Recent
attempts by intellectual progressives to elicit a formal apology from the
government for the army-sponsored 1965-66 anti-communist purge, which saw
roughly 500,000 people perish, have to a large extent been met with stringent
opposition from conservative quarters, while anti-communist rallies, symposiums
and even street banners proliferate.
As if to
counter the stories of suffering by the survivors of the purge, testimonies to
the atrocities allegedly committed by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and
its sympathizers have also emerged.
The
absolute truth of what happened in 1965 may continue to be elusive for many
decades to come, due to the complex historical circumstances of the period in
question. However, thanks to the
extensive research done by various academics and historians, it is at least
possible to come to dispel certain myths surrounding it.
First, was
the PKI a pacifist benevolent political force, as some left-leaning activists
of today would have it be? In all fairness, no political force in 1960s
Indonesia could be described as such. If anything, the scene was a ruthless
Machiavellian power struggle: the opponents of the PKI proved it resoundingly
by the bloodbath during the purge. But what about the PKI itself?
By 1965, the
PKI had wittingly or unwittingly united most of its political opponents – the
army, nationalists and political Islam − against it, except for President
Soekarno. The collaboration of its enemies, a process that was more than a
decade in the making, would eventually pave the way for its destruction. But
how did this come about?
After
suffering from an enormous setback following the 1948 Madiun Rebellion, the
party had to build its strength anew. The stigma attached to the communists
then was that they were not patriots, having sabotaged the independence efforts
with a rebellion when national leaders like Soekarno and Hatta were engaged in
difficult negotiations and an armed struggle with the Dutch.
A constant
feature of Indonesian communism lay in its ideological exclusivity – where the
ideological and intellectual tenets of Marxism were only fully understood by
the PKI elite – never at the grassroots level. D.N. Aidit, the new chairman elected
in 1951, realized that the socioeconomic settings in Indonesia then did not
allow a strategy based on class struggle as in Russia or China.
As a result,
the PKI was in no position to inspire the almost non-existent proletariat to an
armed revolution. The 1950-51 suppression of trade unions by the government –
when the workers failed to defend their arrested union leaders − further opened
the eyes of the party leaders to the levels of class awareness in Indonesia.
The late Rex
Mortimer, an eminent historian on communism and a lifelong member of the now
defunct Communist Party of Australia, acknowledged that the class struggle in
industrialized Europe, which inspired Karl Marx to write "Das
Kapital," was alien to Indonesia's traditional social structure,
especially in Java.
"Class
formation and class differentiation along a property line of demarcation (or,
in Marxist terminology, based on opposed relationships to the means of
production) are a relatively recent development in Indonesia," he wrote in
1969. "In the absence of strong class pressures, political parties and
mass-organizations organized their followings largely along lines of religious
and cultural cleavage."
Hence,
rather than transform Indonesia's sociopolitical landscape, the PKI had to
adapt itself to the dichotomy between the santri (Muslim Indonesians
favoring religious orthodoxy) and the abangan (cultural Muslims with
syncretic religious practices harking back to the pre-Islamic era).
Understandably, it was among the abangan that the party found most of its
support.
Under
Aidit's chairmanship, the PKI's strategy, according to Mortimer, were: "
1. The cultivation of the closest possible relations with the dominant
anti-Islamic nationalist groups [in particular, the PNI and President Sukarno],
2. The accumulation of the largest possible membership and organized support,
3. According ideological primacy to symbols associated with nationalism and
national unity."
Point one
suggests that the PKI lacked a sensible strategy in dealing with political
Islam in what was ultimately a Muslim-majority country. However, it worked for
a while because the Nationalist Party of Indonesia (PNI) also had the most
support among the abangan, particularly in the priyayi (bureaucrats and
civil servants) class. Combined with point three, the strategy yielded
dividends in the 1955 general election when the party came fourth after the
PNI, the Masyumi Party and the Nadhatul Ulema Party (both Islamic parties).
Point three
also drove the party into lending fervent support for President Sukarno's
ultra-nationalist policies during the Guided Democracy period (1959-1966), such
as the Confrontation with Malaysia, the Trikora Operation to seize West Papua
and general anti-Western agitation.
Historian
Frank Palmos, who was then dean of the Foreign Press Corps in Jakarta, related
an incident in which he found his car daubed by PKI followers with the word
"kabir" (Kapitalis Birokrat or Capitalist Bureaucrat)
even when he was present at the party's headquarters at the invitation of PKI
chairman Aidit to help translate his speech for the benefit of international
guests.
Palmos also
revealed the manipulative bend of the PKI elites. While he said he was on
amiable terms with most of the party elite, he found the grassroots PKI
supporters to be rabidly anti-Western and xenophobic, partly out of
indoctrination. While translating for Aidit, for instance, he saw the PKI crowds
below give him the cutthroat sign repeatedly.
Suffice to
say, the power struggle between competing factions in 1960s Indonesia was
fierce and often violent. To say that the PKI was innocent of such excesses is
truly misleading. Like the other players in the game, the PKI used all the
available means to strive for victory, and lost. And yet the mass murders
against alleged communists and their sympathizers – which took place in the
aftermath of the 30 September incident – were unjustifiable by any standard.
By : Johannes Nugroho |
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