An Arc of Contention

So, what further destabilised the situation in 1963 and created the conditions for the confrontation that followed? Most observers agree Aidit of the PKI made the first move. One historian of the PKI wrote: ‘By late 1963, the party leaders felt more secure and capable of taking political initiatives.’^[778] In September he visited the People's Republic of China.

Aidit felt politics had put the army on the back foot. In May, martial law had been lifted, reducing the army's day-to-day powers. No longer was armed forces commander A. H. Nasution the most powerful man in the country after Sukarno, but the civilians Johannes Leimena and Subandrio. This was a victory for Sukarno. He won another in July with the successful resolution of the Irian Jaya crisis. Aidit began to speak in thinly veiled terms of a struggle within the state between a ‘pro-people aspect' and an ‘anti-people aspect'. The PKI - never opposed to democracy - put elections back on the agenda in 1963, thus openly countering hitherto successful army efforts to postpone them. It felt confident of winning them.

Another motivation for Aidit's risky move came from below. His party had drawn millions into politics for the first time, but until now they had seen none of the social justice it had promised them. In 1960 the PKI had been the biggest supporter of a new basic land reform law (UUPA).

Early in 1964, farmer groups belonging to the PKI-affiliated Farmers Union (BTI) began scattered unilateral actions (aksi sefihak) to occupy and till plots of land they considered theirs by right. This was a shocking new repertoire in the rural and small town areas where they took place. Until this point, the PKI's agitation had not diverged much from the general tone set by the president. Its members had confronted foreign plantation owners over land and labour rights, but even the army had agreed foreign capital should be tackled hard. Now farmers began confronting indigenous landowners. As aksi spread from Central to East Java, landowners began to coordinate a response through their Islamic party Nahdatul Ulama (NU), a long-standing rival to the PKI. The timing of the aksi increased the sense of threat. Instead of serving as vote-getters at election times, land seizures were now intruding into everyday life.

NU sent flying squads of its youth militias (Ansor) to support landowners against challengers. Rival groups adopted strident identities, and assigned their opponents to distinct categories as well. Where organised communists had until then been seen as little different from other nationalist groups, now a mutual process of name-calling kicked in that saw them take on distinct shapes. Groups led by religious landowners and village bureaucrats presented themselves as defenders of the faith against atheist communists. Their repertoire of tactics grew increasingly violent.

Revolutionary conflict, as a new phenomenon, resulted in a new social reality constructed by both the PKI and its opponents. The two parties had to redefine the political arena from a competitive political market (prior to 1963) to a battlefield where political and human survival became the new stakes. Social interaction also changed, and new violent actions, such as beatings, kidnapping and killings, replaced prior actions, such as ‘horse trading'.^[779]

A legitimation conflict lay behind the demonstrative shows of force by rival provincial groups. Farmers Union members squatting on rice fields felt inspired by their president's sympathy for their plight. They knew that justice had been at the heart of the independence war twenty years earlier. At the very same time, NU drum marchers in a town nearby felt they were defend­ing the faith of their community, indeed the entire social order, from godless attack, just as their fathers had done in Madiun in 1948. Similar legitimation conflicts were emerging in other parts of Indonesia. In Bali, one observer wrote, ‘The anger of PNI administrators, landlords and traditional rulers had been roused by the boldness of the PKI's agitation in the 1960s.'^[780] A Catholic priest who had mobilised church youths against communists in Central Flores wrote afterwards of the heightened tension surrounding the prospect of new national elections: ‘A new authority must be established within society.' He had in mind one that was obedient to the church.^[781]

As both sides perceived and acted on threats and opportunities, they engaged in a spiral of increasingly confrontational actions.

The PKI had overestimated its own strength in the villages. Recruitment to the peasants' cause was not bringing in as many new supporters as they had hoped. Unlike China, Java had no real tradition of rural revolt. Even with inflation running at several hundred per cent, the economic crisis was not bad enough to be creating an impoverished rural proletariat. Moreover, they had too little success leveraging cross-class linkages on the issue of economic injustice. Middle-class civil servants, army officers and white-collar workers were still doing reasonably well. This caused one foreign observer to write prophetically already in 1962 that the nation was unlikely to turn to the PKI ‘by acclamation'.^[782]

The increasingly strident tone of the rural confrontations soon attracted attention higher up the social and administrative chain. As it did so, con­testation expanded to the provincial and even the national level and fed into the elite struggle between army and president. Each side framed the situa­tion in sharply contrasting ways, aiming to strengthen internal ranks and attract allies. Military commanders in some regions (West Java, Aceh, North Sumatra, Sulawesi) identified the problem as one of communists creating unmanageable disturbances to public order.

Meanwhile, on the ground an expanding circle of contestants was being drawn into the ring. Groups directly opposed to the aksi sefihak had revived the Madiun theme of the PKI as a danger to the nation. This broader theme appealed to elite urban groups for whom peasant landlessness held no interest. By means of brokerage, the new discursive repertoire was spreading and helping to expand a still rather loose anti-PKI coalition. Students belong­ing to religious and nationalist organisations, already at odds because their future careers depended on factional patronage, now took up the PKI ques­tion as the lens on their differences. On one side was the Islamic HMI, backed by the army, and on the other the left-wing CGMI, backed by the PKI. They began loudly to confront each other in May 1964, and in October HMI was expelled from the national student union PPMI. Polemics continued to escalate throughout 1965. These were the nation's elites, many from well- connected families. The polarising language they each used was widely reported and helped set the tone for journalists and other opinion-makers throughout the nation.

‘Show of force' rallies and marches where these slogans were aired began to be widely deployed throughout 1965. On 23 May 1965 the PKI invited President Sukarno to a massive 45th anniversary rally held in the nation's largest sports stadium. Aidit announced the party had 20 million sympathisers throughout the nation. Sukarno told the rally Aidit was the ‘bulwark of Indonesia'. Similar PKI rallies were held in towns all over the country.

In this polarised atmosphere, marked by agitating popular collectivities that increasingly saw themselves and rivals in antagonistic terms, national elites began to fear the other side would strike first. The military feared the PKI. Army commander Yani had been secretly consulting an informal ‘brains trust' of top generals since January 1965 about contingency plans in the deteriorating political situation. In that month Aidit, hoping to increase the party’s influence within the armed forces, called for the estab­lishment of an armed civilian militia. He knew the army leadership was busy in Borneo with Sukarno’s anti-Malaysian Confrontation (which had also started in September 1963). The first volunteers began training in June 1965. More threatening, the generals felt, was the possibility that Sukarno, president-for-life with unlimited powers, might anoint Aidit as the next president. He was a somewhat fragile 64 years of age, and lacked an obvious successor since his vice-president Hatta had resigned in 1956 with­out being replaced. His remarks praising Aidit at the May PKI rally worried them.

Simultaneously, the PKI feared the military. The Politburo read news leaks about Yani’s ‘brains trust’ as a coup-in-preparation. In August 1965, it blinked. It authorised Aidit to give ‘political support’ to pre-emptive military action by progressive army officers, leaving the details to him. Inspired by the progres­sive coup by Algerian army officers the previous June (he had met the conspirators in Paris), Aidit secretly formed a little group that would kidnap a number of right-wing generals. He intended that they should be presented to Sukarno, who would condemn them and replace them with leftists. Street politics in support of the PKI was supposed to do the rest. The plan was adventurous, but not a coup.

However, the kidnapping on 1 October 1965 went wrong. All six abducted generals were killed by their ill-trained captors after some resisted. Not among those taken was another general, named Suharto. He too was right­wing but had kept a low profile. Suharto took over the levers of military power in Jakarta vacated by those killed and neutralised the kidnappers’ group within 24 hours. He then judiciously ignored various executive orders from President Sukarno designed to limit the impact of the incident. Instead, he set about using it to justify a nationwide crackdown on all communist organisations. His coherent, purposeful action suggests he was working to contingency plans prepared in preceding weeks, even if implementation was chaotic. Army censors told newspaper editors early in October they were starting a campaign against the PKI and anyone printing information critical of that campaign would be considered an ally of the PKI.^[783] The following months were taken up with organising and mobilising to seize state power on the back of the destruction of the Communist Party and the isolation of President Sukarno.

The high command realised the military were unpopular, so rolling in the tanks alone would not work. However, it believed it could build a legitimating coalition out of friendly factions in the nation's peak and provincial elites, and of course from its own military ranks. The preceding polarisation had spooked the nation's factionalised elites enough to make them listen to a call for united action. Without this, Suharto would not have been able to solve his collective action problem. Images of the six dead generals, luridly exploited in military broadcasts, finally convinced them that communists were a serious threat to their established authority. The wonderfully unifying effect of popular action on elites similarly created many other autocracies in the Southeast Asian region during the Cold War, as Slater has shown.^[784] Leaders of the devout Islamic community, Christian minorities, and members of the indigenous entrepreneurial, professional and bureaucratic middle class, and a Westernised intelligentsia, united quickly behind Suharto. Western governments, meanwhile, had already quietly indicated their support for anti-communist action. The US govern­ment had long envisaged a military-led developmentalist regime as its pre­ferred option for Indonesia. It committed itself after i960 to ‘provoking a clash between the army and the PKI, on the presumption that the army would emerge victorious... Washington [in 1965] did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of the alleged PKI members.'^[785]

Within the armed forces, Suharto had to persuade or else remove officers unhappy about the brutal and unconstitutional course upon which he was set. Governors, some but not all active military men, also had to be per­suaded to permit aggressive action in their region. All this required skill and time. Ultimately, the organisational resources available within the armed forces were decisive to the outcome.

Out in the provinces, Suharto had to mobilise the civilian groups that had joined the loose anti-communist coalition over the previous eighteen months. In addition, he had access to a large array of non-ideological civilian clients who were more or less directly attached to military garri­sons. Every local commander could call on hundreds of young men who had registered as village guards or other auxiliaries. Various campaigns over the years had led to people's militias being set up to recruit volunteers for possible service in faraway places such as Papua or Malaysia, or for village defence against insurgents such as Darul Islam militants. All were encouraged to vent their feelings about PKI treason to the nation. A barrage of radio, television and newspaper propaganda about the PKI ‘stockpiling Chinese weapons, digging mass graves for opponents, compiling lists of individuals to murder, or collecting special instruments for gouging out eyes', while entirely fictitious, helped build a ‘kill or be killed' atmosphere.^[786]

At some point, the young men were given a licence to kill those in detention. Who issued this licence, and why, remains a matter for research. Mass murder from then on became for the allied provincials the ultimate ‘show of force'. Aware that the military needed their eyes and ears for local intelligence, and their hands for plausible deniability, they exercised a reign of terror in which every neighbourhood feud could be dressed up as anti­communist righteousness. It was these feuds that, in some areas, gave the killing sprees an anarchic energy that early observers saw as amok. Yet rarely, so far as we now can see (and contra Gerlach), was it a case of ‘uncontrolled violence'.

Organisational exigencies meant that the exact timetable and course of events varied from one region to another. Wholesale savagery occurred in rural parts of Java and Bali, and in the plantation zone near Medan. In East Nusa Tenggara the military mostly did the killing themselves, for lack of a strong anti-communist civilian movement. We still know little about other regions of Indonesia.

Some mass executions took place in public, with crowds forced to watch and even clap for joy. But even when they took place secretly at night - as was more often the case - a performative element remained central. Heads were left on spikes, severed penises nailed to trees, bodies thrown into rivers. The great majority of victims were indigenous leftists (the stubborn myth that most were ethnic Chinese obscures the class nature of the violence). The carnage stopped before all the millions who had supported the PKI were dead. Apparently, the political objective of establishing a new ‘counter­revolutionary' authority had been achieved. Allowing unruly proxies to go on killing risked unleashing civil war. After initially encouraging it, the military in some cases intervened to rein in further violence.

Detainees suffered a full array of torture techniques - rape, forced ‘mar­riage' with officers, electric shock, displacement, forced labour, hunger. ‘Scientific' psychological tests designed in the West were used to purge hundreds of thousands of teachers and other civil servants from the state apparatus. The military first shut down and subsequently controlled closely all political party activity. This left them as the sole party in charge of allocating rents obtained from the state. The religious militias failed to gain significant prominence afterwards: they had been pawns. On the contrary, the New Order became a military-led, secular developmentalist regime. It demanded religious observance as a form of obedience but prosecuted any who preached theocracy.

Elite and middle-class members of the anti-communist coalition looked to their military patrons for rewards. The rapidly expanding bureaucracy after 1965, paid for by Western aid and a fortuitous oil boom, could accommodate plenty of them. Depoliticised economic planning turned the economy around, creating performance legitimacy for the new arrangement.

Censorship of print and electronic media remained tight throughout the three decades of the New Order. Yet middle-class support for the destruc­tion of the PKI was largely genuine, despite some discomfort over the extreme violence it took. A new legitimation discourse dropped the theme of justice for those dispossessed by neo-colonialism, and took up bourgeois concerns for law and order, and religion. In this discourse, the killings in fact never ended. They continued in the form of more or less subtle threats of further arbitrary violence made on every public occasion. At the community level, meanwhile, ‘Violence continues to reverberate through social networks, marking everyday life and molding aspirations for the future.'^[787]

Indonesian political, social, economic and cultural life continues to pay a high price for this single violent episode. The principles of non-violent political consultation were replaced by those of violent authoritarianism. The political party's function of forum for popular representation disappeared and with it progressive programmes of land reform and labour rights. Emancipative aspirations born out of the anti-colonial movement went underground. Whole genres of fictional, political and historical writing as well as visual and dramatic arts were banned. Even after demonetisation in 1998, law courts still have not recovered from the blow to their authority delivered by the extrajudicial impunity with which the killings were car­ried out.