A t least three former PKI Politburo members, Sudisman, Subekti, and Munir, stated in their courtroom defense pleas that the party as a whole

A t least three former PKI Politburo members, Sudisman, Subekti, and Munir, stated in their courtroom defense pleas that the party as a whole

was not involved in the movement but that certain unnamed leaders were involved as individuals. Their assessment seems correct. The movement appears to have been Aidit’s own project. He believed that a military action by progressive officers was the best strategy to eliminate the threat of the Council of Generals. As a covert military operation, no one in the party was allowed to know the details except for a handful of his trusted confidantes largely from the Politburo Working Committee. Aidit recruited individual party leaders, such as Njono and Sukatno, who mobilized youths into a militia force, without informing them of the overall operation. Information was conveyed on a need-to-know basis. None of the official leadership bodies of the Communist Party— the Politburo, its Working Committee, and the Central Committee— was involved in the planning and organizing of the movement.

In principle, the movement was justifiable in terms of the PKI’s self- interest. The party’s contacts in the military could be put to good use in eliminating the anti-Communist army high command. The movement turned into a fiasco for reasons that Aidit did not foresee. First, he was blind to the faults of Sjam. He authorized Sjam to proceed with the

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military action without having sufficient means of verifying Sjam’s word. Aidit, I suspect, did not realize that Sjam had dragooned the mil- itary officers into joining and had deluded them into thinking that the PKI would ensure the success of the action. When linking Aidit and the officers, Sjam distorted their perceptions of each other.

Second, Aidit did not perhaps sufficiently appreciate beforehand that the army was riddled from end to end with double agents and that the personal networks inside the army criss-crossed the officers’ political allegiances. Any action by “progressive officers” was highly vulnerable to betrayal. Untung and Latief, the two key officers willing to stick with Sjam even as others dropped out, thought that Suharto was their ally.

Third, given the inherent risks of a military action, Aidit’s involve- ment needed to have a much greater degree of plausible deniability; he did not take enough precautions to protect himself and the party in case of a failure. If he had stayed away from Halim and had decided not to go underground in Central Java, he could have been more convincing when asserting that the party was not involved.

Fourth, Aidit had developed a populist theory in which a military coup could be a positive development if it had a revolutionary program and the backing of the masses. He and Sjam inserted a political content into the movement—the Revolution Council, a term borrowed from the Algerian precedent. This political agenda placed too great a burden on what was, after all, a very limited military operation to kidnap the army high command. Aidit was too caught up in the fuzziness of popu- lism to recognize the strategic errors in exploiting the military for polit- ical purposes. The movement was not organized as a coup and com- manded by a single military officer (such as the successful coups with which Aidit was familiar, Qasim’s in Iraq in 1958 and Boumedienne’s in Algeria in 1965). The political agenda adulterated the purely military as- pects of the movement. Its plan for success was predicated on gaining Sukarno’s assent to it; the president would ensure that rival officers would not counterattack. The movement was not designed to succeed on the basis of its own raw military power.

My explanation of the Communist Party’s role in the movement does not confirm the Suharto regime’s version that accuses the PKI of being the mastermind. The party as an institution was not responsible. Only two individuals in the party, Aidit and Sjam, were responsible for organizing it. As Sudisman argued, the party’s formal decision-making bodies were responsible only in the sense that they had allowed Aidit far too much leeway to work on his own.