“The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped the World” by Vincent Bevins
The date was 18 May 1958. In the island of Maluku in Eastern part of Indonesia, there is an increasingly violent separatist movement that suspiciously uses weapons bore the mark of a manufacturer in Plymouth, Michigan. The rebellion is also occurring elsewhere like in the Western island of Sumatra, but it is in Maluku that the tension escalates into air bombings by mysterious fighter pilots, hitting Indonesian military, commercial shipping vessels, and even a crowded market.
But then, on this day, 18 May, the Indonesians managed to shoot down one of the planes, with a single person floated down on a parachute and eventually captured by the Indonesian soldiers. His name is Allen Lawrence Pope, from Miami, Florida. And he is a CIA agent.
This is an incredible account of one of the most turbulent periods in world politics, the post-World War 2 era that quickly transitioned into the Cold War period of the 1950s-1980s. Within this period of time the battle of ideology was in its full force, with US capitalism in one side and Soviet communism in the other, with a lot of “Third World countries” swing from one ideology to the other, often done through violence. This book is the clearest explanation about the method behind this violence, the one that the US first perfected in Jakarta in 1965.
Indonesia in the Sukarno era was a chaotic place. The young country was experiencing many teething problems that come after independence in 1945, which stemmed from 3 centuries worth of colonialism. And most crucially the country adopts a multiparty system that embraces all parts and classes of the society, including Partai Komunis Indonesia (the Indonesian Communist Party or PKI for short).
I must admit, by just reading its name PKI gives me chills, due to a constant propaganda since elementary school. But unlike the common stigma of atheism and barbarism, the book shows that PKI actually consists of religious people who sees Muslim unity as a revolutionary and anti-colonial force. As the author Vincent Bevins remarks, “[t]here were committed Muslim Communists who wanted to create an egalitarian community—inspired to varying degrees both by Marx and the Koran—but felt that foreign infidels were holding them back. And for almost everyone in the country, “socialism” by definition implied opposition to foreign domination and support for an independent Indonesia.”
And under the leadership of D. N. Aidit, the PKI transformed from a rebel party (with infamous uprising incident in Madiun in 1948) into a “mass-based, legal, ideologically flexible movement that rejected the armed struggle, frequently ignored Moscow’s directions, stuck close to Sukarno, and embraced electoral politics.” They also distance themselves from the way the Chinese communist party do thing after the Sino-Soviet split, and instead they form an anti-feudal “united national front” with the local bourgeoisie and wont implement socialism “until the end of century.” In other words, there’s arguably little communist DNA left in this 3rd largest communist party in the World after Soviet and China.
Moreover, in their day-to-day life the PKI increasingly added active members or cadres who took a pledge to uphold party ethics. It also ran a number of affiliated organizations such as BTI (mass civilian participation), SOBSI (union worker member that includes much of the country’s working class), LEKRA (the cultural organization that provides concerts, plays, dances, and comedy shows in small towns), and Gerwani (the women’s movement group).
Indeed, they’re anti-imperialists first and foremost, with party members growing their movement by legally winning democratic elections and winning the hearts and minds of the people though their organizational works. Which is exactly what scared Washington.
But PKI was not the only concern for them. The Indonesian charismatic leader Sukarno was a force to be reckoned with, who attempted to place Indonesia high up in the ranks of powerful countries. And instead of aligning Indonesia with US imperialism he instigated the Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 18-24 April 1955, to solidify the idea of the Third World. As Bevins explains, “[t]his remarkable gathering brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union.” And as you may have guessed, this did not bode well with Washington.
But things are never straight forward in politics, and this is where the strength of the book lies. It perfectly captures all the intricate detail about the geopolitics dealings without getting too complicated. And it shows that Indonesia did still got offered economic and military aid from the Soviet Union, but in alignment with its neutral position in the Cold War, Indonesia said it wouldn’t take any more than the Americans offered. That is, until 1958 when Allen Pope and other CIA operatives burned Indonesians alive and open the lid to their real intention, that Indonesia finally took the Soviet aid and became a stronger ally for them.
Indeed, Washington’s intention to interfere in Indonesian domestic matters was crystal clear. In total, the US government spent $10 million to back a revolution in Indonesia, with CIA pilots such as Allen Pope took off from Singapore (an emerging Cold War ally), with the goal of “destroying the government of Indonesia or breaking the country into little pieces.” The US also tried to infiltrate the Indonesian political scenes by funding a million dollars to Masjumi, an Islamic conservative party to the right of Sukarno. However, Sukarno and his supporters did well in the 1955 election, and worse for the US, the PKI (who are in the left of Sukarno) came in 4th place with 17% of the votes (their best performance to date). And so, Washington decided to take a different approach.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Indonesia experienced a sudden hyper inflation, which was initiated by Indonesia’s compliance to IMF’s loan conditions in order to secure lending from them. As Bevins remarks, “[t]he IMF demanded what amounted to a structural adjustment program in Indonesia, which dictated spending cuts, an increase in the production of raw materials for export, currency devaluation, monetary tightening, and an end to government subsidies. Sukarno’s ministers went along with the IMF’s demands, and they had a swift, severe, and widespread impact on the population, which saw prices double, triple, or even quintuple overnight.”
And perhaps most significantly, the inflation was then exacerbated due to a sabotage by a certain figure named Suharto. As Bevins explains, “[a]ccording to Subandrio, his former foreign minister, Suharto intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic goods like rice, sugar, and cooking oil. Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.”
When Sukarno figured out the root-cause of the hyperinflation, it prompted him to respond with his famous line of “go to hell with your [IMF] aid!” The many aids soon indeed dried up from the US, except their aid to Indonesian military that would become handy later on. Things got worse after the friendly US Ambassador to Indonesia, Howard Jones, was replaced and especially when US president John F. Kennedy (who was also friendly with Sukarno) was assassinated in November 1963 and his replacement Lyndon Johnson opted out from reconciliatory approach under the JFK administration.
It was within this hostile environment that the 30 September 1965 incident occurred in Jakarta. By then the three forces in the country were the PKI on the left (loosely influenced by the Soviet and China), nationalistic Sukarno in the middle, and the military and Muslim groups on the right (funded by the US), with the president would “use his personal influence to play rivals against each other, and maintain a delicate balance.” The PKI in particular now had 3 million card-carrying members, with the organizations affiliated with the party had at least 20 million members. At that point, the population of Indonesia was roughly 100 million (including children) therefore nearly a third of the country’s adult register voters were PKI affiliates. A grave concern for Washington.
But they had a plan, a big scenario, where “both the American and British governments had believed, and discussed often, that the ideal situation would be a “premature PKI coup” that could provoke an Army response. It’s possible that some version of this plan had been worked on secretly, under the cover of Kennedy’s civic action program, since 1962.” But the problem was, under D. N. Aidit, the PKI took the non-violent path, despite being advised by Mao Zedong to take up arm struggles when Sukarno fell ill in August 1965, in a fear of a right-wing attack towards the left if Sukarno dies. But as CIA themselves noted earlier in May 1965, the PKI had “only limited potential for armed insurgency and would almost certainly not wish to provoke the military into open opposition.” And thus provoking the PKI to stage a coup was out of the question.
So the alternative would be a CIA-funded military coup, since they’re already in Washington’s payroll anyway. But confusingly, Washington also told Indonesian top commander General Nasution that “he should wait patiently; even if Sukarno dies [head of the Armed Forces, General Nasution] should be flexible rather than start a coup. He accepted the suggestion from the Americans.” But still, as 1965 went on, “rumors that right wing generals were conspiring with the CIA or some foreign power began to spread like wildfire in Jakarta.”
And their suspicions intensified when Sukarno and many in the Indonesian government found out who was coming to Jakarta to replace US Ambassador Howard Jones. As Bevins remarks, “[n]ewly minted Ambassador Marshall Green, they learned, had been in Seoul when Park Chung Hee took power in a military coup that destroyed the short-lived parliamentary Second Republic.” And that suspicions did not take long to be proven right.
Until this day, what happened on 30 September 1965 remains blurry due to the unavailability of the hard evidence (still kept in secret), but to its credit this book made a very clear distinction between facts and speculations. And what’s factually accurate is as follows: “At some point, a group of midlevel Army officers formed a group and decided to call it the Gerakan 30 September (“G30S” or “September 30th Movement”) and came up with a plan.”
The leaders of the movement were Lieutenant Colonel Untung and Colonel Abdul Latief, and they genuinely believed that the military generals were about to conspire against Sukarno and stage a coup. Being Sukarno loyalists, they would take actions to prevent this from happening. How do they come up with that conclusion, what information were being fed to them, and by who? It’s still a well-guarded secret until today, and naturally not mentioned in the book.
But what did happen was these low ranking officers organized 7 teams that consist of soldiers already under their official military command. Each one of them would head to the homes of 7 of the highest-ranking officers in the Armed forces, arrest them, and bring them back to the Halim Air Force Base where they met before the operation.
But the plot went offrail real quick when 6 of the teams brought back their targets, allegedly tortured them, and assassinated them. The victims include the commander of the Army Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, Lieutenant General MT Haryono, Lieutenant General S. Parman, Mayor General DI Panjaitan, Mayor General Sutoyo Siswomiharjo, Lieutenant General Suprapto, but the most important target General Nasution escaped by jumping over the back wall of his house and hid in the home of his friend, the Iraqi ambassador. And instead, the team accidentally killed Nasution’s 5-year old daughter and brought back his military assistant Captain Pierre Tendean and assassinate him instead.
Another General that escaped the slaughter, rather conveniently, was Mayor General Suharto. The only General spared right from the start. He was the person who Washington used to exacerbates the hyperinflation, the person who Washington supported and funded after the coup, but notably there’s no official public evidence ever published that shows he’s directly involved in the coup (with “published” is the key word here).
However, if CIA didn’t orchestrate the coup, they surely made the most of it by grabbing power after the incident. As explained by Bevins, “[s]oon after the initial confusion, the US government assisted Suharto in the crucial early phase of spreading propaganda and establishing his anticommunist narrative. Washington quickly and covertly supplied vital mobile communications equipment to the military, a now-declassified October 14 cable indicates. This was also a tacit admission, very early, that the US government recognized the Army, not Sukarno, as the true leader of the country, even though Sukarno was still legally the president.” Hence, the many strong assumptions and speculations that the coup was backed by the CIA, due to the activities it conducted around the coup, although this book stopped short on labeling it as a CIA orchestrated coup.
And what was the US-assisted propaganda that Suharto was spreading? That it was not the conduct of a faction of the military that believed the Generals were about to betray Sukarno in a coup (something that Lieutenant Colonel Untung until his last dying breath swore that it is what he was doing, to save Sukarno and the country), but instead it was the PKI that staged the kidnapping, torturing, and killing of the generals (which fits with the ideal situation discussed by the US and Britain).
Subsequently, due to the false smear campaign towards PKI, there were a tsunami of rage and revenge towards the PKI and a mass slaughter then occurred for its members (most notably conducted by the youth faction of Nahdlatul Ulama – a right wing Muslim group). And astonishingly, it wasn’t only the US government officials who provided a kill lists to the Army. But “managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.” They also raided the houses of the Chinese embassy personnel.
In total, it is estimated that between 500,000 to 1,000,000 people were slaughtered, and 1,000,000 more were herded into concentration camps, which consist of Sukarno supporters and PKI members (including its affiliate organizations). And for the rest who got away? They mostly went underground and stayed silence. As Bevins remarks, “[t]heir silence was the point of the violence. The Armed Forces did not oversee the extermination of every single communist, alleged communist, and potential communist sympathizer in the country. That would have been nearly impossible, because around a quarter of the country was affiliated somehow with the PKI. Once the killings took hold, it became incredibly hard to find anyone who would admit to any association with the PKI.”
Bevins then added, “[e]very part of the story the Indonesian Army told is a lie. No Gerwani women participated in any killings on October 1. More than three decades later, Benedict Anderson was able to prove not only that the account of the torture of the generals was false, but that Suharto knew it was all false in early October. He himself ordered an autopsy that showed all the men were shot except one, who may have been stabbed with a bayonet in a fight at his home. But by 1987, when Anderson’s proof was published, not much of that discovery mattered anymore. The story of a demonic communist plot to take over the country by mutilating good, God-fearing military men in the dark of night had become something like part of the national religion under the Suharto dictatorship.”
Moreover, US officials made it very clear to the military that direct assistance could resume “if the PKI were destroyed, Sukarno was removed, and attacks on US investments halted. Aid flows were also conditional on Indonesia’s willingness to adopt IMF- and US-approved economic plans.”
And that’s exactly what Suharto did. “In his first acts [after taking over power from Sukarno], he officially banned what was left of the Communist Party, then arrested much of Sukarno’s cabinet, including Subandrio. The United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.”
Bevins then continues, “[i]n 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.” Moreover, they also set up a conference in Geneva titled “To Aid in the Rebuilding of a Nation”, and it was a huge success. “Under Secretary of State George Ball was there. New Foreign Minister Adam Malik, a longtime Washington favorite in Indonesia, gave a speech emphasizing the importance of the military as “the only credible political power in Indonesia.” And David Rockefeller made some very encouraging final remarks: “I have talked with a good many people over the course of the last couple days and I think I have found universal enthusiasm.”
Indonesia was back in business.
The sheer success of the coup (or taking advantage of the incident) inspired the US to implement the “Jakarta Method” into 22 more countries, most notably in Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, and Cambodia, which are covered extensively in the book.
The method has very specific objectives similar to what they did in Indonesia: to kill off the spread of communism, even those built through a democracy, as well as practically destroying any trace of the Third World Movement of non-alliance. And instead, the US actions in 1950s-1980s were to make the world submissive to its control, through IMF loan and its neo-liberalist conditions of austerity, liberalization and privatization, which open up “profitable markets” for corporations.
All in all, the book is a carefully written account of one of the darkest periods (if not THE darkest period) of Indonesian history, written based on “declassified information, the consensus formed by the most knowledgeable historians, and overwhelming first-person testimony.” And for the latter part, Bevins “visited twelve countries and interviewed over one hundred people, in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Indonesian. [He also] pored through the archives in the same number of languages, spoke to historians around the world, and did work with research assistants in five countries.”
As a result, Bevins combined the explanation of the evidence-based context with a brilliant story telling using the vantage points of previously-unknown ordinary citizens like Sakono, Zain, Francisca, Ing Giok, Carmen, Agung, Benny, Sumiyati, Magdalena, Winarso, and many more people who represent many different demographic classes in Sukarno’s Indonesia, Guatemala, Brazil, etc.
The book also provides further background context for these individuals in chapter 11, which culminated nicely in chapter 12 where it shows where they are now. Not all of them have a happy ending, however, and the majority of them are now living in exile, such as the scores of people studying abroad sent by Sukarno and unable to come back home after the coup because they were forced to sign a form declaring allegiance to Suharto by their embassy, and those who refused to do so got their passport confiscated (thus making them stateless).
And for anyone wondering about the legality of the coup, Bevins reported that “[i]n addition to the crime of extermination, an International People’s Tribunal assembled later in the Netherlands found the Indonesian military guilty of a number of crimes against humanity, including torture, unjustified and long-term detainment in cruel conditions, forced labor amounting to enslavement, and systematic sexual violence. The judges found that all this was carried out for political purposes—to destroy the Communist Party and then “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime”—with the assistance of the United States, the UK, and Australia.”
The statement couldn’t be any clearer than this. But somehow, the verdict was hardly heard in Indonesia, if any. And instead, the narratives in Indonesian textbooks and media are still those that stigmatizing PKI, where being a communist is still the gravest and most taboo thing to be, and the PKI propaganda museum still exists today and hasn’t changed one single false narrative even 26 years since Suharto stepped down in 1998. I should know, because I visited it last month. As they say, they may changed the clothes but the regime stays the same.
THE CHAOS THEORY 