Soeharto and the grand scheme of things

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.