By James Balowski
Later described by the president of Indonesia, Sukarno, as nothing more than "a ripple in the mighty ocean of the revolution", the "G30S/PKI [September 30 Movement/Indonesian Communist Party] affair", as it came to be dubbed, proved to be the precursor to one of the most brutal massacres in human history — and the beginning of dictator Suharto's rise to power.
In the months before October 1965, Jakarta was rife with rumours that a group of high-ranking generals, fearful of the growing strength and influence of the PKI, were planning to move against Sukarno. While Sukarno's strong anti-US and anti-imperialist rhetoric won broad support among the Indonesian masses, to the West it appeared that Indonesia was on a headlong slide to the left.
Sukarno's announcement in January 1965 of the formation a "Fifth Force" of armed peasants and workers — independent of army control — led to a bitter rift between Sukarno and key military leaders such as minister of defence General Achmad Yani and minister of the army General Nasution.
In this tense atmosphere, Sukarno fell temporarily ill in early August. The concentration of some 20,000 troops in Jakarta on Armed Forces Day, October 5, added to the tension.
The September 30 Movement
Lieutenant Colonel Untung, Lieutenant Colonel Latief and Brigadier General Supardjo — leaders of the September 30 Movement (G30S) — sought to pre-empt the coup against Sukarno. In the early hours of October 1, squads of soldiers burst into the homes of Nasution, Yani and five other members of the army general staff, intending to take them before Sukarno.
Yani and two others were killed. Nasution was able to escape, but his five-year-old daughter was fatally shot. The kidnap victims were taken to Halim air force base in south-east Jakarta, with support from air force chief Omar Dhani. Meanwhile, troops from other units occupied several key sites in Jakarta, including the national radio station, the telecommunications building and positions opposite the presidential palace.
At around 7am the next morning, the G30S leaders announced on national radio that they had taken pre-emptive action against a "Council of Generals" who, with the support of the CIA, had been plotting a coup against Sukarno.
Later that day, a decree was broadcast setting up a Revolutionary Council, dismissing the cabinet and ordering the establishment of regional councils. No mention was made of the PKI or Sukarno's role. Untung stressed it was "an internal army affair".
Suharto makes his move
In the absence of Yani, the Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) commander, Major General Suharto, assumed "temporary" command of the army. He marshalled his troops and, along with a former chief of one of the rebel battalions at the palace, "persuaded" the rebel soldiers to change sides. The other battalion, formally under Untung's command, withdrew to Halim.
Hearing that the operation had failed, the G30S captain in charge of the kidnapped officers panicked; the captives were shot and their bodies were dumped in a well. Suharto ordered a commando regiment to attack Halim, and the base fell with little struggle early on the morning of October 2.
Having also seized the national radio station and closed down most of the country's newspapers, Suharto was in a position to manipulate events to overthrow Sukarno and obliterate the PKI.
Within days, Suharto announced that evidence had been uncovered that the coup had been masterminded by the PKI. There was national press coverage of gruesome pictures of the generals' bodies being removed from the well, and descriptions of how they had been tortured and sexually mutilated by members of the PKI's women's organisation, Gerwani, before being killed.
Armed Forces Day ceremonies were replaced with an elaborate military funeral for the dead generals. Nasution delivered a bitter oration. Army-backed student and Muslim groups were already being mobilised, and mobs attacked and destroyed homes of prominent PKI figures and the party's headquarters in Jakarta.
Meanwhile, Suharto's security units began a wave of arrests, and local military commanders in the provinces launched purges. PKI chairperson Dipa Nusantara Aidit and other PKI leaders were hunted down. Most were executed soon after on specific instructions from Suharto.
Meanwhile, the military were training and arming Muslim gangs for the "final solution". The killings started in East Java and soon spread through Java, Bali and Sumatra. Within four months, as many as 1 million Communists and left-wing sympathisers were murdered, and hundreds of thousands of others interned for long periods.
Officially portrayed as a failed "communist coup" — thwarted only by decisive action by Suharto and the army — the events leading to and surrounding that fateful night have been carefully, and very consciously, interwoven into the fabric of New Order mythology and its ideological justification for the seizure of power and the military's continuing social and political rule (the "dual role" of the military).
But the sequence of events, the many unexplained contradictions, the web of relationships between the key actors and assessments of the prevailing social, political and economic conditions have led to the official line being questioned.
One of the first serious investigations was conducted by Ben Anderson and Ruth McVey from Cornell University in 1971. They concluded that the PKI was not directly involved and that a key factor in the failure of the G30S operation was that Suharto was not one of the army leaders seized.
Suharto's role
Why was Suharto, commander of the unit equipped and trained for rapid deployment against just such a rebellion, not included on the kidnappers' list? Initially, rumours were spread that he had been included but was away from home on the night. Suharto later admitted that this was not true.
In the absence of Yani, Suharto was automatically next in the chain of command. He was far more important than many of the others targeted. Suharto's corrupt financial and political dealings would have been more than enough cause to accuse him of plotting against Sukarno. That Suharto and Kostrad were simply forgotten by the plotters is hard to believe.
According to Suharto, at around 5.30am he drove to Kostrad HQ, where he heard the coup broadcast on the radio. With Untung's troops occupying key positions close to the Kostrad HQ, it seems surprising that he was able to reach his destination without incident.
In an interview in 1969, Suharto revealed that just hours before the G30S operation, he had met with Latief at a military hospital where Suharto's son was being treated for minor burns. By then rumours of the meeting had already surfaced and it became necessary for Suharto to come up with an explanation.
Suharto claimed that Latief was there to keep an eye on him, but in a later interview said that Latief planned to assassinate him but got cold feet at the last minute.
Suharto had long personal and professional ties with both Untung and Latief. Latief and his wife were close personal friends of the Suhartos.
When Latief was finally brought to trial in 1976, he gave a very different version of events. He asserted that not only did he inform Suharto of the operation at the hospital but that they had discussed it at his home two days before. A request that Suharto appear for his defence was rejected by the court. Subsequent investigations support Latief's account.
The alleged sexual mutilation of the kidnap victims was instrumental in whipping up the anticommunist hysteria in the days following October 1. Sukarno insisted repeatedly that the murdered generals had not been mutilated.
The autopsy reports were never published. Some years ago, they were discovered among trial records and showed conclusively that no mutilations had occurred. Published on Suharto's orders, the stories were fabrications.
Informers
Another key figure accused of being behind the G30S plot was Sjam Kamaruzzaman, who with Aidit was alleged to have headed the PKI's "special bureau", which handled the party's political and intelligence work within the armed forces and recruited progressive officers.
Aidit, who was also a minister in Sukarno's government, was captured and shot without trial on November 22 and his body dumped, on Suharto's orders. With Aidit dead, Sjam was left as the only person who could testify to the existence of the bureau.
Sjam appeared as a witness in dozens of G30S/PKI trials to blame Aidit and the PKI for the coup. Although tried and sentenced to death in 1966, Sjam was kept alive for 20 years and is said to have boasted to other prisoners that every time he thought his execution was imminent, he would inform on another PKI contact in the armed forces, requiring him to appear as a witness in the subsequent investigation.
Later investigations found that Sjam also had a personal relationship with Suharto. A CIA report on the 1965 events refers to Sjam as a longtime informer on the PKI for military intelligence.
Sjam's role makes it clear why it was necessary for Aidit to be disposed of as quickly as possible and why Suharto has tried to distance himself from the killing.
On September 30, 1988, the Jakarta daily Merdeka carried an editorial entitled "Retracing history", which indirectly questioned the official version. Labelling the plotters as "G30S", not the official acronym "G30S/PKI", it referred to historians as "still combing the depths to discover the unknown truth". The paper was severely reprimanded and the journalist who wrote the editorial sacked.
Conclusion
Why was the PKI was able to grow so rapidly, become such a significant force in Indonesian politics, only to be obliterated in a few short months? Why was it necessary for those leading the counter-revolution to slaughter so many people?
The PKI was able to grow rapidly because the Indonesian bourgeoisie, with its small economic weight, its lack of an effective alliance with, or support from, imperialism, its internal divisions and great ideological weakness, was unable to hold back the growth and influence of the left and communist movement. The populist, nationalist and anti-imperialist mood of the masses put the bourgeois forces at a huge disadvantage relative to the left.
It was this situation that made it necessary for those leading the counter-revolution to kill so many people. The pro-capitalist forces were not able to achieve their fundamental goal — the establishment of a national economy and a stable bourgeois democratic government — or defeat the worker and peasant movement through political means. Only the military — in reality armed capitalists with the backing of imperialism — were in a position to carry it through.
Finally, the scale of the defeat of the PKI was made possible by the theoretical and strategic errors. As the struggle intensified between Sukarno, the nationalist left and the PKI on the one hand, and the military, conservative Islam and the major landowners on the other, the PKI's "false characterisation of the state" and its illusions in Sukarno prevented it and its supporters them from being able to identify where the real threat would come from. It found itself without the highly organised, worker-based revolutionary cadre which it needed to mobilise and defend itself.
[This is the final article in a series on the Indonesian Communist Party. James Balowski is a researcher in Indonesian politics and history and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party. He is Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor's publications and information officer and a member of the coordinating committee of the Bangkok- and Jakarta-based human rights organisation Asian Network for Democracy in Indonesia.]