A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  Elsewhere in Jakarta, six other top generals had also been attacked. Half a mile to the south, the chief of staff, the sprightly forty-three-year-old Ahmad Yani, had been shot as he tried to resist another group of kidnappers in his own home, as had generals Harjono and Panjaitan. Three more generals—Suprapto, Sutarjo and Parman—had been seized from their beds and bundled into waiting trucks. By first light, the seven trucks from the seven suburban homes had converged at the Halim air force base on the southeast edge of the city. There, on a patch of marshy ground beyond the end of the runway, the three surviving generals and Nasution’s unfortunate aide were shot. The bodies were thrown into a deep well known as Lubang Buaya, the ‘Crocodile Hole’. Six of Indonesia’s most senior generals were dead; a seventh was incapacitated and hiding in a flowerbed.

  Even half a century later, there is little consensus about what had really been going on in the early hours of 1 October 1965, but the bones of the affair are this: a group of junior officers, most notably Lieutenant Colonel Untung, the commander of the presidential palace guard, had organised a putsch against the top brass, who they believed were hostile to Sukarno. Having thrown the generals down the Crocodile Hole, they quickly moved to take control of the Istana Merdeka (from which Sukarno himself was absent, having spent the night with wife number five, the Japanese hostess, at her villa in the south of the city), the national radio station, and the telecommunications centre—all three places flanking Lapangan Merdeka. At 7.20 am, they went on the radio to announce that they were the self-proclaimed Gerakan Tiga-Puluh September, the ‘30 September Movement’, and that they had acted to safeguard the president against a cabal of right-wing generals who had been plotting to overthrow him. Later that day they made another broadcast, declaring that they were in the process of forming a revolutionary council to temporarily run the country.

  But by this time the nascent rebellion was falling apart. The one man the plotters had injudiciously left off their assassination list—the head of the army’s Strategic Reserve, a softly-spoken Javanese general by the name of Suharto—had quickly, calmly and efficiently assumed overall command of the military in Jakarta. Over the course of the day he had established which units were loyal, which were wavering, and which were with the rebels. It soon emerged that there were very few of the latter, and by 8 pm that evening the whole business was over. Most of the rebels had either fled or been arrested, and Suharto was in charge.

  The shocking murders of six generals, an aide, a policeman and a little girl notwithstanding, the 30 September Movement could well have been dismissed as a flash in the pan. The whole thing was over in less than twenty-four hours. But it was what would happen in the aftermath that really mattered.

  Who, if anyone, was behind the 30 September Movement has never been established with any certainty. The fact that both Sukarno and PKI leader Aidit turned up at the plotters’ Halim headquarters during the morning of 1 October has led some to suggest that either the president or the communists—or both—had ordered the putsch. But Halim was a natural place for Sukarno to head if there was unrest in the city: it was where he kept the presidential plane, ready to whisk him to safety if required. And it was also quite natural for Aidit to want to find out what was going on. The leaders of the 30 September Movement clearly banked on the support of the communists, but they were not actually PKI members, and it would not have been entirely logical for the party, which was already doing so well under guided democracy, to launch a revolution at that point.

  From elsewhere come seemingly far-fetched claims that the whole business was the doing of Suharto, who had somehow engineered a convoluted chain of events to allow him to seize power. And inevitably there are the suggestions that the CIA had been behind it all, creating a pretext for pro-American right-wingers to take control.

  Perhaps the most likely explanation is that things were exactly as they seemed: that the junior officers of the 30 September Movement really had believed that a coup against Sukarno was imminent and had acted on their own initiative, possibly with the tacit support of some elements of the PKI, but without the party’s full knowledge or approval.

  By the end of the first week of October, however, there was no room for alternative theories: the communists were to blame, and with all newspapers besides those owned by the army now shut down, some particularly grotesque propaganda was taking shape. The bodies had been fished out of the Crocodile Hole and false reports were circulating that they had been horribly mutilated, their eyes gouged out and their genitals hacked off. Soon, there were lurid stories, reported in the international as well as local media, that the killings had taken place in the midst of a deranged orgy, with the unhinged harpies of the PKI women’s movement dancing naked as the generals were hacked to death. Rumours spread that all over Indonesia the PKI had dug mass graves and stockpiled special eye-gouging instruments in readiness for a mass slaughter of Muslims, Christians, nationalists and anyone else they didn’t like.

  A new name for these forces of darkness had also been coined by some unknown propagandist: Gestapu, based on the Indonesian name of the 30 September Movement—Gerakan Tiga Puluh September. It was a somewhat odd acronym: in Indonesian dates the day always comes before the month, so the abbreviation should really have been Getapus. However, the rearranged word order produced a name that would remind many Westerners of the Nazi secret police, even if it meant nothing to most Indonesians. Soon, the acronym had been irreversibly wedded to another abbreviation in military and media pronouncements: the evil entity behind the bloody orgy at the Crocodile Hole and the great existential threat to Indonesia, it was said, was ‘Gestapu-PKI’.

  In the first weeks of October things were quiet. Reports drifted in that Muslim groups in Aceh had spontaneously slaughtered local PKI cadres, but across most of the country there was an uneasy calm. Suharto might have been in full control of the army and much of the media, but Sukarno was still the president, and he was doing his very best to quell the growing anti-PKI hysteria. Always a man to understand the potency of words, he even tried to stamp out the use of the term ‘Gestapu’, pointing out correctly that the entire affair had actually taken place on 1 October, Satu Oktober in Indonesian, and so should really be called ‘Gestok’.

  In the wake of the events of 1 October excited cables had bounced back and forth between British and American consulates in Indonesia and their home intelligence headquarters. The CIA and MI6 may not have been behind the bungled putsch, but they were certainly hoping that its aftermath might allow for the eradication of communism in Indonesia. On 7 October, the CIA worriedly reported to the White House that ‘Sukarno seems to be making progress in his efforts to play down the 30 September Movement and prevent any effective anti-communist action. The US embassy [in Jakarta] comments that there is danger the Army may settle for action against those directly involved in the murder of the generals and permit Sukarno to get much of his power back’. But they need not have worried.

  The organised mass killing of communists began in Central Java in late October. The army’s elite red beret para-commando unit RPKAD (later rechristened Kopassus) had headed east from Jakarta on 17 October under the command of General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo. Central Java was the one province where some of the local army units had come out in favour of the 30 September Movement, and PKI membership there was huge. In some of the villages they passed through, the troops were jeered by the residents. But Sarwo Edhie had been a close friend of the murdered General Ahmad Yani, and he was out for personal revenge as much as anything. Within weeks he had eliminated whatever power the PKI once had in Central Java, and in the process unleashed all the violent forces of the land.

  Sarwo Edhie later explained to the American journalist John Hughes what he had done:

  We decided to encourage the anti-Communist civilians to help with the job … we gathered together the youth, the nationalist groups, the religious organisations. We gave them two or three days’ training, then sent them out to kill the Communists… />
  By November 1965 a mass pogrom was underway all across Indonesia. Some accounts of the killings present them as a vast communal rampage and speak of the entire nation running amok as the built-up tensions of the previous decades exploded. But what was often most striking about the slaughter was how organised it was. Huge numbers of people were rounded up by the army. They underwent cursory interrogations, and those who were deemed to be passive supporters of the PKI were thrown into detention; anyone who was considered to be an active party member was handed over to the civilian killing squads. Their bodies were then dumped in rivers, ravines and mass graves.

  Youth groups of every stripe took part in the slaughter. In East Java the Nahdlatul Ulama’s youth wing, Ansor, were a major part of the process. The Kalimas River in Surabaya was clogged with bloated bodies that had floated down from the countryside. Elsewhere it was nationalist militias that did the work. In northern Sumatra the Pemuda Pancasila, the youth wing of the army-backed IPKI party, carried out much of the slaughter. Catholic, Protestant, Hindu and other organisations also did their bit, and entirely new militias were formed, too—groups of young men raised from villages or street gangs, armed, and sent out to kill. In many places the killings were coloured by old conflicts: the PKI’s attempted land reforms in East Java were avenged by the Muslim groups; in the plantation areas of Sumatra, locals vented their hostility against the migrant Javanese communities where PKI membership had been strong.

  Some of the worst violence was in Bali. The PKI had found strong support in the villages there. But Bali was also home to a more entrenched pre-colonial aristocracy than many other areas of the country, and there was a certain amount of inter-caste tension in this, the last part of Indonesia with a Hindu majority. When Sarwo Edhie and his commandos crossed the straits from Java to Bali at the start of December they found that sporadic violence had already begun.

  ‘Whereas in Central Java I was concerned to encourage the people to crush the Gestapu, [in Bali] on the other hand the people were already eager to crush the Gestapu to its roots’, Sarwo Edhie later said. By the end of the year, tens of thousands of people—possibly as much as 5 percent of the entire Balinese population—had been killed.

  By early 1966, the mass killings had petered out in many areas—for the very simple reason that most people who could be connected to the PKI, and a good many more besides, were already dead. Here and there the bloody forces that the army had unleashed showed signs of turning on each other. There were occasional clashes between nationalist and Muslim youth groups, and in some places anti-communist pogroms gave way to riots against the ethnic Chinese communities. The military began to rein in the violence, and by the middle of the year it was almost as if it had never happened. Some killing went on in scattered spots around the Archipelago over the next two years, but it was done quietly now, the victims taken out into the forest after dark. Most of the communists and suspected communist sympathisers who had survived were interred in prison camps in the forests of Sulawesi, or on remote islands in Maluku.

  No one really knows how many people died in the violence during the monsoon months of late 1965 and early 1966. The US ambassador to Indonesia at the time plumped for a round figure of three-hundred thousand; staunch critics of the Indonesian military often go for an arbitrary one or two million; and none other than Sarwo Edhie himself, speaking shortly before his death at the age of sixty-four in 1989, claimed that ‘three million were killed. Most of them on my orders’. Academics, meanwhile, tend to settle very tentatively on a conservative figure of five-hundred thousand. In the end, all that really matters is that a very great many people died.

  Strange voids were left in society all over Indonesia. In Kupang in West Timor in the second half of the 1960s, the locals had to get used to putting up with cracked pipes and leaking cisterns: the city’s plumbers had all been killed as suspected PKI members.

  Meanwhile, as the slaughter had spread across Indonesia then gradually subsided, there had been a change of regimes in Jakarta.

  During the first months after the 30 September Movement, Sukarno still seemed to be in full control of the presidency. He was genuinely horrified by the violence unfolding all across the country, and in one speech in December, when the killings were at their very height, he told his audience that ‘If we go on as we are, brothers, we are going to hell, really we are going to hell’. At the start of 1966, he announced the formation of a new cabinet, but it was little more than a ramshackle concoction of appointees, and with the communist constituency quite literally wiped out, guided democracy was now without an essential element in its precarious balance. What was more, Sukarno was now facing growing opposition from a quiet coalition of all manner of anti-communists. Before long this grouping, based around General Suharto, would be calling itself the ‘New Order’.

  The economy, meanwhile, had inched towards outright melt-down, with inflation running at 600 percent and the country defaulting on its commercial loans. As food costs spiralled and what was left of the national infrastructure crumbled, students came out on the streets of Jakarta, protesting against the economic chaos. Fresh violence looked entirely possible, and though he was still hoping to somehow manoeuvre himself out of the mess and regain the presidential initiative, Sukarno had no wish to see more bloodshed. On 11 March 1966, he signed an order that allowed Suharto ‘to take all measures considered necessary to guarantee the security, calm and stability of the government’. The order, in effect, gave the general extraordinary presidential powers.

  Over the next twelve months, Suharto and his allies quietly and carefully edged any remaining Sukarno allies out of the military and the political elite. Finally, in a parliamentary session on 12 March 1967, Sukarno was stripped of his title and all his remaining powers. He was shipped off to his residency in Bogor, the old country seat of the Dutch governors-general, where he would spend the last three lonely years of his life under house arrest. General Suharto, meanwhile, had been named acting president.

  While Indonesia had been convulsed by a bout of violence that would rank amongst the twentieth century’s worst episodes of mass killing, the mild-mannered, smiling Suharto had effected a slow, subtle, and in itself entirely bloodless coup.

  CHAPTER 10

  A NEW ORDER:

  SUHARTO, CRISIS,

  REFORM

  The town of Dili stands at the edge of the Ombai Strait on the north coast of East Timor. Its western suburbs are cut by the Comoro River, a broad smear of braided channels. To the east, a long arm of land reaches out towards the hazy hulk of Atauro Island, riding some fifteen miles offshore. To the south, behind the town, there are hills. They rise sharply, their ribbed flanks marked with patches of scorched grass and a thin speckling of trees. There is none of the rich, tropical vegetation of Java or Sumatra here. The air is different: it is hotter, drier. It smells like the air of northern Australia—which is hardly surprising, for Dili is far closer to Darwin than to Jakarta. It is a town at the limits of the Archipelago’s vastness.

  In the early 1970s, it was a place that seemed to have been forgotten by history, for in a post-colonial epoch East Timor was still a colonial territory. What was more, it was the possession of a European power that was already past its prime when the Dutch first arrived in the Archipelago almost four centuries earlier. East Timor was a ghostly survivor of the Portuguese empire.

  The first Portuguese sailors had arrived in East Timor in the sixteenth century, but they had made little serious effort to take control. Even by the middle of the seventeenth century there were reportedly just eight Portuguese officials in all of East Timor; any real power was split between the ‘Black Portuguese’, the mixed-race Catholics who made much of their Iberian origins but had no political ties with Portugal itself, the Dominican friars who ministered to them, and the local chieftains of the interior. By the nineteenth century a little more order had been established, but East Timor was hardly the jewel in a glittering colonial crown.

  The Portu
guese only fixed the border of their Timorese territories in 1914, drawing a line across the island’s midriff, with the Dutch in charge to the west. On the eve of World War II there was still virtually no modern infrastructure in Dili, no mains water or electricity, and no paved roads. East Timor had a rough time in the war. Japan invaded, and teams of Australian soldiers harried them from the hills, making it one corner of the Archipelago where Japanese supremacy was not entirely uncontested. Thousands of local people died during the fighting and occupation, but when peace returned and the soldiers departed, East Timor simply slipped back into the same lackadaisical Portuguese rule. It seemed to be a colony in a coma. But in 1975 the territory would come to its senses with an almighty shock.

  A year earlier in far-off Lisbon, a group of left-leaning military officers overthrew Portugal’s authoritarian regime. It was a singularly bloodless coup—no one was murdered or thrown down a well, and there were no pogroms in its aftermath. But the new government did decide to do away with imperial anachronisms. East Timor was faced with the alarming prospect of independence from Portugal.

  As Dili and the surrounding hills came to their senses, two main political arguments, and two main political parties, emerged. One party, the UDT, or ‘Timorese Democratic Union’, called for a slow and steady move towards autonomy, with old ties to Portugal maintained. The other, the ASDT—later to be better known as Fretilin, the ‘Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor’—wanted immediate and absolute independence. In August 1975 the two parties fought a brief but bitter civil war. Fretilin won, and the UDT leadership fled across the border into Indonesian West Timor.