Opening The Rift
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Learning from the Mass Distress and Violence of Indonesia’s Decade of Regime Change 1957-67
Almost overnight, the government of Indonesia went from being a fierce voice for Cold War neutrality to a quiet, pliant partner of the US world order.
Key Takeaways
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1. Introduction
Indonesia is a resource rich and biodiversity rich country. With a population of around 280 million this is the fourth most populated country in the world. Indonesia also has the largest Muslim population in the world at over 250 million (around 87% of the total population), with both inclusive and fundamentalist traditions of religions finding a place among various sections of people, also influencing politics.
In the early and mid-1940s the people of Indonesia moved rapidly towards independence from Dutch colonial rule under the leadership of Sukarno (1901-1970) and his colleagues. He became the first President of Indonesia and while his Presidency is officially listed for the years 1945-67, he retained his real power only till 1965.
Within a few years of becoming President of Indonesia, Sukarno became known as a wider leader of the Third World countries and an important voice for protecting sovereignty and neutrality of many newly independent countries, while opposing neo-colonialism and military alignment with western countries. He made statements supporting revolutions and maintained good contacts with China and the Soviet Union (he tried to be friendly with western countries too, but not successfully).In 1955 Sukarno organized the Bandung Conference of newly independent countries which helped to prepare the base for non-alignment, emphasizing the path of neutrality instead of joining the anti-communism alignments being promoted by the USA. Sukarno had nationalized some foreign companies, particularly those belonging to the Dutch. It was a point of discussion that he had plans for nationalizing more foreign assets, including those in the oil sector. Sukarno was not a communist leader but the USA and its western allies were worried that the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) had progressed very well during Sukarno’s leadership of Indonesia.
The PKI was following a legal, peaceful path and Sukarno was content not to disturb this, particularly as this enabled him to balance the right wing forces in the army as well among extremist Muslim parties or groups. The CIA heavily funded a Muslim party in the 1955 elections but could not disturb the wider support base of either Sukarno’s favored Indonesian National Party (PNI) or the PKI.
2. First Regime Change Effort 1957-58
Keeping in view all these factors as well as the desire to acquire greater control over Indonesia’s resources and to secure Indonesia’s supportive role in the wider cold war calculations, a decision appears to have been taken sometime around the mid and late 1950s to push for a more aggressive approach against President Sukarno and the PKI. The next step was to involve some army officers opposed to Sukarno in a plot against him in 1957-58. As Joseph Burkholder Smith, who was in charge of the CIA’s Indonesian Desk in the USA during this period, later wrote in his book titled ‘Portrait of a Cold Warrior’, “We began to feed the State and Defense departments intelligence that no one could deny was a useful contribution to understanding Indonesia. When they had read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion that we should support the colonels’ plans to reduce Sukarno’s power.”
However as we see time and again in such happenings, there are some highly principled US officers and diplomats who do not allow irresponsible covert regime change type of work that they know from their experienced can be very harmful. The US Ambassador to Indonesia John Allison was one such principled official. So alongside with creating problems for Sukarno, the local CIA also made efforts to oust their own Ambassador. He was soon replaced by Howard Jones who was much more to the liking of the local CIA staff.
In one of the CIA’s most ambitious military operations, tens of thousands of rebels were armed. Thousands of weapons were air-dropped. Several B-26 bombers were used for attacks, even as various rebellions were starting on ground. An Indonesia military representative in the USA was persuaded to join the rebels.
In April 1958 when a plane bombed a ship in the harbor of the island of Ambon, a church located nearby was also hit, resulting in about 700 casualties. After some time a pilot of one of the planes that was shot down was captured, with full identity papers, exposing CIA and US involvement. This as well reverses suffered by rebels forced the USA to quietly phase out its regime change efforts for the time being.
3. 1959 to mid-1965—Preparations for the Next Phase
After this clear evidence of the US efforts to harm or change his regime, Sukarno took some steps to reduce his vulnerability. As often happens after external foreign regime change or weakening efforts, this led to some curtailment of democratic norms and some moves towards more authoritarian governance. At the same time as his suspicion of pro-USA forces increased, his reliance on the communists increased. The PKI appeared to be getting more recognition from him, more role in government affairs and at the same time was continuing to do well in elections and increasing its membership. It had emerged as the communist party with the highest membership outside of China and Soviet Union. Keeping in view all these factors the USA and its close allies, particularly UK and Australia, also increased their determination to oust Sukarno and harm the PKI. In fact there are references in the documents of this period of assassination efforts against Sukarno but more specific details are not available.
However reference may be made here to the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate) and its Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots involving Foreign Leaders, 1975 (incidentally those within the CIA dealing with assassination related issues were then referred to internally as the ‘Health Alteration Committee’!). In this report the committee stated that it had “received some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno of Indonesia”, and that such planning had even reached the stage of identifying an agent for this.
Contacts between US and Indonesian military officers were steadily increasing during this period via training programs. Roger Hilsman, who worked for both the CIA and the State Department, noted that by 1963, “one-third of the Indonesian general staff had had some sort of training from Americans and almost half of the officer corps.” A report of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs noted in 1971 that by late 1965, “more than 1200 Indonesian officers, including senior military figures, had been trained in the USA. As a result of this experience, numerous friendships and contacts existed between the Indonesian and American military establishments, particularly between members of the two armies.”
However preparations were not just for the removal of Sukarno but also for establishing a very different system that would prioritize western business interests, exploitation of natural resources by them and make Indonesia a partner of the west in the Cold War conditions. In this context it was considered important not just to get rid of Sukarno and the PKI but also to prepare for a different future by training those who can decide and implement economic and business policies later, and for this intervention at the level of academics and education was considered to be necessary.
David Ransom in his widely quoted essay ‘Ford Country—Building an Elite for Indonesia’ has described how the Ford Foundation aligned with several prominent US universities and Soumitro Djojobadi, aristocrat- politician—academic and leader of a political party PSI—to work against Sukarno and communists. Academics visiting for field work also established contacts with army personnel. Ford started a Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell which worked closely with Soumitro’s contacts in Jakarta. This essay says, “MIT and Cornell made contacts, collected data, built up expertise. It was left to Berkeley to actually train most of the key Indonesians who will later seize government power and put their pro-American lessons into practice. Dean Soumitro’s Faculty of Economics provided a perfect academic host camp for these economic stock troops.” John Howard, director of Ford’s International Training and Research Program said, “Ford felt it was training the guys who could be leading the country when Sukarno got out.” One of the leading visiting academics said that to defeat communism countervailing forces were needed. Soumitro said, now from exile, said that his PSI party and Masjumi Party, the one which had earlier received external help in elections, were the most suitable allies of the army.
Soon several Berkeley trained academics were teaching at the Army Staff and Command School, probably at the invitation of Colonel Suharto. In effect this group became the Army’s high level civilian adviser. Meanwhile a large number of army officers were also being trained in the USA. Collaborative efforts also led to the creation of the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI). Some of them travelled to the USA under exchange programs and for longer periods for a student leadership project. Kami’s most militant leadership came from Bandung following an institution building program by the USA.
Subsequently Marshall Green joined as US Ambassador in Jakarta at a critical time, bringing with him the reputation of a student led regime change in Korea, sparking rumors that something similar may be attempted in Indonesia. In fact later students played an important part in the ouster of Sukarno and as propagandists carrying the cry of fanaticism related massacres to villages.
However Ransom’s essay also mentions that in the middle of all this there were also academics of conscience who realized something terrible was happening and therefore quit. One of the Berkley team members Ralph Anspeck said, “I had the feeling that in the last analysis I was supposed to be a part of this American policy of empire, bringing in American science, and attitude and culture…winning over countries…doing this with awful lot of cocktails and high pay. I just got out the whole thing.” Another senior academic Len Doyle said, “I felt that the university should not be involved in what essentially was becoming a rebellion against the government.”
4. Late-1965 to 1967—Effective Regime Change, Massacres and Torture
In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965 some junior military officers are reported to have killed 6 senior officers. They then announced that this was a pre-emptive step to stop a wider planned coup assisted by the CIA to oust President Sukarno. The entire truth of the matter may never be known. These junior officers were soon overpowered by the army. Then false rumors were spread that they had acted on behalf of the communists and had also mutilated the bodies of those whom they had killed. These rumors spread very fast. After some days, army and religious fanatic mobs, sometimes allied to some political parties and youth groups, started massacres of people including those in remote villages. The most targeted were members of the PKI (the Communist Party of Indonesia) or their supporters but in addition other trade unionists, members of some progressive women groups, some members of ethnic minorities, transgender people etc. were also targeted. Those Muslims who had more inclusive approach and inter-mingling of cultures, such as the Abangan communities of Java, were also targeted. After a stage, such violent gangs also killed for looting and for personal enmities.
Very cruel methods were widely used, so cruel that is difficult to describe. According to the most common estimates, the killings took place mainly between October 1965 and March 1966 and somewhere in the range of half a million to one million persons were killed. This does not include those who died in the earlier phase of violence in 1957-58. Some other estimates say that attacks continued beyond March 1966, and the number of those killed may be between 2 to 3 million.
In addition over a million people were imprisoned. Prisons overflowed and in addition there were concentration camps. There were reports of extremely cruel forms of torture as well as of rapes.
It is now widely recognized that in such times a large number of people, particularly children and women, also die from the indirect impacts of violence as those providing from them die, there is hunger and denial of basic needs like medicines and shelter, and a large number of people are deeply sad, shocked, depressed and traumatized. The Time magazine reported in December 1965, “Travelers…tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies. River transportation at places has been seriously impeded.” The New York Times called this “one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history.”
Hundreds or perhaps thousands of Indonesians who were abroad at that time could not return.
The PKI which was fast emerging as perhaps the most significant political force of the country, following the peaceful electoral path, was not only effectively removed from the political scene but in addition chances of its reemergence in the next few decades were suppressed. The killings and imprisonments targeted at the communists were accompanied by an immense lot of false propaganda against them.
The powers of President Sukarno were reduced significantly. In 1967 he lost his Presidency. He died in 1970.
General Suharto soon became the most powerful leader of Indonesia, heading a highly authoritarian and unjust regime for nearly three decades and remaining close to the west.
5. Responsibility for Tragedy
Prof. Geoffrey B. Robinson of the University of California and Los Angeles, who has written a book on this subject titled ‘The Killing Season’ has written, “There is clear evidence that in the crucial six months after the alleged coup (of October 1, 1965) that western powers encouraged the army to move forcefully against the Left, facilitated widespread violence including mass killings, and helped to consolidate the political power of the army. In doing so, they helped to bring about the physical destruction of the PKI and its affiliates, the removal of Sukarno and closest associates from their political power, their replacement by an army elite led by General Suharto, and a seismic shift in Indonesia’s foreign policy towards the West and the capitalist model it advances.”
Bradly Simpson, Director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project has stated, “Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the Army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and US officials worried only that the killing of the Party’s unarmed supporters might not go far enough, permitting Sukarno to return to power and frustrate the Johnson administration’s emerging plans for a post-Sukarno Indonesia.”
In November 2015, on the 50th anniversary of these tragic events, The International People’s Tribunal on 1965 Crimes against Humanity in Indonesia, with 7 international judges, gave its verdict in Hague, Netherlands. Its chief judge Zak Yakoob said, after criticizing the main role of the local army in the killings, “The USA, the UK and Australia were all complicit to different degrees in the commission of crimes against humanity.”
A little earlier in December 2014 the US Senator Tom Udall introduced a ‘sense of the Senate resolution’ which condemned the killings and called for the declassification of all documents on US involvement in the events, noting that, “the US provided financial and military assistance during this time and later, according to documents released by the State Department.”
Prof. Ruth Blakeley has written, “The case of Indonesia reveals the extent to which the US state prioritized its elite interests over the human rights of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians.”
The British embassy in Jakarta advised intelligence headquarters in Singapore on how the news should be presented, “Suitable propaganda themes might be: PKI brutality in murdering generals,…PKI subverting Indonesia as agents of foreign communists…British participation should be carefully concealed.”
Paul Lishmar and James Oliver wrote in The Independent regarding such aspects of British involvement in 1998 and also in their book Britain’s Secret Propaganda War.
Sweden sold huge amounts of small arms to Indonesia, used by the army in this violence, although later the Swedish ambassador regretted this.
Germany (then West Germany) played a supportive role for the Army in these massacres, as shown in Huseyin Dogru’s documentary film Indonesia’s 1965 Genocide—Germany’s Unknown War Against Communists (also released as Germany’s Hidden Role in Indonesia’s 1965 Massacres) which among other things also revealed that some of the German Ambassadors in Indonesia had a Nazi background earlier.
6. Attitudes of a Sense of Accomplishment regarding Massacres
Several senior persons spoke in the middle of the violence or after violence as though something important had been achieved.
Mary Trent , the US Embassy’s First Secretary sent a cable to the US State Department—“a fantastic switch which has occurred over ten short weeks.” Robert J. Martens, political officer at the US Embassy said regarding providing lists of communists to the Army, “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
A headline in US News and World Report said—‘Indonesia, Hope where there was none before.’ Time magazine said regarding the suppression of PKI—‘the West’s best news for years in Asia’ and went on to praise Suharto. Australia’s Prime Minister Harold Holt said, “With 500,000 to one million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”
McGeorge Bundy, US President Johnson’s National Security Advisor said that these events have been “a striking vindication of US policy towards Indonesia in recent years.”
At an early stage of the tragedy, the British Ambassador Andrew Gilchrist wrote to London, “I never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.”
7. Aftermath
John Roosa of the University of British Columbia and author of Pretext for Mass Murder wrote, “Almost overnight, the government of Indonesia went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, pliant partner of the US world order.”
The cause of non-alignment, opposition to neo-colonialism and pursuit of self-reliance received a big blow while the interests of imperialism and neo-colonialism were advanced in a big way.
The Indonesian economy was opened up to western companies and exploitation by them in a big way, as well as to authoritarian and unjust policies of the three decades of Suharto’s rule. Democracy suffered. Draconian laws and prohibitions were introduced to ban the spread of communism or its ideas in any way, even though communists were the victims and not the perpetrators of this violence in Indonesia, a point emphasized by Robert Kennedy Sr. in the USA at that time to unsuccessfully draw wider attention to the obvious injustice of what had happened in Indonesia (before he too was assassinated in 1968).
What is even worse is that the Indonesian massacres appeared to have served as a model for large-scale violence against communists in other countries too, a point emphasized by Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method. In some countries like Chile which later experienced mass violence against communists, Jakarta was found to be written on walls.
The events of late 1965 and soon after were so traumatic that Indonesia never really recovered from them. In Suharto’s times no one could speak the truth about what happened, and instead falsehoods regarding the victims were spread to provide some justification for the mass killings. To a lesser extent such trends continued even later.
8. Conclusion
These events were so deeply distressing and traumatic that at times it even becomes difficult to speak about them. The acts of cruelties were so horrible that it becomes difficult to take them up with readers. Then you also see perpetrators saying loudly in documentary films that they do not feel any remorse even after years have passed.
What lessons can one draw from such horrible experiences? At a more obvious level all this is further confirmation that foreign covert regime change operations have horrible results (turning neighbors into enemies of each other) and so should be given up, a point this writer has emphasized repeatedly. However here I would like to emphasize a deeper learning. This is for people with different ideologies and thinking in any country to be more accommodative and understanding towards each other so that a situation of mass hostility and violence can never arise, even though instigating efforts for this are made by external forces. There will always be differences among people regarding which ideas and programs are good and which are bad, and the real democratic spirit comes in living peacefully despite this, and try to create at least some common points of agreement on which a consensus can be created that we all accept this as being good for the country and society and so we all cooperate for this while also learning to live peacefully with other differences. On the other hand, when as in Indonesia and in several other countries which have experienced mass distress in recent years, there is a tendency on rival sides to be guided more by external forces while failing in the duty to give more attention to reducing local hostilities and promoting friendships, then possibilities of avoidable mass violence can increase in these countries, and if at the same time foreign covert regime change operations also take place, then this has all the makings of a hugely distressing disaster situation. So I would like to end this essay with a very strong plea for peace, and for continuing efforts in all societies and countries to resolve their differences on the path of nonviolence and peace with justice.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Rift.
