Nearly 35 years later the massacres of 1965–66 are again reverberating in Indonesian politics. As workers, peasants, students, and others in this country of 212 million people engage in new struggles for a more dignified and less poverty-stricken future, they are also starting to dig for the truth about their past. Their search is aided by documents that have recently been released.

The "army is doing a first-class job here of moving against communists," wrote Ambassador Green on Nov. 4, 1965. Green's cables appear among secret records of the U.S. State Department and CIA. Extracts from the files published in Sydney Morning Herald articles during July of this year reveal evidence of the hands-on involvement of the imperialist powers in the massacres.

Some of the secret diplomatic correspondence between the Australian embassy in Jakarta and Canberra has also been published. These imperialist functionaries reported the military's use of arson, construction of concentration camps, and perpetration of large-scale murder in matter-of-fact, and at times enthusiastic, tones.

On Oct. 6, 1965, Australian ambassador K.C.O. Shann described the official Indonesian government of the time as "Sukarno and his greasy civilian cohorts." Sukarno had assumed power at the head of a powerful independence movement that had forced the Dutch colonialists to cede independence in 1949.

Sukarno's foreign minister Subandrio is one of the "snakes that infest the country," wrote Shann on October 15. His opinion mirrored that of all the imperialist powers: they hated the government of Sukarno not so much for what it was, as for what had created it.

Marian Wilkinson wrote in a Herald article entitled "Hidden Holocaust" that "Sukarno's power rested, in part, on the support of the PKI [Communist Party of Indonesia], the largest political party in the country. Sukarno used the PKI to contain the power of the army." The PKI, whose leadership looked to the Mao Zedong regime in China for their political line, and popular organizations affiliated with it influenced and organized millions of working people. Sukarno's "relations with his top generals and the West were tense," continued Wilkinson. "His country was in armed border 'confrontation' with Britain and Australia over Malaysia, and he was threatening to break diplomatic relations with the US…"  
 

Imperialist interests in Indonesia

For the imperialists Indonesia represented enormous human, agricultural and mineral resources and potential profits. It carried similar weight in their political and strategic considerations. During 1964 and 1965 the rulers of Australia and New Zealand, the imperialist powers closest to Indonesia, had sent soldiers to join military efforts by the U.S. and Britain in Vietnam and Malaysia respectively — in the latter case, to fight against Indonesian forces.

Fear of "communism" — of massive anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles —marked the imperialist stance towards Indonesia and elsewhere, just as it marked the policy of the government in Jakarta they were about to install. The tumultuous events of late 1965 began with the kidnapping and killing of six army generals by a group of lower-ranking officers, who announced that they had taken action to save Sukarno from a "CIA-backed coup."

The leadership and character of this "September 30 affair" are still subjects of debate, but in the formerly classified files the Australian and other embassies in the capital of Jakarta describe it as internal army affair, backed by some PKI leaders only at the last minute. With imperialist backing, however, military officers in Indonesia immediately denounced the event as PKI-led, and used wildly fictionalized and gory accounts of it to justify their offensive.

U.S. Ambassador Green forcefully recommended that the military, which immediately began to move against the PKI, put the September 30 affair to propaganda use. "On Indo-language broadcasts show that the South Vietnamese are fighting this same kind of Gestapu terror [as the attempted rebellion]," he wrote on October 15. Two weeks earlier he had reported approvingly that the army "has important instruments of power such as press, radio and TV." He recommended to Washington to "indicate clearly to key people … such as [Generals] Nasution and Suharto our desire to be of assistance.… Spread the story of PKI's guilt, treachery and brutality…"

The U.S. representatives were directly involved in the events. The files describe meetings between representatives of the Indonesian generals and the U.S. embassy, some over rounds of golf. Among other things, they discussed the secret supply of U.S. "medical supplies, communications equipment, and small arms." One Herald article referred to a study published by U.S. lawyer Kathy Kadane "detailing how an American diplomat provided lists of Indonesian communists to the Soeharto [Suharto] forces when the mass killings were beginning."

The embassy also dealt with leaders in the Muslim church. The files record the role of both Muslim and Catholic hierarchies, who organized reactionary forces to work alongside the army in the massacres.

Suharto, then head of the army's strategic command, increasingly took charge. Sukarno was powerless in the face of the furious military assault. (His defeat was later formalized in March of the next year, when he delegated extensive powers to Suharto.) In the days and weeks after September 30, Green favorably reported arrests of PKI leaders, and "extensive sweeps [by the army] in Jakarta lower-class suburbs to round up communist paramilitary elements active in September 30 violence." In another cable he wrote that a "pro-army youth group in Medan [a major city in northern Sumatra] began destroying PKI property."

"He would be a very cautious man," smugly declared an October 22 report by the Australian embassy, "who did not derive some encouragement from events in Indonesia over the past week."  
 

Trade unions, peasants are target

Among the unionists targeted, Green reported the "arrest, interrogation and execution of PKI leaders" in the camp of the state-owned Permina oil company.

The Australian embassy reported that it was customary "for the army to assemble the labour force and ask them whether they wish to continue work as usual. Those who decline are asked again and, unless they change their mind, summarily shot."

Peasants also fell victim. Drawing on the files, another Herald article reported that "entire villages were wiped out during the killings .… many of the killings occurred at the behest of landlords, who had earlier been outraged when PKI cadres encouraged peasants to take over fields."

Green reports that the military attaché to the U.S. embassy heard from the aide to an Indonesian general that "Anti-PKI demonstrations and raids taking on more of an anti-Chinese line. Recently there have been raids against Chinese residents in Kalimantan and Atjeh.… The forcible entry and search of Chinese Embassy commercial office in Tjikini was not done by the army but by those "who do this kind of thing for us."

For several months the reign of terror rolled across the country, especially across Java, the most populous and developed island, and Sumatra, a center of oil and agricultural production.

In the new year, a CIA report stated, "Nearly every member of the PKI politburo has been arrested; many have already been executed, including the three top leaders. The party's mass organizations have been paralysed and virtually put out of business. The slaughter of PKI members and sympathizers in North Sumatra, East and Central Java and Bali is continuing." By February, Green's deputy in the embassy estimated "a total of about 400,000 killed as a result of the September 30 affair..." By a year later, U.S. scholars were placing the death toll between 500,000 and a million.  
 

The most important lesson

While the files reported in the Herald articles allow a glimpse at the crimes of the imperialists, they provide little insight into why the PKI, as Green noted, "offered … no meaningful resistance." This inaction did not reflect a lack of combativity on the part of Indonesian working people as was shown in an Australian embassy report of an incident on November 10. As an Indonesian army unit approached a village in East Java, "the villagers… advanced… on the troops with cries of 'Nekolim,' meaning 'Neo-colonialists and imperialists'… [They] were armed with bamboo spears, knives and "one or two guns.… Shots fired over their heads by the patrol failed to deter them and the army was obliged to shoot ... killing seven and wounding 17."

Workers, farmers, and young people looking for an explanation of the PKI's paralysis can start with Maoism vs. Bolshevism, part of the "Education for Socialists" series published by Pathfinder Press. The booklet is by Joseph Hansen, who wrote about the events in Indonesia as they occurred in the Marxist magazine World Outlook. In Maoism vs. Bolshevism he analyzes this "disaster that shattered the largest Communist party in the capitalist world" as "a major defeat still reverberating in world politics…"

This was "the most devastating defeat for the working class since the fascist victory in Germany in 1933," writes Steve Clark in his introduction to the booklet.

Hansen places responsibility for the PKI's abject defeat on the leaderships of the PKI and the Chinese Communist Party: "Out of … passing diplomatic needs (an alliance with Sukarno and the Indonesian bourgeoisie) [Mao] blocked the Indonesian Communist party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped the reactionary generals and put the Indonesian working class in power."

Today, the new generations of workers, peasants, and students in Indonesia are weighed down less heavily by the weight of the catastrophe as they wage their struggles, forge new organizations, and begin to figure out their way forward politically. Above all, Stalinism is now much weaker in the international workers movement, and nowhere is this more true than in Indonesia.

The imperialists and the Indonesian rulers are weaker than in 1965. The "New Order" regime of Suharto, founded on the massacres of that period, has been revealed for the reactionary myth it has always been. Over 25 years the military has been unable to crush the independence forces on East Timor. And a degree of new industrialization means the enemies of working people now face a bigger working class than ever before.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home