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  The occupation of large landholdings and parts of plantations brought the PKI’s mass organization, Barisan Tani Indonesia (the Indonesian Peasants’ Front), into direct conflict with a rural class of landowners in Java and the army managers of plantations. That most PKI followers in Central Java and East Java were from the abangan (fairly nominal) stream of Islam, while the landlords were often from the santri (devout) stratum, if not members of the local pesantren (Koranic schools), sharpened the conflict. The backlash against the “godless” communists turned violent.

  Sukarno stepped in at the end of 1964 to moderate the rural conflict. But the UN General Assembly’s election of Malaysia to a seat on its security council sent Sukarno to a new level of fury in January 1965. He withdrew Indonesia from the United Nations and approved the training and arming of a “fifth force” of civilian volunteers (in addition to the army, navy, air force, and police).

  The Year of Living Dangerously, which Sukarno had announced on Indonesia’s national day in August 1964, was becoming just that. Events were taking a dramatic, deadly turn; nearly fifty years later, historians and even the surviving participants are still trying to untangle them. In two nights in Jakarta, a series of abductions, murders, troop maneuvers, radio broadcasts, arrests, threats, and bluffs changed the strategic settings of the biggest country in Southeast Asia. Like the sprawling city at the time, which was mostly lit dimly by kerosene lamps and an unreliable electricity supply, the shadowy period has spawned all kinds of theories and conspiracies. Was the pivotal event an attempted communist coup, a fake one, or neither? Were the key participants idealists, dummies, or dupes? Was the instigator working for the PKI or for the army? How was it that the senior general who had been left off the hit list reacted with such “uncanny efficiency” to take power? Was it all planned?

  From all the records, including declassified diplomatic archives in Washington and London, the events of January 1965 had inspired the Indonesian army to intensively plan for a showdown with the PKI. In response to the threat of Sukarno’s “fifth force” to their monopoly of armed force, the US-trained army chief, General Achmad Yani, and four of his senior generals, all strongly anticommunist, began discussing how to meet the looming PKI challenge. Over the next two months, their plan took firm shape. The army would not mount a crude coup d’état against Sukarno: he was simply too popular. Nor would it strike preemptively against the PKI, which would risk Sukarno’s opposition. Instead, as American and allied diplomats reported, the generals’ plan was to be ready with a countercoup if and when the PKI made a move—as the army hoped it would.

  By May, rumors of a pro-Western “Council of Generals” reached Sukarno, and he called in Yani to explain. The general said the rumors must be referring to a promotions committee. Midyear, the foreign minister, Subandrio, brandished an intercepted telegram said to be from the British ambassador, which referred to “our local army friends” and some unspecified secret “enterprise.”

  According to a highly plausible reconstruction of events by an American scholar, John Roosa, the PKI’s chairman, D. N. Aidit, around this time called in his chief secret agent. Kamaruzaman, then aged forty-one and known generally as Sjam, was a man of Arab descent from the North Java coast; after a comparatively good education, he had been a trade union organizer on the Jakarta docks following independence. Aidit, who had emerged from hiding in 1951 and taken the PKI leadership, assigned Sjam to what became the PKI’s special bureau, keeping watch on the army. Sjam took up cover as a small businessman. He reported directly and only to Aidit.

  By August 1965, Sjam was reporting that Yani and his right-wing generals were planning a coup. The annual Armed Forces’ Day parade in Jakarta on October 5, when battalions and tanks were assembled in the capital, loomed as an obvious occasion on which it might be launched. Sjam had also identified and made contact with a number of middle-ranking officers who were alarmed at this prospect. Aidit grew increasingly attracted to the idea of an internal army putsch by these officers to remove the plotting generals. The move would not be seen as a PKI operation and would, he hoped, be endorsed by Sukarno and might result in a new, more “progressive” army leadership.

  So the plot for the 30 September Movement was hatched between the left-wing officers and the PKI spy. Sjam assured Aidit of its sound military planning and gave the officers the impression that high-ranking officials of the PKI had decided on a decisive blow. Both claims were incorrect.

  The officers moved late on the night of September 30, assembling small numbers of troops at Lubang Buaya, then an unpopulated stretch of rubber trees on the edge of the Halim air force base. In a camp there over the previous six months, several hundred members of the PKI women’s movement, Gerwani, and its youth wing, Pemuda Rakyat, had been given some basic military training by the air force as part of efforts to create the “fifth force.” Sjam, another member of the PKI special bureau, and the three leading rebel officers made their headquarters at the house of an air force sergeant at the air base. Aidit and his immediate PKI staff awaited developments in another house on the base, half a kilometer away.

  At about 3:15 on the morning of October 1, trucks containing seven teams of soldiers left Lubang Buaya and headed into the city, storming into the homes of the sleeping generals who had been identified as members of the coup-plotting council. Resistance came at the houses of Yani and two other generals, and they were shot dead. The defense minister, Nasution, jumped over the back wall of his garden and managed to hide. A bullet killed his five-year-old daughter, and an aide was mistakenly arrested in his place. Three other generals were taken alive. By about 5:30 a.m. the bodies and the captives were back at Lubang Buaya.

  Meanwhile, two army battalions, which had been called in from East Java and Central Java to take part in the upcoming Armed Forces’ Day parade, were ordered out of their temporary camps by middle-ranking officers and deployed around Merdeka Square, the vast park in the center of Jakarta’s government district. They took up positions on three sides of the square, controlling the presidential palace, the national broadcaster, Radio Republic Indonesia, and the central telephone and telegraph exchange. Dozens of PKI youth were called in to assist.

  At 7:15 a.m. the radio station broadcast an announcement: the 30 September Movement, led by a commander of the presidential guard and well-known hero of the New Guinea campaign, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, had arrested several generals, known for their dissolute lifestyles, in order to preempt a “counterrevolutionary” coup that was planned for October 5. The aim was to protect Sukarno and his goals.

  But the operation was already unraveling. Roosa has argued that the generals were not meant to be killed but to be paraded and humiliated in front of Sukarno, in the manner of the patriotic kidnappings of wavering leaders during the independence struggle—including of Sukarno and Hatta themselves in August 1945. Instead, the 30 September Movement had the bloodied bodies of Yani and two others. At some point, it was decided to execute the four captives, as well, and dump all the bodies in the well at Lubang Buaya.

  Outside Jakarta, the only military units to join the movement later in the morning were from the Central Java command, where middle-ranking officers seized control in Semarang, Yogyakarta, Solo, and Salatiga. Only in Yogyakarta did PKI organizations turn out in support.

  In addition, the president was missing—he was not at the palace. After a long speech the previous evening, he’d gone to spend the night at the home of his third wife, the Japanese-born Dewi. When he woke the next morning, aides told him of unidentified troops around the palace. Sukarno moved to the house of his fourth wife, Harjati, and then, toward midmorning, to the Halim airfield—not because he knew it was the 30 September Movement’s base but because it was his default place of retreat in times of crisis, since a special aircraft was always at his disposal.

  At the house of the base commander, Sukarno learned more about the events of the day from the most se
nior officer involved, Brigadier General Supardjo, a late addition to the movement. The air force chief, Marshal Omar Dani, had meanwhile spent the night at the base trying to find out what was going on. He and other air force officers, from a service known for its sympathies with Sukarno’s anti-Western policies, had cheered the radio announcement.

  By early afternoon, according to testimony by Supardjo and Omar Dani at their trials, Sukarno had deduced that the generals were dead. He asked Supardjo to call the movement off, fearing a left-right conflict that would open Indonesia up to dismemberment by neocolonialist forces.

  The coup leaders debated what to do. The army officers deferred to Sjam, assuming that he was part of a bigger scheme. Sjam himself desperately tried to keep his collapsing movement together. Possibly he was the instigator of three further radio broadcasts, which dissolved the existing cabinet under Sukarno, announced the membership of a broad-based revolutionary council, and, bizarrely, abolished all military ranks above lieutenant colonel.

  The commander of the army’s strategic reserve, or Kostrad, Major General Suharto, was not targeted, even though he usually stood in as acting army chief when Yani was aboard. Nor was the Kostrad headquarters, which was located on the fourth side of Merdeka Square, seized.

  By 6:30 on the morning of October 1, Suharto was at Kostrad, assessing the reports of shooting and spilled blood at the missing generals’ homes in the nearby suburb of Menteng. He concluded that Yani was dead and took over his position, with the assent of other generals who had made contact during the morning. However, he had ignored a verbal message from Sukarno appointing another general as army chief and prevented that general from going to see the president.

  In the early afternoon, Suharto sent an ultimatum to the troops across the square to surrender or face attack. The East Java battalion came over to Kostrad, while the Central Java battalion boarded trucks and retreated to Halim. By early evening the square was in Suharto’s control, and the radio station was playing his message that the 30 September Movement had been put down. The army’s best-trained troops, the Special Forces, were sent to seize control of the Halim air base and its surrounds.

  At 8 p.m. Suharto advised the president to leave the base for his own safety; Sukarno drove off to the palace at Bogor, the town at the foot of mountains just south of Jakarta. The leaders of the 30 September Movement sneaked away during the night. Sjam, Colonel Abdul Latief, and Supardjo went into hiding in Jakarta. Untung took a train to Central Java. Aidit was given an air force plane to reach Yogyakarta. When the Special Forces, under their fiercely anticommunist commander, Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, arrived at Halim and Lubang Buaya in the early hours of October 2, they met only desultory resistance from leaderless troops and civilians.

  A rising smell from the sealed-off well and interrogation of captives at Lubang Buaya soon indicated where the generals’ bodies were. Suharto came out in person to supervise the retrieval. By then he’d gotten a signed instruction from Sukarno to restore order. The Armed Forces’ Day parade was replaced by a grim funeral procession through Jakarta.

  That same day, Suharto and the other generals decided that this was all the excuse they needed to smash the PKI—to the relief of the CIA station chief, Hugh Tovar, who’d been worried that the army might miss the opportunity.

  The campaign did not visibly get started until mid-October, by which time it was quite clear that the PKI had not even tried to call out its supporters en masse. The civilian PKI involvement in the 30 September Movement had been limited to the few hundred Gerwani and Pemuda Rakyat members at Lubang Buaya and the communications facility on Merdeka Square, as well as those who had rallied in Yogyakarta. The PKI’s top leadership was nowhere to be seen. The party’s newspaper, Harian Rakyat, had cautiously backed the movement in its last edition, printed in the night of October 1, but painted it as part of an internal struggle within the army.

  As soon as the generals’ bodies were brought to the surface on October 2, the propaganda writers on Suharto’s intelligence staff swung into action. The generals had been tortured, emasculated, and killed by naked, frenzied Gerwani members, who, during the training at Lubang Buaya, had been given stimulant drugs and encouraged to take part in sexual orgies by their PKI superiors. Autopsies later tabled in trials showed no evidence of this, but the misinformation and “psywar” created the impression that the PKI’s perfidy and inversion of the natural order extended down to its rank-and-file members.

  Across Indonesia, district army commanders called in PKI members and mass organizations, and went around to houses with lists. Leaders were put in trucks, taken to fields, and shot on the edges of mass graves. Hundreds of thousands of others were taken to temporary prison camps.

  In Central Java, senior commanders had rallied powerful armored and other units against the 30 September Movement and smashed its grip on the major cities by October 5. Sarwo Edhie Wibowo arrived in Semarang with commandos of the Special Forces. They quickly put down a strike by railway workers and then drove their armored cars and trucks into Central Java, machine-gunning any protesting PKI supporters. In Solo, where PKI supporters continued to come out in protest, Sarwo Edhie’s troops ran quick training courses so that army-friendly groups could make arrests and perform executions. Elsewhere in Java, the Muslim organization that had battled the PKI over land reallocation the previous year was given the green light to begin sweeps against party supporters. The santri (devout) young men who walked through their villages to the mosque in green sarongs and black fez-type caps became members of death squads at night, calling their mostly abangan (nominally Muslim) PKI neighbors out to local fields or river banks and then killing them with knives and blows.

  Colonel Kemal Idris, the army’s anti-Malaysia commander based in Medan, North Sumatra, had begun rounding up and executing known PKI leaders in the region almost as soon as he heard the Untung broadcast. Here, the army subcontracted some of the killings of the PKI’s rank and file to members of an army-sponsored youth movement, Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth), which was headed by a former boxer, Effendi Nasution. Many of its city members were street thugs who made money from systematic ticket scalping at Medan’s cinemas. Across the street from the movies, they began butchering actual or suspected PKI members. In Bali, the killing started on a large scale after the arrival of Sarwo Edhie’s Special Forces in December 1965 and at times took on the character of Hindu ritual sacrifice.

  That month, Sukarno spoke out against the killings, which he put at 78,000, berating his people for “running amok like monkeys caught in the dark.” But the “mouthpiece of the revolution” was cut off from the microphones and radio stations on which he was a spellbinder, and the newspapers were being told to downplay anything he said. The killings went on. The rivers of Java choked with bodies.

  Nor were the Western powers interested. The killings were just what they wanted. It was a turn in the tide in Southeast Asia, the “best news” for a long time, as Time magazine commented. In mid-October the army was helpfully advised that the British would not attack while it was otherwise engaged with the PKI. On November 4, 1965, Ambassador Marshall Green reported to the US State Department that even the PKI “smaller fry” were being “systematically arrested and jailed or executed.” Green had assured the army that America was “generally sympathetic with and admiring of what they were doing.”

  British operatives in Singapore stepped up “black propaganda,” spreading stories in the media about caches of arms smuggled in from China to the PKI. The US embassy’s political section handed the Indonesian army a list of several thousand names, all members of PKI cadres. Partly thanks to a radio communications network rushed out to help the Indonesian army, US intelligence was able to listen in to commands from Suharto’s intelligence section about which PKI members were to be executed on the spot and which were to be brought in alive. Almost certainly, an instruction would have come to execute Aidit, who was shot af
ter being captured in a village on the slopes of Mount Merapi in November, thus removing both the PKI’s most charismatic figure and his testimony.

  The wave of killings abated around March 1966. By then, the few American and other journalists allowed to travel around Java and Bali were putting their estimates of the dead at about 400,000. Others thought that conservative, and a later tally by the army’s internal security command put the number across Indonesia at 1 million killed. More than 600,000 had been arrested. The West still didn’t care—the massacre was put down to the irrational Malay tendency to run amok or the inevitable collision of santri and abangan social groups in a time of political change. The role of the army in stirring up the violence, and in directing and sustaining the killings, was played down. “With 500,000 to one million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to say a reorientation has taken place,” the Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, noted with evident satisfaction in July 1966.

  The surviving senior leadership of the PKI and the leaders of the 30 September Movement were put through show trials in an “Extraordinary Military Court.” None was acquitted. Death sentences were handed down and promptly carried out by firing squads.

  Strangely, the mysterious Sjam and two other PKI Special Bureau operatives were kept on death row until 1986: Sjam still hoped he could spin out his story to stay alive but was eventually executed. Other senior figures, such as Abdul Latief and Subandrio, emerged from imprisonment toward the turn of the century, adding little new to the story—except Latief’s assertion that he’d told Suharto about the plot beforehand and believed he’d assented. The very elderly Subandrio claimed that Untung hoped to the end that Suharto would save him.