Suharto agreed. They began preparations for a swanky get-together in Geneva that fall.
At least one million Indonesians were still in concentration camps, comprising one of the largest populations of political detainees anywhere in the world. They were subject to starvation, forced labor, physical and psychological torture, and attempts at anticommunist re-education.32 The families of up to another million victims were reeling from the disappearance of their loved ones, without explanation and often without confirmation they were even dead. Bodies were strewn about the country. Sakono was imprisoned. Magdalena was imprisoned, and badly confused. Francisca was in the process of giving up on her husband and finding a way to escape the country and keep the rest of her family safe.
Judging by the materials prepared after the conference, titled “To Aid in the Rebuilding of a Nation,” the meeting in Geneva was a roaring success. Under Secretary of State George Ball was there. New Foreign Minister Adam Malik, a longtime Washington favorite in Indonesia, gave a speech emphasizing the importance of the military as “the only credible political power in Indonesia.” And David Rockefeller made some very encouraging final remarks: “I have talked with a good many people over the course of the last couple days and I think I have found universal enthusiasm.”33
Cambodia
Like Sukarno, Prince Norodom Sihanouk had attempted to maintain his neutrality in the Cold War since Cambodia’s participation in the Bandung Conference in 1955, but his relationship with Washington became increasingly strained from years of CIA plotting and the escalation of the Vietnam War.
At the same time a man, born Saloth Sâr but known now to the world as Pol Pot, was leading a very small group of idiosyncratic Marxists camped out near the Vietnamese border. His group, then called the Workers Party of Kampuchea, had almost no public support, and alternately collaborated and quarreled with the more experienced—and much busier—Vietnamese Communists to his east. Pol Pot had ignored directives from both the Soviet Union and the Vietnamese to keep peace with Sihanouk’s government, and his group was organizing a rural rebellion.34
Pol Pot and his followers were also paying very close attention to Indonesia. They studied the collapse of the PKI, and concluded that its strategy of aligning with Sukarno and winning mass democratic support had only led to disaster. As a result, he vowed that his movement would not meet the same fate at the hands of reactionaries, and resolved that power for his group would be achieved and maintained through arms and violence. The PKI had no arms, and trusted far too much in democratic niceties; that was its downfall, the secretive leader of the “Khmer Rouge” concluded. He would be different.35
Ghana
If sub-Saharan Africa had a Sukarno, it was likely Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Born to a poor family in what was then called the “Gold Coast”—as usual in the Third World, it was named for a precious commodity by its British colonizers—and educated at the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he saw firsthand how virulent racism defined black life in the United States.36 At first, authorities in London viewed him as a threat, then briefly saw him as useful, until he was a problem again.
In 1957, he helped create Ghana, the first independent nation in Sub-Saharan, “black” Africa.37 He was a socialist, and opposed to Western imperialism; he wanted to change the rules of the world economy to favor formerly colonized peoples; and by the 1960s he rivaled Sukarno on the world stage as the man who most loudly railed against “neocolonialism.”
In his 1965 book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he wrote that “neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.” According to Nkrumah, the new way of the world was that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation, rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world,” and that imperial powers no longer even had to admit what they were doing—not even to themselves.38
In 1966, while the US was still assisting in the extermination of Indonesia’s leftists, Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup backed by the United States and Britain. The role of the CIA is still unclear; it is established, however, that the coup plotters had trained in the United Kingdom. Nkrumah took refuge in Guinea, then led by Third World movement ally Ahmed Sékou Touré.
By the end of the 1960s, it was safe to say that the Third World movement was in disarray, if not destroyed. The “Bandung Spirit” had become a ghost. The leaders of the progressive wing of the postcolonial movement were gone: Nehru had died in 1964; Sukarno was languishing in Indonesia as his allies bled out, waiting to die soon himself; Ghana’s Nkrumah and Burma’s U Nu had been deposed in military coups. Many of Iraq’s leftists were already dead, and US-backed Saddam Hussein would finish them off soon; Egypt’s Nasser had been weakened by the collapse of the United Arab Republic following a coup in Damascus, whose leaders in turn purged the Syrian Communist Party.
Living in Guinea, Nkrumah came to a new conclusion about the nature of neocolonialism. Given the state of the world, and considering the success of Western imperialism, the only path to revolution was protracted guerrilla struggle.39
As Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute, put it, “The destruction of the Left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained dominance over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.”40 Or, in the words of German historian Christian Gerlach, speaking about the body that had probably been the best global forum for advancing the Third World movement: by 1971, “a murderer like [Indonesian Foreign Minister] Adam Malik could even become President of the UN General Assembly.”41
Chile
In 1964, the Christian Democratic Party easily won presidential elections in Chile, one of Latin America’s most stable and prosperous nations. The Christian Democrats were the party favored by Washington—and the CIA—and they received very significant help from Uncle Sam.
The Agency pumped $3 million into that election. That came out to almost a dollar per vote for Eduardo Frei, more than Lyndon Johnson spent in his own 1964 campaign.42 In addition to funds, the CIA also delivered a crude “scare campaign” to the Chilean people.43 The Agency made extensive use of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, and posters, and painted the walls of the cities. One red-baiting radio ad featured the sound of a machine gun operated by murderous communists, followed by a woman declaring, “They have killed my child!” There were up to twenty radio spots of this kind per day.44
The CIA also distributed disinformation and “black propaganda,” falsely attributing materials to the Communist Party.45
Chile had been a stable democracy since 1932, and Frei was no dictator. He initiated a modest land reform program, made efforts to bring regular people into the educational system, and made taxation a bit more progressive. This long, thin country on South America’s cold Pacific coast was nothing like Guatemala, where the generals ruled through terror, or even most of its neighbors closer to home, which were periodically rocked by military coups. It was Latin America, yes; inequality was rampant, and the racial hierarchy was obvious to any visitor, but many middle-class Chileans remember the 1960s as a pleasant time. Supporters of the second-place finisher that year—Salvador Allende—and other leftists in the country believed that a move toward socialism could happen Chilean-style, without much fuss or trouble, and help the country to develop on more equal terms. But the virulence of the 1964 campaign had been a shock.
Carmen Hertz was nineteen, studying at the University of Chile, and she and her friends understood very well how strongly Washington opposed Allende and his assorted allies. Growing up in a strict, well-off, and conservative home, with afternoon tea more reminiscent of the England of Mary Poppins than the mountains of Cuba, she arrived at college in braids, and sixteen years old.46 She had been sy
mpathetic to the right-leaning Liberal Party while living at home, but a growing social consciousness pushed her to the left, and her personality had always been a bit radical and confrontational.
There were two left-wing groups active around her at the time. On the one side was the Communist Party (PCCh). Its members were more conservative, in every sense of the word. Short hair, moral rectitude, and discipline were their identifying characteristics. They represented one of the more important communist parties in the world, one with its mass base in the working class, tightly disciplined and maintaining good relations with Moscow. They followed the Soviet line on Latin America at the time, and so insisted that the left should participate in elections and work within the democratic system, bourgeois or not, that Chile had.
The other group, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), was new, and very much a creation of the 1960s. Its members were more bohemian. And they looked not to boring old Brezhnev but to Che Guevara, inspired by his model of guerrilla warfare and the lessons he learned in Guatemala in 1954. They thought the road to democratic socialism was a trap, and they worried they would be swallowed up by reactionary forces before they could get halfway there. They told the Communists, no, the only way is armed resistance.
Both sides noticed what had happened in Indonesia. Orlando Millas, a Communist Party official, had visited Jakarta recently, and spoke at length with Aidit about their worries that Washington was planning something against them.47 Both leftist groups, the PCCh and the MIR, were horrified to hear about a massacre on a scale they considered impossible in Latin America. The leftists at Carmen’s university were united in thinking that the future belonged to them, and that they would win soon. But it was the members of MIR who seized upon the violence in Indonesia to make their point about tactics.
Carmen remembers her radical friends saying, “You see what happens if you leave yourselves vulnerable?”
In 1966, the MIR newspaper, Punto Final, published a text attributed to philosopher Bertrand Russell. “I fear that the horror of the killings in Indonesia was only possible because in the West we are so saturated with racism that the death of Asians, even in the hundreds of thousands, doesn’t impress us. Blacks in North America know it well,” the article continued. “Knowing the same thing, the peoples of the world should take the path of open struggle.”48 Punto Final also published a guide to CIA activities in Indonesia, the Congo, Vietnam, and Brazil.49 The paper got some details wrong; but just as was the case when Harian Rakyat covered Guatemala in 1954, Chile’s left-wing press described events in Indonesia more accurately than the mainstream US press at the time.
While she studied at the University of Chile, Carmen was more sympathetic to the MIR than to the Communist Party, though she had a verbal sparring partner in Carlos Berger, a wild soccer fan who had been a disciplined, polite Communist Party member since he was fourteen. He was a man of incredible integrity, she realized—that is, in the old-school Communist way. He was totally devoted to the cause, to moral living. Nothing was for himself—everything was for a bigger cause.
The events in Indonesia would be a point in the MIR’s favor in those ideological debates, Carmen thought. The violence did seem to support the MIR position, just as the 1954 coup in Guatemala had been proof for Che that peaceful revolution wasn’t possible. Still, the Communist Party remained unconvinced; it wasn’t the 1950s anymore, and this was mature Chile, the thinking went, not Central America or a little island in the Caribbean. Allende himself had become more radical after he heard about what happened in Guatemala in 1954.50 But like Carlos and the Communist Party, he believed in Chile’s institutions.
Thailand
In 1965, Benny was living in Bangkok. After finishing his studies so close to all those generals in Kansas, he went on to get his PhD in economics at the University of Texas, and then landed a job with the United Nations.
Thailand was a reliably pro-Western country, so that was where the regional UN headquarters were located. It was also where the CIA was based in the region, and the KGB had some agents there too. Both groups kept asking Benny out for food or drinks, perhaps trying to get information from him, or to feel him out as a possible asset. Benny would go, and just engage in small talk, entirely bemused by the whole thing.51
The CIA man who kept asking Benny to lunch was named Allan Fuehrer, which was hilarious to Benny and his UN colleagues, because, well, that’s literally what Hitler was called. What made Benny laugh even more was that the CIA and the KGB men seemed not to know what his job was or what he could do for them. He was on the economics side of UN activities, and had nothing to do with the political work, so they would be wasting their time even if he had any interest in helping them. Which he did not.
Benny also watched as Bangkok slowly began to turn into a destination for sex tourism—American soldiers would visit for their “rest and recreation” breaks from the war in Vietnam. The steady inflow of GIs transformed parts of the city into a kind of factory row for prostitution.
Benny overheard those men talking about what they were doing back in Vietnam. There was a bar, Rendezvous, where the pilots would come and get drunk, and they’d just let it rip. “I dropped a load of fucking bombs on that village,” they’d say, as soon as they fell into the chairs. The world didn’t quite know yet, but Benny knew just from hanging out at Rendezvous that something very disturbing was beginning to take place to his east. The pilots were clearly describing indiscriminate bombing and the massacre of civilians.
Benny first heard about the September 30th Movement on Radio Australia, which means—as he would find out only later—he actually heard a version broadcast by a station actively assisting in a psychological warfare campaign against the PKI. He was sitting in the garden with his wife, who was pregnant with their second child.
Later, a man from the embassy came to ask him some questions. Did he know anything about Jakarta? What did he think? He didn’t know anything, he said. He really didn’t.
As things worsened back home, Indonesians all around the world were being forced to declare their allegiances, and Benny’s Chinese heritage made the new government doubly suspicious. His wife was also part of an Indonesian women’s group, a semicompulsory organization of Indonesian wives and UN workers living abroad who supported Sukarno’s causes, such as his conflict with Malaysia.
Benny was called in to the embassy for interrogation. The question was very simple.
“Who are your best friends in Jakarta?”
Benny had to be strategic now. He had always been opposed to communism, but never anti-Sukarno. He figured he knew exactly what to say to these interrogators. He gave them the names of rich, well-connected Catholic Indonesians who were forming an anticommunist nucleus around Suharto. He knew them from his days at the expensive private school he had attended, and figured they would vouch for him.
It worked. He was allowed to get back to work at the UN. But in 1968, a military attaché in Bangkok contacted Benny with a friendly warning. The name he was born with, Hong Lan Oei, was too Chinese. Suharto had severed relations with China and banned all Chinese-language materials in Indonesia. Even Chinese characters were banned. The government had passed legislation strongly recommending that Chinese Indonesians drop names of Chinese origin. Benny had gotten away with keeping his own name on his passport for a while, because he was outside the country and working at the UN. But he had two options. Either he would drop his family name, or he would be subjected to periodic harassment and interrogation.
Like so many Indonesians of Chinese descent, he picked a Javanese-sounding last name. From then on, he was officially Benny Widyono.
In 1967, Southeast Asian nations came together in Bangkok to launch a new organization, called ASEAN. Previously, only the Philippines, the Federation of Malaya, and Thailand—all Western-facing conservative powers—made up a group called the Association of Southeast Asia. But now, with Suharto in power in Indonesia, the region’s largest country and young Singapore joine
d them to form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. A few things united them—authoritarian developmentalism, close ties with Washington, and, most importantly, anticommunism.52
In the 1970s, Thailand’s government would kill thousands of people in its own anticommunist purge.53
Cuba
In 1963, President Sukarno had sent his old friend A. M. Hanafi to Havana, to serve as Indonesia’s first ambassador to Cuba in the age of Fidel Castro. He wasn’t a communist, but he was a committed revolutionary, loyal to the president since the days of the struggle against the Dutch back in the 1940s. He got along well with Fidel and Che, and his family settled into a luxurious neighborhood on the Caribbean coast.
His daughter, Nury, was seventeen.54 She was impressed. Havana was more modern, more elegant than Jakarta. She was amazed to see that some of the grand houses in her neighborhood were filled with young students. “How lucky!” she thought. She couldn’t believe that youngsters like her would be allowed to live here, and spend all day just studying like this. She only found out later, as she began her own studies in Cuba, that this part of the city had served as the “bordel of the United States,” a vacation paradise for playboys and mafia types, and that the houses had been reclaimed by the revolution. That explained a lot.
As a child back in Jakarta, she had intimately felt the effects of political conflict. One of the attempts to assassinate Sukarno—maybe carried out by the Islamists? By the CIA? Who knew?—consisted of throwing a grenade into Nury’s school, in the downtown neighborhood of Cikini, as he was visiting one day. Things felt a lot calmer in Cuba, at least in her corner of town.
Her father, now Ambassador Hanafi, was planning the Tricontinental Conference, an ambitious expansion of the Bandung project, set for January 1966. Then, while he was away for business, Nury heard about the events in Jakarta of October 1, 1965. Hanafi didn’t return as planned. Nury and her family only got patches of information, before learning that he had gone to visit Sukarno at the palace in Bogor. Suharto, now effectively in power, made Hanafi an offer in an attempt to get him to join his new government. He refused, saying that Sukarno had posted him to Cuba as ambassador, and that was the mission he was going to carry out.
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