Karaniya Dharmasaputra
*) Master of Public Policy Program, George Washington University, May 15, 2005
Introduction
The so-called “September Movement” of 1965 was a critical turning point in Indonesia – United States relations in the Cold War. This communist backed coup was also one of the darkest pages in Indonesian history. Until today, historians are still struggling in answering many questions surrounding this bloody incident.
At dawn, on October 1, a group of Indonesian soldiers which named itself the “30 September Movement” kidnapped and killed seven Army-anti Communist generals including Army Commander General Ahmad Yani. Defense Minister General A.H. Nasution was also on the target. Yet, the rebels failed to capture and murder him.
The movement announced that they took over the power to anticipate what they called a “General’s coup d’etat” with a plot to topple President Sukarno, the first President of the Republic of Indonesia. The rebels also claimed that the alleged Generals’ plot was American inspired. At the same day, the group’s leader, Commander of the Presidential Guard Regiment Cakrabirawa Lt. Colonel Untung, issued a decree stating that 45 members of a leftist “Revolutionary Council” would administer the government.
The official version of Indonesian history tells that the Indonesian Communist Party, PKI, backed the September Movement. Harian Rakjat, a PKI’s affiliated newspaper, indicated that support before later withdrew it. Indonesians name this coup “G30S/PKI” or “Gestapu;” an acronym of the September 30th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party.
However, the movement turned out to be an abortive coup. Led by General Suharto, the Army Strategic Reserve (KOSTRAD) and the later second Indonesian president, the Army cracked down the September movement. This backlash was then followed by a brutal massacre of PKI leaders and members across the country. The killings were largely undertaken by Muslim youths under the military’s blessing.
The September movement resulted in the end of Sukarno’s power and the beginning of Suharto’s 32 year militaristic-authoritarian rule over the country. This also became a dramatic reversal point of Indonesia’s foreign relations. Suharto stirred the country away from Beijing and Moscow, and turned that to Washington and its allies. The downfall of President Sukarno and PKI, the fourth largest communist party in the world, indeed served the United States’ best interest in the region during the Cold War.
The main objective of this paper is to investigate the US foreign policy and involvement in the 1965 coup attempt in Indonesia. In reaching that goal, I try to address the following four major questions surrounding this incident that have been haunting Indonesian history for years. Those are:
· Was there any reasonable proof to support a long speculation that the US government, particularly CIA, has instigated the September coup attempt?
· In what level the US embassy at Jakarta was involved in the Communist brutal massacre?
· Was there any base for an allegation that in the sake of eliminating communism influence as its top priority, US government supported the establishment of a military-heavy influenced-government in Indonesia?
· What was the US policy in dealing with Islamic movements in Indonesia? Did the US utilize the Islamic movements to halt the Communist influence in Indonesia?
To answer those questions, this paper utilizes primary resources of the US government archives, notably the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) documents. These documents have been declassified by the Department of State in 1998-99 and have printed and bounded by the US Government Printing Office under the title ”Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-68, Volume XXVI, Indonesia, Malaysia-Singapore, Philippines.” However, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of State subsequently stalled and prevented the release of the volume. Thank to the National Security Archive of George Washington University that has obtained the Indonesia volume and then posted it on their website. Beside the FRUS documents, this paper also employs other related documents from the National Archives and Records Administration – RG59, US National Security Council and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.
Background
During the Cold War, Indonesia was a strategic country in the US interests. Its gigantic size, with more than 100 million populations, made Indonesia as the sixth most populous country in the world in 1965. Its location between the Pacific and Indian Ocean, and between Australia and the mainland, placed Indonesia as a focal point in the region. And last but not least, amid the American’s fear of the prevalence of the domino theory in the Southeast Asia, the rapid growth of the communist influence in the country made US leaders believed that Indonesia is a crucial ideological battlefield they had to win.
Gained its independence in 1945 from the Dutch-British-Japanese colonialism, the infant Indonesia was born with a bold sentiment of anti-imperialism and a strong favor of communism. For the past several years, before the 1965 September movement was underway, most Indonesians were exposed and affected by a constant pro-Communist propaganda. Along with this stream, anti-American spirit placed its deep root in most Indonesians’ minds.
President Sukarno played a substantial role in shaping the nation’s leftist orientation. As a founding father of the newborn Republic of Indonesia, Sukarno had towered over Indonesian political life for more than a generation. He listed himself after Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—but not Mao, who was still alive—as a prophet and what he called himself “the Great Leader of the Revolution.” Sukarno, actually, was not a communist in a formal sense. He was rather an admirer of communism since he perceived that as an effective tool to mobilize his society and to advance his Marxist-nationalistic ideology. In this regard, he gave his strong support to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) that was closely connected to the Red Chinese Government and he later even vowed to bring the country into a “socialist stage.”
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These circumstances laid an important ground for the US foreign policy toward Indonesia. Halting the expansion of communist influence was the Washington’s highest priority during this period. At latest in 1953 the US National Security Council had formulated a series of policy to undertake an “appropriate action, in collaboration with other friendly countries, to prevent permanent communist control” of Indonesia.
In the Statement of Policy NSC 5405 of 1954 the US National Security Council underlined the goal of the US foreign policy towards Indonesian communism. The fall of Indochina made US worrying at the expansion of communism throughout the Southeast Asia, including to Indonesia. This fear was formulated as what so called “the domino theory.” In 1954, Secretary of State Dulles warned that the fall of Indochina would quickly collapse the rest of Southeast Asia like a “row of dominoes.”
In 1965, this theory had also been terrorizing the US embassy at Jakarta. “One after another, faster and faster, the PKI’s enemies were over-run; the domino theory was being tested before our eyes,” Richard Cabot Howland, a foreign-service officer at the Embassy, described how his corps assessed the situation at that time.
As the PKI’s grip became stronger, Indonesia became as a crucial major target of the Communist powers and as a significant battlefield between Moscow and Peking. Washington saw this development would inevitably determine the world political balance. In this regard, the National Intelligence Estimate concluded:
“Indonesia’s formal accession to communism would have a heavy impact on world politics. It would be seen as a major change in the international balance of political forces and would inject new life into the thesis that communism is the wave of the future… Indonesia would provide a powerful example for the underdeveloped world and hence a credit to communism and a setback for Western prestige.”
Washington believed these losses would pose a substantial threat to the US security interest in the Far East, particularly in Malaysia, Philippines, and Australia. Moreover, considering these countries’ positions as the primary world suppliers of natural rubber, tin, petroleum, and many other strategic commodities, US saw that the loss of Indonesia and other Southeast Asia nations would substantially strengthen the Soviet bloc and endangered economic stability of the US and its allies.
Sukarnos’ hostile behaviors toward the United States provided another harbor for the Washington’s fear. Persistently, the Indonesian president characterized the West as the representative of neo-colonialism and imperialism. Repeatedly, he even declared his intention to purge the United States from Indonesia. And consistently, every facet of his policies clashed with US’ best interests. When the US government gave its recognition and support to Malaysia, Sukarno refused to accept the existence of the British-backed newborn country. Not only that, since August 1964 he even waged a military confrontation against it. In the same month, on August 10, Sukarno recognized North Vietnam and opposed the US intervention policy in South Vietnam.
Being ambitious to be a paramount leader of the Afro-Asian nations, Sukarno declared the establishment of what he dubbed the NEFOS, the New Emerging Forces that consisted of developing countries, against the OLDEFOS, the Old Established Forces that meant the US and its Western Allies. This made Washington nervous that Sukarno’s Indonesia would drag other countries to the same direction. “If Indo virus is allowed to spread unchecked in AA [Afro-Asian] world it could be particularly insidious front runner for international communism.”
Sukarno grew “the virus” vigorously. Under his blessing, PKI’s influence expanded very fast. In 1965, the communist party claimed having three million members. With the unchallenged President Sukarno’s support, PKI’s members and sympathizers had successfully penetrated into many strategic positions in the central and local government. Borrowing the American intelligence’s assessment, PKI became “the best organized and most dynamic political entity in Indonesia.”
Less than three weeks prior to the September movement, Indo-American relation was almost completely crushed. In his telegram to the Embassy at Jakarta, Secretary Rusk discussed his intention to close the Surabaya consulate that had been hit earlier by a mobs riot. He also ordered the US Ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green to evacuate US embassy employees and their dependents at Surabaya, and other cities, to Jakarta.
Sukarno’s bluff in July 1965 to explode an atomic bomb sent another red-code to Washington. This was worsened by the US suspicion that the Red Chinese government stood behind this move in order to strengthen Sukarno’s prominent position as the leader of the Afro-Asian countries. The Indonesian Army leader also repeatedly made the similar statements. Earlier, General Hartono, Director of the Army Arsenal, announced that 200 scientists had been building a bomb to be detonated at the Armed Forces Day celebration on October 5, 1965; or only five days after the September 30 Movement then broke out. On July 27, for the third time, Hartono reiterated his statement that the atomic bomb would be tested after the Afro-Asian conference in Algiers in November that year.
Did CIA Plot the Coup?
It is a long speculation among Indonesians that CIA has engineered the September coup attempt in order to raise the public hatred toward the communists. This suspicion is not without ground. Several documents showed compelling indications leading to such direction.
An assessment prepared by Sherman Kent, the Director of the Office of National Estimates of the CIA, on January 26, 1965, stated:
“[I]f Sukarno lives on for some time to come, the chances of the Communist Party (PKI) to assume power will probably continue to improve… Should Sukarno leave the scene in near future, we believe that the initial struggle to replace him would be won by Army and non-Communist elements, though Communists would continue to play an important role… unless the non-Communist leaders displayed more backbone, effectiveness, and unity than they have to date, the chances of eventual PKI dominance of Indonesia would quickly mount.”
Another interesting indication is provided by a memorandum prepared for the 303 Committee, a US interdepartmental committee that was responsible in reviewing and authorizing covert operations, on February 23, 1965—or seven months before the September movement was under the way. The document, entitled ‘Progress Report on [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] Covert Action in Indonesia,’ discussed “an operational program of political action in Indonesia” formulated and developed by the Department of State and another US government agency, presumably CIA, since the summer of 1964.
The objective of this operation was stated very clear: To halt the PKI and Red Chinese Government’s influence on Indonesian foreign and domestic policies, and to simultaneously strengthen the non-Communist elements in Indonesia. Several methods were designed to employ, including “covert liaison with and support to existing anti-Communist group, …black letter operations, media operations, including possibly black radio, and political actions within existing Indonesian organizations and institutions” and to provide “covert assistance to individuals and organizations capable of and prepared to take obstructive action against PKI.”
The memorandum noted that this operation had been approved by the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the US Ambassador to Indonesia, and then by the 303 Committee. It also noted that a CIA official urged the 303 Committee to establish “a larger political design or master plan to arrest the Indonesian march into the Chinese camp” considering that the loss of Indonesia “would make a [US] victory in Vietnam of little meaning.”
Deputy Chief of Mission of the American Embassy, Francis J. Galbraith, also emphasized the importance of such program. To halt the Indo-communist virus infecting other Afro-Asian countries, in his telegram to the Department of State in June 1965, he recommended the US government to launch a discreet counter-propaganda and actions against Sukarno.
Five months before the Gestapu broke out, in his report to President Johnson in April 1965, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker wrote that the succession fight had started in Indonesia. US government recognized that this crucial development was taking place amid a sharply accelerated growth of the PKI’s role in government and that this trend would continue as long as Sukarno remained in control.
On the same tone with the Kent’s analysis mentioned previously, a National Intelligence assessment came up three months later projected that the non-communist elements within the Indonesian Army would end up as a winner. However, it also foresaw that the Communist elements would still play an important role. The report concluded:
“If Sukarno dies or become incapacitated in the next year or so, the immediate successor government would probably be an ostensibly non-Communist coalition. The military would almost certainly exercise greater authority than at present, but would be unlikely to risk civil war to initiate a roll back of the Communists. Indeed, the Communists are already so entrenched that they could probably not be denied an important share in any successor government.”
To be noted, this estimate was prepared by the CIA and the intelligence organizations of the Departments of State, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Agency; and was approved by the members of the US Intelligence Board.
In this regard, one could reasonably imply that CIA and other US intelligence bodies had a clear interest to secure the window of opportunity that had been opened to “free” Indonesia and to eliminate the chance of the continuing influence of the PKI elements in the post-Sukarno regime.
Four weeks before the September 30 Affairs taking place, another intelligence report bolstered such speculation. The Special National Intelligence Estimate even saw that the fall of Indonesia into the Communist world was a clear and present danger. The report wrote:
“If Sukarno lives, it is possible that in two or three years the Indonesian state will be sufficiently controlled by the Communists to be termed a Communist state, even though Sukarno remains the acknowledged leader... Sukarno’s Indonesia already acts in important respects like a Communist state and is more openly hostile to the US than most Communist nations.”
Nonetheless, digging the FRUS documents and other archives, I found no solid evidence to establish a direct link between those operations with the September coup attempt and to unveil the CIA’s role in plotting it. Instead, many of those revealed the US government’s consistent denials on this issue. For instance, in his telegram dated March 16, 1965, Ambassador Howard Jones wrote that he had told President Sukarno and First Deputy Prime Minister Subandrio that “he had received assurances from the ‘CIA Head for the Far East’ that there were no anti-Sukarno and anti-Indonesia subversive operations.”
The next denial is revealed by a telephone conversation record between acting Secretary of State Ball and Deputy Director of CIA Richard Helms on October 1, 1965, at 11:35 a.m.; one day after the September movement started. As recorded in this document, Ball questioned Helms “if we were in a position where we can categorically deny this involvement of CIA operations in the Indonesia situation.” Helms firmly answered that his agency “had had absolutely nothing to do with it. [1 line of source text not declassified].”
Ambassador Jones’ letter to Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs William Bundy unveils an interesting fact. Written on April 23, 1965, he reported that he was “privy to plans for a coup here [Indonesia]” approximately in late May or June when Sukarno was out of the country. In order to play safe, he told his contact that “the US Government can in no way participate in any effort of this kind.” Jones admitted that he “conveyed clearly [his] own sympathy with his objectives.” However, in his next cable sent on month later, on May 25, 1965, Jones reported that the coup plans would not happen.
Later, at a historical conference discussing Indonesia at Annapolis in 1995, President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy revealed a discussion between acting Secretary of State George W. Ball and a CIA’s representative. Responding to Ball’s question whether the Agency could use its resources to reverse the leftist-trend in Indonesia, as Bundy recalled, the CIA official answered that his agency did not have an adequate assets in Indonesia to produce such impact.
One of the obvious means employed by the US government to hamper the Indonesian Communist was its foreign aid. Washington gradually cut off the economic and military aid to Indonesia between 1962 and 1965. As a reaction to Sukarno’s confrontation policy toward Malaysia, Washington even took a dramatic step by reducing 80 percent of the planned assistance to Indonesia for Fiscal Year 1964. The following table summarized that action:
|
| 1963 | Requested for 1964 | Present 1964 |
| AID-technical assistance to civil groups, police and officers engaged in civic action, and malaria eradication | $19.6 | $29.4 | $12.9 |
| MAP-weapons, communications, training | $16.6 | $16.4 | $2.1 |
| Loan support for stabilization | $17.0 | $40.0 | 0.0 |
| TOTAL | $53.2 | $85.8 | $15.0 |
* in million
Easy to predict this move had successfully exacerbated the country’s economy and created a hard pressure to Sukarno’s administration. On the other hand, the aid allocation was shifted to anti communist elements in the Indonesian Army. In the period 1962-65, the amount of US military aid was about $39.5 million, much higher than that of 1949-61 with $28.3 million in total.
Beside that, the documents I examined can only unveil the CIA operation after the September coup attempt. One of them is provided by Ralph McGehee’s confession. McGehee, an ex CIA officer, admitted to have once read a top secret CIA report on the agency’s role in provoking the PKI annihilation after the September movement. One of the agency’s roles was steering public opinion against communism. McGehee explained:
“The Agency seized upon this opportunity [Suharto’s response to Gestapu] and set out to destroy the P.K.I…. [eight sentences deleted]…. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals—badly decomposed—were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage of a massacre.”
McGehee explained that this kind of media operation was typical to CIA. The agency’s operation in Chile was a comparable example. In order to create appropriate situations to convert the initial reluctance of the Chilean military leaders to topple Allende, CIA manufactured a fake document revealing a communist’s plot to murder Chilean generals. This “plot” was then discovered, blown up as big news on the front page of major newspapers, and resulted in Allende’s murder.
A telegram sent from the Department of State to the US embassy in JakartaOctober 6, 1965, the telegram elaborated a strategy to carry out “VOA and information program based on citation Indonesian sources and official statements without at this stage injecting US editorializing.” The focus of this campaign was on the material “pointing finger at PKI and playing up brutality of September 30 rebels.” corroborates McGehee’s testimony. Dated on
Other than such media operation, I could not find any compelling proof to support a notion that was the CIA who directly plotted the September coup.
Moreover, during the first days after the coup occurred, it seemed that the USIndonesia. This was reflected, for instance, on the telephone conversation between acting Secretary of State George W. Ball and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on October 1, 1965, at 9:30 a.m.—or, considering the twelve-hour differences between Washington and Jakarta, only a few minutes after the September 30 Movement was initiated. The memorandum of this discussion described how Ball merely provided his best guess that “[it] looks more and more as though this is a PKI operation but [I] could not be sure.” Another indication, over three weeks after the coup attempt, the US Embassy in Indonesia even could not provide an exact chronology of this incident. In a telegram-report to the Department of State, Ambassador Marshall Green summarized the September movement under a sub-title “What Probably Happened.” government reacted confusedly and did not fully comprehend what exactly happened in
Washington’s knowledge about the figure of General Suharto, the key leader in cracking down the PKI, provides another indication. Suharto was indeed “a strong military leader and apparently a firm anti-Communist” who indeed fitted to the Uncle Sam’s glove. Yet, prior to the September coup, he was almost an unknown figure in Washington. Evidence showed that the CIA just started preparing an intelligence memorandum on his background on October 2, one day after the coup.
Another lead, although it was obvious that the US leaders did not like Sukarno, several documents revealed that they hesitated to topple Sukarno. Washington realized that its closest ally, the Army, heavily relied on Sukarno figure to gain a wide public support and to balance the PKI’s growing influence. In his assessment, Ambassador Green wrote, “…despite his faults, he [Sukarno] is Indonesia and national unity depends on allegiance to his father figure, but the army, for its part, finds its public support of Sukarno a useful symbol that it is the protector of national unity.”
Based on this consideration, Washington always tried hard to maintain a good relationship with Sukarno. Like his predecessor, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in April 1965 recommended to President Johnson that the US government “should, to extent possible, continue the effort to work with Sukarno and maintain a dialogue between him and the President.” Within this perspective, should also be understood why in December 1964, in regard of Sukarno’s illness, Under Secretary of State George Ball directed Ambassador Jones to convey President Johnson’s offer to help by sending US specialists to Indonesia to provide appropriate medical assistance for Sukarno.
Instead of revealing a proof of the CIA’s plot on the September coup, other declassified documents pointed the finger to other directions. One of them accused Beijing standing behind this abortive coup. The Red Chinese involvement was including “at least to extent of supplying several thousand guns which smuggled into Indonesia and distributed to Communist RBP [Pemuda Rakjat, Communist Youth Organization]” and “[t]here circumstantial evidence that Peking aware of or perhaps even had hand in plot but this not established.” Ambassador Green even called the September movement as an Indonesia’s own “peculiar form of military coup.”
Washington’s Hands in the Massacre
Another center of the debate surrounding the Gestapu is whether the United StatesUS regards itself as a human rights vanguard, this question is indeed significant. The number of the victims of this bloody incident was enormous. Its death scale pushed a famous philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “…in four months, five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years.” One of the CIA studies even called the killings as “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” According to Richard Cabot Howland, a Foreign Service officer at the Embassy in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, approximately 350,000 to 1.5 million PKI members were murdered in the aftermath of the September movement. He obtained this figure from a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army’s Supreme Operation Command’s “Social Action Affair Section” who claimed this as an accurate field report. Howland wrote, “The totals were 50,000 dead on Java; 6,000 dead on Bali; 3,000 in North Sumatra. I was skeptical of his methods but accepted his estimates faux de mieux, and combining them with my own data produces a figure of 105,000 communists dead.” played a significant role in one of the most brutal massacres of the century, by providing lists of PKI members to the Indonesian Army that then haunted and killed them. In today’s context where the
The FRUS documents clearly revealed a fact that the US government provided its hands to the Indonesian Army to haunt and slaughter the Communists. This assistance took many forms. One of those was by providing a list of PKI leaders and members. Many sources have corroborated this role.
In his letter to the Washington Post, on May 21, 1990, Robert J. Martens, an expert in international communism in the US embassy’s political section at Jakarta, confirmed that he “passed names of the PKI leaders and senior cadre system to non-Communist forces during the six months of chaos between the so-called coup and the ultimate downfall of Sukarno.” Yet, Martens emphasized that the lists he gave “were based entirely—I repeat entirely—on the Indonesia Communist press and were available to everyone.” He also stated that his step was undertaken without any order or consent of the superior official of the embassy.
Interestingly, this contradicts several interviews with the embassy top officials at that time. In an interview on May 14, 1990, with Kathy Kadane, a reporter working for the States News Service, the former deputy chief of mission Jack Lydman answered “absolutely” when Kadane asked whether he or other high-level officials in the embassy approved Marten’s list to be distributed. This fact is also confirmed by the airgram A-74 sent by Ambassador Green to the State Department on August 10, 1966, which clearly stated that:
“A sanitized [i.e. Embassy attribution removed] version of the lists in A-398 has been made available to the Indonesian Government last December [1965] and is apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership at the time (lists of other officials in the PKI-affiliates, Partindo and Baperki were also provided to GOI officials at their request).”
A bulk of FRUS documents provides another confirmation. Between December 1965 and August 1966 the US Embassy at Jakarta sent the State Department three airgrams consisting two lists of PKI leaders and members. The first was an unclassified list of 67 leaders of PKI’s Politbiro, Central Committee, Central Control Commission, Central Verification Commission, and Secretariat Control Committee as of May 1965. The second one was a fragmentary compilation about the present location of the PKI leaders existence.
Washington also provided various military aids. Yet, to avoid the requirement of resuming the military assistance program in a government-to-government level—which could be interpreted as an official US support to Sukarno who then remained as head of state and government of Indonesia—and to minimize the risk of public exposure, this operation was channeled covertly through a third country, mainly Thailand. Another reason, this covert operation was needed since at that time the Indonesian government could not legally purchase nor obtain any US military equipment. Due to its hostility policy to the US interests, Congress had frozen the military assistance program (MAP) to Indonesia.
The assistance provided including tactical communication equipments, small arms of non-US origin, medical supplies, other logistical supports such as rice, and even money. In his telegram sent to the Department of State, Ambassador Green confirmed “we provide Malik with fifty million rupiahs requested by him for the activities of the Kap-Gestapu movement [1-1/2 lines of source text not declassified].” Kap-Gestapu was a civilian group linked to the Army that launched massive raids to PKI members, particularly in Central Java. Adam Malik was one of the key civilian leaders and promoters of the movement.
In regard the communication equipments, the objective of providing them was clearly stated “to provide a continuity of communications among the various Army units and their anti-Communist leaders and between certain of these leaders and US elements.” This may provide a compelling foundation to a speculation that by providing such means US also greatly benefited by gaining access to the vital Army internal communication, particularly in intercepting their moves to haunt the Communists. And, one therefore can fairly concludes that Washington knew every detail of the atrocities and yet let those happened in front of their eyes.
Not only providing the list and other forms of assistance, evidence also showed that Washington was fully aware of the massacre and instead of preventing or protesting it, Uncle Sam closed his eyes to this brutal men-hunt game. A telegram sent to the State Department revealed that in mid November 1965 two officers of Pemuda Pancasila, an anti-communist youth organization, visited the US Consulate office in Medan and blatantly told the consulate officers that “they intends to kill every PKI member they can catch... that Pemuda Pan[c]asila will not hand over captured PKI to authorities until they are dead or near death.” Worth to be noted, firstly set up in 1959, Pemuda Pancasila later became a notorious paramilitary organization of petty criminals who undertaking strong-arm jobs in supporting Suharto’s dictatorship.
As well, the Medan Consulate was not unaware of the potential atrocity and of the fact that the murder also included many common people. In the same telegram, Consul Theodore Heavner inserted his comments as follow:
“Attitude of Pemuda Pan[c]asila leaders can only be described as bloodthirsty. While reports of wholesale killings may be greatly exaggerated, number and frequency such reports plus attitude of youth leaders suggests that something like real reign of terror against PKI is taking place. This terror is not discriminating very carefully between PKI leaders and ordinary PKI members with no ideological bond to the party.”
Was the list a determinant factor causing the killing? Historians are still on dispute in determining how significant the US lists’ role in aiding the massacre in the aftermath of the September movement. Here, I would argue that the more significant impetus of the killings rooted on a long conflict between the Communist and Muslims in the grass-root level.
Hefner’s classical study on a peasant-society of Mountain Java in rural Pasuruan, Eastern Java, showed that the bloodshed of 1965 was deeply rooted on a latent political-class-religious rivalry between the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and a traditionalist-Islamic organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Ulamas Association, NU). In this area, a long-standing cleavage occurred between the two polarized societies living in two different areas. They who lived in the upland area were predominantly non-Muslim, Hindus-Javanist, and affiliated to the Indonesian National Party (PNI) and the PKI. On the other side, they who inhabited in the lowland were traditionalist Muslims and members of the NU Party.
In these circumstances, fierce competitions between the two subsets of society to gain controls over the political, religious and means of production were inevitable. The tension mounted in late 1963, less than two years before the Gestapu broke out, when PKI called for a land reform as a part of their strategy to expand their political basis in the rural areas. Muslim party leaders who owned the vast farming lands perceived this move as an assault to their political-religious-economic interests. And many studies noted that East Java was the site where the most violent anti-communists hunting took place in the aftermath of the coup attempt of 1965.
Muslims’ Jihad Against the Communist
Examining the FRUS documents focusing on the September movement, from October 1965 to March 1966, it is obvious that the US government did not consider Islamic movements as key players.
The American foreign policy was not yet in a direction toward the US-Mujahedin relationship in Afghanistan during 1970-80s. Authorized by President Carter in December 1979 and then by President Reagan in 1981, CIA launched a covert operation to send weapons to the Mujahedin in order to increase the cost of Soviet intervention and to block the communism expansion in this region.
Of the sixty-four FRUS documents examined, none a single significant part were devoted to elaborate a pivotal role of Islamic movement activists in cracking and hunting down the PKI members. All analyses almost neglected Muslims and put them as no more than a category of communist hunter in the aftermath of the Gestapu. For example, in a telegram from the US Consulate in Medan to the Department of State, on November 16, 1965, it is only written, “Consulate sources have connected some of this violence with declaration ‘holy war’ against PKI by local Moslem leaders.” Adding to this, Hefner also noted that another major Islamic organization, Muhammadiyah, also issued a fatwa, a legal pronouncement in Islam, saying that the destruction of the communist was a religious obligation. To put it quantitatively, in all these documents with hundreds pages long, the word “Moslem” appeared only twelve times and “Islam” was even completely absent.
Those documents even barely elaborate the role of Islamic parties and institutions. Only once the telegram from the US Embassy explicitly identified two major Islamic organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah. This is interesting to underline considering that in the Indonesia-FRUS documents regarding the preceding period, the key role of Islamic institution in fighting communism was recognized, even very modestly. A secret intelligence memorandum dated on December 3, 1964 recognized NU’s standing in opposing communism. This document recorded the discussion between Adam Malik and Ambassador Jones. Malik was the Indonesian Minister of Trade and a pivotal figure that spurred the anti Communist movement.He told Jones that his maneuver “has the support of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)” and that an NU official had requested Sukarno to “endorse non communist ideas” and that NU was “fully backing the new force.”
The US’ lack of concern on the Muslim’s pivotal role occurred even though one of the US Medan-Consulate telegrams had recorded an analysis of their sources indicating that the communists massacred was related to a holy war waged by local Muslim leaders. Not only that, an intelligence memorandum written three weeks after of the September movement identified that “some army officer’s belief are firmly rooted in a fundamentalist and essentially anti-Communist Moslem tradition.”
More interestingly, at least twelve years earlier the US government has recognized the potential role of Muslims in halting the spread of communism in Indonesia. Scott noted that in the mid-1950s the CIA channeled millions of dollars to the right-wing political parties, particularly to the Masjumi Party, or the Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims Party.
NU was the only major Islamic party in Indonesia after Sukarno disbanded Masjumi Party over an allegation of its involvement in prior separatist armed movements. NU and Muhammadiyah had each million members across the country. In the first national parliamentary election of 1955, NU, functioning as a political party, was the third winner. Another Islamic party, Masjumi, was on the second rank. Masjumi obtained over 7.9 million votes or 20.9 percent of the total votes, and almost 7 million voters or 18.4 percent supported NU. On the top was the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) with 8.4 million votes (22.3 percent), whereas the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was on the fourth with about 6.2 million votes (16.4 percent). These four parties’ votes consisted 77.7 percent of the total votes.
Muslims’ opposition to communism had even been flagged far long before. Masjumi, another Islamic party, denounced communists as kafir (infidel). They openly attacked the anti-religious nature of communism by using Chou En-lai’s speech at the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference stating, “We Communists are atheists.”
US Support on Suharto’s Militaristic Regime
The next puzzle pertains to the US government endorsement on the establishment of Suharto’s military dictatorship in replacing Sukarno’s leftist administration. Evidence showed that Washington deliberately made this choice in order to serve its best interest during the Cold War. In his memorandum, the Acting Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, David L. McDonald, explicitly wrote that “[t]he displacement of President Sukarno by the Indonesian Army could benefit US security interests in the area.” In Uncle Sam’s eyes Suharto was “a strong military leader and apparently a firm anti-Communist” who nicely fitted onto his glove.
US’s favor on the Indonesian Army was developed under some reasons. The first explanation is, as elaborated before, the firm anti-communist standing of its top leaders. The army leaders had a long record in opposing the PKI. In addition, some army leaders undoubtedly viewed Communism as an ideology that was essentially evil and alien to the “Indonesian way of life.”
The second reason is more important. After PKI was cornered, the Army emerged as the most plausible option for the US interests. As depicted by Ambassador Green, after the September coup there were only two power centers in the Indonesian political stage: Sukarno and the Army. Washington believed that “there was no organized or disciplined force capable of providing leadership and direction to successor government, except Army.” Such belief had been long established. Years ago US leaders had saw that they needed to tie a close relation with the Army leaders under a projection that “they may well played a major role in the decision as to the future political orientation of the country.”
Moreover, Washington even forecasted a chaotic scenario in Indonesia in the absence of Army leadership. In his telegram, State Secretary Dean Rusk wrote, “Unless Army accepts the responsibility for taking lead in new government, however unready or unwilling it may be, there will be anarchy in government... Indonesia can be saved from chaos, and that Army is main instrument for saving it.” For Washington, in fact, more than as a savior, the Army was a determinant factor to shifting away Indonesian foreign policy’s direction from Beijing and Moscow.
However, the FRUS and other documents also revealed that this support was given not without reservation. The US government did aware of the negative aspect of the new Indonesian military-heavy government. Washington had already foreseen the prevalence of the future authoritarian Indonesian government. Sent to President Johnson in August 1966, a secret analysis of the State Department conceded that this new militaristic regime was a potential threat to Indonesian democracy in the future considering the military had “no major commitment to democratic freedoms as we know them” and “[t]here is a danger that the Army may in the course of time move in the pattern of Burma to a military authoritarian state.” As proven later, this was an apt forecast of the future Indonesia under Suharto’s 32-year dictatorship.
Washington was also aware that despite its strong anti-Communist orientation, the Indonesian Army is far from being a capitalist-defender. The Army opposed western military presence in Southeast Asia and US policy in Vietnam. Its economic orientation was very nationalistic and supported any notion to nationalize western business entities. Moreover, due to its dependency to the Soviet military spare parts, replacements and ammunitions, it was more likely that the Army leaders would maintain a good relationship with Moscow. An intelligence report also revealed that to sooth Sukarno, Indonesian Minister of Defense Nasution had “promised that Indonesia would adopt neither a policy of hostility to Communism as an ideology at home nor to the Soviet Union and its satellites in international affairs.” The report also described the Soviet Union, in order to maintain a close government-to-government relations, took a quiet position in reacting on the Communists killings in Indonesia in which this was very contrast compared to Moscow’s standing on a similar situation at Iraq in 1963.
Clearly, Washington then defined its foreign policy toward Indonesia under a pragmatic consideration. The paper concluded, “For the time being and for the foreseeable future there is no conceivable political alternative to an Army-dominated government[.]” Haunted by the domino theory, the US government ironically chose a blatant paradox: supporting a militaristic regime to safeguard the Free Indonesia.
Conclusions
When the dust settled, a clear picture emerged: The 1965 abortive coup led to one of the US’ glorious victories in the Cold War battlefield. Short after the September movement, the leftist Indonesian foreign policy was successfully neutralized. “Indonesia’s close alignment with Communist China is shattered… Indos are starting to do normal business with us again,” Ambassador Green reported happily in December 1965.
Only three months after the abortive coup took place, the Embassy received payment for damage to Medan and Surabaya Consulates attacked previously by mobs. USIS books kept in storage since March were handed over back to the Indonesian Ministry of Higher Education to be distributed to Indonesian universities.
Not merely acting as a neutralist country as previously predicted, Suharto’s IndonesiaChina in what so called the triangle-diplomacy game, Indonesia provided its crucial vote in the United Nations to support the United States’ important question resolution to expel Taiwan. also converted to be an American reliable ally in the international phora. When Uncle Sam was struggling to embrace
Sukarnos’ axis with Beijing was ended and the idea of NEFOS (New Emerging Forces) was suddenly scrapped. The change in Indonesia’s leftist policies was a significant break in the Southeast Asia “and a vivid example to many other nations of nationalist forces rising to beat back a Communist threat.” And the “American dream” became a reality as Ambassador Green reported on March 12, 1966, “PKI and all its front organizations were formally banned by Suharto at noon today.”
Apparently, the American government took advantages of the 1965 September momentum. Yet, this paper found no evidence that it played an active role, such as instigating the coup attempt. CIA’s involvement was rather indirect and took a form of ex post factoplaying up the brutality of September 30 rebels. The conversation records during the first days after the September coup also indicated that the US leaders reacted confusedly and did not fully understand what was happening in Jakarta. Other documents even accused Beijing and Sukarno’s role in backing up the Gestapu. operation. Evidence showed that such operation was undertaken by steering public opinion against communism. The focus of this campaign was on materials pointing finger at PKI and
Another US obvious role was providing the lists of PKI leaders and members to the Army that utilized those in haunting and killing them. Yet, the list was not a determinant factor leading to the massacre in the aftermath of the September movement. As shown by Robert Hefner’s study in a peasant society in Mountain Java, the long socio-economic-political conflict between the Communist and Muslims in the grass-root level contributed a more significant role to the atrocities.
In battling Indonesian communist, Washington did not take the Muslim movement into account and rather relied on the Indonesian army. Examining the FRUS documents focusing on the September movement, from October 1965 to March 1966, there is no single chapter or even a paragraph were devoted to elaborate a pivotal role of Islamic movement activists in hunting down the PKI members. The lack of concern on the Muslim’s pivotal role occurred even though one of the US Consulate telegrams had indicated that the Communists massacre was related to a holy war waged by the local Muslim leaders. This was indeed a contrast with the post 9/11 policies in which the Indonesian Muslims are perceived as an important target of the US public diplomacy and counter-terrorism measures.
In that period, eliminating the Communist influence is the top priority of the US foreign policy toward Indonesia. In achieving this prime objective, the later US foreign policy’s emphasis on the principles of democracy and human rights was compromised. Washington then relied on the Army to establish a new military-heavy government. However, the US government was already aware of the danger of the future Indonesian authoritarian government, that the new military regime was a potential threat to Indonesian democracy in the future. Proven later, this was an apt forecast of the Indonesian future under Suharto’s 32-year dictatorial regime.
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