When Sakono first heard about the September 30th Movement, he was sympathetic. As he understood it from radio reports, it was an internal Army movement that stopped a coup against his childhood hero, President Sukarno. But then news became a bit more confused. The People’s Daily no longer arrived in his village. His local chapter of the People’s Youth organization didn’t give him any answers either, so he just kept waiting to start his job as a schoolteacher, desperate for scraps of news from Jakarta, as he had been since he was a teen.
As the narrative around the events shifted, with only military and foreign media reporting on them, Sakono knew that the left was under some suspicion, but he didn’t really consider it a big deal. He got word that everyone in a communist-affiliated organization had to check in regularly with the police.
Though he had never dealt with law enforcement before, he didn’t mind this much. He didn’t have a lot to do, and he wasn’t worried. Whatever had happened in Jakarta didn’t affect his plans. He figured he would be the best revolutionary he could be as a teacher. “When education moves forward, the country moves forward,” he thought. He continued waiting, helping out his family with the crops, just passing the time.
October 29
Galena, Maryland—Frank Wisner found one of his sons’ shotguns while staying at the family farm, and used it to kill himself.17
November 2
Purbalingga, Central Java—Sakono checked in with the police once more. Once more, he walked out of the station, then got on his bike and rode back to his village. When he got home, around two in the afternoon, a pair of police officers were waiting for him. One of them was holding a letter. They told him the letter meant he had to go with them. “This is of the utmost importance,” the police officer said. “You need to face this now.”
So he went with them.
When Sakono entered prison, he felt just fine. He had done nothing wrong, so he figured he would just do some interviews, provide some information, and clear his name. He wasn’t a full member of the PKI himself, but had been variously, and proudly, involved with the Communist Party since he was very young, so he immediately ran into a lot of old friends. There was Sutrisno, the party cadre who had given him classes in Marxism-Leninism when he was younger. Suhada, his short, slightly chubby older friend who always wore sunglasses, was there too. He was in the Party Central Committee, a funny guy who always gave amazing speeches.
It was practically a reunion. The mood was light, almost festive. They began singing revolutionary songs together—not even in defiance of the police, but just in a kind of joyful solidarity.
Move forward undaunted
Defend what is right
Forward, together,
Of course, we win
Move forward, move forward
All together, all together
That night, while everyone was sleeping, they took away twelve of the prisoners. They took away Sutrisno. They took away Suhada. They took away his friends Kamdi and Sumarno and Suharjo.
They never came back. No one ate breakfast the next morning. There was no more singing. No more cheer. No one talked. This couldn’t be happening. It went against everything Sakono had learned, and believed, his entire life. The military and the police were defenders of the revolution. Indonesia had a system of law and order, of fair trial, of evidence and justice. He had barely seen any violence in the nineteen years since he was born.
“I’m not a rebel! I’ve never held a weapon! I would never rebel against my country! I never did anything wrong in my whole life!” Sakono shouted, over and over, but silently inside his own mind, as his body quivered, terrified he would be in the next group to be taken away.
What had happened to his friends? Sakono heard rumors, as did everyone in the region. They were taking some people to the Serayu River in the middle of the night. They tied up their hands and threw them into the water. Or maybe they shot them first. Or maybe they stabbed them. That there were mass killings became obvious. There were so many bodies piling up that they were blocking rivers, and unleashing a horrible stench across the country. But as to who was killed, and where and how, all the survivors had were rumors.
This was a new characteristic of the mass violence. People weren’t killed in the streets, making it very clear to families that they were gone. They weren’t officially executed. They were arrested and then disappeared in the middle of the night. Loved ones often had no idea if their relatives were still alive, making them even more paralyzed with fear. If they complained, or rebelled, could that be what cost their imprisoned loved ones their lives? Might they be taken too? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that mass murder is occurring, the human instinct is to hold out hope that your son, or your daughter, might still be saved. This freezes people, and makes populations much more quiescent—easier to exterminate and easier to control. Historians who study violence in Asia believe this was the first time forced “disappearances” had been used.
Who murdered them? Just as in Aceh, military and police took captives to special locations at night and killed them. But very often it was not the actual uniformed officers who pulled the trigger or plunged the machete into human flesh.
The country’s largest Muslim organization had a youth wing and an armed wing, the Ansor and Banser. These were acronyms, but the founder of the Banser said that he wanted the word to sound like Panzer, Hitler’s famous tanks. He also said he had been studying Mein Kampf, starting in 1964, in order to learn how to deal with the Communists.18 These groups participated in the killings in Central and East Java. In Aceh, the military press-ganged and threatened suspicious civilians, politically suspect individuals or outcasts, into carrying out the murders. Afterward, they would often down alcohol to numb themselves to what they had just done.19 Whatever happened, whoever it was, almost all of Sakono’s friends were gone now, and corpses were piling up everywhere.
November 6
Washington, DC—The State Department received a cable from Jakarta. The US embassy passed on some more reports of Army progress. The message ended precisely as follows:
E. Army info bureau also reported that para-comandos (RPKAD) in armoured vehicles entering city of Surakarta (no date given) were blocked in village at outskirts by nine “witches” from PKI women’s affiliate GERWANI, who insulted them and refused to let them pass. After asking them quietly to give way, and firing into air, para-comandos were “forced by their intransigence to terminate breathing of these nine GERWANI witches.”
3. Miscellanous [sic]: Beginning what we believe will be major fad, Bandung renamed part of its main street “General Yani Boulevard” yesterday. It’s good he has an easily pronounceable name.
Green20
November 22
Boyolali—The Armed Forces found, arrested, and executed D. N. Aidit, the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party in Boyolali, Central Java, on the morning of November 22. Aidit had been on the run since he realized that the military was after him.
The military told the world Aidit confessed to plans to take over the country, and this account was later published in Newsweek. After the issue came out, a cable from the embassy told the State Department that embassy staff knew it was “impossible to believe that Aidit made such a statement” because according to the military’s version, he allegedly referenced a fake document, one they knew “was obviously being disseminated as part of an anti-Communist ‘black propaganda’ operation.”21
December 13
Jakarta—Francisca kept working in the days after October 1, 1965. Zain stopped working after The People’s Daily was closed down by the military. But Francisca kept going to the Afro-Asian Journalist Association office every day, and the staff continued working on preparations for their next edition, and for the Tricontinental Conference planned for Havana in 1966. Despite everything that was happening, Sukarno and a senior Communist Party leader, Nyoto, had managed to convene a conference in Jakarta in protest of US military bases around the world, and Francisca ha
d helped Afro-Asian Journalist cover it in October.22
But Francisca knew people were being arrested all around the capital. Some of her colleagues, especially the journalists, stopped showing up for work. Still there was almost no reliable information as to what was going on. Everyone was keeping to themselves. No one knew whom they could trust. Every night, Francisca took the car straight back from the office, to her home with Zain in Menteng. She had lived two months like this, as the world of left-wing intellectuals in Jakarta was getting smaller and smaller.
At four in the morning on December 13, three men knocked on their door, and took them both away. Francisca and Zain went peacefully, into police custody. The officers told Francisca she was only being brought in for questioning, and that she would be home very soon, then loaded her and Zain into a Land Rover and drove to Independence Square. The kids were left alone in the house.
Soon after they got there, the men took Zain into a different room. Francisca saw a man begin to undo his belt as he entered another door. She was left with a military officer in an interrogation room. He pulled out a gun and put it on the table in front of her. She lost contact with her senses. She was certain she was going to die.
Somehow, she made it through. The interrogation was over. It might have lasted an hour, or several. She was in a daze. They brought her to the office of the military doctor, the one who treated the wives of the officers. Why was she there? Maybe to be killed in a different way? Then they brought Zain in. It became apparent he was there to say goodbye. It was also apparent he had been tortured. She could see cigarette burns up and down his arms. How many, she didn’t know. Too hard to count. Then he was gone, and she was alone in the doctor’s office.
She languished there for eight days. At night, she would sleep on a kind of a bench, seemingly an examination table that gynecologists used. She didn’t eat, and she lost maybe fifteen pounds. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. During the daytime, the doctors would ignore her as they worked, seemingly unsure why she was there, but knowing she was some sort of a communist, and therefore undeserving of treatment.
But a patient, another woman, probably a soldier’s wife, noticed her.
Francisca was sobbing uncontrollably. She didn’t know where her children were. She didn’t know if Damaiati or Kandida or Anthony, or her youngest, Benjamino, were OK. For days, the police had ignored her tears. But this woman saw her, and asked her what was wrong. Francisca tried to tell her.
“You have children?” the woman asked.
“I have four!” Francisca said, and broke down again.
She turned to the doctor and shouted, “Why are you not taking care of this woman!”
The doctor gave in, and granted just a little of her humanity back. He must have called someone, because Francisca was transferred to the military office. It turned out the police had processed her incorrectly, and they forgot about her. Now she was taken to the women’s prison. Still no contact with her family. At the women’s prison she met a younger girl, only nineteen, a country girl pregnant with her first child. She looked up to Francisca, an older mother, now thirty-nine years old. The young woman was sobbing uncontrollably, and told Francisca her husband had already been killed.
December 16
Washington, DC—US officials were in close contact with the military, making it clear to them that direct assistance could resume if the PKI were destroyed, Sukarno was removed, and attacks on US investments halted. Aid flows were also conditional on Indonesia’s willingness to adopt IMF- and US-approved economic plans.23
All Army leaders seemed to want to know, according to a State Department cable in December, was “how much is it worth it to us that PKI be smashed.”24 It was worth a lot.
But US officials were also very alarmed that the military government-in-waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno’s plans to take over US oil companies, by far their most important economic concern at the time. They “bluntly and repeatedly warned the emerging Indonesian leadership” that if nationalization went forward, support from Washington would be withheld, and their grip on power was at stake, according to historian Bradley Simpson’s analysis of the declassified communications. The White House enlisted Australian and Japanese officials in the fight.25 They won.
On December 16, a telegram from Jakarta to the State Department described the victory. Suharto arrived at a high-level meeting by helicopter, strode into the room, and “made it crystal clear to all assembled that the military would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies.” Then he walked out.26
January 1, 1966
Bali—The violence arrived on the island of Bali in December. It’s almost like it started at Indonesia’s westernmost tip and moved east across the main population centers, through Central Java, to East Java, and then to Bali. Like the movement of the sun, only precisely in reverse.
The slaughter in Bali was probably the worst in all of Indonesia. As the new year began, the island convulsed with violence.
Agung Alit was just a little boy, but he knew they were looking for his father. His father, Raka, knew it too. So instead of sleeping at home, he went to sleep in the nearby Hindu temple. Agung stayed at home. As he slept, men came to their home night after night, rummaging around, demanding to know where Raka was. Finally they got him. Agung was awoken, and his family told him his father was gone. They weren’t sure when he would be back.
The people of Bali knew something was very suspicious about the outbreak of violence. People were being killed with big machetes. Machetes are not native to the island. Balinese people use the klewang, a thinner, local blade. Someone must have brought the heavy weapons in from another island. And, as elsewhere, locals were participating in the killing. Agung heard that it was actually a neighbor, a man known by the family, who took away his father.
The machetes arrived around the same time that military anticommunist propaganda campaigns, nationally coordinated, arrived in Bali. One rumor declared that Gerwani women had plans to sell their bodies in order to buy weapons for a communist revolt, and to castrate the soldiers they seduced. Propaganda teams toured rural areas, spreading stories like this, driving home the message that the people must “be on the side of the G30S or stand behind the government in crushing the G30S. There is no such thing as a neutral position.”27
Some killings were carried out by members of the PNI, the nationalist party Sukarno had founded long ago, as well as local paramilitary gangs that had already been opposing the government’s national land reform program.28 Young Wayan Badra, the thirteen-year-old son of the Hindu priest in the Seminyak neighborhood, noticed that the two nice communist teachers at his school went away and never came back. Then he heard what was happening on the beaches. They were bringing people from the city to the east to kill them on the sand. It was public property there, and empty at night. The bodies were abandoned there. Some families came to recover them. Others were gathered by Badra’s village, to be given anonymous funeral rites and cremated by his father.
For Balinese Hindus, the loss of a family member’s body is a deep spiritual tragedy of infinite consequence. So a few years after the violence ended, Agung went with his family to find his father’s body, and give him an honorable funeral and cremation. They walked four kilometers to the site where someone told them they could find his remains. They found a field of bodies.
They began looking through bones, picking up skulls.
Someone shouted, “This is Mr. Raka!”
But no, that skull didn’t look right. Maybe the hair was wrong. Maybe that one? They kept sorting through decomposing bodies, desperately, for minutes, before someone realized it was impossible, crazy. There were just “too many skulls, too many skeletons.”
They walked back home for an hour, processing the knowledge they would never lay him to rest, and sickened by the vast sea of humanity they had just entered.
In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand peop
le, probably the highest proportion in the country.29
The Balinese had been especially strong supporters of Sukarno’s multifaith political project, because it gave Hindus more freedom in a Muslim-majority country.30 A severe economic crisis in the early 1960s made the communists’ promises of redistribution more attractive to some—and more threatening to others. The PNI killed Suteja, the governor, and members of his family, and spread the myth that he actually chose to nyupat, or volunteered to be executed and be reincarnated as a better person. Some Balinese were indeed asked if they wanted to nyupat or not. But those who said no were killed anyway, rendering the question meaningless.31 They were executed, murdered one by one, over just a few months, for affiliation with an unarmed political party that had been entirely legal and mainstream just weeks earlier.
A little bit later, the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field.
January 14
Washington, DC—The State Department received a detailed assessment of the Indonesian situation from Ambassador Marshall Green:
Prior to October 1, 1965, Indonesia was for all practical purposes an Asian communist state.…
Events of the past several months have had three major effects on Indonesia’s power structures and policies:
1. The PKI has ceased for the foreseeable future to be an important power element. Effective action by the Army and its Muslim allies has totally disrupted the party’s organizational apparatus. Most Politburo and Central Committee members have been killed or arrested, and estimates of the number of party members killed range up to several hundred thousand.…
The Jakarta Method Page 18