30 September Movement
In the days and weeks that followed, the army blamed the coup attempt on the Indonesian Communist Party. Soon a campaign of mass killing was underway, which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists.
Under the "New Order" regime of President Suharto the movement was usually referred to as "G30S/PKI" by those wanting to associate it with the PKI, and propaganda would refer to the group as Gestapu.
Later that morning, around 2,000 troops from two Java-based divisions occupied what is now Lapangan Merdeka, the park around the National Monument in central Jakarta, and three sides of the square, including the RRI (Radio Republik Indonesia) building. They didn't occupy the east side of the square â€" location of the armed forces strategic reserve (KOSTRAD) headquarters, commanded at the time by Major General Suharto. At some time during the night, D.N. Aidit, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) leader and Air Vice-Marshal Omar Dhani, the Air Force commander both went to Halim pointing at their involvement.
Most of the rebel troops fled, and after a minor battle in the early hours of 2 October, the Army regained control of Halim, Aidit flew to Yogyakarta and Dani to Madiun before the soldiers arrived.
Suharto and his associates immediately blamed the PKI as masterminds of the 30 September Movement. With the support of the Army, and fueled by horrific tales of the alleged torture and mutilation of the generals at Lubang Buaya, anti-PKI demonstrations and then violence soon broke out. Violent mass action started in Aceh, then shifted to Central and East Java. Suharto then sent the RPKAD paratroops under Col. Sarwo Edhie to Central Java. When they arrived in Semarang, locals burned the PKI headquarters to the ground. The army swept through the countryside and were aided by locals in killing suspected communists. In East Java, members of Ansor, the youth wing of the Nahdlatul Ulama went on a killing frenzy, and the slaughter later spread to Bali. Figures given for the number of people killed across Indonesia vary from 78,000 to one million. Among the dead was Aidit, who was captured by the Army on 25 November and summarily executed shortly after.
The Army leadership began making accusations of PKI involvement at an early stage. Later, the government of President Suharto would reinforce this impression by referring to the movement using the abbreviation "G30S/PKI". School textbooks followed the official government line that the PKI, worried about Sukarno's health and concerned about their position should he die, acted to seize power and establish a communist state. The trials of key conspirators were used as evidence to support this view, as was the publication of a cartoon supporting the 30 September Movement in the 2 October issue of the PKI magazine Harian Rakyat. According to later pronouncements by the army, the PKI manipulated gullible left-wing officers such as Untung through a mysterious "special bureau" that reported only to the party secretary, Aidit. This case relied on a confession by the alleged head of the bureau, named Sjam, during a staged trial in 1967. But it was never convincingly proved to Western academic specialists, and has been challenged by some Indonesian accounts.
The reason given by those involved in the 30 September movement was that it was to prevent a planned seizure of power by a "Council of Generals". They claimed to be acting to save Sukarno from these officers allegedly led by Nasution and including Yani, who had planned a coup on Armed Forces Day â€" 5 October.
In 1971, Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey wrote an article which came to be known as the Cornell Paper. In the essay they proposed that the 30 September Movement was indeed entirely an internal army affair as the PKI had claimed. They claimed that the action was a result of dissatisfaction on the part of junior officers who found it extremely difficult to obtain promotions and because of hostility toward the generals because of their corrupt and decadent lifestyles. They allege that the PKI was deliberately involved by, for example, bringing Aidit to Halim: a diversion from the embarrassing fact the Army was behind the movement.
Recently Anderson expanded on his theory that the coup attempt was almost totally an internal matter of a divided military with the PKI playing only a peripheral role; that the right-wing generals assassinated on 1 October 1965 were, in fact, the Council of Generals coup planning to assassinate Sukarno and install themselves as a military junta. Anderson argues that G30S was indeed a movement of officers loyal to Sukarno who carried out their plan believing it would preserve, not overthrow, Sukarno's rule. The boldest claim in the Anderson theory, however, is that Suharto was in fact privy to the G30S assassination plot.
Central to the Anderson theory is an examination of a little-known figure in the Indonesian army, Colonel Abdul Latief. Latief had spent a career in the Army and, according to Anderson, had been both a staunch Sukarno loyalist and a friend with Suharto. Following the coup attempt, however, Latief was jailed and named a conspirator in G30S. At his military trial in the 1970s, Latief made the accusation that Suharto himself had been a co-conspirator in the G30S plot, and had betrayed the group for his own purposes.
Anderson points out that Suharto himself has twice admitted to meeting Latief in a hospital on 30 September 1965 and that his two narratives of the meeting are contradictory. In an interview with American journalist Arnold Brackman, Suharto stated that Latief had been there merely "to check" on him, as his son was receiving care for a burn. In a later interview with Der Spiegel, Suharto stated that Latief had gone to the hospital in an attempt on his life, but had lost his nerve. Anderson believes that in the 1st account, Suharto was simply being disingenuous; in the second, that he had lied.
Anderson's theory, for all the exhaustive research it has entailed, still leaves open a number of questions of interpretation. If, as Anderson believes, Suharto did have inside knowledge of the G30S plot, this still leaves open several possibilities: (1) that Suharto had truly taken part in the plot and defected; (2) that he had been acting as a spy for the Council of Generals; or (3) that he was uninterested completely in the factional struggle of G30S and Council of Generals. Given that Suharto has since died these questions are unlikely to be answered easily.
The role of the United Kingdom's Foreign Office and MI6 intelligence service has also come to light, in a series of exposxs by Paul Lashmar and Oliver James in The Independent newspaper beginning in 1997. These revelations have also come to light in journals on military and intelligence history.
The revelations included an anonymous Foreign Office source stating that the decision to unseat Pres. Sukarno was made by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan then executed under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. According to the exposxs, the United Kingdom had already become alarmed with the announcement of the Konfrontasi policy. It has been claimed that a CIA memorandum of 1962 indicated that Prime Minister Macmillan and President John F. Kennedy were increasingly alarmed by the possibility of the Confrontation with Malaysia spreading, and agreed to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities." However, the documentary evidence does not support this claim.
To weaken the regime, the Foreign Office's Information Research Department coordinated psychological operations in concert with the British military, to spread black propaganda casting the PKI, Chinese Indonesians, and Sukarno in a bad light. These efforts were to duplicate the successes of British Psyop campaign in the Malayan Emergency.
Of note, these efforts were coordinated from the British High Commission in Singapore where the British Broadcasting Corporation, Associated Press (AP), and New York Times filed their reports on the Indonesian turmoil. According to Roland Challis, the BBC correspondent who was in Singapore at the time, journalists were open to manipulation by IRD because of Sukarno's stubborn refusal to allow them into the country: "In a curious way, by keeping correspondents out of the country Sukarno made them the victims of official channels, because almost the only information you could get was from the British ambassador in Jakarta."
These manipulations included the BBC reporting that Communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta. The accusation was based solely on a forgery planted by Norman Reddaway, a propaganda expert with the IRD. He later bragged in a letter to the British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist that it "went all over the world and back again," and was "put almost instantly back into Indonesia via the BBC." Sir Andrew Gilchrist himself informed the Foreign Office on 5 October 1965: "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change."
In the 16 April 2000 Independent, Sir Denis Healey, Secretary of State for Defence at the time of the war, confirmed that the IRD was active during this time. He officially denied any role by MI6, and denied "personal knowledge" of the British arming the right-wing faction of the Army, though he did comment that if there were such a plan, he "would certainly have supported it."
In a 2006 book on the Movement, historian John Roosa dismisses the official version of events, saying it was "imposed by force of arms" and "partly based on black propaganda and torture-induced testimonies." He points out that Suharto never satisfactorily explained away the fact that most of the movement's protagonists were Army officers. However, he does concede that some elements of the PKI were involved.
Similarly, he asks why, if the movement was planned by military officers, as alleged in the "Cornell Paper", was it so poorly planned. In any case, he says, the movement's leaders were too disparate a group to find enough common ground to carry out the operation.
He claims that US officials and certain Indonesian Army officers had already outlined a plan in which the PKI would be blamed for an attempted coup, allowing for the party's suppression and the installation of a military regime under Sukarno as a figurehead president. Once the 30 September Movement acted, the US gave the Indonesian military encouragement and assistance in the destruction of the PKI, including supplying lists of party members and radio equipment.
As to the movement itself, Roosa concludes that it was led by Sjam, in collaboration with Aidit, but not the party as a whole, together with Pono, Untung and Latief. Suharto was able to defeat the movement because he knew of it beforehand and because the Army had already prepared for such a contingency. He says Sjam was the link between the PKI members and the Army officers, but that the fact there was no proper coordination was a major reason for the failure of the movement as a whole.
Related Sites for 30 September Movement
- Half the Sky read 30 September Movement
- Today in History: September 30 read 30 September Movement
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