Francisca remembers that by the time the Dutch left, her library, and her social life, became Indonesian-dominated for the first time. Her country had been transformed radically in less than two decades, from one where she was part of a minority of brown students sitting in a white classroom to one where she was running a library entirely with fellow Indonesians. This was the world where she would raise her young children—and she now had three.
In naming them, she and Zain mixed local traditions with their international ideals. The first, they named Damaiati Nanita—“damai” means “peace” in Bahasa Indonesia. The second, Francisca wanted to name Candide, after the famous work by Voltaire, which she had devoured in Europe. So they named the child Kandida Mirana. The second name, which Zain chose, included “mir,” the Russian word for “peace” (peace was becoming a theme). The third child, their first son, took the Christian names Anthony and Paul from Francisca’s family tradition on the Moluccan islands. Then they expanded them to Anthony Paulmiro, so that once more, their son would carry mir, or peace. They were among a new group of Indonesians, the first ever born in the country.
Around them in Jakarta, a whole generation that had been raised on the values forged in 1945 was coming up. Students, workers, and regular people of all stripes had been rallying against “imperialism,” in all its forms. Jones was dealing with them right in front of his home.
Benny Widyono, a well-to-do economics student, found himself in one of these demonstrations while attending college in Jakarta. He joined a crowd, which carried him into Lapangan Banteng Square (a new name—it was previously Waterloo Square), and was electrified by the movement taking place all around him. The people were standing up for themselves, and demanding full independence. They weren’t asking the Western powers. They were telling them. Benny’s parents, who had quietly built a business under Dutch rule, and had suffered under Japanese occupation, never could have imagined that just over a decade later, Benny would be out in the streets, openly protesting imperialism in Jakarta.
Howard Jones traveled throughout the entire country, asking Indonesians if they really cared about the issue of Papuan independence from the Dutch. The answer was unequivocal. Yes, they really did. But that wasn’t going to change Washington’s position. He recounts that locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: “We just don’t understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?”
After over a decade representing the United States in Asia, Jones had no answer. The behavior of the United States lent weight to the charge, he realized, “that we had become an imperial power ourselves.”39
4
An Alliance for Progress
Benny
Benny Widyono was born in 1936 in Magelang, Central Java, into a family of Chinese descent. Immigrants from China, particularly the south, started moving to the islands of Southeast Asia centuries earlier. They often fled starvation or bandits, looking for work or at least refuge in a land where it was always warm and it seemed you could always just pick coconuts from the trees when you were hungry. Some Chinese came to Southeast Asia as early as the eleventh century, and immigration continued until much more recently.1
Across the region, some ethnic Chinese ended up as workers or shopkeepers or small business owners. Some became quite wealthy indeed, moving to the top of the emerging business class. Their position in modern Southeast Asian society has sometimes been compared, in the very broadest sense, to that of Jews in Europe. Since the ethnic Chinese were immigrants, and neither peasants nor royalty, without an official place in the old feudal system, they had to work a bit harder and were forced early into industries that would grow in exponential terms as capitalism developed later. They experienced periodic waves of racism—not only because it was perceived they had undue wealth—that would push them into ethnic enclaves, inspiring even more suspicion.
Benny’s family members were not shopkeepers. They were rich. His father farmed tobacco, to this day one of the most important crops in Indonesia. During the Japanese occupation, he was jailed and tortured for sending contributions to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces back in China, leaving him with a lifelong disability. But after the Dutch left, business began to boom for the family again, and they employed a lot of workers. Growing up, young Benny would watch the Javanese men hauling huge sacks, bigger than their own skinny bodies, back and forth from the fields all night long. They begged the boss for higher wages, but he had no incentive to offer a raise—he was the only employer in town, and there was no real way for them to work anywhere else.
Benny had a warm, inviting face, and he was always eager to laugh at the ridiculousness of life. But these scenes stuck with him. He went off to study economics in Jakarta, under some of the country’s leading academics. He began to learn about exploitation and monopolies, accumulation and profit. Then on a visit home from university over the holidays, Benny had an interaction with his father that would probably be familiar to anyone who has sent kids off to college, or gone to college themselves.
Benny turned his radical new ideas on his dad. He called him an exploiter.
“He almost kicked me out of the house!” Benny would remember later, before bursting into laughter. The whole idea behind the economics degree was that he would take over the family business, and there he was, with his newfangled left-wing notions, saying he was too good for it. But eventually, he and his father got over this little fight, and another relative ended up taking over the family business, so no harm was done.
Benny was raised Catholic, even though his father was Confucian. But Benny took his mother’s faith, and ended up in one of Jakarta’s elite Catholic high schools. The students there were all wealthy, and mostly anticommunist. Some were solidly conservative. But whatever their political stripes, almost all of them supported Sukarno and his opposition to international imperialism. At school in Jakarta, even the right-leaning students felt real sympathy for the great leader of the revolution, and were intensely proud of their young democracy.
But in 1959, as Benny was finishing his undergraduate studies, the nature of Indonesian democracy changed: it took a big step backward.
A few months after the regional rebellions backed by the CIA were defeated, Sukarno declared that the country would be moving to a system he had been discussing for a few years called “Guided Democracy.” As he put it, the system was a national response to the weakness of liberal democracy. Liberalism and party democracy, he complained, were a Western import that pitted everyone against each other, forcing each person to fight for their own selfish interests. That was not the Indonesian way, he claimed.2 He wanted a decision-making process based on the traditional village assembly, in which everyone got together and chose a course of action after careful consideration. Every party would be represented in the cabinet—called a gotong royong cabinet, after the traditional village practice of doing collective work—and there would be a “National Council” representing civil groups like workers, peasants, intellectuals, religious groups, and entrepreneurs. The idea was that minority considerations could never be excluded.
However, when Sukarno declared the system would be put in place in July 1959, he was overstepping his constitutional powers. He cemented himself as the leader of the government, and major parties—such as the Masjumi (the Muslim party that received CIA funds in 1955, then supported the regional rebellions) and the Socialist Party—were effectively excluded from the new system. Western-style elections would not occur again under President Sukarno.
Some back in Washington used Indonesia’s slide toward a kind of illiberal populism as retroactive justification for their opposition to Sukarno’s government. But the move to Guided Democracy happened after the CIA bombed the country and discussed killing its leader. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), Washington’s bête noire in Southeast Asia, was the political group that most wanted
voting to continue.3 The PKI had no interest in ending elections in Indonesia for one simple reason—it was doing better and better in them. In Singapore, British intelligence concluded in 1958 that if votes were held, the Communist Party would have come in first.4
It was the military, the most anticommunist force in the country, now building an increasingly intimate partnership with Washington after Ambassador Jones’s recommendations, that forced the cancellation of the vote that was planned for 1959.5 The regional conflicts had enormously increased the influence of the Army in Indonesian society over the past two years. The Armed Forces were granted emergency powers to fight the rebels, and the prestige of the forces under General Nasution got a big boost after they effectively put down attacks on the central government.6 As Guided Democracy went into effect, the Army became one of a few key actors in Indonesian society. The military was to the right of the president, the Communists were on the left, and Sukarno provided a delicate balance by playing political forces against each other.
Washington took Howard Jones’s advice, and moved closer to the Indonesian Armed Forces to construct an anticommunist front. In 1953 and 1954, there were about a dozen Indonesian officers training in the United States, and that number dropped to zero in 1958, the year Allen Pope bombed Ambon. In 1959, zero became forty-one, and by 1962, there were more than one thousand Indonesians studying operations, intelligence, and logistics, mostly at the Fort Leavenworth Army base.7
This new approach dovetailed with a growing consensus within the United States that the military should be given more power and influence in the Third World, even if it meant undermining democracy. In the 1950s, an academic field of study called Modernization Theory began to gain influence in Washington. In its basic approach, Modernization Theory replicated the Marxist formulation that societies progress through stages; but it did so in a way that was highly influenced by the anticommunist, liberal American milieu in which it emerged. The social scientists who pioneered the field put forward that “traditional,” primitive societies would advance through a specific set of stages, ideally arriving at a version of “modern” society that looked a whole lot like the United States.8
Technocratic and resolutely antipopulist, Modernization Theory was prodemocracy when possible, but its proponents increasingly came to the conclusion that it might be better to just have some determined elite, say US-friendly generals, provide the crucial force for the difficult jump to “modernity.”
In 1959, the State Department completed a major study informed by this logic. The recent history of Latin America, the study claims, “indicates that authoritarianism is required to lead backward societies through their socio-economic revolutions.… The trend towards military authoritarianism will accelerate as developmental problems become more acute.” The National Security Council met to discuss the report with the president, and to shower its conclusions with lavish praise. In Indonesia especially, they began to view the Army as they viewed themselves: as a bulwark against communism, and a modernizing political and economic force.9
At the same time, young Indonesians were brought to study in universities in the United States through various scholarship and funding programs. The idea, as with similar programs around the Third World, was to show the young intellectuals how things worked in the US, which would hopefully inspire them to take pro-American ideas back home. Since 1956, the Ford Foundation had been providing fellowships that brought young Indonesian economists to the US.10
In 1959, much to his surprise, Benny received a scholarship to study in the United States. This was a very welcome development, as he was unsure about his future at home and still in a bit of a fight with his family. But he wouldn’t be going to California, as he would have liked. He was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. He had never set foot outside of Indonesia before.
The United States was a bit weird, he wrote in endless letters to his high school sweetheart. For some reason, he had to do a physical education class as part of his economics master’s degree. On the one hand, Americans ate huge amounts of meat, which he didn’t mind. But these people in Kansas would drink big glasses of cow’s milk with their food, which he never understood. His life was that of a typical poor grad student—living in dingy dorms and trying to have as much fun as possible in between class and endless research. He and the other Indonesian students craved Indonesian food, but there was nothing like that in Kansas. There was just one “stupid, stupid Chinese restaurant” in the American style in the little university town, he told his friends.
But Lawrence was just forty minutes from the Fort Leavenworth Army base, where members of the Indonesian military were getting their training. And Washington was treating them very nicely. To Benny and his broke student friends, it seemed like the military men were being downright wined and dined by the US government. They had cars, and they had cash, so they would drive to meet the students in the college town, pool Uncle Sam’s money to buy the best ingredients, and cook up a little Indonesian feast in the dorms. They were mostly Army generals—some of whom had even fought to crush the regional rebellions the CIA had backed. The young academics and the Army guys didn’t talk too much politics, but it became clear to the grad students that the idea was to “groom them to be anti-Sukarno generals,” in Benny’s words. “They were all well-trained, and Americanized, and many of them became anticommunists there in Kansas.”
The students and military brass spent most of their time bonding over the food, and their homesickness. And, getting drunk and heading into town for some fun. The Indonesian boys loved getting together and heading to Kansas City, where they could hit up the strip clubs. Indonesia is not a prudish country, but this type of show was something you couldn’t catch back home.
Benny also witnessed another distinctly American spectacle: the US political process unfolding, viewed from the heartland. Not long after he arrived, John F. Kennedy took on Richard Nixon in a presidential contest. Benny and his buddies could watch the famous debate that aired on television on September 26, 1960, in which JFK, confident and attractive, proved perfectly suited to the medium, while Nixon, stuffy and sweaty, came across very poorly. But it was also the faltering economy, anxiety about the Soviet Union, the influence that vice presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson had in the South, and the support of minority voters that helped to win it for JFK. Just barely. He only got around 110,000 more votes than Nixon, out of sixty-nine million votes cast.11
Patrice, Jack, Fidel, Nelson, Nasution, and Saddam
After the prudish Eisenhower, the United States elected a president who was a womanizer, just like Sukarno. The two would meet soon, and get along well. But Kennedy’s election seemed to herald serious changes for US foreign policy, especially toward the Third World. Sukarno, like many Indonesians, viewed young Jack as a rare American ally in the fight against colonialism because he had read JFK’s denunciations of French colonial rule in Algeria.12
As a candidate, JFK had run on solidly anticommunist credentials, of course. It was the United States. But in his inauguration speech, he also made a pledge to the Third World. “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right,” Kennedy said. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress.”13
However, JFK wasn’t going to build a United States government from scratch. He would be inheriting the state as it existed—and the CIA operations already underway around the globe. On January 17, 1961, three days before he was sworn in, as he was still writing that lofty speech, the whole world got a stark reminder of that when Patrice Lumumba, the young, energetic, and popular leader
of the Congo, was executed.
Lumumba had become prime minister in the wake of a decolonization process that was even more chaotic than Indonesia’s had been a decade earlier. The end of Belgian control left the few independence leaders in the Congo scrambling to set up a government. Lumumba was dynamic and renowned for the fast-paced speeches that rolled over the radio waves across the territory. When the nation won independence, he was compared to the Sputnik satellite, and regular people looked forward to nothing less than a cosmic turnabout.14
The debonair Lumumba was more of a classical liberal than a leftist. Often wearing a bowtie, he was an évolué, a member of the class of Congolese who dressed to the nines, suiting up in European attire. He was an economic nationalist, not a committed internationalist revolutionary. Khrushchev observed that “Mr. Lumumba is as much a communist as I am a Catholic.”15
But just months after his election, the young, inexperienced politician made a serious mistake, at least given the rules of the global Cold War. As Belgian forces (and mining interests) backed a white-supported secession movement in the Katanga Province, Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help. The UN offered nothing more than a strongly worded resolution—but Lumumba was desperate, and thought he deserved troops. So on July 14, 1960, he sent a cable to Moscow asking for further assistance. It was immediately leaked to the CIA.
As David Van Reybrouck notes in his astounding history of the Congo, “It would be hard to overstate the importance of this move. At a single swoop, this telegram opened up a new front in the Cold War: Africa.” Did Lumumba and his team realize the impact the telegram would have? “Probably not. Inexperienced as they were, they were simply trying to obtain foreign assistance in solving a conflict concerning national decolonization.”16
The Jakarta Method Page 10