The Masses Did Not Rise (The Hindustan Times, 8 Desember 1965)

=== [PDF page 1] === The Masses Did Not Rise by Dennis Bloodworth Singapore: Pprovipen misjudgments ate glaring enougt, obeervere may be too blinded to spot them, and it te for this reason, perhaps, that the abortive coup and apparent subsequent collapse of the formidable Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) seem eo mystifying. At the end of September no vommunist perty in the “free” world was better placed to create the “revolutionary situation” which pood Marxists regard as essential wene-shifting before the curtain riees on Red Revolution itself. The PKI was the oldest and biggest Communist party in Asia. Formed In 1920, its membership had risen from the shoal waters of §,000 in 1948 to three million in 1985, and It claimed at least another 12 mil- Hon active mipporters within its mass organizations. Tn the 1056 local eiecti th last of any kind to be held in Ine donesia, it had swepi the board porting Col Untung in the belief that Dr Soekarno was threatened by a reactionary plot quickly discovered the hoax, and in nearly all cases hastily switched sides— as the Communists should have calculated they would. Some soldiers have since defected to the PKI in Central Java, one battalion has given trouble in Jogjakarta, four colonels have been identified as pro-Commu-' nist renegades, and there has Deen some purging of the ranks among units in the capital. Gen Abdul Haris Nasution, the De- ‘fence Minister, has said that the PKI had managed § to suborn perhaps 10 per cent of junior officers, and this figure might be higher in Central end East Java and gky of Celebes and Borneo. But It is evident that his 350,000strong army (including reservists) is substantially intact. and the degree of political disaffection within It does not faintly resemble the inflated claims of the in the main provincial cities and PKI. rts of Java, and emerged as the leading party in much of the republic. Its yo dynamic and able leaders had cannily allied tremselvea with middle-of-the road groups in order to isolate diehard anti-Communists and conserva. tives, and Indonesia's vociferous irredentist claim for the return of Dutch West New Guitca and her sainpalen to “crush” neighbouring Malaysia five the PKI excellent cppertunities to take the lead of a e! ping pack of “anti-neo-colonialnationaliste who had the whole nation plunging after them. Loyalty to Soekarno The Communists were also {ntelligent enough to give unswerving loyalty to the person of President Soekarno, who needed them in turn to counterbalance the army end the Muslims. They had. moreover, adroitly manveuvred f-om a position In which thev merely murrrured in his ear to one in which they were beginning to tweak it, te put sharp pressure upon him to arm the peasants ard workers (ostensibly against Mplaysia). to take more Communists Into the Government (he hae accented three already), and to hold general elections in which they would undoubtedly have made new. gigantic gains. They had meanwnile widely penetared the administration. and ad cut the claws of the anti- Communist army leade:ship by engineerin the repeal in 1963 of the tate of War Emergency which had given the military sweeping puwers, It seemed 1n.¥ a matter of time and tactics before they would dominate the Government that controlled the fate of 105 milclion people from Jakarta, and /Southeast Asia would find itself jcaught between the hammer of China and the sickle of Indonesia. If Dr Soekarno died. the PKI had its tame, “respectable” non- Communist candidate for presidency to hand in the unremarkable shape of Dr Suhandrio the first Vice-Premier for party leaders knew that thev could not themselves make any avert hid for direct power without at once facing the guns of the army In any case Mr D'pa Nusantara Aidit. the party chairman, had cautiously stressed in 1963 that armed revolution could only be undertaken once the ground had been fully prepared in the rural areas for a uerilla | war, the workers organized for strikes and demonstrations in the towns, and the armed forces sat'sfactorily penetrated and subverted. Yet when Lt.Col Untune made his foolhardy grand-slam bid for power by milltary coup d'etat on the fatal October 1, ft was at onca obvious that he was playing with Party cards. The official organ of the PKI immediately hailed him as “patriotic and revolutionary”: the Russian and Chinese ambassadors. boycotted the impressive official funeral of the six generals who had been murdered bv the so-called “Gestapo” tncurrece tionists, and Mr Aldit disappear. ed into Central Java. Col Untung, once captured, was reported to have revealed that the Revolutionary Council he had tried to set up was tn have been simply the puppet of the PKI, that Dr Soekarno would have been retained as paper-Pres'dent or, if he refused, “kept in safetv” somewhere He added that many thousands of Communist women and youth had been given weaon-training before the coup and t was later disclosed that the PKI had received massive deli+ veries of thousands of arms from Communist China, some shipned in boldly through the main Indonesian ports disguised as building materials. But none of the ineredients in Mr Aldit’s recipe for “Revolution a la Indonesia" had really heen secured, as far as can be seen, The army wae not “fighting against itself,” with units desert. ing en masse to the Communista. The parachute battalions which had been hoodwinked into sup- Mr Njoto, Deputy Chairman of the Party, once told me confi. dently in Jakarta that at least eivht soldiers out of 10 were sympathizers of the Communists, and fervently “pro-Soekarno The secret of Communist miscalculations mav lie here—in the attempt {o pull the wool over the eyer of outsiders. by confusing lovalty to Dr _ Soekarno§ with loyalty to the PKI, and fudgine the fleures accordingly. To what extent did the Communlst leaders in Jakarta, fed with optimistic renorts from provincial cadres who onlv aimed to olease. end un by deceiving themselves that thev ennid split the army like a rotten fie? In the event the armv did indeed swing ¢o the side that wtelded authority in the name of fr Seekarno, but this was the cide of armv leaders who were in fert the eworn enemies of tha “Castano” plotters and their PKI backers The Communists had achieved deep penetration of the Air Force. and its commander. Air Vice- Marshal Qmar Dani, was hopelessly implicated in the recent coup. But this avails the insurrection{sts little. Gen. | Nasution himself once told me: “I_am not afraid of the air force. The man who holds the ground troops con: trols the situation. It is a small matter to isolate a few military airfields, cut off supplies of petrol and jet fuel. and eround the MiGs for rood.” And he has been proved ticht. The importance of air force support to the PKI has been largely {Husory. But the mainstay of any Communist revotution must be the masses And the masses did not rise, The PKI had alwavs threat- | ened the anti-Communist army Jeaders with the one paralysing weapon which might have | left them imnotent—a general strike in the ports are main towns. at only has there en no gence strike, however. but SOBSI, the Communist-led trade union confederation which has mare than three million memhere has “voluntarily” dissolved itself Party cards burnt There is consequently a growing suspicion that the PKI was just another fine figure of a man in a well-padded overcoat. The Communist leaders themselves claimed it had three million members, but perhaps there were far fewer. In 1963 card-holding membership was reported to be about 400.000. ani today militant cadres may number no more than 30.000 to 40.000. Spread among the 3.000 islands of Indonesia, this big, adipose, loudmouth of an organization was clumsy and sluggish to manipulate. There is little doubt that the great majority of its members were unindoctrinated rice-Marxiste: peasants and workers who joined it because they were land-hungry. or underpaid, and who were more tnterested in runiahs than revolution. Thousands have since burned their party cards in public. Despite the reported arrival of weapons from China. the rebels have for the most part proved to be pitifully armed with spears, sticks and knives. and the menac- Ing mobs {n Jakarta that successfully engendered a heart-sinking feeling that Indonesia must go Communist tomorrow were often made up of rent-a-crowd rowdics on $00 rupiahs ea dav and no exnses. Moreover, with astonish. ing obtuseness, Mr Aidit had earlier discredited his whole acheme for creating a “fifth national service” of armed peasants and workers by proclaiming that it had been suggested by none other than Premier Chou En-lai of Communiet China. Nothing could more effectively have made the Indonesians hold their nostrils whenever it was mooted. However, while these were some of the miscalculations that led up to the coup of October 1. they were to be matched by the mistakes that followed it —Bv arrangement with the Observer, London Te be concluded === [PDF page 2] === Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.