Soeharto and the grand scheme of things

Carmel Budiardjo, Contributor, London

Shadow of a Revolution: Indonesia and the Generals; by Roland Challis; Sutton Publishing Ltd,; August 2001; 260 pp

How better to start a review of this very committed book than to quote the author's dedication:

"Dedicated with respect to the memory of more than one million Indonesians who died and are still dying because of the greed, brutality and indifference of the military, politicians, corporations and 'statesmen' of all nations."

Accounts by journalists about Indonesia are all too few and far between, as compared for instance with the flood of books that have been published in the past year or so about East Timor. That there is so much to say about East Timor following the dramatic events of 1999 is indisputable.

Yet Indonesia too has passed through many dramatic events since the 1997 financial crisis, and the removal from power in May 1998 of the dictator, Soeharto, who ran the country with an iron rod for more than three decades. Which is why this book is so welcome.

What Roland Challis has produced is not just a survey of the years under the Soeharto dictatorship, which are well covered in his concluding chapters. He has taken the trouble to set the scene of the generals' take-over in 1965 against a historical background, looking at the development of Indonesia as a nation- state which has colored subsequent developments.

In particular, he provides a comprehensive overview of Indonesia's konfrontasi with Malaysia in the early 1960s, regarding which he is particularly well informed as he was the BBC's correspondent in Southeast Asia throughout that period.

As he shows, at a time when British forces in North Borneo were escalating operations and were given permission to carry out incursions across the border into Indonesian territory, there were two quite separate approaches being made from Jakarta to end the conflict.

One was from Sukarno, who sent senior members of his cabinet for secret talks with Malaysia, while another, dating back to mid-1964, was pursued by Soeharto loyalists behind Sukarno's back and only became public several years later.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Indonesian Kalimantan, troops that had been dispatched there were not being deployed, indicating, as Brig. Gen. Supardjo told a military court while on trial for his part in the Oct. 1, 1965 coup attempt, "that some Army leaders were not keen on the confrontation", an obvious reference to Soeharto, who was then in charge of troop deployment to the "front".

Challis also documents the fact that British military officers and the British government realized by early 1965 that Indonesian's campaign was running out of steam.

While acknowledging that many aspects of the events of Oct. 1, 1965 are still shrouded in mystery, Challis deals with the developments leading to Soeharto's formal assumption of the presidency in 1968 in three distinct stages: the coup attempt itself, the brutal extermination of communists, presided over by sections of the Army, and the gradual process of removing Sukarno from power.

However, one significant error of fact needs correcting. Challis records that the newspaper of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), Harian Rakjat, made a "misjudgment" by coming out on Oct. 2 in support of the putsch. In fact, that newspaper was the only non-Army paper allowed to appear on that day, with an editorial written while events were still unfolding, and describing them as an "internal army affair".

This editorial later enabled the Army to claim that the PKI was involved in the events and suggests that the paper's appearance was quite deliberate.

The most intriguing section of Challis' account of the 1965 events relates to the activities of the UK's propaganda agency, the Information Research Department (IRD), which set up office in Singapore less than a month after the coup attempt.

He writes that IRD head Norman Reddaway, one of the foreign office's most senior propaganda specialists, took charge, and worked in close collaboration with Andrew Gilchrist, the UK ambassador in Jakarta, in a campaign to spread lies and distortions as the massacre of hundreds of thousands of communist suspects gathered pace throughout Indonesia.

As the BBC correspondent in Southeast Asia, Challis was a prime target of this campaign and was told by Reddaway many years later, as he began to work on this book, that his terms of reference were to "do anything you can think of to get rid of Sukarno". Many of the accounts spread by the IRD to journalists in the region were simply recycled reports that had been received from the ambassador.

This even led to the ambassador complaining, according to a recently declassified letter from Reddaway to Gilchrist when the latter was writing his memoirs, that the ambassador had on one occasion complained "that the versions put back (by the IRD, and hence used in the press) were uncomfortably close to those put out by yourself (i.e. Gilchrist), and caused Reddaway to wonder "whether this was the first time in history that an ambassador had been able to address the people in his country of work almost at will and virtually instantaneously".

Challis also writes: "While MI6 agents 'came and went at will'" between Jakarta and other regional capitals, other journalists, including himself, were kept out, and forced to rely on handouts from the IRD. "The control of information was rigorous," writes Challis. "No word of the slaughter came my way."

If one casts one's mind back to those horrendous events and to the lack of reporting in the world's press about the massacre of communists, it explains why Soeharto was able to seize power with virtually no mention of the crime against humanity that eliminated a potential opposition to military power. Even today, the repercussions are evident: rarely does Soeharto's name appear when journalists or academics survey the worst cases of genocide or massacres from the 20th century.

The IRD's strategy was threefold: to target the PKI, to tar Sukarno with the communist brush and to provide documentary support for Soeharto's interpretation of the events of Oct. 1. They were stunningly successful, as Challis shows.

The second half of this highly readable book deals comprehensively with the Soeharto era. A chapter on Soeharto's Javanese empire provides an overview of the dictator's moves to exploit the fabulous natural resources in the non-Javanese regions of the republic.

Challis rightly has nothing but contempt for the term "outer islands" so often used for everything except Java (including West Java, where the people are Sundanese, not Javanese), calling it a phrase "loaded with assumptions of Javanese superiority". The conflict in Aceh led to desperate attempts, already under Sukarno, to curb secessionist sympathies though the rebel movement under Daud Beureuh in the 1950s was focused on calling for Indonesia to become an Islamic republic, rather than supporting the idea of an Islamic Republic of Aceh.

As for West Papua, western powers made no secret (in secret documents, of course) of their contempt for West Papuan aspirations, in the months preceding the so-called Act of Free Choice in August 1969.

As one British diplomat wrote, "I cannot imagine the U.S., Japanese, Dutch or Australian governments putting at risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia on a matter of principle involving a relatively small number of very primitive people".

Soeharto's unbridled exploitation of the hugely rich regions beyond Java under Javanese control are briefly covered, as well as the invasion of East Timor, shortly after Soeharto had proclaimed (as we now know, following a meeting in the U.S. in early July 1975 with President Gerald Ford and Kissinger) that independence 'was not a viable option' for the Portuguese colony.

When asked at the time what he might do if Indonesia invaded East Timor, the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser replied, 'absolutely nothing'.

However, the Santa Cruz massacre in November 1991, as Challis records, caused reverberations around the world, and "started processes that would strike at the very heart of General Soeharto's military regime".

After dealing in some depth with the human rights (and wrongs) situation, the author described the dictator's strategy over the more than three decades of his rule to play military and political forces against each other, while keeping himself in power and building for himself, his family and his cronies a huge business empire.

His account of Soeharto's moves in the late 1980s to curb the military and build an alliance with Muslims, who earlier had been the target of many brutal crackdowns, are a reminder of Soeharto's shrewdness as a political operator.

For the general reader who wants to understand Indonesian contemporary history up to the downfall of Soeharto in 1998, this book is highly recommended.

The reviewer is the London-based director of the human rights organization Tapol.