1965 putsch remains a mystery

1965 putsch remains a mystery

Harry Bhaskara, The Jakarta Post, Berkeley, California

Southeast Asia: A Testament; By George McT. Kahin;
Publisher Routledge Curzon (2003), 373pp

Scholars often have to face awkward situations for their
independent views. George Kahin is no exception. For 15 years the
noted American scholar was barred from Indonesia by the New Order
military government. Back home, he was banned from leaving
America for five years on charges that he was a communist. The
real reasons were that he was critical of pro-Dutch, U.S.
officials posted in a new independent Indonesia and, regarding
the ban on visiting Jakarta, because of his reservations over the
military government's line that the communists were to blame in
the 1965 coup d'etat.

In the early 1950s the Indonesian Communist Party and U.S.
government went as far as to share a common charge against Kahin,
saying that he represented himself as an American agent in
Indonesia. Kahin showed how folly and personal grudges
contributed to this confusion and, in the process, unveiled the
intricacies of Cold War politics. Fortunately, Kahin's friends,
who shared his vision and principles, stood firmly beside him
throughout all his difficult years.

All this is laid bare in this fascinating book. A testament in
the true sense of the word, it contains a lot of interesting
historical tidbits that would help readers better understand the
context of any given event. The book has been published
posthumously by his wife, Audrey, two years after his demise.

The book not only captures the historical pinnacles of
Indonesia but also those of Vietnam and Cambodia, two countries
in which Kahin got more and more interested in the latter part of
his life. Kahin had been critical of U.S. policies in those
countries.

Virtually all the notable events that occurred in the
fledgling Indonesia are touched upon, including the Madiun
communist rebellion, the Dutch military actions, the Republican
troop attacks on Yogyakarta and the Renville and the Roem Royen
agreements. Kahin puts a human face on virtually the who's who in
Indonesia's history, a rare treat indeed, talking about
crocodiles while hunting with Sukarno during the latter's exile
in Bangka island, and a glimpse of the late communist leader,
Amir Sjarifuddin, reading a bible on a ship's deck.

Readers will find history an intimate subject as it unveils
itself in a way a diary does. The Madiun rebellion could not have
occurred if the U.S. had not reneged on the Renville agreement,
he said. A UN official believed that the rationalization of the
military under General Sudirman was another reason why the
rebellion took place. Civilian workers had been worried that they
would lose their jobs once the military took over their jobs.

Kahin was not only a scholar par excellence for his
determination always to recognize the power of knowledge, as the
difficult political conditions of the time also drove him to
become a journalist and diplomat. The book speaks for itself --
he answered those calls with flying colors.

The reason for writing the book, Kahin said, was because he
felt that significant events were often missing in today's
history books. Many were also incompatible with what he found in
American and British archives, as well as with his direct
experience in Southeast Asia.

"All too much of significance, it seems to me, has been
consciously or unconsciously swept under the carpet, or tailored
to fit in with perdurable and broadly accepted myths as to the
past roles of the American government," he says.

On the CIA, he says, he had tried for more than 20 years
without success to find out whether the agency had been involved
in a number of assassination attempts on several foreign heads of
state, including Indonesia's first president, Sukarno. This was
after U.S. Senator Frank Church dropped his committee's
investigation into the allegations in 1975 under pressure from
Henry Kissinger and CIA director William Colby.

"The committee's staff in 1997 so fully stonewalled my efforts
that I was unable even to get copies of the record of testimony I
myself had given before the committee more than two decades
earlier (in 1973)," Kahin says.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence continues to this
day but its mandate to investigate these charges was not
restored.

That experience illustrates well his decades of effort to find
out the true story behind the 1965 coup d'etat in Indonesia,
blamed on the communists.

The government, under Soeharto, which ruled Indonesia from
1966 to 1998, never wanted the outside world to know the real
story behind the 1965 putsch. It repeatedly promised to deliver
pertinent documents Kahin had been asking for to facilitate a
further study on the coup. The Army's judge advocate general,
Gen. I.J. Kanter, was initially upbeat on helping him but the
documents were never delivered. In November 1976 Soeharto sent a
military delegation to Cornell that delivered 200 pounds of
documents but none was what Kahin had been asking for.

Kahin devotes a three-page chapter to the Cornell paper,
drafted by Kahin's graduate students soon after the putsch, and
based on Indonesian newspapers available at Cornell University.
The paper, intended for limited internal use by scholars,
promoted the belief that the coup was the result of a dispute
within the Army. It somehow leaked out and received instant fame
within Indonesia. Kahin had sought the pertinent documents from
the Soeharto government in order to rectify the paper that he
said had been "misquoted, doctored and misrepresented" by other
parties.

These two episodes may give rise to the dreaded question: How
come then the U.S. and the Indonesian governments differed from
each other? At the same time, they showed that Kahin's response
to events swirling around him was based on humanistic principles,
hence his refusal to be swayed by either communist or imperialist
ideology.

With regard to pre-independence days, Kahin found the Dutch
government's plan to grant independence to Indonesia to be
genuine. He held Governor General Van Mook in high regard, saying
that the latter had a genuine affection for the country. But seen
from today's perspective, Van Mook's comments on his government's
plan to establish a federal united states of Indonesia are
disturbing because they strike a chord regarding every regime
change that subsequently occurred in the country. Van Mook
alluded to the obstacles to a federalist state in an Aug. 2,
1948, interview with Kahin when he said that there were too many
people in the Republic with "vested interests in the present
political setup." He added, "Those people knew that under a
Dutch-sponsored federation they would have lost their arms and
thus their power."

On a lighter side, Kahin recounted his first encounter with
Javanese mysticism when he drove his two, Western-trained
Indonesian friends and their wives from Cirebon to Bandung. He
was puzzled by the dramatic silence from his usually talkative
friends on the two-hour trip, only to discover the reason why
when they were close to Bandung.

They said that they had been advised against the trip by their
spiritual guru as they might be attacked by antigovernment Darul
Islam troops on the way. To ward off any possible danger, they
had been asked to concentrate intensely on the way to Bandung,
thus rendering themselves mute companions for Kahin.

Kahin, who died in January 2000, also mentions his family
background to help readers understand his views better. He was
raised, he said, in a free-thinking family. To many Indonesians
he was more than a true friend for his outstanding contributions
to the fledgling country. Kahin is best remembered for his
contributions in setting up the Modern Indonesia project in
Cornell, to date one of the largest centers for Indonesian
studies in the world.

Harry Bhaskara (bhaskara@uclink.berkeley.edu) is a visiting
scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.