Year 501 (24 page)

After its liberation from the Dutch, Indonesia was ruled by the nationalist leader Sukarno. At first, the United States was willing to tolerate this arrangement, particularly after Sukarno and the army suppressed a land reform movement supported by the Indonesian Communist Party [PKI] in the Madiun region in 1948, virtually destroying the party's leadership and jailing 36,000 people. But Sukarno's nationalist and neutralist commitments soon proved entirely unacceptable.

The two major power centers in Indonesia were the army and the PKI, the only mass-based political force. Internal politics were dominated by Sukarno's balancing of these two forces. Western aims were largely shared by the army, who therefore qualified as moderates. To achieve these aims, it was necessary somehow to overcome the anti-American extremists. Other methods having failed, mass extermination remained as a last resort.

In the early 1950s, the CIA tried covert support of right-wing parties, and in 1957-1958 the US backed and participated in armed insurrection against Sukarno, possibly including assassination attempts. After the rebellions were put down, the US turned to a program of military aid and training coupled with a cutback of economic aid, a classic mode of pre-coup planning, followed in Chile a few years later, and attempted in Iran with the dispatch of arms via Israel from shortly after the Khomeini takeover—one of the many crucial elements of the Iran-contra affair suppressed in the subsequent cover-up.
5
Universities and corporations also lent their willing hands.

In a RAND study published by Princeton University in 1962, Guy Pauker, closely involved with US policy-making through RAND and the CIA, urged his contacts in the Indonesian military to take “full responsibility” for their country, “fulfill a mission,” and “strike, sweep their house clean.” In 1963, former CIA staff officer William Kintner, then at a CIA-subsidized research institute at the University of Pennsylvania, warned that “If the PKI is able to maintain its legal existence and Soviet influence continues to grow, it is possible that Indonesia may be the first Southeast Asia country to be taken over by a popularly based, legally elected communist government...In the meantime, with Western help, free Asian political leaders—together with the military—must not only hold on and manage, but reform and advance while liquidating the enemy's political and guerrilla armies.” The prospects for liquidation of the popularly based political forces were regarded as uncertain, however. In a 1964 RAND memorandum, Pauker expressed his concern that the groups backed by the US “would probably lack the ruthlessness that made it possible for the Nazis to suppress the Communist Party of Germany...[These right-wing and military elements]are weaker than the Nazis, not only in numbers and in mass support, but also in unity, discipline, and leadership.”

Pauker's pessimism proved unfounded. After an alleged Communist coup attempt on September 30, 1965, and the murder of six Indonesian generals, pro-American General Suharto took charge and launched a bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, were slaughtered. Reflecting on the matter in 1969, Pauker noted that the assassination of the generals “elicited the ruthlessness that I had not anticipated a year earlier and resulted in the death of large numbers of Communist cadres.”

The scale of the massacre is unknown. The CIA estimates 250,000 killed. The head of the Indonesia state security system later estimated the toll at over half a million; Amnesty International gave the figure of “many more than one million.” Whatever the numbers, no one doubts that there was incredible butchery. Seven-hundred-fifty-thousand more were arrested, according to official figures, many of them kept for years under miserable conditions without trial. President Sukarno was overthrown and the military ruled unchallenged. Meanwhile the country was opened to Western exploitation, hindered only by the rapacity of the rulers.

The US role in these events is uncertain, one reason being the gaps in the documentary record. Gabriel Kolko observes that “U.S. documents for the three months preceding September 30, 1965, and dealing with the convoluted background and intrigues, much less the embassy's and the CIA's roles, have been withheld from public scrutiny. Given the detailed materials available before and after July-September 1965, one can only assume that the release of these papers would embarrass the U.S. government.” Ex-CIA officer Ralph McGehee reports that he is familiar with a highly classified CIA report on the agency's role in provoking the destruction of the PKI, and attributes the slaughter to the “C.I.A [one word deleted] operation.” The deletion was imposed by CIA censorship. Peter Dale Scott, who has carried out the most careful attempt to reconstruct the events, suggests that the deleted word is “deception,” referring to CIA propaganda that “creates the appropriate situations,” in McGehee's uncensored words, for this and other mass murder operations (citing also Chile). McGehee referred specifically to atrocity fabrication by the CIA to lay the basis for violence against the PKI.
6

There is no doubt that Washington was aware of the slaughter, and approved. Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled to Ambassador Marshall Green on October 29 that the “campaign against PKI” must continue and that the military, who were orchestrating it, “are [the] only force capable of creating order in Indonesia” and must continue to do so with US help for a “major military campaign against PKI.” The US moved quickly to provide aid to the army, but details have not been made public. Cables from the Jakarta Embassy on October 30 and November 4 indicate that deliveries of communications equipment to the Indonesian army were accelerated and the sale of US aircraft approved, while the Deputy Chief of Mission noted that “The embassy and the USG were generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army was doing.”
7

For clarity, we must distinguish several issues. On the one hand, there are questions of historical fact: What took place in Indonesia and Washington in 1965-1966? There are also questions of cultural history: How did the US government, and articulate sectors at home, react to what they took to be the facts? The political history is murky. On the matter of cultural history, however, the public record provides ample evidence. The cultural history is by far the more informative with regard to the implications for the longer term. It is from the reactions that we draw lessons for the future.

There is no serious controversy about Washington's sympathy for “what the army was doing.” An analysis by H.W. Brands is of particular interest in this connection.
8
Of the more careful studies of the events themselves, his is the most skeptical concerning the US role, which he regards as basically that of a confused observer, with “only a marginal ability to change a very dangerous situation for the better.” But he leaves no doubt about Washington's enthusiasm about the turn “for the better” as the slaughter proceeded.

According to Brands's reconstruction of events, by early 1964 the US was engaged in “quiet efforts to encourage action by the army against the PKI,” ensuring that when the expected conflict broke out, “the army [would know] it had friends in Washington.” The goal of the continuing civic action and military training programs, Secretary of State Dean Rusk commented, was “strengthening anti-Communist elements in Indonesia in the continuing and coming struggle with the PKI.” Chief of Staff Nasution, regarded by US Ambassador Howard Jones as “the strongest man in the country,” informed Jones in March 1964 that “Madiun would be mild compared with an army crackdown today,” referring to the bloody repression of 1948.

Through 1965, the main question in Washington was how to encourage army action against the PKI. US emissary Ellsworth Bunker felt that Washington should keep a low profile so that the generals could proceed “without the incubus of being attacked as defenders of the neo-colonialists and imperialists.” The State Department agreed. Prospects, however, remained uncertain, and September 1965 ended, Brands continues, “with American officials anticipating little good news soon.”

The September 30 strike against the army leadership came as a surprise to Washington, Brands concludes, and the CIA knew little about it. Ambassador Green, who had replaced Jones, told Washington he could not establish any PKI role, though the official story then and since is that it was a “Communist coup attempt.”

The “good news” was not long in coming. “American officials soon recognized that the situation in Indonesia was changing drastically and, from their perspective, for the better,” Brands continues. “As information arrived from the countryside indicating that a purge of the PKI was beginning, the principal worry of American officials in Jakarta and in Washington was that the army would fail to take advantage of its opportunity,” and when the army seemed to hesitate, Washington sought ways “to encourage the officers” to proceed. Green recommended covert efforts to “spread the story of the PKI's guilt, treachery, and brutality,” though he knew of no PKI role. Such efforts were undertaken to good effect, according to McGehee's account of the internal CIA record. George Ball, the leading Administration dove, recommended that the US stay in the background because “the generals were doing quite well on their own” (Brands's paraphrase), and the military aid and training programs “should have established clearly in the minds of the army leaders that the US stands behind them if they should need help” (Ball). Ball instructed the Jakarta embassy to exercise “extreme caution lest our well-meaning efforts to offer assistance or steel their resolve may in fact play into the hands of Sukarno and [his political associate] Subandrio.” Dean Rusk added that “If the army's willingness to follow through against the PKI is in any way contingent on or subject to influence by the United States, we do not want to miss the opportunity to consider U.S. action.”

Brands concludes that US covert aid “may have facilitated the liquidation of the PKI,” but “at most it speeded what probably would have happened more slowly.” “Whatever the American role in these developments,” he continues, “the administration found the overall trend encouraging. In mid-December Ball reported with satisfaction that the army's campaign to destroy the PKI was ‘moving fairly swiftly and smoothly.' At about the same time Green cabled from Jakarta: ‘The elimination of the communists continues apace'.” By early February 1966, President Johnson was informed that about 100,000 had been massacred. Shortly before, the CIA reported that Sukarno was finished, and “The army has virtually destroyed the PKI.”

Nevertheless, Brands continues, “Despite that good news the administration remained reluctant to commit itself publicly to Suharto,” fearing that the outcome was still uncertain. But doubts soon faded. Johnson's new National Security Adviser Walt Rostow “found Suharto's ‘New Order' encouraging,” US aid began to flow openly, and Washington officials began to take credit for the great success.

According to this skeptical view, then, “The United States did not overthrow Sukarno, and it was not responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved in the liquidation of the PKI,” though it did what it could to encourage the army to liquidate the only mass popular organization in Indonesia, hesitated to become more directly involved only because it feared that these efforts would be counterproductive, greeted the “good news” with enthusiasm as the slaughter mounted, and turned enthusiastically to assisting the “New Order” that arose from the bloodshed as the moderates triumphed.

4. Celebration

The public Western reaction was one of relief and pride. Deputy Undersecretary of State Alexis Johnson celebrated “The reversal of the Communist tide in the great country of Indonesia” as “an event that will probably rank along with the Vietnamese war as perhaps the most historic turning point of Asia in this decade” (October 1966). Appearing before a Senate Committee, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was asked whether US military aid during the pre-coup period had “paid dividends.” He agreed that it had, and was therefore justified—the major dividend being a huge pile of corpses. In a private communication to President Johnson in March 1967, McNamara went further, saying that US military assistance to the Indonesian army had “encouraged it to move against the PKI when the opportunity was presented.” Particularly valuable, he said, was the program bringing Indonesian military personnel to the United States for training at universities, where they learned the lessons they put to use so well. These were “very significant factors in determining the favorable orientation of the new Indonesian political elite” (the army), McNamara argued. A congressional report also held that training and continued communication with military officers paid “enormous dividends.” The same reasoning has long been standard with regard to Latin America, with similar results.
9

Across a broad spectrum, commentators credited the US intervention in Vietnam with having encouraged these welcome developments, providing a sign of American commitment to the anti-Communist cause and a “shield” behind which the generals could act without undue concern about Sukarno's Chinese ally. A Freedom House statement in November 1966 signed by “145 distinguished Americans” justified the US war in Vietnam for having “provided a shield for the sharp reversal of Indonesia's shift toward Communism,” with no reservations concerning the means employed. Speaking to US troops in November 1966, President Johnson told them that their exploits in Indochina were the reason why “In Indonesia there are 100 million people that enjoy a measure of freedom today that they didn't enjoy yesterday.” These reactions reflect the logic of the US war in Indochina.
10