Context

In order to avoid having to recreate an infinite regression of causal processes going back to the remote past, contentious politics analysts identify a key turning point in the story that they find the most puzzling.

Indonesia at this time was the economic basket case of South-East Asia; 90 per cent of its 100 million inhabitants remained rural and poor. Its economy had been shattered by the Pacific War (1942-5) and by the revolu­tionary war of national liberation it had fought against the colonial Netherlands (1945-9). The young national institutions remained fragile and deeply embedded in the numerous local societies that made up this diverse nation. To correct the economic injustices of the colonial era, the govern­ment promised ‘socialism a la Indonesia'. To the indigenous middle class, small but largely urban and vocal, this meant jobs for them. But the govern­ment lacked the wherewithal to disturb the inherited capitalist economy. As it desperately attempted to control inflation and thus the money supply on the one hand, while not offending the state-dependent political class on the other hand, the government from 1958 onwards lurched from crisis to crisis. The only solution was to slash government expenditure, yet precisely that was politically inexpedient.

The result was an economy of primitive accumulation in which too much money - acquired in highly political ways by the well-connected - was chasing too few goods. Indonesia's developing economy was ‘marginality- ridden': awash in financial and labour surpluses, while the poor remained cut off from the modern formal economy.^[773] Financial surplus was the basis for a politics of patronage through the highly politicised bureaucracy. Labour surplus disempowered labour.

Three phenomena of relevance to the ensuing violence followed from this political economy context. One concerns the prevalence of patron-client relations; the second, populist politics that the government deployed to compensate for organisational ineffectiveness; and the third, the slow growth of institutional effectiveness particularly in the armed forces.

Patron-client relations began to attract researchers' attention in the 1960s, when American social scientists rediscovered Weber and reformulated his notion of patrimonialism as ‘neo-patrimonialism'.^[774] They quickly found many instances of it in Indonesia. From the rural dependency relation between landlord and peasant to the personalised politics at the highest levels of the Indonesian military, Indonesian society was shot through with patron­client relations.^[775] Everyone, including Indonesians themselves, thought these relations signified a modernisation lag. Even government officials initially praised the communist-affiliated Indonesian Farmers Union (Barisan Tani Indonesia, BTI) for attempting to wean peasants off their dependency on patrons. It encouraged them to take ‘small but successful' steps towards modern, autonomous citizenship.^[776] One reason that the party ultimately failed is that patron-client relations proved to be far more resilient than was then thought. Such unequal relations typically thrive under conditions of poverty and insecurity.

Populist mobilisation was one of the hallmarks of the period. As in other developing countries at the time, elites in Indonesia oscillated between wanting to mobilise and to repress popular agitation.

The Communist Party was far better at spreading calls to arms than any one else. All the others were patronage parties with limited mass appeal. The PKI practised modern politics, based on an active membership and on practical material issues. Starting with just 8,000 members when the new leadership took over in 1951, it gained 16 per cent of the national vote in the 1955 general election, and even more in regional elections held in some areas in 1957. By 1964 it claimed to have branches in every large island, 93 per cent of districts and cities, 83 per cent of sub-districts and small towns, and 62 per cent of villages.^[777]

The party had, moreover, a strong interest in building a mutually bene­ficial relationship with the president. It had barely survived elimination during the national revolution in 1948, when it had supported a rebellion at Madiun (East Java) against the national leadership. Fighting between local Muslims and communists broke out that claimed tens of thousands of lives. Memories of the PKI betraying the republic at its most critical hour were to resurface vigorously after 1963. But in the early 1950s, under new leadership, the party managed to rebuild its nationalist credentials. Socialism was de rigueur. Indonesia was officially neutral in the accelerating Cold War, but nearly everyone, whatever their religion, accepted the idea that Western capital was the cause of misery in former colonies. The party followed the Soviet united front strategy of supporting the nationalist bourgeoisie.

Social mobilisation of all kinds in the 1950s and early 1960s created an enormous range of popular organisations at the provincial level. These often represented cross-class collaborations that saw themselves optimistically as bringing modernity to their region. At the same time, limited state centralisa­tion meant that these organisations also expressed and deepened locally specific social divisions. Underneath their (often religious) differences lay latent class conflict. This was particularly so where agrarian capitalism had penetrated deeply, such as in East Java and North Sumatra.

Institutional effectiveness, the third contextual phenomenon to consider here, was low. Elites weakened it by constantly politicising the bureaucracy. They struggled for advantage, and for control of rents. The military, too, was affected. Rather than a professional force guarding borders against foreign enemies, it had looked inwards towards internal security since its birth in the national revolution. But as an armed hierarchy it was less open to public intervention than other institutions. It could afford to contemplate organisa­tion as an effective political resource even without popularity. Initially, however, it did not even have a presence outside the major towns. Especially in the thinly populated islands beyond Java, the state bureaucracy in general was virtually absent, while political party mobilisation was wide­spread. The army's success in suppressing the regional rebellions of 1956-7 provided a major motivation to expand. Between 1958 and 1963 it extended its network of garrisons to the provincial level, and in some critical areas ofJava down to the district and even village level. In March 1961 it set up a mobile force called Kostrad that could be deployed anywhere at short notice. A year later a new army office was created to insert active army officers into every field of government activity. Senior military officers kept in close touch with the US Embassy, which worried about Indonesia falling into the communist camp.

Internally, the military leadership increasingly saw the organisational reforms as a counter-balance to PKI influence. They saw the PKI expanding in areas where the army, for lack of funds, still had no presence. PKI general secretary D. N. Aidit realised top army officers were overwhelmingly anti­democratic and anti-communist - the reason he sought the president's protection - but he believed rank-and-file ‘peasant soldiers' could be appealed to.

Despite many incidents of riots, rebellions and bannings out in the pro­vinces, political contention at the centre did not become particularly antag­onistic before late 1963. President Sukarno would not permit open confrontation in his polity. He acknowledged ideological distinctions among nationalists, the religious and communists, but he ruled that all should work together. In i960 he announced that factional struggles within the government should be resolved through a principle of proportional representation he called Nasakom (NASionalisme, Agama, KOMunisme). This prevented open discord, but at the cost of intensifying byzantine intra- bureaucratic politics. Every government departmental head, governor, attorney or police chief owed their appointment to factional alliances. The communists, under-represented in the bureaucracy, stood to gain most from Nasakom.

Sukarno's always-belligerent campaigns against foreign oppressors pro­vided more opportunity for manoeuvring. Each new venture led to yet another joint military-civilian organisation primed for mobilisation. The campaign from December 1961 to recover West Irian (West Papua) from the Dutch was the first of these; the move from September 1963 to combat the new state of Malaysia another. Each helped to militarise society, yet in each the military had to share authority with civilians.

Whenever the military attempted openly to buck the enforced unity and assert their own agenda, they failed. A coup d’etat attempt on 17 October 1952 backfired. In 1956-7, revolts by various regional commands against perceived communist dominance in Jakarta failed, despite military backing from the United States.

Only Sukarno could get away with assertive action. After returning from a visit to communist China late in 1956, he spoke about ‘burying the parties’, which, he said, divided the nation. Extra-constitutional acts followed rapidly after this. In 1957 he dismissed the cabinet and appointed a non-party ‘work­ing’ cabinet. Two years later he took over the leadership of cabinet himself, dismissed the elected assembly debating a new constitution, and reinstated the authoritarian 1945 constitution. In i960 he got rid of the elected parlia­ment and appointed his own, arguing that politicians did not understand the people as well as he did. The military supported these anti-democratic moves. Then he banned the small but powerful liberal intellectual technocrats’ party PSI. More importantly, in August i960 he banned the Islamic party Masyumi. Both were enemies of the PKI. Many newspapers were banned as well. All this alienated some upper-middle-class intellectuals in Jakarta, and many religious petit bourgeois traders in the outer islands. But the political heart­lands remained loyal, and nowhere did these actions trigger national-level contention that threatened to get out of hand.