Indonesia’s reluctance to remember September 1965

Horrible things happened in Indonesia between autumn 1965 and spring 1967. There is that eternal battle between memory and forgetting, a reality which reasserts itself when you go into any discussion of the horrors that were inflicted on Indonesians after Sept. 30, 1965. On the night of Sept. 30, the world was informed, a plot by the country’s communist party to seize power had ended up in the murder of six generals of the army. A seventh one survived. He was General Suharto. And he would go on to set in place and preside over a kleptocracy for 32 years.

The 1960s were electrifying times, not least because it was widely believed that President Sukarno was invincible, that he was friendly with the People’s Republic of China and therefore was on an easy relationship with D.N. Aidit and his Partai Komunis Indonesia. To be told, therefore, that Aidit had been involved in a plot to take over the state was a rude awakening for many people around the world. Doubts about the supposed coup began to emerge as early as 1967, when Sukarno was finally pushed aside and the presidency was taken over by Suharto. The new ruler and his associates, Adam Malik and Sultan Hamengku Buwono, were in little mood for Sukarno to continue in office. The founding father of Indonesia would die in 1970, a sad, lonely man.

All these decades after September 1965, questions keep coming up about the realities behind the unfolding tragedy. How’s this for a query? If six senior generals were murdered in their beds by the communist plotters, how is it that the seventh, Suharto, remained untouched? It is here that suspicions arise, about the coup actually being engineered by the Indonesian army, with the PKI being made a convenient cover for the crime.

In 1994, at a meeting of South Asian media practitioners in Kathmandu, Tan Sri Ghazalie Shafie, a former Malysian deputy prime minister, let slip a truth that one could explore in detail. As he reflected on the birth of ASEAN, he let it be known that in 1964 the Tunku Abdur Rahman government kept in touch with a young Indonesian army officer named Suharto. That was all he said before clamming up. And remember that those were Sukarno’s konfrontasi days with Kuala Lumpur. Was Suharto already in on a plan to push Sukarno from power?

Indonesians were put through long trails of fire within days of the incidents of Sept. 30. The soldiers went on a rampage, rounded up communists and communist sympathizers, before dispatching them through pumping holes through their heads. Those they did not kill they maimed physically and psychologically. Even today, you will find aging school teachers once detained and tortured by Suharto’s men reluctant to relate the tales of horror they went through after the fall of Suharto. Aidit was picked up by the army and was never heard of again. It emerged years later that he had been summarily shot. Sukarno’s very respected foreign minister Subandrio was tried and sentenced to death, though the conviction was later commuted to imprisonment for life. He was eventually freed in the final years of Suharto. He has never told the world of the ordeal he went through.

The journalist John Pilger, in his revealing work, “The New Rulers of the World,” gives you his own take on the coup and its aftermath in Indonesia and around the globe. A few weeks after the “smashing of the PKI coup,” says Pilger, a number of western donors and representatives of multinational agencies met in Geneva to slice out bits of Indonesia and its resources for themselves. A proud country once led by a charismatic father figure swiftly passed into the world of faux capitalism, in much the same way that Nigeria fell into the grip of foreign oil firms. Ken Saro-wiwa would hang in Sani Abacha times because of his defense of Nigerian rights to the country’s natural resources. Conditions were almost similar with those which Indonesia confronted between 1965 and 1967.

A million Indonesians were murdered in the months following the military take-over of the country. Tens of thousands disappeared without trace. Unlike the energetic search for truth and reconciliation which has led to the emergence of a new South Africa, unlike the travails which a resurgent Chile put Augusto Pinochet through, those who came after Suharto in Indonesia felt little need to delve into the truth of all that happened in the country through the long period of murder and mayhem in the 1960s.

Silence has been all. In a changed Indonesia ― affluent, democratic and happy ― that dark chapter has been consigned to the attic of history. A pity.

The writer is executive editor of The Daily Star. ― Ed.

By Syed Badrul Ahsan

(The Daily Star)

(Asia News Network)