Sudisman’s Analysis

The most significant statement by a PKI leader about the movement was by Sudisman, the party’s secretary general who managed to survive the great massacres. He was captured in December 1966 and brought before the Mahmillub in July 1967. He was one of a group of five young men who had taken over the leadership of the party in 1951. These five—Aidit, Lukman, Njoto, Sakirman, and Sudisman himself— enjoyed great success in rebuilding the party. In his defense plea Sudis- man referred to the unity among these five men as similar to that of the five Pandawa brothers of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata: “The four of them are I, and I am the four of them. . . . With the four of them, I have been five-in-one. . . . We five have always been together.” 1 The Communist Party’s success from 1951 to 1965 was in part due to this unity of the leadership. No splits fragmented the party into rival orga- nizations (such as occurred in the Communist movement in India), even in the midst of the Sino-Soviet conflict.

Sudisman’s defense plea, though presented in the Mahmillub— “in the grip of the enemy,” as the ex-PKI activists would say—is a can- did, well-written document that exhibits remarkable intelligence and composure. He did not shrink before the court in fear, shift blame onto others, feign ignorance, or plead for his life. As the highest party leader left alive, he felt a responsibility to the party’s supporters to explain what went wrong. Aware that he was going to be sentenced to death, he composed his defense plea as a political statement to the broader public outside the courtroom. Indeed, because he refused to recognize the

Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement t 141

legitimacy of the Mahmillub, he denied that it should be called a defense plea (pledoi). He called it an “analysis of responsibility” (uraian tanggundjawab). 2

Sudisman acknowledged that, in some unspecified way, he was “involved” (terlibat) in the movement and that other unnamed Communist Party leaders were also “directly involved” in it. 3 By using the word involved he did not mean that the PKI leaders had directed the movement. He upheld the party’s statement of October 6, 1965, that the movement was “an internal army matter” and that the PKI as a party “knew nothing” about it. 4 He contended that the initiators and main organizers of the movement, its “moving spirits,” were “progressive officers” who wanted to foil the coup plot by the Council of Generals. 5 This group behind the movement largely consisted of “non-Communist officers” (meaning Sukarno loyalists) but also included “a few who were Communists.” 6 Sudisman’s implication was that certain Communist Party leaders as individuals decided to support these progressive officers. He did not explain exactly how he and the other party leaders struck up an alliance with the officers and provided this support. His focus was on justifying the Politburo’s strategy of supporting the movement rather than describing the manner in which it was implemented.

He claimed that he had become convinced that the action by the “progressive officers” was the best method of countering right-wing army generals who had proved themselves to be the single largest ob- stacle to the party’s programs. They blocked Sukarno’s anti-imperialist foreign policy, the government’s economic policies designed to benefit peasants and workers (such as land reform), and the PKI’s continued expansion. The strategy of supporting the “progressive officers,” Sudis- man argued, seemed correct at the time. In retrospect, however, he considered it misguided. The failure of the movement and the vulnerability of the party to military repression revealed something wrong in the very nature of the party’s organization and ideology. Sudisman suggested that the problem was not that the party leaders just happened to bet on the wrong horse; the problem was that they were betting in the first place. Caught up in their long streak of success, they had lost the ability “calculate scientifically the concrete balance of forces on each side.” 7 Their emphasis on national unity had led them to become too accom- modating of the middle class and neglectful of building up the autono- mous organized strength of the peasants and workers. 8 By supporting a secretive putsch divorced from “the masses,” the leaders had opted for a kind of risky short-cut to the revolution—a risk they never would have

142 t Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement

taken had the party not been preoccupied with the machinations of elite politicians in Jakarta. In the ruins of the movement stood revealed the “accumulated mistakes of the PKI over a long period of time.” 9

Sudisman believed that the masterminds of the movement were the military officers such as Untung and Supardjo. In evaluating the accu- racy of his belief, one has to ask what Sudisman knew about the movement. On what information was his belief based? According to his Analysis of Responsibility, his knowledge of the movement was derived solely from Aidit. Sudisman noted that in Politburo meetings Aidit had “explained that there were progressive officers who wanted to take pre- ventive action to forestall a coup d’état by the Council of Generals.” 10 In Sudisman’s experience Aidit “was always extremely careful and precise in estimating the balance of power”; he was “extremely meticulous in such matters.” 11 By virtue of his position as a coordinating minister in Sukarno’s cabinet, Aidit “had many channels for checking his information.” 12 Sudisman trusted Aidit’s opinion that the movement deserved to receive support: “Comrade Aidit explained to us [presumably, mem- bers of the Politburo] quite convincingly that the existence of the Council of Generals had called into being the progressive officers and the September 30th Movement, which would carry out a military operation and form a Revolution Council.” 13 Aidit was consistent in in- forming the Politburo that the movement was internal to the military: “Aidit always said that the progressive officers wished to carry out a military operation, never once that the PKI wished to carry out such an operation. Nor did Comrade Aidit ever state that the PKI wished to start

a revolution at that time.” 14 Sudisman positioned Aidit as the one per- son in the party who was in touch with the ofﬁcers and who determined

what actions PKI personnel would take to support the movement. He mentioned that Aidit instructed “a number of cadres to be sent to the provinces a few days before the outbreak of the September 30th Move- ment, with the line ‘listen to the announcements over the Radio of the Republic of Indonesia and support the Revolution Council.’” 15 For Su- disman the movement was similar to the coup by Colonel Qasim in Iraq in 1958 that overthrew the monarchy and canceled Iraq’s participation in the military alliance for containing the Soviet Union (the Baghdad Pact of 1955, which included Turkey and Great Britain, among others). 16 Some coups have a progressive political agenda—they are against feu- dalism, imperialism, and capitalism—while some coups have a reac- tionary agenda. The movement, though not a coup, was a military action that the party considered to be progressive.

Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement t 143 Sudisman did not claim to have direct contact with the ofﬁcers in-

volved in the movement. Perhaps he was not even in contact with Sjam and the personnel of the Special Bureau. He did not mention them. Al- though Sudisman must have known more about the party’s connection to the movement than he revealed in his Analysis of Responsibility, with- out additional evidence one cannot presume that Sudisman’s judgment on the movement’s “moving spirits” was based on information other than what Aidit provided him. During the Mahmillub sessions Sudis- man, in response to Sjam’s testimony, claimed to have no direct knowledge of the movement, to have been following orders from Aidit, and to have believed that Sjam was also following orders from Aidit: “Even though I myself did not know [about the movement], what was done by the witness, Comrade Sjam, was on the instructions of Aidit, and even

I carried out instructions from Comrade Aidit, from the perspective of responsibility, I will take over the responsibility for all of it.” 17

I will comment later on Sudisman’s enigmatic assumption of responsibility for a movement about which he admitted to knowing so little. For now the important point to note is that Sudisman was not necessarily in a position to know how the movement was organized. There is no reason to consider as authoritative and well informed his opinion that the military ofﬁcers were acting on their own. Sudisman’s evaluation of the movement as having been led by the military does not constitute a convincing refutation of Supardjo’s evaluation of it as having been led by Sjam. Since Supardjo was much closer to the movement’s organizers and witnessed their decision-making process ﬁrst hand, his evaluation should be given more weight. 18

The question about Aidit’s knowledge remains unresolved in Sudisman’s analysis. Perhaps Aidit too believed that the military officers were acting on their own. He depended on information from Sjam. Perhaps Sjam did not explain to him that he was actually playing a dominant role in organizing the officers. Alternatively, Aidit might have known that the officers behind the movement were those con- nected to the Special Bureau but might have wished to hide that fact from others in the Politburo in order to maintain the secrecy around the Special Bureau’s operations.

Sudisman’s Analysis