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Indonesia The Coup and its Aftermath
By 1965 Indonesia had become a dangerous cockpit of
social and
political antagonisms. The PKI's rapid growth aroused the
hostility
of Islamic groups and the military. The ABRI-PKI balancing
act,
which supported Sukarno's Guided Democracy regime, was
going awry.
One of the most serious points of contention was the PKI's
desire
to establish a "fifth force" of armed peasants and workers
in
conjunction with the four branches of the regular armed
forces
(army, navy, air force, and police; see
Organization and Equipment of the Armed Forces
, ch. 5). Many officers were bitterly
hostile,
especially after Chinese premier Zhou Enlai offered to
supply the
"fifth force" with arms. By 1965 ABRI's highest ranks were
divided
into factions supporting Sukarno and the PKI and those
opposed, the
latter including ABRI chief of staff Nasution and Major
General
Suharto, commander of Kostrad. Sukarno's collapse at a
speech and
rumors that he was dying also added to the atmosphere of
instability.
The circumstances surrounding the abortive coup d'état
of
September 30, 1965--an event that led to Sukarno's
displacement
from power; a bloody purge of PKI members on Java, Bali,
and
elsewhere; and the rise of Suharto as architect of the New
Order
regime--remain shrouded in mystery and controversy. The
official
and generally accepted account is that procommunist
military
officers, calling themselves the September 30 Movement
(Gestapu),
attempted to seize power. Capturing the Indonesian state
radio
station on October 1, 1965, they announced that they had
formed the
Revolutionary Council and a cabinet in order to avert a
coup d'état
by corrupt generals who were allegedly in the pay of the
United
States Central Intelligence Agency. The coup perpetrators
murdered
five generals on the night of September 30 and fatally
wounded
Nasution's daughter in an unsuccessful attempt to
assassinate him.
Contingents of the Diponegoro Division, based in Jawa
Tengah
Province, rallied in support of the September 30 Movement.
Communist officials in various parts of Java also
expressed their
support.
The extent and nature of PKI involvement in the coup
are
unclear, however. Whereas the official accounts
promulgated by the
military describe the communists as having a
"puppetmaster" role,
some foreign scholars have suggested that PKI involvement
was
minimal and that the coup was the result of rivalry
between
military factions. Although evidence presented at trials
of coup
leaders by the military implicated the PKI, the testimony
of
witnesses may have been coerced. A pivotal figure seems to
have
been Syam, head of the PKI's secret operations, who was
close to
Aidit and allegedly had fostered close contacts with
dissident
elements within the military. But one scholar has
suggested that
Syam may have been an army agent provocateur who deceived
the
communist leadership into believing that sympathetic
elements in
the ranks were strong enough to conduct a successful bid
for power.
Another hypothesis is that Aidit and PKI leaders then in
Beijing
had seriously miscalculated Sukarno's medical problems and
moved to
consolidate their support in the military. Others believe
that
ironically Sukarno himself was responsible for
masterminding the
coup with the cooperation of the PKI.
In a series of papers written after the coup and
published in
1971, Cornell University scholars Benedict R.O'G. Anderson
and Ruth
T. McVey argued that it was an "internal army affair" and
that the
PKI was not involved. There was, they argued, no reason
for the PKI
to attempt to overthrow the regime when it had been
steadily
gaining power on the local level. More radical scenarios
allege
significant United States involvement. United States
military
assistance programs to Indonesia were substantial even
during the
Guided Democracy period and allegedly were designed to
establish a
pro-United States, anticommunist constituency within the
armed
forces.
In the wake of the September 30 coup's failure, there
was a
violent anticommunist reaction. By December 1965, mobs
were engaged
in large-scale killings, most notably in Jawa Timur
Province and on
Bali, but also in parts of Sumatra. Members of Ansor, the
Nahdatul
Ulama's youth branch, were particularly zealous in
carrying out a
"holy war" against the PKI on the village level. Chinese
were also
targets of mob violence. Estimates of the number
killed--both
Chinese and others--vary widely, from a low of 78,000 to 2
million;
probably somewhere around 300,000 is most likely.
Whichever figure
is true, the elimination of the PKI was the bloodiest
event in
postwar Southeast Asia until the Khmer Rouge established
its regime
in Cambodia a decade later.
The period from October 1965 to March 1966 witnessed
the
eclipse of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto to a position
of supreme
power. Born in the Yogyakarta region in 1921, Suharto came
from a
lower priyayi family and received military training
in Peta
during the Japanese occupation. During the war for
independence, he
distinguished himself by leading a lightning attack on
Yogyakarta,
seizing it on March 1, 1949, after the Dutch had captured
it in
their second "police action." Rising quickly through the
ranks, he
was placed in charge of the Diponegoro Division in 1962
and Kostrad
the following year.
After the elimination of the PKI and purge of the armed
forces
of pro-Sukarno elements, the president was left in an
isolated,
defenseless position. By signing the executive order of
March 11,
1966, Supersemar, he was obliged to transfer supreme
authority to
Suharto. On March 12, 1967, the MPRS stripped Sukarno of
all
political power and installed Suharto as acting president.
Sukarno
was kept under virtual house arrest, a lonely and tragic
figure,
until his death in June 1970.
The year 1966 marked the beginning of dramatic changes
in
Indonesian foreign policy. Friendly relations were
restored with
Western countries, Confrontation with Malaysia ended on
August 11,
and in September Indonesia rejoined the UN. In 1967 ties
with
Beijing were, in the words of Indonesian minister of
foreign
affairs Adam Malik, "frozen." This meant that although
relations
with Beijing were suspended, Jakarta did not seek to
establish
relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan. That same
year,
Indonesia joined Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and
Singapore
to form a new regional and officially nonaligned grouping,
the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN--see Glossary), which
was friendly to the West.
Data as of November 1992
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