BY ERNEST MANDEL
Below we reprint excerpts from The Catastrophe in Indonesia - Three articles on the fatal consequences of Communist Party policy. This pamphlet was published in 1966, just months after the Indonesian army launched a bloodbath to wipe out the Communist Party, allegedly in retaliation for the assassination of six high-ranking officers. Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in the massacre. Gen. Suharto took power in this coup, gradually removing Sukarno, who had headed a nationalist movement for independence from Dutch colonialism and was the first president of an independent Indonesian republic. Sukarno had suspended parliament in 1960, and declared himself president for life in 1963. The selection below is from the article "Lessons of the Defeat in Indonesia." Copyright (c) 1966 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted with permission.

The international workers movement, the colonial revolution, have suffered a terrible defeat in Indonesia. Since October 1965, thousands of militants belonging to the Communist party and other left groupings have been murdered in a veritable white terror. This sweeping massacre has met with hardly a word of disapproval in the Western press, so "humanist" and so sensitive when it comes to defending the "sanctity of the human being" when a victorious revolution eliminates butchers who have committed unspeakable crimes, as occurred at the time of the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

But innumerable victims have fallen in the wave of terror that has swept Indonesia. Sukarno himself has officially admitted 87,000 dead. At the Tricontinental Conference Fidel Castro spoke of 100,000 dead.(1) Western observers in Indonesia have put the figure at 120,000 to 125,000 murdered workers and militants, and certain sources even speak of 150,000 to 200,000 dead.

Journalists of conservative right-wing newspapers like the special correspondents of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the London Sunday Times and the Basel National-Zeitung have given detailed descriptions of the terror in certain parts of the country. The report of the special correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the events of Bali, the island formerly considered to be a Communist fortress, is terrifying. He tells about bodies lying along the roads, or heaped in pits, of half-burned villages in which the peasants dare not leave the shells of their huts. There is likewise a nightmarish account of the hysterical fear that has caught up large numbers, so that people suspected of being Communists have killed their alleged comrades with their own hands in order to show the ferocious army men that "they were not Communists."

In addition to the dead, there are innumerable other victims of the repression. The figure has been given of 250,000 militants or sympathizers of the extreme left in prison. At the beginning of October 1965, certain trade unions tried to react timidly against the counterrevolutionary wave of terror. Every worker who went out on strike was summarily fired....

But our reaction in face of the fearsome terror unleashed on the Indonesian people cannot be limited to denouncing those responsible for the massacre and to demanding that the prisoners be freed (beginning with Njono, the president of the Indonesian trade unions, who has just been tried in Djakarta and given the death sentence) and the murderers given the punishment they deserve. We must also consider the cause of this terrible defeat which the international workers movement has suffered in Indonesia.... The first question that comes to mind is how a Communist party having 3,000,000 members and more than 10,000,000 sympathizers organized in all kinds of "mass organizations" (groupings of youth, of women and of peasants, as well as trade unions led by the PKI [Partai Kommunis Indonesia]) could be crushed overnight, in October 1965, by an adversary that was certainly weaker in numbers.

The answer involves essentially two points: the reactionary enemy was able to utilize surprise; that is, the masses were not systematically prepared for this inevitable confrontation with the reactionary army. And the initiative was left to the reactionary enemy; that is, the PKI leadership did not utilize the innumerable mass actions during recent years to organize a systematic offensive aiming at the conquest of power by the working class and the poor peasants....

Without exception, the experience of half a century bears out the following: Either the freedom movement of the former colonial countries remains under the leadership of the indigenous possessing classes, or of petty-bourgeois groups unable to break resolutely with the capitalist economy - and in this case the fundamental tasks of the colonial revolution, above all the agrarian revolution, remain unsolved and the country is condemned to continue stagnating in misery and incessant social crisis; or the freedom movement is conquered by the working class in alliance with the poor peasants, the revolution is continued up to the expropriation of imperialism and the indigenous possessing classes, the agrarian reform is completely carried out - and in this case the bourgeois state must be replaced by a state based on the toiling masses, and construction of a socialist economy must be begun.

Wherever the leadership of the revolution has remained in the hands of "national fronts," directed in actuality by the "national" bourgeoisie or by petty-bourgeois groups, there has been no radical agrarian revolution, the state has fundamentally remained a bourgeois state, and the reaction was able to break the front at any moment and unleash a ferocious repression against the workers. Wherever the revolution has come under a proletarian leadership basing itself on the poor peasantry, it proved necessary to destroy the bourgeois state and create an entirely new state if only to carry out a genuinely radical agrarian reform (China, Vietnam, Cuba).

The leaders of the PKI did not assimilate these lessons of history. Deeply affected by the "putschist" and "adventurist" errors committed by their predecessors - the PKI leaders of the period of the "Madiun incidents" of 1948(2) - they wished at any cost to "stick with" the Sukarno group representing the national bourgeoisie. Consequently they followed the policy of a "united national front." They accepted Sukarno's partial suspension of democratic freedoms at the beginning of the sixties. They joined the NASAKOM (national front composed of the Sukarno nationalists, the Muslim grouping - a reactionary formation that has been in the vanguard of the anti-Communist terror since October 1965 - and the PKI). They joined a coalition government which included in particular the ultrareactionary head of the army.

Their political line for the past five years has been defense of this national front formula and not propaganda for a workers and peasants government. They did not stand for the conquest of power by the masses but for the slow conquest of state power "from within."

1. The Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America was held in January 1966 in Havana, Cuba, and attended by anti-imperialist fighters from around the world.

2. The Madiun Affair was a failed uprising attempt against the Indonesian government by the PKI in 1948.  
 
 
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