Sukarno and the Sept. 30 movement

Harry Bhaskara The Jakarta Post Jakarta hbkc@centrin.net.id

A lot has been said openly about the 1965 "Sept. 30 Movement" -- the attempted putcsh and assassination of seven top military leaders which led to then president Sukarno's demise -- in the last four years, due to the reform movement and the downfall of former dictator Soeharto.

Unlike before, foreign scholars' perspectives such as those of Donald Hindley, Bernhard Dahm, Ruth T. McVey and those in the Cornell paper, are now readily available.

Public discussion has also been enriched by numerous locally produced books on the topic.

The above scholars generally believe that former president Sukarno was left uninformed about what would happen on the night of Sept. 30 and in the early morning hours of Oct. 1, 1965 as opposed to other scholars like Arnold C. Brackman and Justus M. Van der Kroef who believe that he had a hand in the assassinations.

A newly published book by local publisher Aksara Karunia entitled In the Spirit of the Red Banteng by Dutch political analyst Antonie C.A. Dake fell into the second camp of scholars.

Sukarno was the driving force behind the movement and was the deciding factor behind the Communist Party of Indonesia's (PKI) leadership spasm to link their fate to the movement, Dake told The Jakarta Post in an interview during his brief visit here recently.

"That was the conclusion in 1973 and it still is the conclusion in 2002," he said.

Dake was referring to the year when the book was first published in 1973. The book was immediately banned in Indonesia but part of it appeared in a series in the Pedoman daily in 1974.

"As a foreigner I found it interesting that this kind of thing could happen," he said with a chuckle.

In the time elapsed between 1973 and now, there had been no new findings that could prove the thesis wrong, he said.

Apart from the role Sukarno played in the incident, the book attempts to answer other questions including, the reasons for the attempted putsch and reasons for the ensuing communal enmity, especially in Central and East Java, and how that could evolve into such dizzying intensity that hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

One may ask why such a thesis, which portrays Sukarno in a negative light, did not seem to gain much adherence in the country despite the interest of Soeharto's government to reduce his predecessor's legendary stature?

Dr. Richard Lowenthal of the Free University of West Berlin said in the preface of the book that it was a conscious repression by Soeharto's New Order government.

They had no interest in revealing that Sukarno had become the deadly enemy of the army leadership, because this would have undermined their own legitimacy as his successors, he claimed referring to Soeharto's government.

"They were satisfied to know the truth but on balance saw no reason to publish it," he wrote.

Dake dismissed as "myths" other stories or hypotheses about the attempted putsch including those put forth by the council of generals, a theory that Sukarno was tricked by the army or top level politicians with substantial involvement from the American CIA.

The bone of contention that preceded the attempted coup was a conflict between Sukarno and his anti-communist generals over the former's plan to arm the citizens, he said.

There was a heated debate on July 28, 1965 in a meeting between the generals and Sukarno in Senayan, Dake said, and Sukarno had given the nod to his Palace Guard Col. Untung who later organized the coup, to take action against his disloyal generals.

It is not very likely that Sukarno gave an order to kill the generals, but he was certainly in a position to "call it on or off", Dake said.

"If you don't stop a unit of a crack army troops to kidnap a general, then you know that the unit did not go for a picnic," he added.

"Of course he did not say, 'kill them', but he had allowed the climate and the organization to go forward and it had some results. I think he was responsible for that," he said, adding that it was an "unspecified action" order.

PKI leaders Aidit and Njoto learned about this conversation on Aug. 4, 1965 and they appeared to have not been able to resist the temptation to take part in the action, thus violating Vladimir I. Lenin's maxim: One must not play at insurrection; once one has begun it, one must go through with it to the end.

Why had the experienced communist leaders chosen such a disastrous and amateurish course?

In their eyes, a simple purge had to be arranged and carried out with the aim of getting rid of a couple of anti-communist generals, Dake wrote in the book.

And support for this could be counted on from president Sukarno. The involvement of the PKI would remain limited in the first phase, and only if the first phase had been completed would the cadres and members of the party be informed.

Asked about the role of then Maj. Gen. Soeharto, Dake said he was in a lucky position but he did not like that position in the beginning.

He was an experienced officer but not in politics, Dake said.

Only when Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution appeared reluctant to take things in his own hands did Soeharto come forward.

And he surprised the world when he turned out to be an able and cunning politician as well, Dake said.

The fact that he later became a dictator and a corrupt one at that, was a different story just like Sukarno who was good when he first emerged as the leader of the country, he said.

Asked about the prolonged crisis the country is now in, Dake who received his doctoral degree in political science at the Free University of Berlin for his study of the Indonesian Communist Party, said that he remained optimistic about Indonesia's future.