BOOK
REVIEW Bare bones of Suharto's secrets Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup by Helen-Louise
Hunter
Reviewed by Andrew Symon
SINGAPORE - Indonesia's former president Suharto took many secrets with him to
his final resting place on his death in late January. But none were arguably as
important as the unanswered questions about his role in the attempted 1965 coup
d'etat - portrayed at the time as being masterminded by the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI) - and how he leveraged those events to maneuver into
power, replacing the left-leaning president Sukarno.
The official version of those events, which later underpinned the legitimacy of
his rule, was that Suharto saved the day for the country after six of the
country's top generals were horribly murdered early in the morning of October 1
by communist plotters. Then the head of the military's Jakarta-based strategic
reserve, Kostrad, and second in line to
army minister and commander, Ahmad Yani, who was among those killed that
fateful morning, Suharto moved quickly through the day to neutralize the
supposed threat.
By uniting the military behind him, he ensured that Indonesia survived a
descent into virtual anarchy when angry Indonesians, often with the assistance
of the army, attacked and killed as many as 500,000 PKI members and their
followers across the country. Suharto gained ever-greater legal powers,
initially under a special order by Sukarno in March 1966, giving him sweeping
authority, then by his eventual appointment as acting president in 1967 and
finally, the year after, as full president by the supreme legislative body
under Indonesia's constitution.
Thus
were the tumultuous beginnings of Suharto's New Order regime, which ruled with
an iron fist until 1998. One of the early foreign studies to support the story
that the attack on the generals was indeed a PKI conspiracy was a 1968 US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study entitled Indonesia - 1965: The Coup
that Backfired. Now, the report has been published in revised book form as Sukarno
and the Indonesian Coup: the Untold Story.
Helen-Louise Hunter, the book's author, who spent many years in the CIA as an
analyst and later became a lawyer, maintains the argument of PKI involvement,
but also asserts that Sukarno knew about and approved the plot. Basing the
study on Indonesian army records from post-October 1 interrogations and trial
reports, she says the plot's aim was to remove opposition from the
anti-communist leadership so that a new socialist state could be proclaimed
under president Sukarno with the PKI chairman, Aidit, as his successor.
This version of events, of course, has been questioned ever since the alleged
coup attempt was foiled. A counterview, as argued by Bob Elson, professor of
Southeast Asian History at the University of Queensland in Australia, and
author of the currently available Suharto: a Political Biography, is
that the PKI's role was limited to a handful of its top leaders who were aware
of the military officers' plot and saw in the pressure-cooker political
atmosphere of the time that they could gain advantage from the situation.
The PKI, at the time a legal political party with some 3 million members plus
as many as 20 million more in associated organizations, had gained an
influential position in Sukarno's Indonesia. But its leadership feared the
army, particularly in light of rumors of a secret Council of Generals, linked
to the US government and the CIA, which allegedly planned to take over
government. They knew that with Sukarno's health uncertain, should he die, the
army could clamp down violently on the PKI.
There were also divisions within the army, ranging from strongly pro-US
generals and officers to nationalist so-called "Sukarnoists" and staunch PKI
supporters. A small group of middle-level officers, disenchanted with senior
staff who were seen to be living too much the good life in Jakarta, and
apparently influenced by the rumors about the Council of Generals, decided
pre-empt a pro-US move and take matters into their own hands.
The generals would be kidnapped and then presented to Sukarno for a dressing
down and sacking - or at least demotion or move sideways. But things apparently
went badly wrong with the plot when the generals were murdered. Elson told Asia
Times Online that the plot was most likely an attempt to change in only a
limited way the "political configuration", but it became terribly "botched up"
with the murder of the generals.
"What they had planned was a lightning strike against a group of generals they
had reason to believe was plotting a real coup," contends Elson. "Their strike
was pre-emptive and its purposes limited."
Suharto and the army then took advantage of the situation by portraying the
affair as a PKI conspiracy, fueling vengeance within the rank and file and
around the country by falsely saying the generals had been tortured and badly
mutilated by communist youth and women. This historical falsehood was
maintained throughout the New Order, and was seared deep in the national
consciousness each year in the 1990s in the movie Penumpasan G30S/PKI, which
was shown on Indonesian television.
Historical gaps Hunter's book does not thoroughly examine Suharto's move to power, nor
does she focus much attention on how he subsequently presided over the mass
killings of PKI members and supporters in late 1965 and early 1966; estimates
of the carnage range from 90,000 to 500,000 killed.
But she does state clearly that there was no "ghastly" mutilation of the
generals and she underlines that the attempted coup did result in an anti-PKI
massacre that ranks "as one of the worst mass murders in the 20th century,
along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the
Second World War and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s".
A major criticism of Hunter's book might be that she does not delve deep enough
into the questions still lingering over Suharto's possible role in the initial
kidnappings. Given his seniority and authority as Kostrad commander, why was he
not among those generals kidnapped?
One of the coup's leaders, ex-colonel Abdul Latief, who was pardoned and
released from prison only in 1999, claimed that he told Suharto that an attack
on a group of senior generals was imminent and that Suharto made no move to
prevent it. Latief made the claims at his trial in 1978 - 13 years after the
actual event - but records of his testimony were not made public at the time.
He received a death sentence that was never carried out.
Suharto consistently denied having spoken to Latief, including when the
question was again raised after his fall from power in 1998. Elson believes
that Latief's account was essentially accurate, though that does not mean that
Suharto was necessarily part of the conspiracy.
Suharto may have discounted Latief's warning in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of
the time, or because the plot was not explained in detail and as originally
designed anyway it meant they would be summoned to the palace to meet Sukarno.
Another plausible but unconfirmed explanation could be that Suharto recognized
the gravity of the plot but chose to wait and see how events played out before
positioning himself.
Yet another key unanswered question: was there ever a pro-US Council of
Generals maneuvering behind the scenes? With communism on the march, the
mid-1960s were a very uncertain time for US and Western interests in Indonesia
and Southeast Asia. Earlier in the decade, Sukarno had challenged the merger of
the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah into Malaysia as an imperialist move and
he was waging a low-level war, or Konfrontasi, with Malaya in Borneo, which was
defended by British and Commonwealth soldiers.
Having already committed combat troops on a large scale to fight communism in
Vietnam in March 1965, Washington was worried. Indonesia was home to the
world's largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union and China and the
US feared the left-leaning Sukarno's increasing orientation towards Beijing.
Resonating with current US anti-proliferation policy, there may have also been
a nuclear component.
Indonesia's interest in the civilian application of nuclear energy dated back
to the mid-1950s, and in the early 1960s the country was supported in this by
the US, resulting in construction of a research reactor in Bandung in West
Java. Under Sukarno's increasingly nationalist rule in the early 1960s, and one
increasingly oriented away from the US and West and towards communist China,
the idea of Indonesia having a nuclear weapons capability was also put forward.
There were apparently fears in Washington at the time that Jakarta was seeking
assistance from China for weapons development and after Beijing's first nuclear
bomb test in 1964, Indonesian officials publicly spoke of their desire to build
a bomb. In July 1965, Sukarno gave the idea his approval, but the pro-bomb talk
notably came to an end shortly after his fall and Suharto's rise in the wake of
the failed coup attempt in October 1965.
Elson argues that there undoubtedly would have been meetings among like-minded
senior Indonesian officers concerned about where the country was heading. But
no concrete evidence has ever surfaced that there was a coherent right-wing
cabal supported by the US and CIA - unlike the situation in 1958 when there was
what is now a well-documented CIA-sponsored rebellion among army officers in
Sumatra and Sulawesi against Jakarta in an effort to break up the new sprawling
state and bring down Sukarno. Sukarno and others had good reason to feel that a
repeat US effort to destabilize the country was possible.
Comprehensive documents published by the US Department of State, Foreign
Relations, 1964-1968, Indonesia; Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines, now available
online
indicate that the US government knew very little about what was going on at the
time - much to Washington's frustration. After the October 1 botched coup, the
US did try to steer the situation to its advantage, not just by supporting
Suharto but also through covert assistance for the PKI's destruction.
As Hunter writes, the attempted coup of 1965 and its outcome was one of the
most significant events of the 20th century, not just for Indonesia, but
internationally: "The decimation of the Indonesian Communist Party ... and the
complete turnabout in Indonesia's international alignment - from that of
communist China's close ally in growing estrangement from the rest of the world
... to a new posture as friend of the West ... was nothing less than an upset
of the world balance of power."
Now with the strongman and his 32-year authoritarian tenure firmly in the
grave, Indonesians are left to ask: At what price?
Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: The Untold Story by Helen-Louise
Hunter. Praeger Security International (May 30, 2007) . ISBN-10: 0275974383.
Price US$75, 216 pages.
Andrew Symon is a Singapore-based
journalist and analyst who was based in Jakarta from 1992-97. He may be reached
at andrew.symon@yahoo.com.sg
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
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Thus
were the tumultuous beginnings of Suharto's New Order regime, which ruled with
an iron fist until 1998. One of the early foreign studies to support the story
that the attack on the generals was indeed a PKI conspiracy was a 1968 US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study entitled Indonesia - 1965: The Coup
that Backfired. Now, the report has been published in revised book form as Sukarno
and the Indonesian Coup: the Untold Story.
