This piece is a follow-up to Johannes
Nugroho's earlier column on the myths
surrounding the country's communist purge
An
important point in the Communist Party of Indonesia's, known as PKI, strategy
under Aidit — the accumulation of the largest possible membership
— had a big role to play in securing alliances for the party. Often touted
as the third largest communist party in the world during its heyday with 3
million signed-up members, the PKI used its strength on paper as a bargaining
tool with both the PNI and President Sukarno.
Yet, astonishingly, when its enemies
closed in for the kill in 1965, the PKI appeared helpless in stemming the tide.
Once again the 1950-51 specter of the lack of class struggle consciousness came
to haunt. The meekness with which many purge victims reacted to their demise
has been used as evidence of the party’s pacifist bend. Many PKI sympathizers
were probably non-violent citizens but the overall picture was decidedly more
complex.
To explain why many PKI leaders took their
fates lying down, we must delve into the nature of socio-political cleavages
and loyalties in Indonesia. Rather than ideological conviction, it relies
heavily on kinship, peer pressure and the strength of personalities. The PKI’s
own growth, for one, could not have taken place without the personal
endorsement of president Sukarno, a charismatic leader loved by Indonesians.
Locally, for instance, if the village
chief in a given village inclined towards supporting the PKI, most of the
villagers under him would probably declare for the party, even if they did not
necessarily understand what its platform was. In this sense, membership numbers
of most Indonesian organizations, then and now, are probably suspect at best,
inaccurate at worst.
Many would have joined because of the
socio-economic benefits promised. Others may have agreed with the party
platform partially. Most sympathizers of the PKI, including members of its
affiliated bodies such as its women activist organization Gerwani and its
literary and performing arts movement Lekra, would belong to this category,
quite distinct from its elite.
In this light, the unfounded rumors spread
by the PKI’s enemies that Gerwani members had mutilated and castrated the
military generals arrested in the 30 September Coup were pernicious in intent.
The rumors were further perpetuated by pro-army journals at the time and sealed
in iron by the propaganda film Pemberontakan G30S/PKI, made with president
Suharto’s blessing. Subsequent testimonies including those by the doctors
performing the post mortem on the generals’ bodies found no evidence of
mutilation let alone castration.
What we must bear in mind is that it was
indeed a time of confusion and hearsay. The increasingly poor health of
President Sukarno, the PKI’s main protector, was, for example, kept a secret.
Frank Palmos testified that on 4 Aug. 1965 president Sukarno had collapsed
when conducting foreign journalists on a tour of the palace, ironically in a
bid to brush off rumors of ill health. But Palmos said the news of the
president’s collapse was never reported as it would have meant instant
expulsion of the foreign journalist responsible.
By then, the PKI had alienated most of its
allies, save the president. Its 1964-65 agrarian agitation in rural areas,
known as Aksi Sefihak (Unilateral Action) was bitterly resisted by a
combination of landed peasants, the priyayi and santri alike,
especially in Central and East Java. Basing its action on the new land reform
law passed in 1960, the PKI elite ordered its supporters in rural areas to hold
demonstrations, public petitions and even forcible seizures of land and crops
with the ultimate goal of effecting land redistribution for the landless
peasants.
Again, the lack of existence of class
struggle in rural Java worked against the PKI. It also impinged on the economic
interests of many pesantrens or religious schools many of which had sizeable
tracts of land, which the PKI insisted be broken up and redistributed. Yet
again, the clashes, in many cases bloody and violent, occurred along the
traditional santri-abangan lines rather than class struggle.
The agrarian campaign also aggrieved many
priyayi supporters within the PNI, only to be made worse by the PKI’s maneuvers
in August 1965 to have senior members of the PNI including the vastly popular
Muhammad Isnaeni expelled on suspicion of being “anti-communist and
anti-revolution.”
For its part, the army blamed the
communists for driving the president into China’s lap at the expense of ties
with the West, particularly the US. Deprived of military hardware of supplies
due to the American embargo, it saw the Jakarta-Beijing axis as detrimental to
its own interests.
The final straw may have been the Chinese
PM Zhou Enlai’s suggestion of arming Indonesian peasants and workers to form
the Fifth Armed Force, which was a clear challenge to the supremacy of the
army. It did not help that the suggestion came from a foreign power, given
Indonesia’s long allergy to foreign domination and latent Sinophobia. In many
ways, the PKI painted itself into a corner and doomed its own future.
While the PKI’s ruthlessness in the 1960s
power play among Indonesia’s elites is in no doubt, it is fair to say that the
ordinary left-wing sympathizers who were massacred, imprisoned, raped and so on
were innocent of any complicity. It is to these people that the government owes
its apology, not to the PKI as an entity. Mistaking one for the other is the
greatest error of judgment in the debate.
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