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Published : 29 Sep 2021, 09:35 PM
Fifty-six years ago, a bloodbath was inaugurated in Indonesia in the aftermath of the murder of six senior generals of the Indonesian army. It was given out that on Sept 30, 965, a conspiracy by the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), the country's influential communist party, to seize the state had been foiled. The murdered generals, it was said, had been the victims of the party, that a seventh general named Suharto had survived the massacre. The death of the generals, in all these decades, have remained a mystery, given that the army under Suharto utilised the opportunity to neutralise President Ahmed Sukarno and push his government from power. There have been suspicions that the coup had been the brainchild of Suharto and his rightwing fellow officers and that the PKI had nothing to do with it. As it was, the PKI was already in an influential relationship with the Sukarno regime and therefore could not have been inclined to make a move to seize power.
Back in 1994, Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie, a former Malaysian deputy prime minister invited to a South Asian media seminar in Kathmandu as a special guest, at one point in his remarks let slip the thought that in 1964 the Kuala Lumpur authorities had been in contact with Suharto. That was all he said before quickly moving on to other themes. Now, if one looks back at 1964, it was a time when President Sukarno was engaged in his policy of confrontation — he called it confrontasi — against the government of Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdur Rahman. And if in that period Kuala Lumpur was keeping links with Suharto, it raises the very significant question of the degree to which the Malaysians and certainly such western governments as Lyndon Johnson's America were involved in fomenting the conspiracy against Sukarno and his administration. As the American journalist Vincent Bevins notes in his work, The Jakarta Method, the coup in September 1965 was a culmination of what he calls Washington's anti-communist crusade and the murder program that shaped our world. Years ago, the Australian journalist John Pilger, in his seminal book The New Rulers of the World, referred to the intense interest western multinational companies took in Indonesia soon after September 1965. At a conference in Geneva in 1967, presided over by David Rockefeller, the booty that was Indonesia, as Pilger calls it, was divided among General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank, US Steel, ICI and British American Tobacco.
Indonesia's tragedy, born of the darkness which engulfed the country in 1965, has not quite ended in that no open discussion has been there in all these decades on what actually transpired between September 1965 and early 1967, when anywhere between a million and two million Indonesians were murdered by the army on allegations that these citizens were either PKI members or communist sympathisers. The soldiers, many of whose officers had undergone higher training in the United States in the Sukarno period and were certainly indoctrinated in anti-socialist and anti-communist ideas before returning home, carted off thousands of people to prison, where they were to remain for years, even decades. To this day, none of the surviving former inmates of prisons are ready to speak out on the torture they endured under the new dispensation. Not a single Indonesian government that has followed the collapse of what would be a kleptocratic regime of General Suharto has ever indicated a willingness to initiate a conversation on the ramifications of 30 September 1965. The murder of the popular PKI leader DN Aidit by the army remains a blot on Indonesian history, with no efforts to unearth the truth of his kidnap and brutal killing. Under Aidit, the PKI happened to be the world's third largest communist party, after those of China and the Soviet Union. Yet by 1967 it had been brutalised out of existence by the Suharto regime.
The rise of Suharto was a carefully orchestrated move by the soldiers, who moved swiftly to strip President Sukarno of many of his powers. The President was concerned at the pogrom that had seized the country but, wings clipped, he had little way of exercising his lapsed authority. By 1967, Sukarno would finally be pushed out of office after agreeing to hand over authority to Suharto, who would then embark on taking Indonesia into the Western orbit of influence. He and his family would, for the subsequent thirty-two years, preside over unbridled corruption in the country. Meanwhile, Dr Subandrio, Indonesia's articulate foreign minister under Sukarno, would be put on trial by the new regime and sentenced to death. In the event, Subandrio would escape execution but would remain in prison for twenty-nine years, till 1995. He died in 2004, President Sukarno having preceded him in 1970.
The anniversary of the 30 September coup, or abortive coup, in Indonesia calls for intense and focused scrutiny. Light needs to be shed on Henry Kissinger's lightning visit to Jakarta before the tragic events came to pass in 1965, ostensibly to explore the chances of a rightwing coup against the Sukarno government. Once the military went into destroying the PKI and terrorising the country through its programme of extermination of communists, the Johnson administration in Washington handed over to the Suharto regime a list of 4,000 alleged communists prepared by the CIA, obviously a signal for their elimination.
Indonesians need closure over the mass murders which shook up their country between 1965 and 1967. That can only be done if and when its government, currently led by President Joko Widodo, decides to go for an examination of the truth, indeed for soul-searching. The search for the truth can only have one objective — of knowing who and why all those Indonesians were killed, who orchestrated the coup, the extent to which foreign conspiracy undermined the Sukarno government, to what degree the Suharto regime pilfered national resources. The men and women who, victimised by the military but remaining silent about their memories of terror, need encouragement to come forth and speak out on the nature of their sufferings.
A nation which papers over the dark chapters of its history only promotes the cause of anti-history. The long silence needs to be broken in Jakarta.
