Gardener, sweep the garden!
That broom is broken! Make a new broom!
Here are the dirty clothes!
And then, in a section called “Hold the Thief”:
All the silver is gone
The drawers of the sideboard are empty69
Wright also realized just how little anticommunism there was in Asia, compared to his native United States. Even the head of Masjumi, the Muslim party receiving CIA funding, told him the West’s predominant “fear of communism” made trusting First World leaders difficult.
“We shall always have our misgivings about the real aims of the West, of which we have had good reasons to be suspicious in our past history,” the Masjumi leader said. “No real success can be expected from a cooperation based on such weak grounds,” meaning a partnership based purely on Washington’s desire to find anybody to oppose the communists.
Not everything went smoothly at Bandung. The Cold War hung over the conference, and not everyone could agree on how to mark themselves out from the major powers. Nehru, for example, resisted attempts by Western-oriented Third World states, such as Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, to condemn Soviet movements in Asia as colonialism. The delegates failed to come to an agreement as to how they could practically support territories still under colonial domination. In the end, they came up with ten basic principles that would come to govern relations between Third World states:
1. Respect for human rights and the United Nations Charter.
2. Respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Non-intervention: abstention from interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself.
6. Abstention from the use of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, and abstention from exerting pressure on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression against any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means.
9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligations.
Most famously, the Bandung Conference provided the structure that would grow into the global Non-Aligned Movement, which was founded in 1961 in Belgrade. But in Asia and Africa, Bandung led to changes that were felt immediately. Collectives, communications networks, and international organizations sprung into existence. Leaders began to broadcast radio messages throughout the two continents, carrying the message of the “Spirit of Bandung” to peoples still struggling against colonialism. Most notably, Nasser pointed his Radio Cairo broadcasts south toward sub-Saharan and East Africa with this message.70 In the Congo, people began listening to La Voix de l’Afrique from Egypt and All India Radio, which featured broadcasts in Swahili, as a man named Patrice Lumumba was beginning to form the Mouvement National Congolais, a very “Spirit of Bandung” independence movement that rejected ethnic divisions and sought to build the Congolese nation out of anticolonial struggle.71
In 1958, the first Asian-African Conference on Women was held in Colombo, and launched a transnational Third World feminist movement. For the 1961 Cairo Women’s Conference, Egyptian organizer Bahia Karam wrote in her introduction to the proceedings: “For the first time in modern history, feminine history that is, that such a gathering of Afro-Asian woman has taken place… it was indeed a great pleasure, an encouragement to meet delegates from countries in Africa which the imperialists had never before allowed to leave the boundaries of their land.”72 The press in Egypt, for example, began to focus on the lives of women from around the Third World, including Indonesia, discussing the “ties of sisterhood and solidarity between the women of Africa and Asia.”73
And the Bandung Conference countries would go on to found the Afro-Asian Journalist Association, an attempt by people from the Third World to cover the Third World without relying on the white men, usually sent from rich countries to work as foreign correspondents, who had been telling their stories for decades, if not centuries.
Within Indonesia, Sukarno had cemented himself in the minds of the people as the leader of a new kind of revolution. Francisca, absolutely inspired, would be able to recite parts of Sukarno’s opening speech at Bandung by heart long afterward.
In Washington, the attitude was very different. The response was racist condescension. State Department officials called the meeting the “Darktown Strutters Ball.”74
But to Eisenhower, Wisner, and the Dulles brothers, Sukarno’s behavior was no joke. For them, by now, neutralism itself was an offense. Anyone who wasn’t actively against the Soviet Union must be against the United States, no matter how loudly he praised Paul Revere.
Now a senator, John F. Kennedy made his opposition to this approach very public in a set of speeches given in the years after Bandung. In a speech harshly criticizing the French for attempting to hold on to Algeria by force, he said that “the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.”75
JFK’s star was rising, and this kind of position was rare among US politicians. President Sukarno noticed what he said. But Kennedy was in the opposition. And one more event in 1955, in Indonesia, alarmed the anticommunists in power in Washington even more.
The CIA spent a million dollars trying to influence the parliamentary elections in September of that year. The Agency’s chosen partners, the Masjumi, were solidly to the right of Sukarno. Nevertheless, Sukarno and his supporters did well.76 Even worse for the Americans, the PKI came in fourth place, with 17 percent of the votes cast. It was the best performance in the history of the Indonesian Communist Party.
3
Feet to the Fire, Pope in the Sky
Soccer with Sakono
In March 1956, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, shocked the communist world. In an initially “secret speech” to the Communist Party, he issued a lengthy, unflinching denunciation of crimes committed by Stalin.1 Stalin had been unprepared for World War II, he claimed. He tortured his own comrades and forced them into confessing to crimes they had never committed, as an excuse to have them shot and secure his grip on power.
Stalin had died just three years earlier. When he did, so many people rushed toward his funeral procession that some were crushed—at the time, many citizens of the Soviet Union and other communist countries felt real affection for the man, and a deep identification with the collectivist, socialist project overall.2 To hear him attacked, by the leader of the world’s foremost Marxist-Leninist party no less, was an unexpected blow to communists around the world.
Some leftists, especially in Western Europe, reacted by distancing themselves from the Soviet project altogether. Others, most notably Mao, accused Khrushchev of distorting or exaggerating Stalin’s misdeeds for his own benefit. He began to claim Khrushchev was guilty of the crime of “revisionism” of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the first crack in a growing split between the two countries.3 Under its new leader, the Soviet Union pursued peaceful coexistence with the West, warmed to nonaligned countries, and expanded its aid to Third World countries like Indonesia, Egypt, India, and Afghanistan.
Officially, the PKI went along with Khrushchev into a post-Stalinist, more moderate future. But in practice, the communist world was even more divided than it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The Indonesian communists, confident in the importance of their country and growing in size and strength, were even more certain than before that they didn’t need to take orders from abroad.
After the failed Madiun uprising in 1948, the PKI had reorganized u
nder the leadership of D. N. Aidit. Self-confident and gregarious, Aidit was born off the coast of Sumatra into a devout Muslim family and became a Marxist during Japan’s occupation. With Aidit as its leader, the PKI transformed into a mass-based, legal, ideologically flexible movement that rejected the armed struggle, frequently ignored Moscow’s directions, stuck close to Sukarno, and embraced electoral politics. The party was doing things very differently from the Russian or the Chinese communist parties. The PKI’s goal, both publicly and privately, was to form an antifeudal “united national front” with the local bourgeoisie, and not to worry about implementing socialism “until the end of the century.”4
Internationally, the PKI was committed to anti-imperialism; and locally, party members were growing their movement by winning democratic elections.
As 1956 progressed, the communist world was divided further, when Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising and reassert Soviet control. The violence of October and November 1956 was a public relations debacle for Moscow. It was also a deep personal failure for Frank Wisner. Though the US denied this publicly, the CIA had been encouraging the Hungarians to revolt, and many did so thinking they would receive support from Washington. When the Dulles brothers decided against this course of action, seemingly hanging the protesters out to dry, Wisner felt personally betrayed.
His behavior became increasingly erratic. William Colby, a senior CIA officer in Rome, said in 1956 that “Wisner was rambling and raving, totally out of control. He kept saying, all these people are getting killed.” His son noticed that he appeared overworked and was deeply emotionally involved in the events in Europe. Wiz began acting in ways the people working with him had a hard time understanding. They thought it might have been because of an illness caused by a bad plate of clams he had in Greece.5
While Second World communism was suffering from fissures, the Third World was further united by a bit of First World bumbling. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, France and Britain invaded—against Washington’s wishes—to reassert control of the waterway and oust the Egyptian leader. They were joined by the young state of Israel, whose creation had been supported by both Washington and Moscow, but eventually had to back down because of US pressure. Despite Eisenhower’s anger with the new Jewish state, Washington steadily increased support for Israel from the middle of the 1950s for Cold War reasons. It was the nascent alliances between the USSR and radical Arab nationalist regimes, we know now, that formed the basis for a growing US-Israel alliance.6
Something else happened in 1956. Or rather, it didn’t happen. The division between North and South Vietnam was supposed to be resolved by an election that would unite the country under a single government. But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote.7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime.
In the same turbulent year, Sukarno went to Washington. It’s not clear whether or not the Indonesian leader himself knew this, but the visit did not go well. The impression he made with the most powerful people on the planet was not a good one. Back home in Indonesia, Sukarno’s sexual appetites were famous, but they shocked the Americans. John Foster Dulles, a deeply prudish Presbyterian, found him “disgusting.” Frank Wisner, who usually didn’t take his work home with him, confided to his son that “Sukarno wanted to make sure his bed was properly filled, and the Agency was not without the ability to satisfy the Indonesian ruler’s lust.”8
To make things worse, he went from Washington straight to Moscow and Beijing. He believed this his right as an independent world leader, of course, but this was not the kind of thing the Eisenhower administration tolerated.
In the fall of 1956, Wisner told Al Ulmer, head of the CIA’s Far East Division, “I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire.”9
In elections the following year, the Indonesian Communist Party did even better than it had in 1955. The PKI was the most efficient, professional organization in the country. Crucially, in a country plagued with corruption and patronage, it had a reputation for being the cleanest of all the major parties.10 Its leaders were disciplined and dedicated, and Howard Jones saw quickly that they actually delivered on what they promised, especially to peasants and the poor. Jones was not the only one in the US government who understood why the Communists kept winning. The vice president at the time, Richard Nixon, gave voice to the general feeling in Washington when he said that “a democratic government was [probably] not the best kind for Indonesia” because “the Communists could probably not be beaten in election campaigns because they were so well organized.”11 And most importantly, Jones recognized that the PKI was going into the countryside, delivering the kind of programs that spoke directly to the people’s needs. The party was “working hard and skillfully to win over the underprivileged,” he worried.12
Sakono Praptoyugono, the son of farmers in a village in Central Java, remembers the impact of these programs very well. Sakono—not to be confused with Sukarno, the president—was born in 1946 in the Purbalingga Regency, the sixth of seven children, while the Dutch were still trying to crush Indonesia’s independence movement. After Indonesia was established, his father got a bit of rice from the revolutionary government, and their family worked a small plot of land. While his parents were peasants who spoke only Javanese, the young republic gave Sakono a chance to study, and he took to it like a fish to water.13
You might call Sakono something of a teacher’s pet. He was the kind of kid who read the whole newspaper every day, and organized extra classes for him and his friends after school. He absolutely loved studying history, and politics, and by the age of nine, he was already following Sukarno’s near-constant radio speeches—he was a huge fan—and the results of national elections.
Short and solidly built with twinkling eyes, Sakono was the kind of guy who rattles off facts and quotes and phrases from foreign languages, smiling the whole time, so excited he may not notice when others may want to talk about something else. He read The People’s Daily, or Harian Rakyat to him, and he started an extracurricular study group under a young member of the PKI, which was engaged in constant outreach in his town.
The most important of the PKI programs in his region was carried out by the Indonesian Farmers Alliance (BTI), which sought to enforce peasants’ rights within the existing legal framework and push for land reform. BTI members told Sakono and his family that “the land belongs to those who work it, and it can’t be taken away,” and even more importantly, they surveyed and recorded holdings, made sure laws were enforced, and helped improve agricultural efficiency.
Twice a week, Sakono and two of his friends got together for three hours with a man named Sutrisno, a tall, happy-go-lucky party member with brown curly hair, to study basic politics in the Marxist tradition. Sakono learned about feudalism, and that the inefficient distribution of land his family lived under would be replaced if Indonesia ever transitioned to socialism. They studied the concepts of neocolonialism and imperialism, and learned about the capitalist United States. Sutrisno told them about Khrushchev and Mao, and the “revisionist” debate, but said that the PKI had chosen the peaceful path to power in the context of President Sukarno’s revolution. Sakono could not afford to buy issues of Harian Rakyat, the paper Zain wrote for, so he’d go read it at the newsagent’s house for free.
As teenagers often do, Sakono got a bit obsessed. His love for left-wing theory suffused every part of his life. He and his friends would play soccer in the middle of town (there was no proper field in their small Javanese village, of course), and as they kicked the ball back and forth, he told h
imself he was learning important political lessons. “Soccer was the people’s sport, because it was cheap,” he would remember later. “And sport builds the collective spirit, it teaches you to work with others, that you can’t accomplish anything alone. I realized soccer taught me that if you have something you want to accomplish, you have to cooperate.”
The PKI claimed it was organized along Leninist lines, but it wasn’t really. It was a “broad mass party,” in its own terminology, growing far too quickly to maintain the strict hierarchical discipline Lenin himself argued for.14 The party had active members, or cadres, like Sakono’s teacher Sutrisno, who took a pledge to uphold party ethics, and it also ran a number of affiliated organizations, like the BTI, which were meant for mass civilian participation. The industrial counterpart to BTI was SOBSI, the affiliation of union members that included much of the country’s working class, whether they cared about Marxism or not. Then there was LEKRA, the cultural organization, which provided an essential service in small towns where there was little to do—it put on concerts, and plays, and dances, and comedy shows, which would often go on all night and provide the best (and perhaps only) entertainment in town.15 “Oh, everyone went,” Sakono said. “It didn’t matter what your politics were. If it was happening, you had to come and watch.”
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