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PRESIDENT SUKARNO AND THE SEPTEMBER 30 MOVEMENT John Roosa Published online: 28 Mar 2008.
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To cite this article: John Roosa (2008) PRESIDENT SUKARNO AND THE SEPTEMBER 30 143-159, DOI: 10.1080/14672710801959182
MOVEMENT, Critical Asian Studies, 40:1,
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14672710801959182
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Critical Asian Studies Roosa / Review Essay
40:1 (2008), 143–159
Review Essay th
President Sukarno and the September 30 Movement
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John Roosa Helen-Louise Hunter, Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: The Untold Story. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007. Antonie C.A. Dake, The Sukarno File, 1965-67: Chronology of a Defeat. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Victor M. Fic, Anatomy of the Jakarta Coup: October 1, 1965. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2004. When the Indonesian army began a murderous campaign of repression against the Communist Party (PKI) in the early days of October 1965, it took control of the mass media and issued a steady stream of propaganda blaming the PKI for a clandestine action on 1 October that had abducted and killed six army generals. The army, under the command of a senior surviving general, Suharto, banned most newspapers and censored those allowed to continue publishing. The army became the source of all information about the conspirators who had killed off a good portion of the army’s high command. Its propaganda played a crucial role in instigating mass violence against the PKI — violence in which over one million people were arrested and hundreds of thousands killed. Those who had secretly killed the six generals did not have much time to speak for themselves. When occupying the national radio station in Jakarta for twelve hours on 1 October, they only identified the name of their group, the September 30th Movement, and the name of their leader, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, a commander in the presidential guard. Facing Suharto’s counterattack, Untung and his cohorts scattered; they fled the city only twenty-four hours after launching their action, without ever having presented themselves before the public and clearly identified who they were and what they wanted. With the leaders and participants of the movement in hiding, Suharto was free to identify whomever he wished as the masterminds. He decided to blame the PKI — all 3 million members of it and, for good measure, all the millions belonging to its affiliated organizations. The party, he ordered, had to be “eliminated down to its 1 roots,” however far down those roots went. The army’s psychological warfare specialists designed an anticommunist propaganda campaign in which no lie was too absurd: the members of the September 30th Movement had supposedly held an orgy while torturing the generISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 01 / 000143–17 ©2008 BCAS, Inc. DOI:10.1080/14672710801959182
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Lt. Colonel Untung, a leader of the September 30th Movement, is pictured handcuffed and held by soldiers at a Jakarta prison, 16 November 1965. After Untung’s group of junior officers killed six army generals, the army, under the command of a senior surviving officer, Major General Suharto, banned most newspapers and censored those allowed to continue publishing. The army became the source of all information about the conspirators. Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for the murders and claimed Untung was acting on orders from the party. (Credit: AP Photo)
als; women of the PKI had danced half-naked while slicing the generals’ bodies with a thousand razor blades; the generals were castrated and their eyeballs were gouged out, all the while women performed “the dance of fragrant flowers” (a name the army invented).2 We know this story was entirely made up because the autopsy report of the generals’ bodies — a report that was initially suppressed but unintentionally released years later — revealed that they had not been mutilated.3 They had been killed by gunshots and stab wounds and had not been tortured by a thousand small cuts. President Sukarno denounced the incessant propaganda about razor blades and eye-gouging but even his voice was silenced by the army’s officers with their hands on the controls of the radio transmitters and printing presses.4 The army retailed this horror story about the six generals with the message that all PKI members throughout the country were about to inflict the same sadistic violence on their enemies. The newspapers were filled with stories about how PKI chapters had been stockpiling special eye-gouging instruments and digging mass graves. In addition to such ridiculous stories, the army information department released documents that purported to be confessions of the
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Many Indonesians recall the army frequently using the phrase “down to its roots” at the time. For one documented use by Suharto, see Dinuth, ed., 1997, 137. Wieringa 2002, 291–327. Anderson 1987, 109–34. See Sukarno’s speeches from October 1965 to January 1967, compiled in Setiyono and Triyana, eds., 2003. Critical Asian Studies 40:1 (2008)
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PKI chairman, D.N. Aidit, and the PKI Politburo member, Njono. Predictably, the so-called confessions had the party leaders admitting to being the organizers of the September 30th Movement. No one treats these confessions as authentic. Even later Suharto regime history books did not cite them as evidence. The army never organized an independent investigation into the events of 1 October. It did hold show trials of individuals affiliated with the September 30th Movement. Since the trials, held in military courts with military prosecutors and judges, focused only on the actions of the individuals brought to trial, they were no substitute for a commission of enquiry that would have adopted a holistic approach. Moreover, the trials proceeded from the premise that the PKI was guilty rather than treating that point as something to be proved. The defendants and witnesses, trying to save themselves and/or the party from any blame, provided testimonies that were inconsistent and largely unreliable. The army captured four of the five top PKI leaders in late 1965 and summarily executed them, ensuring that they would not be around to provide their version of events. Given this anti-PKI propaganda campaign and the climate of terror after the event, the first rule in studying the September 30th Movement has to be a skeptical attitude toward all the primary sources. Newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, courtroom testimonies, confessions — none of these sources can be trusted as factually reliable. Historians are taught to critically evaluate their sources. In the case of the September 30th Movement, the historians’ critical faculties have to be sharper than usual. All three of the books under review are written with little critical evaluation of sources; they treat fake documents, interrogation transcripts, and testimonies in military courts as solid evidence. All the sad detritus of the Indonesian army’s original propaganda campaign of the mid to late 1960s reappears here. The books recycle the Suharto regime’s official version of events by arguing that the PKI, as an institution, was the mastermind of the September 30th Movement. One twist to the old storyline in these three books is the idea that President Sukarno conspired with the PKI. The Suharto regime was always ambivalent about accusing Sukarno of complicity in the movement. Although some officers (such as General Nasution) occasionally alleged that Sukarno had been involved, Suharto decided against charging Sukarno and bringing him before a military court. Suharto’s reluctance stemmed perhaps from the fact that he had legitimated his takeover of state power by appealing to orders issued by Sukarno. The official version of history issued by the Suharto regime in 1994 did not claim that Sukarno knew about the plot beforehand and approved of it.5 Hunter, Dake, and Fic dredge up the army’s old allegations about Sukarno and hold them aloft as proof that Sukarno was working with the movement plotters.
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Sekretariat Negara Republik Indonesia 1994, 141–53. The anonymous authors of this book actually did an admirable job with the chapter on Sukarno; they excluded all the bogus claims of military propaganda and restricted their account to what was reliably known from the many eyewitnesses to the president’s actions on 1 October 1965. Other chapters of the book incorporate bogus propaganda material but this particular chapter displays some care in its handling of evidence.
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As I will explain below, their claim of Sukarno’s involvement is baseless. It is just one more red herring among the many that have spread so much confusion in the literature on the September 30th Movement. Another red herring shows up in Fic’s book. He contends, on the flimsiest evidence, that Mao Zedong was the mastermind. Whereas Hunter and Dake exclude Mao from the group of people responsible for the movement, Fic places him front and center. Supposedly Mao had instructed Aidit to carry out the movement when they met in Beijing and Aidit had then gained Sukarno’s acquiescence when he returned to Jakarta. Independently of Fic, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have come up with the same story. In their book Mao: The Unknown Story, they assert that Mao “set the PKI in motion to seize power.”6 Their evidence is just as flimsy as Fic’s. I will explain below that stronger evidence is required if one is to counter the many prima facie reasons to believe that Mao was not involved. Hunter, Dake, and Fic have a shared history: they supported the Suharto regime’s version of events back in the late 1960s, when the regime was trying to make its case to a skeptical international audience. Fic, then in his forties, was a professor in Singapore whose upbringing in Czechoslovakia had made him a committed anticommunist. Dake, also in his forties, was a journalist from the Netherlands working in Indonesia. Hunter, in her thirties, was a CIA analyst writing from her desk in Langley, Virginia. Now, forty years later, they have decided to return to the topic, still trying to convince an international audience that is even more skeptical about the events of Suharto’s bloodstained rise to power. It is a shame that late in life, after decades of experience, they could not have found some activity more worthwhile than re-excavating fraudulent evidence and concocting bogus arguments. In my book on the September 30th Movement, Pretext for Mass Murder, I did not rebut the allegations of Sukarno and Mao’s involvement because I did not consider them worth considering.7 I address the allegations here only because 8 they are now being given a new prominence and are apt to mislead the unwary. These books of Hunter, Dake, and Fic should be included in the genre of Gavin Menzie’s book 1421 — a genre that I will call “misinformation”; they do more to mislead than to edify.9 Of necessity, I will not follow the usual protocols of scholarly reviewing here, such as the noting of positive contributions and the respectful pointing out of limitations and weaknesses of the arguments. These books require a straightforward debunking.
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Chang and Halliday 2006, 606. Roosa 2006, 276 n1. Damien Kingsbury, a specialist on Indonesia politics usually critical of the Suharto regime’s self-image, wrote a favorable review of Dake’s book. See Kingsbury 2007, 171–73. On the debunking of Menzies’ book, see the website http://www.1421exposed. com/index.html; accessed 2 February 2008. The 1968 report can be downloaded at http://www.foia.cia.gov/CPE/ESAU/esau– 40.pdf; accessed 2 February 2008. Critical Asian Studies 40:1 (2008)
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The Spook Hunter’s book is subtitled “the untold story.” In fact, Hunter’s story has been told before — by herself. This book is a reprinting of a report she wrote anonymously for the CIA forty years ago. It is strange, if not downright deceptive, for Praeger to publish this book without mentioning anywhere in the text, on the cover, or on the online promotional web page, that it is a verbatim reprinting of the CIA report titled Indonesia — 1965: The Coup that Backfired (1968). Comparing the two, I find that the new edition contains only minor changes: a few subchapter headings have been reworded, an appendix has been incorporated into the body of the text, and three and a half pages of uninteresting commentary have been tacked onto the conclusion (181–84). Readers can save themselves some money by downloading the original report for free from a U.S. government website.10 The original report is better: it contains helpful maps, diagrams, and photos. All of the illustrations have been stripped from the current incarnation. By her own account, Hunter was assigned the task of writing about the September 30th Movement because of her expertise in analyzing coups (especially the 1964 coup in Zanzibar), not because of her knowledge of Indonesia.11 She had not visited the country, had not studied its politics, and did not speak Indonesian. The CIA provided her with English-language translations of relevant documents. The fatal flaw of Hunter’s book is its almost exclusive reliance on the transcripts of the military’s interrogations of the September 30th Movement leaders. She argues that these transcripts are reliable because of the “striking similarity in the stories told by Untung, Latief, Sujono, and Supardjo”; these four military officers in the leadership of the movement “told basically the same story” (65). While I have not seen the interrogation transcripts of Lieutenant Colonel Untung and Major Sujono, I have read those of Colonel Latief and Brigadier General Supardjo.12 I do not see how Hunter can claim a similarity between the interrogation transcripts of these two men; there is not even a similarity between different interrogation transcripts for the same man. By not citing the dates of the interrogation sessions, Hunter conveys the impression that the
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The U.S.-Indonesia Society in Washington, D.C., held a book launching for Hunter’s book on 10 July 2007, and issued a four-page summary of the speakers’ comments: http://www.usindo.org/publications/briefs/2007/Hunter_Book_ Launch071007; accessed 2 February 2008. Hunter’s article on the Zanzibar coup has been declassified: “Zanzibar revisited,” Studies in Intelligence (spring 1967). The article is available at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/ v11i2a01p_0001.htm; accessed 2 February 2008. The interrogation transcripts were not available to the public at the time. Even today they are not readily available. Only a few can be found in the military court documents. The CIA seems to have obtained them directly from Indonesian military officers. A laudatory review of Hunter’s report in the CIA’s in-house journal noted that “virtually all source material used in The Coup that Backfired was obtained originally via clandestine channels.” See Pizzicaro 1969. This article was declassified in 2005. I thank Brad Simpson for sending me a copy.
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statements attributed to the detainees were consistent from one session to the next. Latief, an officer in the Jakarta garrison who was one of the key leaders of the movement, was interrogated at least three times, once in late October 1965 and twice in late December 1965.13 In the first interrogation, he admitted to following orders from the PKI instead of his superior officers and working to help the PKI overthrow the government and establish a socialist state. In the third interrogation, he noted that he did not remember what he had said in the first one because he was only halfway conscious at the time. Badly wounded when captured on 11 October, he was still doped up on painkillers and immobilized by casts on both legs when the military police interrogated him on 25 October. According to the transcript of the third interrogation, Latief denied that the movement had intended to establish a new government. Rather it was a movement led by Untung to safeguard Sukarno’s presidency from a right-wing coup. Untung, Latief explained, had brought the PKI personnel into the movement and assigned them the tasks of political propaganda and mass mobilization. Supardjo, who served as the movement’s emissary to President Sukarno on 1 October, was interrogated at least four times.14 On the fourth occasion, he supposedly began by asking that the transcripts of the previous three sessions be “treated as if they never existed” and apologizing that he had not been more honest in his answers: “After I have been in prison I have come to see the military as correct.” Which transcripts should we consider reliable — the first three or the fourth one, conducted after his sudden, inexplicable conversion? At his trial, Supardjo rejected the validity of all of his interrogation transcripts and claimed that he had been intimidated into signing them.15
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The interrogation transcripts of Latief are as follows: Angkatan Darat, Direktorat Polisi Militer, “Berita Atjara Pemeriksaan,” 25 October 1965; Komando Operasi Pemulihan Keamanan dan Ketertiban, Team Pemeriksa Pusat, “Berita Atjara Pemeriksaan,” 21 December 1965 and 23 December 1965. In the first session, the lead interrogator was Captain Hasan Rany of the Military Police. In the second and third sessions, the interrogator was Joseph Soeriadimadja, a police commissioner. I obtained these documents from the records of the Latief military court trial archived at the Indonesian military’s Satria Mandala Museum, Documentation Department in Jakarta. I have two interrogation transcripts for Supardjo, obtained from the Mahmillub records at the Satria Mandala Museum, Documentation Department in Jakarta: Departemen Angkatan Darat Team Optis-Perpu-Intel, “Hasil Interogasi dari Supardjo,” 18 January 1967; and “Interogasi Supardjo di RTM,” 19 January 1967. The latter transcript mentions the existence of three earlier interrogations. A summary report by army intelligence mentions that he was first interrogated on 14 January 1967: Departemen Angkatan Darat Team Optis-Perpu-Intel, “Laporan Team OptisPerpu-Intel,” 16 January 1967. The head judge asked Supardjo to explain why his statement was different than one of his interrogation transcripts. He stated that he had been questioned under “pressure” (penekanan) and had signed the transcript to avoid “trouble from the interrogators again” (repot-repot sama pemeriksa lagi). The prosecutor (oditur), who happened to have been one of his interrogators, reacted furiously, insisting that Supardjo’s signature signified his un-coerced acceptance of the transcript’s Critical Asian Studies 40:1 (2008)
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To believe that the transcripts were, as Hunter contends, “verbatim transcripts of the actual interroga tions” ( 6 5 ) requires us to have great faith in the probity of the interrogators. The interrogators, in writing the transcripts, had the President Sukarno (left) promoting Suharto (right) to the rank of power to represent general, 28 July 1966. (Credit: O.G. Roeder, The Smiling General, pubthe words of the delished in Indonesia in 1969) tainees in whatever way they wished. No lawyers or witnesses were present. The sessions do not appear to have been tape-recorded. I see no reason to believe that the transcripts were verbatim renderings of the dialogues between the interrogators and the detainees: most passages seem to be paraphrasings and summations. The transcripts are worthless as evidence precisely because the detainees were not the authors of those words on the paper. A detainee’s signature at the end of a transcript is no guarantee he approved of it; the military was in a position to compel him to sign. Are we to believe that the interrogators never threatened violence or used violence? One of the transcripts Hunter cites is of the interrogation of the PKI leader Sakirman. What she does not mention is that Sakirman disappeared. The existence of this interrogation transcript is itself damning evidence; it proves that Sakirman was in the military’s custody prior to his disappearance. He and three other top PKI leaders (Aidit, Njoto, and Lukman) vanished after being captured in late 1965. The Suharto regime remained silent on what happened to them. Still today, the location of their sites of execution and burial remain the subject of speculation. Some portions of the transcripts probably do accurately represent the statements of the detainees, but one cannot judge, on the basis of the transcripts alone, which portions were faithful to the detainees’ words and which were fabricated. Even those statements that were accurately rendered as written text might not have represented the sincere beliefs of the detainees. Obviously, people under interrogation tend to say what they think their interrogators want them to say. Once out in public, many of the detainees repudiated their interrogation transcripts. Untung, praised by Hunter as the detainee who had “the clearest
contents. The head judge eventually stopped his lengthy questioning of Supardjo about the allegation of “pressure” during the interrogation. Mahmillub 1967, 650–655. Roosa / Review Essay
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memory of events” (66), provided courtroom testimony that contradicted many 16 of the statements attributed to him in the interrogation transcripts. Latief did 17 the same. Air Force Major Sujono, whose statements under interrogation Hunter finds “strikingly similar” to the others, provided a convoluted courtroom testimony that was not internally consistent, at least in the original Indonesian that Hunter was unable to read.18 In many passages, Hunter presents her guesswork as indisputable fact. Her lengthy, detailed description of the plotters’ meetings (75–101) results from fusing bits and pieces from the various interrogation transcripts. The plotters must have met numerous times in the weeks before 1 October, but there is no reason to accept as fact the information Hunter provides on the precise dates, places, topics of discussion, and names of attendees. Given the inherent unreliability of statements of captives (some of whom were summarily executed), Hunter is presumptuous in concluding that “the true story of the conspiracy behind the coup seems to have been established beyond any reasonable doubt in the confessions of those involved in the conspiracy” (68). Perhaps Hunter herself does not believe such a grand claim to certainty; why else qualify it with “seems”? Hunter’s main argument is that President Sukarno “at least knew about the coup plans ahead of time” (174) and possibly “initiated the idea” (179). She cites four pieces of circumstantial evidence. Each one turns out not to be any kind of evidence at all, even circumstantial. The first is a report of a conversation between Sukarno and General Adjie in July 1965. She admits the report is unconfirmed and does not name its source. This is rumor, not evidence. The second is a “secret” meeting between Sukarno and Air Force commander Omar Dani on September 29 at which Dani informed the president that Aidit would stage a coup. In fact, this meeting was not secret at all. Sukarno admitted, in written testimony provided for Dani’s trial in 1966, that he met Dani on 29 September. Hunter admits she has no evidence about what they discussed: “It can only be presumed,” she writes, “that the meeting concerned the arrangements for the coup” (155). So we have here presumption, not evidence. The third is the fact that Sukarno met Aidit several times in late September. Again, Hunter presumes they spoke about the coup. The fourth piece of evidence, she declares, is the clincher. She finds the “most convincing piece of evidence” (158) implicating Sukarno in the plot to be a report by Brigadier General Sugandhi concerning his conversations with the PKI leaders Aidit and Sudisman on September 27. The PKI leaders allegedly invited Sugandhi to join their plot and assured him that President Sukarno knew all about it. Sugandhi claimed that when he told Sukarno about these conversations three days later the president told him to keep quiet and threatened to hit
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See the questioning of Untung in the military court, Mahmillub 1966, 31–65. Latief ’s defense plea before the court has been published: see Latief 2000. See, for instance, his testimony as a witness at the Untung trial, “Gerakan 30 September” 1966, 90–120. Critical Asian Studies 40:1 (2008)
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him. Hunter thinks that Sugandhi’s report is reliable and “well documented” (158). If she had explained Sugandhi’s background then the absurdity of it would have been immediately revealed. At the time these conversations were alleged to have occurred he was the military’s director of information and the editor of the army’s hard-line anticommunist newspaper Angkatan Bersenjata, which would lead the post–1 October vicious propaganda campaign against the PKI. He was the last person PKI leaders would have tipped off and the last person a historian should consider a reliable source. In arguing that Sukarno was somehow in league with the September 30th Movement, Hunter ignores the facts that contradict the argument. For instance, the movement’s emissary, Supardjo, had trouble meeting Sukarno on the morning of 1 October. If the president had been in touch with the movement then the meeting should have been prearranged. Supardjo should have known the president had spent the night at the house of his third wife (Dewi). Sukarno should have known that Supardjo would be waiting for him at the palace and that the movement’s troops would be stationed in front of it. Sukarno, when being chauffeured to the palace that morning, allowed his bodyguards to drive him to a different destination. His bodyguards were surprised on seeing the movement’s troops in front of the palace and quickly rerouted the motorcade to avoid them. Supardjo waited in vain just inside the palace gate as the president was shuttled off to the house of his fourth wife (Haryati). Three to four hours elapsed before he met the president at Halim airbase, and that meeting was by luck, not by design. Also, if the plotters had been working with Sukarno why did they announce over the radio that they had taken all power and decommissioned his cabinet? Hunter’s argument would lead one to conclude that Sukarno was the first president in history to have staged a coup against himself.
The Scribe With the CIA’s and the Suharto regime’s versions based almost entirely on tranth scripts of secret interrogations of the September 30 Movement’s leaders there’s good reason to be suspicious. Did the Indonesian military have no other sources of evidence? There was neither ballistics evidence, nor eyewitness testimonies, nor documents — nothing but the alleged statements of detainees made to military officers behind closed doors. Suharto’s men became aware of the unpersuasiveness of their case in 1966 when foreign scholars began expressing critical comments about it. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, professors at Cornell University, wrote a report on the movement in January 1966 and privately distributed copies to fellow scholars, who then began relaying the still unpublished report’s arguments in their own publications.19 Intelligence officers in Jakarta obtained a copy of the Anderson/McVey report courtesy of the U.S. State Department, which had also received a copy from the authors. The officers had nothing to counter this schol-
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Anderson and McVey 1971. Anderson has described the writing of the report and the Suharto regime’s reaction in Anderson 1996, 1–18.
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arly analysis since they had themselves adduced no evidence; they had simply asserted, over and over, often in hysterical terms, that the PKI had led the movement. The army generals were particularly concerned about the Cornell report because they were dependent on U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic aid for their gradual takeover of state power from President Sukarno. If U.S. government officials and the broader public believed that the army’s takeover was illegitimate, U.S. support could be jeopardized. Rising to the challenge of transforming the hype of army propaganda into a logical and well-founded argument were an army-employed historian, Nugroho Notosusanto (proud of his titular rank of colonel awarded in 1968), and a military court prosecutor, Ismail Saleh.20 With help from Guy Pauker, an American political scientist (then at the Rand Corporation) who had been writing about the PKI and cultivating warm relations with the Indonesian military, Notosusanto and Saleh wrote a report that was published in Jakarta in 1968 under the title, The Coup Attempt of the September 30th Movement in Indonesia.21 The book appeared in English because the target audience was foreign, not domestic. At the same time, the CIA contributed to the transnational effort to counter the Cornell report by assigning Hunter to write a report and then, breaking with the agency’s usual procedures, publishing it. Like Hunter’s CIA report, Notosusanto and Saleh’s book based itself primarily on the interrogation transcripts. Indeed, the two men contended that the statements of the detainees during interrogation sessions were more truthful than their statements in public, before the military courts.22 One person who put his faith in the Indonesian army’s truth claims was Dutch journalist Antonie C.A. Dake, who took a break from his work in the early 1970s to write a PhD dissertation at Free University in West Berlin. His dissertation, quickly published as a book — In the Spirit of the Red Banteng (1973) — reiterated the arguments of Notosusanto, Saleh, Pauker, and Hunter. He warmly thanked Pauker in the acknowledgments as a “scholar and a friend.”23 His latest book, The Sukarno File, is nothing but a restatement of the chapters in th the earlier book pertaining to the September 30 Movement, with the exact same arguments and sources. In his first book, Dake relied heavily on one interrogation transcript, that of President Sukarno’s adjutant, Bambang Widjanarko, who was questioned by the military in 1970. Dake treats this transcript as the key to the entire mystery for it contains, he claims, “the most reliable intelligence about what precisely happened in the inner circle around the President” (36). The transcript was so important to his first book that Dake decided to publish the original text and an
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On the career of Notosusanto, see McGregor 2007. Saleh has been a staunch Suharto loyalist since 1965. See a collection of his post–1998 newspaper editorials, many of which defended the Suharto regime’s legacy and insisted that Suharto could not be brought to trial for corruption: Saleh 2005. Notosusanto and Saleh 1967. On Pauker, see Budiawan 2006, 650–62. Notosusanto and Saleh 1967, 119–20. Dake 1973, xiv. Critical Asian Studies 40:1 (2008)
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English-language translation in book form in 1974. Publishing the translation once was apparently not enough for Dake. He has published it again as an appendix in his new book — an appendix that occupies 30 percent of the book’s pages. Dake’s method has not changed since the early 1970s: he accepts all statements attributed to Widjanarko in the transcript as true and then constructs a narrative of events that accords with them, regardless of whether that narrative fits the facts or not. According to the interrogation transcript, Widjanarko claimed that Sukarno, on 4 August 1965, ordered the commander of his palace guard, Brigadier General Sabur, and a battalion commander of the palace guard, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, to take measures against disloyal army generals. Widjanarko is also alleged to have stated that Sukarno received updates on Sabur and Untung’s plotting, even up to the night of 30 September, just hours before the seven army generals were to be abducted. For Dake, this interrogation transcript proves th that Sukarno initiated and directed the September 30 Movement. Dake’s redeployment of the Widjanarko transcript suggests that he has remained deaf to the abundant criticism his argument has received in the intervening years. Nearly every scholar who reviewed his previous books argued that the Widjanarko transcript could not be considered a valid source of information.24 In his new book, Dake does not even bother to rebut the many published criticisms. To buttress his claim that the transcript is reliable, he cites, as he did in 1974, the opinion of Rahadi Karni, the Indonesian librarian in the Netherlands who translated the transcript into English for him. Karni only opines that the transcript has an “internal consistency”; he has nothing to say on whether it accurately represents the views of Widjanarko (341–43).25 Dake’s use of the Widjanarko transcript is highly unethical. He does not mention that Widjanarko later wrote a book that contradicted the statements attributed to him in the interrogation transcript.26 In that book, Widjanarko denied that Sukarno had any connection to the September 30th Movement. Dake cites material from this book three times in The Sukarno File, weaving it into his narrative as if the book was consistent with the interrogation transcript (83–84, 91). He never informs the reader that Widjanarko also provided a very different story in his courtroom testimonies as a witness in the early 1970s. Dake does not ap-
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25.
26.
See the critical reviews by Anderson 1977, 1704–5; van der Kroef 1975, 285–87; Utrecht 1975, 99–102; McVey 1975, 770–73. Also see the criticisms by Harold Crouch, in Crouch 1979, 121. One’s suspicions about the reliability of the transcript are only heightened after reading its contents. Military officers interrogated Widjanarko thirteen times over a fifteen-day period (from 21 October to 4 November 1970). Being questioned nearly every day for that length of time must have been stressful. Widjanarko 1988, 166–86. The Indonesian historian Asvi Warman Adam claims that Widjanarko used to privately admit that he had been coerced into making statements against Sukarno. See Adam 2005. Another Sukarno aide, Colonel Saelan, states that he was punished with over four years imprisonment because he did not cooperate with the interrogators’ demand for him to implicate Sukarno. Saelan called the contents of the Widjanarko interrogation transcript “false” and “made up.” Saelan 2001, 189–91.
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pear to have ever attempted to confirm the interrogation report with Widjanarko himself. There was certainly enough time to contact him; the former presidential adjutant lived at least until 1988 when he published his memoir. Dake follows the precedent of Hunter, Notosusanto, and Saleh in treating interrogation reports as being more reliable than the later public statements of the individuals who had been interrogated. Dake presents many dubious allegations in military intelligence sources as “established fact” (one of his favorite terms). No reliable information allows one to state, as Dake does, that the army officers Sabur, Mursjid, Saelan, and Pranoto were part of the plot, or that Colonel Latief searched hospitals on 1 October looking to kill General Nasution, or that Omar Dani’s mission to China in 1965 was to obtain arms for a new civilian militia (the PKI’s proposed Fifth Force) rather than the military itself. Dake does not inform the reader that two of his favorite sources of information — the authors Soegiarso and Oejeng Soewargana — were intelligence agents of the Suharto regime. In addition to all of its unfounded claims, Dake’s text is rife with factual errors. He states that Aidit “did not have any government function” (16). Actually, Aidit was a coordinating minister in the cabinet and vice head of the supreme legislative body (MPRS). Aidit was not captured near Semarang (159); he was captured near Solo. Frans Seda was not the minister of agriculture in 1965 (48); he was the minister of plantations. Supardjo was not the commander of the September 30th Movement’s troops (45, 47, 68); he was the movement’s representative to Sukarno. Sjafiuddin was not the governor of Bali (36); he was the army commander of the region whose headquarters was in Bali. One has to wonder whether a copy editor ever touched this text. The citation method is bizarre. Dake repeatedly cites his previous books instead of citing the primary sources. At times, he hides the primary sources through needless cross-referencing. For instance, he claims on page 61 that Pranoto was a key link between Sukarno and Aidit. The footnote refers the reader to page 67, where the claim is repeated. The footnote there refers the reader back to page 63. There Dake finally reveals that the source is a statement by Sjam in a trial of 1972. After three footnotes, the reader discovers that Dake is using an unreliable source. Amid all the confusing citations, nearly every page has a mistake in either grammar or spelling. For an expensive book from an academic press, the abysmal quality of all aspects of this text is scandalous and should prompt some serious rethinking at Brill about its approval and editing processes.
The Scholar Both Hunter and Dake, while positioning Sukarno as the mastermind, dismiss the idea that Mao Zedong had ordered the PKI to carry out the movement. This idea has been around since late 1965 when the army was accusing the Chinese government of smuggling arms to the PKI for a revolt. The PKI had been siding with Beijing in the Sino-Soviet conflict even while maintaining a pretense of neutrality. Those anticommunist observers who thought that the PKI was subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party suspected that the Chinese leaders must have had a hand in the September 30th Movement. Victor Fic (1922–2005), 154
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a political science professor who taught in Burma and Singapore before moving to Brock University in Canada, highlights this allegation of Chinese involvement. The awkward subtitle to his book is The Collusion with China which Destroyed the Army Command, President Sukarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia. Fic claims that Mao told Aidit in Beijing on 5 August 1965 to seize state power in Indonesia by eliminating the reactionary army generals and then turning Sukarno into a figurehead president. Fic includes a quote from a transcript of their dialogue. How does Fic know what was said between Mao and Aidit? His source is a 1966 newspaper article in Singapore’s The Straits Times, which itself was based on an anonymously authored article in Angkatan Bersenjata, the Indonesian army’s newspaper edited by the infamous Sugandhi. How did Sugandhi’s men obtain the transcript? We are not told. Fic accepts the article as a valid source only because he has faith in the accuracy of army reporting in 1966. Sugandhi and his newspaper’s writers were inventing all sorts of stories about the PKI at the time. This story about Mao’s instructions to Aidit was just another one of their canards. Just because a Singapore newspaper reprinted it does not give it any legitimacy. Some of the black propaganda against the PKI originated with British intelligence agents in Singapore.27 Chang and Halliday’s allegation of Mao’s involvement in the movement is no more convincing than Fic’s. They claim that Mao “was to blame” for the movement and that “he had started the action for his own self-centered reasons” (608). Their source for these claims is the former head of the Japanese Communist Party, Kenji Miyamoto, who told them that Mao had constantly urged the PKI to “rise up in armed struggle” (606). Kenji Miyamoto’s statement, even if it is true, does not prove that Mao specifically ordered the PKI to carry out the September 30th Movement. Indeed, the implication is the opposite since the movement was some sort of putsch, not an armed struggle of the Maoist type. The Maoists in the PKI criticized Aidit after the collapse of the movement precisely because he had supported a small clandestine putsch and had not mobilized peasants and workers for a prolonged armed struggle.28 Meanwhile, the pro-Soviet communists around the world (such as the Japanese communists) blamed the PKI’s defeat on the Maoist tendencies of the leadership. Both the pro- and anti-Soviet communists interpreted the communist collapse in Indonesia in terms of their own dogma, with little concern for remaining faithful to the factual record. The statements of Kenji Miyamoto, an anti-Maoist, need to be contextualized within the bitter factionalized debates among communists about the PKI’s defeat. One reviewer criticized Chang and Halliday for drawing upon documents of 29 the Japanese Communist Party that remain unavailable to other researchers. I
27. 28.
29.
Easter 2004, 179. The surviving Politburo leaders issued a self-criticism in 1966, translated excerpts of which are available online: http://www.marxists.org/indonesia/indones/PKIscrit. htm; accessed 2 February 2008. Nathan 2005.
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After the death of Suharto on 27 January 2008, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called for one week of official mourning. Students in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, march with a banner reading “Reject national mourning for Suharto.” The Suharto regime used the September 30th Movement in 1965 as a pretext for a nationwide crackdown on the communist party and other left-wing organizations. The carnage that ensued claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. (Credit: AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)
think the lack of access to these documents is a subsidiary problem. The more significant problem is that the documents, as cited in the book, do not support Chang and Halliday’s claim. Their quotations from these Japanese documents do not actually show that Mao instigated the movement. Their method of handling evidence in this case, as in many other cases, involves a sleight of hand: they make a claim, cite many primary sources related to it, and create a false impression that these primary sources support it.30 Fic’s tale of Mao’s involvement is more intricate than Chang and Halliday’s. According to Fic, Aidit returned to Jakarta after receiving instructions from Mao and spoke privately with Sukarno in the Bogor palace on 8 August. At that time he gained Sukarno’s assent to Mao’s plan. Sukarno agreed that the PKI should take state power and that he would voluntarily retire to China, where he would be given a comfortable pension and a large villa. How does Fic know what Aidit said to Sukarno? It turns out he does not know; he does not have any evidence, not even a fake document. He invents the story. Fic defends his speculative account of the meeting between Aidit and Sukarno by claiming that it agrees with three other firmly established facts. First, Fic cites the bogus Widjanarko transcript for the story about Sukarno ordering
30. 31.
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Sabur and Untung to take action against the disloyal generals. Second, Fic cites a written statement in 1989 by a little-known Indonesian military prosecutor about a conversation in 1965 between the Chinese foreign minister, Chen Yi, and the Indonesian foreign minister, Subandrio. Chen Yi allegedly said that China had prepared a residence for Sukarno where he could retire. This bit of information is wholly unreliable. Third, Fic cites a statement by PKI members in exile in 1967 that Aidit had stated in a Politburo meeting in August 1965 that Sukarno had agreed to replace some of the right-wing ministers of his cabinet with more progressive ministers. Even if this third alleged fact is indeed a fact, it does not support Fic’s argument about Sukarno’s involvement in the September 30th Movement. An argument so improbable requires much firmer evidence for it to be seriously considered. Imagine Sukarno, with his great ego and passionate four decades–long commitment to Indonesian nationalism being willing to surrender power and quietly retire in China. The idea is absurd. Fic, like Hunter and Dake, is so intent on implicating Sukarno in the September 30th Movement that he resorts to gross misrepresentations of the former president’s political career. The three authors adopt the U.S. government’s cold war–era Manichean worldview: Sukarno, the supposed nationalist, was really a communist who wanted the PKI to come to power. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the earliest years of his political activism in the 1920s, Sukarno saw himself as a bridge between the schisms in the nationalist movement, as a leader who could unite people of different ethnicities, religions, and political ideologies.31 Having constructed this persona, he never deviated from it. All of his actions and statements up to his death in 1970 are remarkably consistent with it. If he had wanted the PKI to come to power he would neither have excluded the PKI from executive power before 1965, nor told Supardjo to call off the September 30th Movement on 1 October 1965, nor accommodated Suharto’s power grabs after 1 October. Considering the hundreds of thousands of dead after 1 October, one would be justified in criticizing Sukarno for not doing more to support the PKI and resist Suharto. Most of Fic’s book is depressingly familiar. Its sources and arguments overlap those of Notosusanto and Saleh, Hunter, and Dake. The only new important document Fic cites is Supardjo’s postmortem analysis of the movement written in 1966. He uses this document without critically evaluating Supardjo’s claims and without engaging with its subtleties.32 Two of the documents that he has in33 cluded as appendices appear to be forgeries.
32. 33.
I have written a detailed analysis of the Supardjo document in Roosa 2006, 82–116. The documents I believe to be forgeries are: Document 2, which purports to be the PKI Central Committee’s “Standing Instructions,” dated 10 November 1965 (324– 27), and Document 3, which purports to be a message from the PKI Central Committee to provincial offices, dated 28 September 1965 (327–28). Both documents are written in the style of the Aidit and Njono confessions; they reflect what the army said about the PKI, not what the PKI leaders would say themselves. Fic admits he obtained both from an officer in the Indonesian military. Fic’s Document 5 is also a fabrication; it is the transcript of Sughandi’s alleged conversations with Aidit, Sudisman, and Sukarno — the same transcript that Hunter and Dake used.
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Conclusion
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All three of the books under review claim that President Sukarno was one of the th masterminds behind the organizing of the September 30 Movement. All three appeal to evidence to support this claim. Once one examines their evidence, one discovers that every piece of it is bogus. Their claim of Sukarno’s involvement is baseless. Instead of helping to clear up the mysteries of the movement, they only add to the existing confusion about the events. They give credence to wholly unreliable sources and incorrectly identify the people responsible for the movement. Fic compounds his error in identifying Sukarno as a mastermind by throwing Mao Zedong into the conspiracy as well. Since the three books have so little to contribute to the serious investigation of the movement they are best avoided altogether.
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McGregor, Katharine E. 2007. History in uniform: Military ideology and the construction of Indonesia’s past. Singapore: Singapore University Press. McVey, Ruth. 1975. Review. China Quarterly 64 (December): 770–73. Nathan, Andrew. 2005. Jade and plastic. London Review of Books, 17 November. Available online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/nath01_.html; accessed 31 January 2008. th Notosusanto, Nugroho, and Ismail Saleh. 1967. The coup attempt of the “September 30 Movement” in Indonesia. Jakarta, n.p. Pizzicaro, John T. 1969. The 30 September Movement in Indonesia. Studies in Intelligence 13 (4) (fall). th Roosa, John. 2006. Pretext for mass murder: The September 30 Movement and Suharto’s coup d’état in Indonesia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Saelan, H. Maulwi. 2001. Dari revolusi ’45 sampai kudeta ’66: Kesaksian Wakil Komandan Tjakrabirawa. Jakarta: Yayasan Hak Bangsa. Saleh, Ismail. 2005. Ismail Saleh: Yang serius dan yang santai. Jakarta: Perum. Sekretariat Negara Republik Indonesia 1994. Gerakan 30 September: Pemberontakan Partai Komunis Indonesia. Jakarta: Sekretariat Negara Republik Indonesia. Setiyono, Budi, and Bonnie Triyana, eds. 2003. Revolusi belum selesai: Kumpulan pidato Presiden Sukarno 30 September 1965 – Pelengkap Nawaksara. Semarang: MESIASS. Utrecht, Ernst. 1975. An attempt to corrupt Indonesian history. Journal of Contemporary Asia 5 (1): 99–102. van der Kroef, Justus. 1975. Review. Pacific Affairs 48 (2): 285–87. Widjanarko, Bambang. 1988. Sewindu dekat Bung Karno. Jakarta: Gramedia. Wieringa, Saskia. 2002. Sexual politics in Indonesia. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. q
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