During about five months from late October 1965 until March 1966, approximately half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) were killed by army units and anti-communist militias. At the time of its destruction, the PKI was the largest communist party in the non-communist world and was a major contender for power in Indonesia. President Sukarno’s Guided Democracy had been an uneasy balance between the PKI and its leftist allies on one hand and a conservative coalition of military, religious and liberal groups, presided over by Sukarno. Sukarno was a spellbinding orator and an accomplished ideologist, having woven the main rival ideologies in Indonesia into an eclectic formula called NASAKOM (nationalism, religion, communism), but he was ailing and there was a widespread feeling that either the communists or their opponents would soon seize power.
The catalyst for the killings was a coup in Jakarta, undertaken by the ‘September 30 Movement’ but actually carried out on October 1, 1965. Although many aspects of the coup remain uncertain, it appears to have been the work of junior army officers and a PKI ‘Special Bureau’ answering to the party chairman D.N. Aidit. The aim of the coup was to forestall a predicted military coup planned for Armed Forces Day (5 October) by kidnapping the senior generals believed to be the plotters. After some of the generals were killed in botched operations, however, and after Sukarno refused to support the Movement, the plotters went further than previously planned and attempted to seize power. Unprepared for such a drastic action, the Movement floundered and was defeated within 24 hours by the senior surviving general, Suharto, who was commander of the Army’s Strategic Reserve, KOSTRAD.
There was no clear proof at the time that the coup had been the work of the PKI. Party involvement was suggested by the presence of Aidit at the plotters’ headquarters in Halim air force base, just south of Jakarta, and by the involvement of communist-affiliated People’s Youth (Pemuda Rakyat) members in some of the operations, but the public pronouncements and activities of the September 30 Movement gave it the appearance of being an internal army movement. Nonetheless, for many observers it seemed likely that the party was behind the coup. In 1950, the PKI had explicitly abandoned revolutionary war in favour of a peaceful path to power through parliament and elections. This strategy had been thwarted in 1957, when Sukarno suspended parliamentary rule and began to construct Guided Democracy, which emphasised balance and cooperation between the diverse ideological streams present in Indonesia.
The PKI, however, had recovered to become a dominant ideological stream. Leftist ideological statements permeated the public rhetoric of Guided Democracy and the party appeared to be by far the largest and best organized political movement in the country. Its influence not only encompassed the poor and disadvantaged, but extended well into military and civilian elites, which appreciated the party’s nationalism and populism, its reputation for incorruptibility and its potential as a channel of access to power. On the other hand, party had many enemies: throughout Indonesia, the PKI had chosen sides in long-standing local conflicts and in so doing had inherited ancient enmities. It was also loathed by many in the army for its involvement in the 1948 Madiun Affair, a revolt against the Indonesian Republic during the war of independence against the Dutch. Although the party had many sympathizers in the armed forces and in the bureaucracy, it controlled no government departments and, more important, had no reliable access to weapons. Thus, although there were observers who believed that the ideological élan of the party and its strong mass bass would sweep it peacefully into power after Sukarno, others saw the party as highly vulnerable to army repression. A pre-emptive strike against the anti-communist high command of the army appeared to be an attractive strategy, and indeed it seems that this was the path chosen by Aidit, who appears to have been acting on his own and without reference to other members of the party leadership.
In fact, the military opponents of the PKI had been hoping for some time that the communists would launch an abortive coup which would provide a pretext for suppressing the party and the September 30 Movement therefore played into their hands. There is evidence that Suharto knew in advance that a plot was afoot, but there is neither evidence nor a plausible account to support the theory sometimes aired that the coup was an intelligence operation by Suharto to eliminate his fellow generals and compromise the PKI. Rather, Suharto and other conservative generals were ready to make the most of the opportunity which Aidit and the September 30 Movement provided.
The army’s strategy was to portray the coup as an act of consummate wickedness and as part of a broader PKI plan to seize power. Within days, military propagandists had reshaped the name of the coup Movement to construct the acronym GESTAPU, with its connotations of the ruthless evil of the Gestapo. They concocted a story that the kidnapped generals had been tortured and sexually mutilated by communist women before being executed and they portrayed the killings of October 1 as only a prelude to a planned nation-wide purge of anti-communists by PKI members and supporters. In lurid accounts, PKI members were alleged to have dug countless holes ready to receive the bodies of their enemies and to have been trained in the techniques of torture, mutilation and murder. The engagement of the PKI as an institution in the September 30 Movement was presented as fact rather than conjecture. Not only the party as a whole, but also its political allies and affiliated organizations were portrayed as being guilty both of the crimes of the September 30 Movement and of conspiracy to commit crimes on a far greater scale. At the same time, President Sukarno was portrayed as culpable for having tolerated the PKI within Guided Democracy. His effective powers were gradually circumscribed and he was finally stripped of the presidency on March 12, 1967. General Suharto took over and installed a military-dominated, development-oriented regime known as the New Order which survived until 1998.
In this context, the army began a purge of the PKI from Indonesian society. PKI offices were raided, ransacked and burnt. Communists and leftists were purged from government departments and private associations. Leftist organizations and leftist branches of larger organizations dissolved themselves. And within about two weeks of the suppression of the coup, the killing of communists began.
Remarkably few accounts of the killings were written at the time and the long era of military-dominated government which followed in Indonesia militated against further reporting. The destruction of the PKI was greeted enthusiastically by the West, with Time magazine describing it as ‘The West’s best news for years in Asia’ and there was no international pressure on the military to halt or limit the killings. After the fall of Suharto in 1998, there was some attempt to begin investigation of the massacres, but these efforts were hampered by continuing official and unofficial anti-communism and by the pressure to investigate more recent human rights abuses. President Abdurrahman Wahid (1999-2001) apologised for the killings on behalf of his orthodox Muslim association, Nahdlatul Ulama, but many Indonesians continued to regard the massacres as warranted. As a result, much remains unknown about the killings.
Many analyses of the massacres have stressed the role of ordinary Indonesians in killing their communist neighbours. These accounts have pointed to the fact that anti-communism became a manifestation of older and deeper religious, ethnic, cultural and class antagonisms. Political hostilities reinforced and were reinforced by more ancient enmities. Particularly in East Java, the initiative for some killing came from local Muslim leaders determined to extirpate an enemy whom they saw as infidel. Also important was the opaque political atmosphere of late Guided Democracy. Indonesia’s economy was in serious decline, poverty was widespread, basic necessities were in short supply, semi-political criminal gangs made life insecure in many regions and political debate was conducted with a bewildering mixture of venom and camaraderie. With official and public news sources entirely unreliable, people depended on rumour, which both sharpened antagonisms and exacerbated uncertainty. In these circumstances, the military’s expert labelling of the PKI as the culprit in the events of October 1, and as the planner of still worse crimes, unleashed a wave of mass retaliation against the communists in which the common rhetoric was one of ‘them or us’.
Accounts of the killings which have emerged in recent years, however, have indicated that the military played a key role in the killings in almost all regions. In broad terms, the massacres took place according to two patterns. In Central Java and parts of Flores and West Java, the killings took place as almost pure military operations. Army units, especially those of the elite para-commando regiment RPKAD commanded by Sarwo Edhie, swept through district after district arresting communists on the basis of information provided by local authorities and executing them on the spot. In Central Java, some villages where wholly PKI and attempted to resist the military, but they were defeated and all or most villagers were massacred. In a few regions – notably Bali and East Java – civilian militias, drawn from religious groups (Muslim in East Java, Hindu in Bali, Christian in some other regions) but armed, trained and authorized by the army, carried out raids themselves. Rarely did militias carry out massacres without explicit army approval and encouragement.
More common was a pattern in which party members and other leftists were first detained. They were held in police stations, army camps, former schools or factories and improvised camps, where they were interrogated for information and to obtain confessions before being taken away in batches to be executed, either by soldiers or by civilian militia recruited for the purpose. Most of the victims were killed with machetes or iron bars. (to be continue....)