Fake Baratayudha. Online exhibition on 'Fake History' (Galeri Rupa Lentera di Atas Bukit - kerja.pembebasan 2015)

Fake Baratayudha. Online exhibition on ‘Fake History’ (Galeri Rupa Lentera di Atas Bukit – kerja.pembebasan 2015)

by: Hamish Macdonald

“If Sukarno dies, it would be a question of who gains the upper hand,” Aidit replied, before discussing two scenarios: a direct attack on the PKI, or an army effort to continue Sukarno’s political balancing act among  nationalist, communist and religious parties that could prove “difficult” for the PKI.

“In the first scenario, we plan to establish a military committee,” Aidit went on. “The majority of that committee would be left-wing, but it should also include some middle elements. In this way, we would confuse our enemies. … If we show our red flag right away, they will oppose us right away.”

This scenario matches the revolutionary committee declared on Sept. 30 by Lt. Col. Untung, the naively patriotic commander of the presidential palace guard, to forestall what he said was a planned coup by a “council of generals” on the upcoming Armed Forces Day on Oct. 5, which was already bringing large numbers of troops and armor into the capital for a big parade.

As the American scholar John Roosa explored in his 2006 book, “Pretext for Mass Murder,” Untung was  closely collaborating with a PKI operative named Kamaruzaman, or “Sjam,” who had been working in army circles for years as a spy reporting directly to Aidit.

The Mao-Aidit transcript supports Roosa’s scenario that Aidit and Sjam almost single-handedly launched the G30S attack as a deniable, pre-emptive operation to throw the army leadership off balance. The rest of the PKI Central Committee was in the dark, along with millions of the party’s rank-and-file members. The Chinese weapons promised for the “fifth force” had not yet arrived. Before it was shut down, the PKI newspaper gave the putsch only a tepid endorsement.

Possibly the intention was not to murder the generals but to present them as abject traitors before Sukarno. But three were killed during their arrest, while the defense minister, Gen. A.H. Nasution, managed to escape. The decision to kill the others was a panicky improvisation.

However, the killings were all the army needed to portray G30S as another example of PKI treachery, following the events in Madiun. Indonesian Army propagandists and a team of MI6 operatives based in Singapore later that year embellished the tale with lurid details. The U.S. Embassy supplied the army with a list of thousands of PKI cadres for targeting.

Suharto, firmly in control, sent a column of special forces under Col. Sarwo Edhie Wibowo into the heartlands of PKI support, a move that included the capture and execution of Aidit. The killings followed the column’s path: Central Java in the third week of October, East Java in November and Bali in December as Muslim groups and other traditionalists turned on PKI members, hauling them out for mass executions night after night — until rivers were choked with their bodies.

History then and now

The contention that the entire PKI was implicated in the murderous campaign was set out later by Suharto’s New Order regime and is still taught in Indonesia’s schools. One post-Suharto president, Abdurrahman Wahid, tried to apologize in the late 1990s for the slaughter, but was disowned by the Muslim organization he once headed. The killing ground of Lubang Buaya (Crocodile Hole), in Jakarta, where the bodies of the six murdered generals and an adjutant were hidden in a well, is a national pilgrimage site, complete with a “Museum of PKI Treachery.”

“People are heavily invested in this theory,” noted historian Robert Cribb at a September conference on the 1965 coup convened by the Australian Institute of International Affairs at the Australian National University in Canberra.

But counter-theories continue to swirl. Cribb likens G30S to “Rashomon,” the Kurosawa movie whose characters recount contradictory versions of the same incident. The central question is: Why did Aidit and Sjam act? Did they discover a genuine army takeover plan about to be put into action? Or were they led to believe, falsely, that there was one, with Sjam either swallowing the disinformation bait or acting as a double agent for the army?

In either scenario, it remains a puzzle why so many top generals were caught off guard. Why was Suharto, who was in command of the army’s rapid reaction forces and leading the Konfrontasi c ampaign against newly formed Malaysia, left off the hit list? And why did he react so calmly when another officer, Col. Abdul Latief, warned him the night before that something was afoot?  The fact that the G30S leaders were drawn from Suharto’s former command in Central Java suggests to some historians that it could have been an agent provocateur operation staged by Suharto’s own operatives.

Suharto was anti-communist but, unlike the murdered generals, had not studied at U.S. military schools and was seen as an outsider by Jakarta’s cosmopolitan elite. The Opsus (special operations) unit attached to Suharto’s command had already opened clandestine links to the British to quietly assure them the army was making only token efforts in Konfrontasi .

Echoes of 1965

The Opsus role 10 years later in sparking a civil war in then-Portuguese Timor is uncannily similar to this scenario. The then-Opsus chief, Col. Aloysius Soegijanto, persuaded the conservative Timorese Democratic Union to stage a pre-emptive coup against an imminent takeover by the leftist Fretilin party. As in Indonesia after G30S, events were highly fluid. Fretilin gained ascendancy in the conflict that followed, but Suharto gained his excuse for intervention that the Western powers accepted.

This remains conjecture. Suharto’s former confidantes have stuck closely to the official line, even after the end of his rule in 1998 and his death in 2008. The CIA and MI6 archives for the period remain closed, so it is still unknown if these agencies were involved in setting up the G30S plot, or were privy to an Opsus or army operation.

The Western powers were happy to accept the story that a “communist coup attempt” automatically triggered a killing frenzy because the PKI had earlier created social tensions by promoting atheism and land redistribution. Time magazine hailed the PKI’s obliteration as the “best news” in Southeast Asia for a long time. Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt declared: “With 500,000 to one million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it’s safe to say a reorientation has taken place.”

Indonesia’s “reorientation” was certainly pivotal in Southeast Asia, more than was the Vietnam War. Had Sukarno survived in power instead of being gradually pushed out by the army and leaving office in 1967 in the wake of the destruction of the PKI, Indonesia could have taken a vastly different direction. As the young scholar Zhou also discovered in the Beijing archives, the Chinese were talking about not just transferring small arms for the “fifth force” but plutonium and atomic bomb know-how. Suharto brought Indonesia back to a path of economic growth and poverty reduction.

Recent documentaries by filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” have reawakened an emotional debate inside and outside Indonesia about the human cost of this change, even while PKI survivor groups still face intimidation and denial.

As ANU Chancellor and former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans told the September conference, the Indonesian killings are the only ones on this scale that have not been put under international scrutiny or been subject to truth-finding and reconciliation processes. “It is the least studied and least talked-about political genocide of the last century,” Evans said. “Lifting the veil on it really is long overdue.”

In 2012, the Indonesian magazine Tempo published a book-length investigation detailing many of the massacres and including confessions by some perpetrators. Yet its conclusions remain as unclear as those of other analysts over the puzzle of G30S.

Successive post-Suharto governments in Jakarta continue to resist the idea of an official inquiry. The archives that matter, in Washington and London, remain closed. Too much is invested in the post-1965 Indonesian story, it seems, for evidence to emerge that it might have started with a deception campaign that led to mass slaughter.

Source Asian Review, September 29, 2015

Hamish McDonald is author of two books on Indonesia and journalist-in-residence at the Australian National University’s College of Asia & the Pacific.