The fall of the PKI “greatly reduced America’s stakes in Vietnam” is the way that Robert McNamara put it, summarizing the 1966 opinion of George F. Kennan, who invented the Cold War containment strategy. “Fewer dominoes now existed, and they seemed much less likely to fall.”1
Later, McNamara himself looked back on his own pro-war views on Vietnam in 1965 and concluded, regretfully, that he and other high-level officials “took no account of the centuries-old hostility between China and Vietnam… or of the setbacks to China’s political power caused by recent events” in Indonesia.2 By 1967, when McNamara recommended against escalating the war, he “pointed to the Communists’ defeat in Indonesia and the Cultural Revolution then roiling China, arguing that these events showed the trend in Asia now ran in our favor.”3
In the end, McNamara was right. Officials in Washington lost the Vietnam War, but they still got, eventually, the version of Southeast Asia that they always wanted.
Then there were the actual people of Vietnam. Southeast Asia’s second-largest communist party (until the Indonesian communists had been destroyed, when it became the largest), like much of the socialist world, responded to the events of October 1 with hesitation at first. The official organ of the party, The People, didn’t comment on events in Indonesia until October 7, when the paper published a message from Ho Chi Minh to President Sukarno. It avoided the question of commenting on the September 30th Movement entirely.
“We are very delighted to hear that the President is well. We wish that you and the Indonesian people are able to continue with your revolution.”
Then, on October 9 and October 18, The People published two headlines: “Forces in Indonesia, supported by the imperialist US, have for months planned a coup against President Sukarno,” read the first one; the second read, “Imperialist US and their cohorts are provoking an anti-communist campaign in Indonesia.”4
Of course, as Washington’s military engagement ramped up, Hanoi was hardly in a position to do anything about Indonesia. The Vietnamese communists did eventually win against the Americans, but at tremendous cost. Three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, and two million of them were civilians.5 Many more were killed in Cambodia and Laos. In Indochina, Washington’s anticommunist crusade erased human life on a truly colossal scale, with no appreciable positive results.
The dynamics of the Vietnam War have been very well documented—especially compared to the attention paid to Indonesia.6 But one aspect often escapes attention, and it’s a program with echoes of Guatemala in 1953, Iraq in 1963, and Indonesia in 1965.
The US military launched the Phoenix Program with the assistance of Australia and the South Vietnamese government in 1968. The goal was to “neutralize” the enemy’s administration through persuasion or assassination. This meant murdering civilians, not waging war. The military drew up blacklists and went hunting for its targets. Operation Phoenix killed tens of thousands of bureaucrats and unarmed people.7
One man working in the operation was already a veteran of Washington’s anticommunist operations. A Cuban exile named Felix Rodriguez fought at the Bay of Pigs invasion; then, he joined the CIA and led the operation that hunted down and executed Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967; when finished there, he went to Vietnam to work in the super-secret Phoenix Program.8
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union reacted to the fall of Sukarno and the destruction of the PKI with mostly quiet resignation. On the one hand, by this point in the Sino-Soviet split, Moscow was not eager to see Beijing’s outspoken ally succeed. On the other hand, Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary since October 1964, was hoping to win the PKI and Aidit back over to the Soviet side. After all, the Indonesian Communists were still “revisionists” according to Beijing, and Aidit—who never liked Khrushchev much—had tried to make a fresh start with Brezhnev.9
It appears that officials in Moscow, like most everyone else, were caught off guard by the events of October 1, and adopted a “wait and see” approach. On October 10, Soviet leaders sent and published a letter to Sukarno, wishing him “sincere wishes of great success.” After learning about the mass extermination program, Pravda asked in February 1966, “What for and according to what right are tens of thousands of people being killed?” The official Communist paper reported that “rightist political circles are trying to eliminate the communist party and at the same time ‘eradicate’ the ideology of Communism in Indonesia.” They compared the slaughter to the “White Terror” unleashed in Russia in 1917.10
However, the Soviets did not actually take any decisive international action. Relations worsened between the two countries as Suharto consolidated power, of course, and the Soviets slowly wound down aid to Indonesia and its military. But there were no fierce denunciations at the UN or threats of retaliation.11 Harsh comments made by the consul general of East Germany, to the effect that “the PKI has seriously failed in connection with the incidents of 30 September,” may indicate that privately, some major officials in the Soviet orbit believed the Indonesians had it coming.12 At least, they found justification for staying out of the way as communists were annihilated, as they often had before.
But there were a lot of Indonesians living in the Soviet Union in 1965. Many of them were students at Patrice Lumumba University, set up in the early 1960s to educate visitors from the Third World. Since independence, Indonesian students had been sent all over the world to study, but as Sukarno moved to the left in the 1960s, opportunities in socialist countries increased relative to spots in the West.
So Gde Arka and Yarna Mansur, a young Indonesian couple from Bali and Sumatra, respectively, jumped at the opportunity to head to Moscow in 1963. They got a little bit of ideological training before they took off—mostly so they could spread the good news about Indonesia’s revolution to the other students—but they weren’t communists. They would have happily gone to England or the Netherlands to study if they could.13
They found Moscow cold, but also quite rich and developed. Everyone had health care, free education, the things Indonesians believed they deserved but hadn’t received yet. Russian wasn’t so hard—they’d been learning and switching between languages far more complex than that since childhood—so they were speaking and studying in the local tongue before long, alongside students from everywhere: Latin America, the Middle East, Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Iran, and Iraq.
After October 1, 1965, news of events back home became disjointed. They tuned in to reports from Soviet Radio, the BBC, and Radio Australia. None of it made sense. Worse, they were cut off from contact with their families back home. Things got even more confusing when the Indonesian embassy called them in to sign some declarations.
First, they were asked to sign something condemning the murder of the six generals. They did happily. But then later, they were asked to sign a form declaring allegiance to the new Suharto government. They hesitated;
this didn’t make much sense. They barely knew who this Suharto man was. This demand for allegiance split the sizable student population in Moscow. Some signed. Gde and Yarna did not. They figured, and hoped, that Sukarno, the president who had actually sent them abroad, would sort things out and return to power.
This didn’t happen. Because they didn’t sign, they had their passports revoked and lost their citizenship—which is to say, they lost their country. The same thing happened to thousands of Indonesians around the world, all of whom became stateless, condemned to seek assistance from the place where they were stuck or wander across borders—without a passport—until they could find a government that would take them.14 They could not communicate with their families in Indonesia. They were marked as communists, and as a result were fully and truly outcasts.
Gde’s uncle was killed in the anticommunist violence back in Bali. He was tortured, forced to watch his friends murdered in front of him, and then stabbed to death. Gde would only hear this full story when he was able to return to Indonesia thirty years later.
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br /> Guatemala
Almost a decade after the CIA-engineered coup, Central America’s largest country was not doing well. Washington still had a Cold War ally in power there, and Guatemala was still tightly integrated with the US economy, but things had not exactly turned out as US officials had hoped.
For the rest of the 1950s, CIA agents watched the country sink back into “feudal repression” with some measure of regret.15 Then the Bay of Pigs invasion indirectly triggered a civil war, which would last for more than three decades.
In November 1960, a group of junior officers led a small rebellion against President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, who had won an entirely fraudulent election after the general hand-picked by Washington in 1954 was assassinated. The junior officers were very broadly left-leaning, and shocked by the regime’s levels of corruption and incompetence. But the spark for the revolt was the fact that the president had granted a base for CIA-backed Cuban exiles to prepare for their invasion of Cuba without asking them. The Cuban exiles were wealthy and reckless, driving impressive cars around the country.16 This was not only an insult to the military and its hierarchy; it was theft, because the president pocketed all the money the US paid him.
The revolt failed. But some of the officers formed a guerrilla group, the Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (MR-13), to openly rebel against the government. Another officer formed a rival group, Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), and began collaborating with the underground Communist Party (PGT), which had been nonviolent since its founding.17
By 1964, the United States and its local military partners, frustrated by their inability to contain the rebellion, changed tactics. They began a series of counterinsurgency actions in Eastern Guatemala. They were assisted by a right-wing terror organization called the White Hand (La Mano Blanca), but victory was elusive. Totally undemocratic and governing a society that offered regular people no chance for advancement, the state had a very hard time establishing legitimacy. Its leaders pursued a different solution. They brought in two Americans from Southeast Asia, as violence continued to roil Indonesia.
In September 1965, a man named John Gordon Mein was appointed US ambassador to Guatemala. He had served as first secretary of the embassy in Indonesia before Howard Jones began his ambassadorial post, and then alongside Jones as the director of the Office of Southwest Pacific Affairs in the State Department. Soon after, Mein requested the services of John P. Longan, a former Border Patrol officer in the US who had worked with the CIA, in Thailand and elsewhere.18 Longan had worked for the same Bangkok office that had authorized the supply of weapons to the Indonesian military during the killings.19
Soon after Longan arrived from Venezuela, he formed death squads. Within three months they carried out Operation Cleanup, or Operación Limpieza, which kidnapped, tortured, and executed thirty prominent left-wing figures in March 1966, just as Sukarno was stepping down in Indonesia. They didn’t just kill them, though—they kidnapped and then disappeared them, murdering them without informing anyone what had happened.
It’s believed the events of 1965–66 in Indonesia were the first time Asia suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.20 In 1965, two men with direct knowledge of US activities in Indonesia arrived in Guatemala City. Historians who study violence in Latin America believe that 1966 in Guatemala was the first time the region suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.21
The People’s Republic of China
October 1 is a special date on the Communist Chinese calendar. It’s National Day, the celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which turned sixteen years old in 1965. When Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping gave speeches that day in Tiananmen Square, some Indonesian students and leftists were in the crowd.22 At a banquet afterward, the Indonesians were the largest foreign delegation.23
As Suharto consolidated control over a new regime in Indonesia, anticommunists used the coincidence of that date to make bad faith accusations that China had somehow engineered the September 30th Movement. Beijing had neither the ability nor the intention to change Indonesia’s government; instead, Chinese officials were profoundly confused as to what was happening.24 At first, they believed a genuine right-wing coup had been stopped; then they thought that Sukarno would regain control of the country and continue to govern with the PKI supporting him; then they were alarmed that Sukarno was unwilling or unable to stop the Army from raiding the homes of Chinese embassy staff in Jakarta.
In December, when Mao learned of D. N. Aidit’s death, he composed a poem:
Sparse branches stood in front of my windows in winter, smiling before hundreds of flowers
Regretfully those smiles withered when spring came
There is no need to grieve over the withered
To each flower there is a season to wither, as well a season to blossom
There will be more flowers in the coming year.25
Apparently, as late as December, Mao thought the leftists would rise once more in Indonesia. Instead, they were being slaughtered, and anticommunist protesters and student groups increasingly targeted the Chinese embassy. In February, more than a thousand right-wing youth attacked the building, and staff did their best to defend themselves with beer bottles, light bulbs, and kung fu. Taiwan’s anticommunist, anti-Beijing government provided resources and training to these groups as they carried out more assaults. In total, the embassy was attacked more than forty times.
Reports of the clashes made their way back to China, and became part of the official discourse of the budding Cultural Revolution. Suharto’s dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution emerged in synchrony, says Taomu Zhou, the scholar who best knows Chinese documentation on Indonesia in the period. “These two significant and stormy processes in Cold War Asia were mutually reinforcing,” she writes—and the conflict with Indonesia “greatly contributed to the growing sociopolitical mobilization during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.” Heroic resistance to the brutality of the likes of Suharto became one of the Red Guards’ favored themes.26
First, enraged Chinese youth petitioned to put up posters to attack “Indonesian reactionaries.” Then, the image of a Chinese diplomat who was injured in an embassy attack in Jakarta became a media sensation across the country. Six hundred thousand Red Guards protested in front of Indonesia’s embassy in Beijing. As ethnic Chinese refugees fleeing the violence in Indonesia arrived in China, they joined the Indonesian students and leftists already stranded there.27 Their stories of the horrors in their homeland became iconic during the Cultural Revolution, used as potent symbols of the dangers of right-wing violence and the need to heroically resist imperialism.
At an event with some of these refugees, in front of a crowd waving the Little Red Book, Foreign Minister Chen Yi declared, “The Chinese people, armed with Mao Zedong thought, cannot be humiliated; the overseas nationals of strong socialist China can never be persecuted!” He continued, “The savage Indonesian reactionaries will ultimately face the harsh judgment of history.”28
The Cultural Revolution was built around the idea that hidden bourgeois elements could infiltrate and threaten a left-wing movement. The events in Indonesia in 1965–66 served as self-evident justification for this narrative. Just weeks previously, the world’s largest unarmed communist party had held considerable influence in the huge country across the South China Sea. Mao and Zhou Enlai had encouraged the Indonesian leftists to arm the people.29 It did not. Then overnight, hidden right-wing elements emerged to kill them all and turn a left-leaning anti-imperialist nation into an ally of Washington. It would be the perfect propaganda tale to invent, if it were not all true.
The United States
US government officials were almost uniformly celebratory of the massacres in Indonesia, even as their scope and brutality became clear. Ironically, one dissenting voice on this topic came from the man with a reputation for pushing for the most violent and reckless covert operations in the early 1960s.
&nb
sp; In January 1966, Senator Bobby Kennedy said, “We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?” No other prominent US politician condemned the massacre. By this time, RFK was in the habit of speaking out forcefully in ways that others wouldn’t.30 It’s unclear whether he knew that the Johnson administration was actively assisting with the massacre at that point. Maybe RFK had a kind of conversion about the nature of black ops after his brother’s death. Maybe it was politics. But we know that whatever it was, Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation.
The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.
James Linen, president of Time-Life, went a step further. He contacted both the embassy and Suharto himself, expressing interest in putting on a major business conference focusing on Indonesian opportunities. Ambassador Green said “this seemed to him an excellent idea,” because “a number of American companies, particularly in the extractive industries, were already in Djakarta.”*31
Linen wrote to Suharto: “I had the privilege of visiting your country last fall and was most favorably impressed with the progressive developments that have been taking place. It occurred to me that an international investment conference… could be a most productive undertaking.”
The Jakarta Method Page 20