The memo listed the plan for the US response:
1. Ensure that our actions and statements do nothing to shore up Sukarno and his henchmen.…
F. Without becoming directly involved, promote arrangements between the [Government of Indonesia] and the American oil companies.…
H. Within the limits of prudence, give open or covert advice and assistance to responsible and competent anti-communist groups for worthwhile activities.32
March 11
Bogor—As the killings went on, State Department officials repeatedly expressed frustration that Suharto had not yet taken full control and formally deposed President Sukarno. Since October, Sukarno had been largely relegated to the palace in the city of Bogor and stripped of most of his powers, but he still had his official title and some influence.
Sukarno’s reaction to the killings was both resignation and desperation. Though he wasn’t getting full reports from around the country, he knew violence was taking place, and seemed overwhelmed by the avalanche of anticommunist propaganda. He told one group of officers and journalists, “Over and over it’s the same thing… razors, razors, razors, razors, razors, a grave for a thousand people, a grave for a thousand people… over and over again, the same thing!”33 He urged restraint, entirely ineffectively, as Suharto’s forces literally hacked away at the number of people on the left wing of Indonesian politics.
Over the period of the killings, the economic situation deteriorated, reducing further what remained of Sukarno’s power. According to Subandrio, his former foreign minister, Suharto intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic goods like rice, sugar, and cooking oil.34 Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.35
As student protests raged around him, Sukarno called top government officials to the Jakarta Presidential Palace on March 10 in an attempt to retain control. Instead, paratroopers loyal to Suharto, led by General Sarwo Edhie, surrounded him the next day.
Sukarno jumped onto a helicopter to flee, Subandrio running behind him barefoot, and rushed back to Bogor. But there, Sukarno was forced to sign a letter handing over executive power to Suharto.36
There are still controversies about this letter, the so-called Supersemar. No one has ever seen the original.
Regardless, Suharto used it as permission to take over immediately, and completely. In his first acts, he officially banned what was left of the Communist Party, then arrested much of Sukarno’s cabinet, including Subandrio. The United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.37
March 17
Washington, DC—Incoming cable from Jakarta:
“1. Several American correspondents here have sought our comments on ‘reports from [Jakarta]’ which we have traced to high-level British sources in Singapore. AP correspondent John Cantwell (protect source) told Congen flatly that British are planting stories.”
The reporter knew he had been receiving misinformation as part of a campaign to strengthen Suharto. He didn’t mind. The memo continues:
“Correspondent complained that, although he was reasonably certain British were feeding him false or misleading information, their stories were so spectacular he had no choice but to file them.”38
Date Unknown
After many months, Francisca walked out of prison. Her father found a way to use his money and influence to pay for her release. Disoriented, she had no idea what day it was.
Broadly speaking, the violence in Jakarta was not as intense as it was in places like North Sumatra, Central and East Java, and Bali. Perhaps because those were the main centers of mass support for the PKI and for Sukarno himself, and perhaps because they couldn’t treat leftists in the capital—surrounded by press and elites and diplomats—the same way they were treating regular people, far from the city. But the world Francisca discovered upon her release was still devastating.
Her house had been covered with violent graffiti, smeared with “G30S,” the September 30th Movement. She was able to see her kids, finally. They were OK. But she found out that her oldest daughter had been taken out of class one day by the military, loaded onto a truck, and taken to Independence Square, where she was forced to line up and chant, “Down with Sukarno! Down with Sukarno!”
She knew that this chant was aimed at her father and mother, who had disappeared, for being on what was now considered the wrong side of history.
None of Francisca’s friends would talk to her anymore. In fact, no one was talking to anyone. Gone were the days of literary discussions and language classes with progressive intellectuals from around the world. There was a new rule of conduct.
“You shouldn’t trust anybody,” she recalled. “They were using people from every type of organization to snitch on their former colleagues. So many people just can’t stand the abuse. They break down, and betray their friends in their own organization. The less you know the better it is.”
Zain was not there. He never emerged from prison.
A Gleam of Light
Most of the Western press repeated the narrative being peddled by the new Indonesian government, which Washington was enthusiastically welcoming onto the world stage. That story went, more or less, that some spontaneous violence erupted when regular people found out about what the communists had done, or been planning. These articles said that the natives had “run amok” and engaged in bloodshed. Because the word “amok” originated in Malay (the language that formed the basis for both Indonesian and Malaysian), this made it easier for Western journalists to employ Orientalist stereotypes about Asians as primitive, backward, and violent people, and blame the violence on a putative sudden, irrational outburst.39
On April 13, 1966, C. L. Sulzberger penned a piece, one of many in this genre, with the headline “When a Nation Runs Amok” for the New York Times. As Sulzberger described it, the killings occurred in “violent Asia, where life is cheap.” He reproduced the lie that Communist Party members had killed the generals on October 1, and that Gerwani women slashed and tortured them. He went on to affirm that “Indonesians are gentle… but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.”40
The Malay, and now Indonesian, concept of amok actually referred to a traditional form of ritual suicide, even if the anglicization now refers to wild violence more generally.41 But there’s no reason to believe that the mass violence of 1965–66 has its roots in native culture. No one has any evidence of mass murder of this kind happening in Indonesian history, except for when foreigners were involved.42
This story of inexplicable, vaguely tribal violence—so easy for American readers to digest—was entirely false. This was organized state violence with a clear purpose. The main obstacles to a complete military takeover were eliminated by a coordinated program of extermination—the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians. The generals were able to take power after state terror sufficiently weakened their political opponents, who had no weapons, only public sympathy. They didn’t resist their own annihilation because they had no idea what was coming.43
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Sarwo Edhie, the man who ambushed Sukarno in March, once bragged that the military had killed three million people.44 There’s a reason we have to settle for estimates. Because, for more than fifty years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to
go out and record what happened, and no one around the world has much cared to ask, either. Millions more people were indirect victims of the massacres, but no one came around to inquire how many loved ones they had lost.
Their silence was the point of the violence. The Armed Forces did not oversee the extermination of every single communist, alleged communist, and potential communist sympathizer in the country. That would have been nearly impossible, because around a quarter of the country was affiliated somehow with the PKI. Once the killings took hold, it became incredibly hard to find anyone who would admit to any association with the PKI.
Around 15 percent of the prisoners taken were women.45 They were subjected to especially cruel, gendered violence, which sprung directly from the propaganda spread by Suharto with Western help. Sumiyati, the Gerwani member who lived near Sakono in her teens, fled the police for two months before turning herself in. She was made to drink the urine of her captors. Other women had their breasts cut off, or their genitals mutilated, and rape and sexual slavery were widespread.46 There has been some debate as to whether the Indonesian mass killings can be categorized as “genocide,” but that is largely an argument about the meaning of the term, not about what happened.47 In the overwhelming majority of cases, people were killed for their political beliefs or for being accused of having the wrong political beliefs. It’s also true that some murderers used the chaos to settle personal scores, and that thousands were killed because of their race. This was especially true for the ethnic Chinese population. But the vast majority of real leftists were no more deserving of any punishment than those who were inaccurately accused of being associated with the Communist Party.
Except for a tiny number of people possibly involved in the planning of the disastrous September 30th Movement, almost everyone killed and imprisoned was entirely innocent of any crime. Magdalena, an apolitical teenage member of a communist-affiliated union, was innocent. Sakono, an active member of the People’s Youth and enthusiastic Marxist, was innocent. His teachers and friends, card-carrying party members all, were innocent. Agung’s father in Bali was innocent. Sumiyati and the other members of her Gerwani chapter, innocent. Sakono’s childhood friends and Magdalena’s union comrades didn’t deserve to be killed. They didn’t even deserve a small fine. They didn’t do anything wrong at all.
They were sentenced to annihilation, and almost everyone around them was sentenced to a lifetime of guilt, trauma, and being told they had sinned unforgivably because of their association with the earnest hopes of left-wing politics. Declassified documents from Eastern Europe indicate that Zain, Francisca’s husband, was a member of the Party’s Central Committee.48 Even in the case of someone like him, at the very top of the Communist Party, there’s no evidence Zain was guilty of anything at all. In addition to the crime of extermination, an International People’s Tribunal assembled later in the Netherlands found the Indonesian military guilty of a number of crimes against humanity, including torture, unjustified and long-term detainment in cruel conditions, forced labor amounting to enslavement, and systematic sexual violence. The judges found that all this was carried out for political purposes—to destroy the Communist Party and then “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime”—with the assistance of the United States, the UK, and Australia.49
It wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.50
The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed—disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular. In line with Frank Wisner’s early strategy of covert direct confrontation, the US government launched secret attacks and murdered civilians in 1958 in the attempt to break up the country, and failed. So American officials adopted Howard Jones’s more subtle on-the-ground insights, turning to a strategy of building deep connections with the Armed Forces and building an anticommunist military state within a state. John F. Kennedy’s active engagement with the Third World and especially its military, under the guidance of Modernization Theory, provided the structure to expand the power of this operation in Indonesia. When Washington parted ways with Jones and his strategy of working directly with Sukarno, it instructed its secret and not-so-secret agents to destabilize the country and create conflict. When the conflict came, and when the opportunity arose, the US government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible, and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. The US embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. The Indonesian military officers understood very well that the more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, and the happier Washington would be.
Up to a million Indonesians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington’s global anticommunist crusade. The US government expended significant resources over years engineering the conditions for a violent clash, and then, when the violence broke out, assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving US geopolitical goals.
And in the end, US officials got what they wanted. It was a huge victory.
As historian John Roosa puts it, “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.”51
This was something for almost everyone in the US government and elite media circles to celebrate, given the thinking that was dominant at the time. James Reston, a liberal columnist at the New York Times, published a piece under the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” He noted, correctly, that “There was a great deal more contact between the anti-Communist forces in that country and at least one very high official in Washington before and during the Indonesian massacre than is generally realized… it is doubtful if the coup would have ever been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.” Reston said that the “savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under General Suharto is, of course, the most important” of a number of “hopeful political developments in Asia” that he saw as outweighing Washington’s more widely publicized setbacks in Vietnam.52
Reston knew Washington’s foreign policy establishment very well. Back in the 1950s, he was a frequent guest at Frank Wisner’s raucous Sunday night dinner parties in Georgetown.53 In his final days, before he took his life, it’s not clear how much attention Wisner was paying to the news, or if he even knew what happened in Indonesia at all.
For writers like Reston, this was an obvious victory for US geopolitical interests as Washington understood them at the time. And for hardened anticommunists around the world, the method behind this “savage transformation” would soon be seen as an inspiration, a playbook. But h
ow could the international press, and the State Department, remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through the mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”54
8
Around the World
INDONESIA DID INDEED BECOME A “quiet, compliant partner” of the United States, which explains why so many Americans today have barely heard about the country. But at the time, things were very different.
The annihilation of the world’s third-largest communist party, the fall of the founder of the Third World movement, and the rise of a fanatically anticommunist military dictatorship violently rocked Indonesia, setting off a tsunami that reached almost every corner of the globe.
In the long term, the shape of the global economy changed forever. And the scale of the anticommunist victory and ruthless efficiency of the method employed inspired extermination programs named after the Indonesian capital. But first, that giant bloody wave wrought short-term consequences as it crashed onto shores around the world.
Vietnam
US strategy in Southeast Asia was dictated to a large degree by the logic of the “domino theory,” which posits that as one country in Asia “fell” to communism, so could the rest of the region. This theory is well remembered to this day. What is completely forgotten is that Indonesia was by far the biggest domino. When influential officials in Washington realized how decisive their victory was in Jakarta, they came to a conclusion. They could afford to lose the battle in Vietnam, because the war was already won.
The Jakarta Method Page 19