second in line to army minister and commander, Ahmad Yani, who was among those killed that fateful morning, Suharto moved quickly through the day to neutralize the supposed threat. By uniting the military behind him, he ensured that Indonesia survived a descent into virtual anarchy when angry Indonesians, often with the assistance of the army, attacked and killed as many as 500,000 PKI members and their followers across the country. Suharto gained ever-greater legal powers, initially under a special order by Sukarno in March 1966, giving him sweeping authority, then by his eventual appointment as acting president in 1967 and finally, the year after, as full president by the supreme legislative body under Indonesia's constitution. Thus were the tumultuous beginnings of Suharto's New Order regime, which ruled with an iron fist until 1998. One of the early foreign studies to support the story that the attack on the generals was indeed a PKI conspiracy was a 1968 US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study entitled Indonesia - 1965: The Coup that Backfired.
Now, the report has been published in revised book form as Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: the Untold Story. Helen-Louise Hunter, the book's author, who spent many years in the CIA as an analyst and later became a lawyer, maintains the argument of PKI involvement, but also asserts that Sukarno knew about and approved the plot. Basing the study on Indonesian army records from post-October 1 interrogations and trial reports, she says the plot's aim was to remove opposition from the anti-communist leadership so that a new socialist state could be proclaimed under president Sukarno with the PKI chairman, Aidit, as his successor. This version of events, of course, has been questioned ever since the alleged coup attempt was foiled. A counterview, as argued by Bob Elson, professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Queensland in Australia, and author of the currently available Suharto: a Political Biography, is that the PKI's role was limited to a handful of its top leaders who were aware of the military officers' plot and saw in the pressure-cooker political atmosphere of the time that they could gain advantage from the situation.
The PKI, at the time a legal political party with some 3 million members plus as many as 20 million more in associated organizations, had gained an influential position in Sukarno's Indonesia. But its leadership feared the army, particularly in light of rumors of a secret Council of Generals, linked to the US government and the CIA, which allegedly planned to take over government. They knew that with Sukarno's health uncertain, should he die, the army could clamp down violently on the PKI. There were also divisions within the army, ranging from strongly pro-US generals and officers to nationalist so-called "Sukarnoists" and staunch PKI supporters. A small group of middle-level officers, disenchanted with senior staff who were seen to be living too much the good life in Jakarta, and apparently influenced by the rumors about the Council of Generals, decided pre-empt a pro-US move and take matters into their own hands. The generals would be kidnapped and then presented to Sukarno for a dressing down and sacking - or at least demotion or move sideways. But things apparently went badly wrong with the plot when the generals were murdered. Elson told Asia Times Online that the plot was most likely an attempt to change in only a limited way the "political configuration" , but it became terribly "botched up" with the murder of the generals. "What they had planned was a lightning strike against a group of generals they had reason to believe was plotting a real coup," contends Elson. "Their strike was pre-emptive and its purposes limited." Suharto and the army then took advantage of the situation by portraying the affair as a PKI conspiracy, fueling vengeance within the rank and file and around the country by falsely saying the generals had been tortured and badly mutilated by communist youth and women.
This historical falsehood was maintained throughout the New Order, and was seared deep in the national consciousness each year in the 1990s in the movie Penumpasan G30S/PKI, which was shown on Indonesian television. Historical gapsHunter's book does not thoroughly examine Suharto's move to power, nor does she focus much attention on how he subsequently presided over the mass killings of PKI members and supporters in late 1965 and early 1966; estimates of the carnage range from 90,000 to 500,000 killed. But she does state clearly that there was no "ghastly" mutilation of the generals and she underlines that the attempted coup did result in an anti-PKI massacre that ranks "as one of the worst mass murders in the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s". A major criticism of Hunter's book might be that she does not delve deep enough into the questions still lingering over Suharto's possible role in the initial kidnappings. Given his seniority and authority as Kostrad commander, why was he not among those generals kidnapped? One of the coup's leaders, ex-colonel Abdul Latief, who was pardoned and released from prison only in 1999, claimed that he told Suharto that an attack on a group of senior generals was imminent and that Suharto made no move to prevent it. Latief made the claims at his trial in 1978 - 13 years after the actual event - but records of his testimony were not made public at the time. He received a death sentence that was never carried out. Suharto consistently denied having spoken to Latief, including when the question was again raised after his fall from power in 1998. Elson believes that Latief's account was essentially accurate, though that does not mean that Suharto was necessarily part of the conspiracy. Suharto may have discounted Latief's warning in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of the time, or because the plot was not explained in detail and as originally designed anyway it meant they would be summoned to the palace to meet Sukarno.
Another plausible but unconfirmed explanation could be that Suharto recognized the gravity of the plot but chose to wait and see how events played out before positioning himself. Yet another key unanswered question: was there ever a pro-US Council of Generals maneuvering behind the scenes? With communism on the march, the mid-1960s were a very uncertain time for US and Western interests in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Earlier in the decade, Sukarno had challenged the merger of the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah into Malaysia as an imperialist move and he was waging a low-level war, or Konfrontasi, with Malaya in Borneo, which was defended by British and Commonwealth soldiers. Having already committed combat troops on a large scale to fight communism in Vietnam in March 1965, Washington was worried. Indonesia was home to the world's largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union and China and the US feared the left-leaning Sukarno's increasing orientation towards Beijing. Resonating with current US anti-proliferation policy, there may have also been a nuclear component. Indonesia's interest in the civilian application of nuclear energy dated back to the mid-1950s, and in the early 1960s the country was supported in this by the US, resulting in construction of a research reactor in Bandung in West Java.
Under Sukarno's increasingly nationalist rule in the early 1960s, and one increasingly oriented away from the US and West and towards communist China, the idea of Indonesia having a nuclear weapons capability was also put forward. There were apparently fears in Washington at the time that Jakarta was seeking assistance from China for weapons development and after Beijing's first nuclear bomb test in 1964, Indonesian officials publicly spoke of their desire to build a bomb. In July 1965, Sukarno gave the idea his approval, but the pro-bomb talk notably came to an end shortly after his fall and Suharto's rise in the wake of the failed coup attempt in October 1965. Elson argues that there undoubtedly would have been meetings among like-minded senior Indonesian officers concerned about where the country was heading. But no concrete evidence has ever surfaced that there was a coherent right-wing cabal supported by the US and CIA - unlike the situation in 1958 when there was what is now a well-documented CIA-sponsored rebellion among army officers in Sumatra and Sulawesi against Jakarta in an effort to break up the new sprawling state and bring down Sukarno. Sukarno and others had good reason to feel that a repeat US effort to destabilize the country was possible. Comprehensive documents published by the US Department of State, Foreign Relations, 1964-1968, Indonesia; Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines, now available online indicate that the US government knew very little about what was going on at the time - much to Washington's frustration.
After the October 1 botched coup, the US did try to steer the situation to its advantage, not just by supporting Suharto but also through covert assistance for the PKI's destruction. As Hunter writes, the attempted coup of 1965 and its outcome was one of the most significant events of the 20th century, not just for Indonesia, but internationally: "The decimation of the Indonesian Communist Party ... and the complete turnabout in Indonesia's international alignment - from that of communist China's close ally in growing estrangement from the rest of the world ... to a new posture as friend of the West ... was nothing less than an upset of the world balance of power." Now with the strongman and his 32-year authoritarian tenure firmly in the grave, Indonesians are left to ask: At what price? Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: The Untold Story by Helen-Louise Hunter. Praeger Security International (May 30, 2007) . ISBN-10: 0275974383. Price US$75, 216 pages.
Comments