Army plans to kill P.K.I. for ever (The Scotsman, 8 Desember 1965)

=== [PDF page 1] === ARMY PLANS TO KILL. PKI. FOR EVER @ just over two months ago it seemed possible that the Communists might soon be in a position to dominate Indonesia. South-east Asia would then have been caught between the hammer of China and the sickle of Indonesia. But the badlytimed Communist coup of October 1 was a failure. President Sukarno has so far refused to ban the Communists, but two army leaders, General Suharto and General Nasution, are pushing ahead with plans to destroy the P.K.I. for ever. Dennis Bloodworth AMMost overlords yesterday, almost outlaws today, the Indonesian Communists who were so deeply implicated in the ruthless but abortive Left-wing coup d'etat in Djakarta on October 1 seem to have miscalculated their moment, their strength, their strategy, and the savage determination of the military and the Moslems to wipe them out. Provided misjudgments are glaring enough, observers may be too blind to spot them, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that the apparent collapse of the formidable Indonesian Communist Party (P.K.I.).seems so mystifying At the end of September, no Communist Party in the “free” world was better placed to create the “revolutionary situation” which good Marxists regard as essential scene-shifting before the curtain rises on Red Revolution itself. Its young, dynamic and able leaders had cannily allied themselves with middleof-the-road groups in order to isolate diehard = antiCommunists and conservatives. They were also intelligent enough to give unswerving sovelty, to the person of resident Sukarne, who needed them in turn to counterbalance the bat and the Moslems. ey had meanwhile widely penetrated the administration, and had cut the claws of the shi engin h 1 ship eering the repea in 1 of the State of War Emergency which had given the military sweeping powers. It seemed only a matter of time and tactics before they would dominate the government that controlled the fate of 105 million Regple from Djakarta, and South-East Asia would find itself caught between the hammer of China and the sickle of Indonesia. Discovered hoax Dipa ieee he _— ee party chairman, cautiously stressed in 1963 that armed Tevolution could be undertaken ey once the ground had been Y prepared in the rural areas errilla war, the workers org for strikes and demonstrations in the towns, and the armed forces satisfactorily penetrated and subverted. Yet when Lieutenant-Colonel Untung made his foolhardy grandslam bid for power by military coup d’etat on the fatal October 1, none of the ingredients in Aidit’s. recipe for “Revolution & la Indonesia” had really been secured, as far as bees army was not against itself,” with units deserting en masse ty the Communists. The arachute battalions, which had boas hoodwinked into supporting Colonel Untung in the belief that Sukarno was threatened by a plot, discovered the hoax and in nearly all cases hastily switched sides —as the Communists should have calculated they would. The key to successful revolution in Indonesia was the support of President Sukarno, whom the overwhelming majority of ordinary Indonesians — in and = out of uniform—regarded as father of the nation. But the odious brutality that accompanied the army leaderfor a " coup at once made it impossible for the openly. Six leading generals were done to death, horribly mutilated by doe-eyed girls of the Indonesian Communist Party’s movement, and their bodies were pitched into a well. Coupcrazed Communist youths danced and sung around some of these officers before they died, capering about in glee at Halim air base in anticipation of the bloody deed to come, when they should have been moving without delay on Strategic targets in Djakarta. Moreover, the secret of the coup had Iéaked, and although he was sceptical about the intelligence reports, General Abdyl Haris Nasution, the anti-Communist Defence Minister, was alert enough to possible danger to skip over his garden wall when the “Gestapo” conspirators came to gun him down. Their failure to kill this arch-enemy was fatal, and they compounded it by murdering his five-year-old daughter. Old image destroyed With this.single demonstration of cold-blooded inefficiency “Bung” to back it they made the man who controlled the half-mllionstrong armed forces of Indonesia their most bitter and implacable enemy, and they simultaneously stripped of all significance Sukarno’s kiss-andmake-up arguments jn favour of internal peace and unity. These acts of - terrorism, followed by Communist mass murders in Central and Eastern Java, and the uncovering of P.K.I, plans for burning forests, creating famine, and razing the houses of political enemies, have destroyed the old “patriotic” image of the party. Today it is not the Communists who dominate the streets of Djakarta. It is the happily outraged Moslem mobs that now take their revenge on them, firing their homes, demanding the dissolution of the P.K.L, calling for Aidit to be hanged. A disarmed Sukarno has been reluctantly obliged to appoint tough anti-Communist ajor- General Suharto, whom he heartily dislikes; Commanderin-Chief of the army, and is reduced to making empty speeches about the need to end violence and restore unity, while the army goes about its © cally grim ee of — cally mopping up e Communist militants in Central and Eastern Java. The crowd is roaring for the dismissal of Dr Subandrio, the First Deputy Premier, who has so obligingly co-operated with the P.K.L in the past, and only now decided to denounce it as “treasonous.” As for the defunct Revolutionary Council, invented by the coup leaders as a respectable front for the Communist take-over of power, its so-called “members” began denying that they had ever agreed to belong to such an organisation almost before the ink was dry on the List of their names. The P.K.L, torn from its pent position of strength n Indonestan affairs, is now at bay. Thousands of its members have been arrested for suspected inplication in the General A. H. Nasution, Minister of Defence. coup, and there are conflicting reports that Aidit himself has been killed. The party has been banned in West Java, South Celebes and the Moluccas, and there is heavy pressure on Sukarno to outlaw it completely. Ministries, public services, the army, the universities, and even private organisations have embarked upon a grand compulsory witch-hunt. To eject from office sympathisers of the conspirators, the P.K.L’s headquarters has been burned, and its countrywide communication network has been destroyed. To what extent did the Communist leaders in Djakarta, fed with optimistic reports, from provincial cadres who only aimed to please, end up by deceiving themselves that they could split the army like a rotten fig? In the event the army did indeed swing to the side that wielded authority in the name of Sukarno, but this was the side of army leaders who were in fact the sworn enemies of the “Gestapo” plotters and their P.K.I. backers. The mainstay of any Communist revolution must be the not i always threatened the anti- Communist army leaders with the one paralysing weapon which might have left them impotent—a general strike in the ports and main towns. Not only has there been no general strike, however, but S.O.B.S.L., the Communistled trade union confederation which has more General Suharto, Commanderin-Chief. than three million members, has “voluntarily " dissolved itself. There is consequently a growing suspicion that the P.K.L 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 oepetrsiee was reported to be about,000, and today militant cadres may number no more than 30.000 to 40,000. The most charitable explanation for this Communist debacle is that the P.K.I. was forced into hasty action by a conviction that if it were not quick it would be dead. It has been said that the Chinese doctors attending the President. acting on orders from Peking. whispered that Sukarno was about to die. This is supposed to have galvanised into revolution Communist leaders who knew that his demise must in any case lead to confrontation with Nasution and the army, and felt that they must _ therefore Nterally jump the gun Besetting weakness The Chinese regard Indonesia as the larger-than-life working mode] that proved their theory of “permanent world revolution” and looked upon Djakarta as the other terminal of an axis on which South-East Asia must one day spin. For them, therefore, much was at stake. Somewhat significantly, they had invited up to 100 Indonesian Generals to Peking for their National Day celebrations on October 1, and had then dropped a hint that big changes were about to take place in Djakarta. Purveyors of arms to the P.K.1., they may also have been purveyors of bad advice, for the abortive — revolution smacked above all of the besetting weakness of Chinese Communists—over-confidence. So far Sukarno has refused to dismiss Subandrio or ban the P.K.1., but most qualified observers believe that his influence will continue to wane, and that Nasution and Suharto —who now see him as little as possible — will not be deflected from their _ self. imposed task of destroying the P.K.L, bloodily if necessary. If ever a new Marxist party arises in Indonesia, it is likely to be a nationalist and socialist organisation bearing no more resemblance to its conspiratorial predecessor than does man to monkey. === [PDF page 2] === Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.