Sjam and Hasan’s Analyses

Sjam and Hasan’s Analyses

Toward the end of his Mahmillub trial Sudisman read aloud his “analy- sis of responsibility” before the judges and spectators. His analysis

144 t Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement

can be understood in part as a refutation of the testimony that Sjam had provided at the same trial. Brought into the courtroom as a wit- ness, Sjam had testified that Aidit did much more than support the movement. According to Sjam’s version of events, Aidit had initiated the movement. He had supposedly ordered Sjam to mobilize military personnel affiliated with the Special Bureau to stage a military action against the right-wing army generals. Sjam stated: “After August [1965], we [in the Special Bureau] received information from Comrade Aidit that the situation was coming to a head. And all the signs pointed to the Council of Generals as having already begun its final preparations for a final seizure of state power. With such issues in mind we had a question: In facing such a situation, should we wait to get hit or should we hit first? Since our conclusion was that we have to hit first, we made preparations by holding meetings between myself, Pono, Untung, La- tief, Soejono, Sigit, and Wahyudi, as preparatory meetings to carry out

a movement that would ultimately be named the September 30th Movement. I was the one who led those meetings.” 19 Sjam claimed to

have chosen the officers who participated in those meetings and to have designed, with Aidit’s help, the idea of the Revolution Council.

Sjam’s testimony, by itself, should be treated with skepticism. His claim to have been the boss of the military officers can be dismissed as the delusion of a megalomaniac, someone who wished to be seen as an important political player. His claim that he was following orders from Aidit can be dismissed as an effort to legitimate actions that may have actually fallen outside Aidit’s purview. Perhaps Sjam implicated Aidit in order to please the military prosecutors who wanted confirmation of their accusation that Aidit was the mastermind of the movement. Sjam’s claims, however, cannot be so easily dismissed in light of Su- pardjo’s postmortem analysis (which I reviewed in chapter 3) and Ha- san’s corroboration of certain parts of Sjam’s testimony pertaining to the functioning of the Special Bureau (reviewed in chapter 4). Perhaps Sjam was not a sham. In the autobiographical essay that he wrote in the mid-1990s, Hasan has corroborated a number of Sjam’s claims about his role in the movement. Hasan believes that Sjam was following Aidit’s orders and that the officers were, in turn, following Sjam’s lead:

At a certain time, about the month of July 1965, in a meeting of the Central Special Bureau, Sjam explained that President Sukarno’s sickness was worsening and could well kill him. This event would be used by the anti-Sukarno military who worked

Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement t 145 hand in hand with the neocolonial forces—the United States,

Britain, Japan, the Netherlands—to overthrow Sukarno’s state and replace it with a pro-Western, fascistic, military government. The democratic people’s movement guided by the principle of Nasakom, in which the PKI had become the vanguard, would be violently repressed to the point of utter destruction.

To face this critical and urgent situation, the PKI as the van- guard of the people’s movement had to take a position. The PKI’s position was that it had to resist the coup movement of the army against the Sukarno government in a military way. Aidit assigned the task to the Central Special Bureau, which had been cultivat- ing military personnel. In the course of subsequent events, as the situation became more critical, the order changed: the Special Bureau would not just wait for the coup by the military but would act preemptively against the pro-neocolonial generals. 20

Sukarno was ill from August 3 to August 9, so the first meeting to which Hasan refers must have occurred in early August. The possibility of Sukarno’s death in early August might have provoked Aidit’s initial determination to prepare for a military action, as Hasan suggests, but it could not have sustained that determination through late Septem- ber. The rumors that Sukarno was dying evaporated as soon as he re- gained his health. Some advisers thought all along that he was suffering from nothing more than a bad case of the flu. After August 9 Sukarno showed no sign of a serious relapse and resumed a grueling schedule filled with passionately delivered public speeches, including one the night of September 30 itself.

For Aidit to have continued the plan for a military action, if that is what he did, he must have been convinced that the anti-Communist army generals would strike regardless of Sukarno’s health. Aidit, ac- cording to Hasan, changed the original plan; the Special Bureau went from anticipating the generals’ coup d’état to preempting it. This echoes Sjam’s contention that the party faced the question of whether to wait for the coup and then act or to preempt it. It also echoes Supardjo’s contention that “the party” at some point shifted its strategy from re- maining informed about the plans of the “progressive officers” to im- posing its own plan.

The accounts of Sjam and Hasan, taken together, cannot be consid- ered definitive proof that Aidit initiated the movement, that Sjam fol- lowed Aidit’s order, and that the military officers affiliated with the

146 t Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement

Special Bureau followed Sjam. Perhaps the officers acted on the basis of unjustified inferences. When speaking before the officers and other members of the Special Bureau (the people whom Hasan knew), Sjam might have boasted of orders from Aidit in order to get the others to follow him. Recall that Supardjo was under the impression that the party had a larger plan that went beyond what Sjam had explained to him. Sjam might well have pretended that the party leadership was more involved in the movement than it was. Hasan’s corroboration of the basics of Sjam’s account, however, suggests at the very least that the idea of Aidit’s being one of the movement’s leaders is not far-fetched. To get a better idea of Aidit’s role one has to consider the accounts by those in the Politburo itself.