The Movement and Sukarno

The movement has usually been described as a coup attempt. The writers aligned with the Suharto regime insisted upon using this term;

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Notosusanto and Saleh titled their book The Coup Attempt of the “Sep- tember 30th Movement” in Indonesia, and the State Secretariat subtitled its 1994 report The Attempted Coup by the Indonesian Communist Party. Even those historians who have disagreed with the regime’s analysis have used the term. Harold Crouch titled his chapter about the movement “The Coup Attempt.” When thinking about the events of 1965, the unwary are likely to believe that the term coup can be unproblemati- cally applied to the September 30th Movement. The CIA study of the movement argued that the term coup is “technically correct” if the meaning is understood as “a sudden, forceful stroke in politics” but that the term coup d’état is incorrect: “For it now seems clear that the Indo- nesian coup was not a move to overthrow Sukarno and/or the estab- lished government of Indonesia. Essentially it was a purge of the Army leadership, which was intended to bring about certain changes in the cabinet.” 38 In reviewing the movement’s actions, one does not ﬁnd any effort to depose the president apart from the radio announcement decommissioning his cabinet (Decree no. 1). The movement took no direct action against the president. Supardjo met with Sukarno that morning on behalf of the organizers, presented him with a fait accom- pli, and then allowed him to take whatever further action he so desired. Supardjo did not dictate terms to Sukarno.

Supardjo’s account of the interaction between the movement and Sukarno on October 1 is particularly valuable because he was the only person speaking to both. He was the channel of communication between the movement’s core organizers and the president. The account in this document is similar to his testimony in court, but the document contains a number of new elements.

An important revelation concerns the reaction of the movement’s organizers once Supardjo reported his conversation with Sukarno to them. According to Supardjo, they debated what to do but could not come to any clear decision. They were effectively paralyzed by their own indecisiveness. Since no overall commander had been designated before then, none of the plotters was in a position to make the ﬁnal decision. Since Sukarno’s refusal to support their action prompted such confusion, it is reasonable to assume that they had counted on receiving his blessing. They would capture all seven generals alive, present them before Sukarno, and demand that they be dismissed or imprisoned. After all, Sukarno and his advisers had been very worried about the Council of Generals for the last six months. Sjam’s conﬁdence that the plan was foolproof must have derived in part from the certainty that

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Sukarno would welcome an action against the army high command. But Sukarno could not support their action once he learned of the bloodshed. Without his support the movement leaders did not know how to proceed.

It is surprising to discover in the Supardjo document that Sjam was of the opinion that the movement should continue even if it meant dis- obeying Sukarno and incurring his opposition: “Comrade Sjam insisted the revolution would have to proceed without Bung Karno [Sukarno].” The main point of Supardjo’s passage is to register his disagreement with Sjam’s proposed line. He argues that the movement should have made a definite decision to keep Sukarno as an ally. If the movement had followed Sjam’s line, it would have confronted the hostility of nearly the entire army and would have been isolated easily. If, however, the movement was able to convince Sukarno that the movement needed to continue to finish off the Suharto and Nasution combine, the right- wing army officers would have been isolated: “If we brought Bung Karno on board, the main contradiction would have become one between the left and the Revolutionary Democratic groups on one side, and merely the right-wing group alone on the other side.” The problem was that the core group never made a decision to either proceed without Sukarno or to gain Sukarno’s assent for further action: “There wasn’t a decision by us on which line to take.” In the manner of Leibniz’s theol- ogy of god as the great watchmaker (creating the universe, setting it in motion, and then abandoning it), the organizers of the movement did nothing during the afternoon and night of October 1 and allowed the initiative to pass into the hands of Suharto and Nasution.

According to the Suharto regime’s white book on the September 30th Movement, the organizers “decided to disobey President Sukarno’s order.” The anonymous authors argued, in the vague phrasing that was their specialty, that Sjam insisted that the organizers disobey the order because he did not want to “create an atmosphere of hesitation among the leaders of the movement.” 39 It is difﬁcult to follow the logic of their argument. They were apparently contending that Sjam succeeded in uniting all the movement’s leaders behind a single program (the councils) at a time when they were uncertain about how to proceed. The actual decision making was, according to Supardjo’s analysis, the exact opposite: the organizers did not decide to disobey Sukarno’s order. They did not decide anything. They were deadlocked.

Supardjo’s comment on Sjam’s position (“Comrade Sjam insisted the revolution would have to proceed without Bung Karno”) may

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explain the radio announcements in the afternoon that decommissioned the president’s cabinet and proclaimed that all power had fallen into the hands of the Indonesian Revolution Council. Supardjo does not specifically address those announcements, but one can presume, reading between the lines, that Supardjo thought Sjam was responsible. While Supardjo and the other military officers remained loyal to Sukarno, Sjam wished to bypass him and create an entirely new form of government. The plotters were deadlocked in their discussions because of this difference of opinion. At his Mahmillub trial Supardjo claimed that he had not agreed with the idea of the Indonesian Revolution Council and had refused to sign the document that Sjam had passed around, apparently sometime in the late morning or early afternoon on October 1: “The Revolution Council was just the wish of Sjam and it had never been discussed at a meeting.” Supardjo recalled that he noticed a divi- sion between Sjam and the military officers in the movement since the other officers, like Supardjo, were unwilling to sign the document. 40 Untung and Latief were willing to follow Sukarno’s demand to end the movement, but Sjam “was not happy with it.” 41 The officers had moti- vated their troops with the idea that Sukarno needed to be protected from a coup by the right-wing generals. Supardjo opposed Sjam’s line because the general recognized what was obvious: the most powerful loyalty among the military troops and officers was to Sukarno, not to the PKI.

The basic idea of the Revolution Council must have received the assent of the officers beforehand as the term was mentioned in the first radio announcement. However, if the officers agreed to the idea, they probably did not envision the council’s displacing Sukarno’s authority. In trying to continue with the movement, Sjam may have altered the original plan for the councils. Since Sukarno did not support the movement, Sjam quickly redesigned the original plan so that it would not rely upon the president. The radio announcements in the afternoon may reflect Sjam’s own improvised departure from the plan that the military officers had initially agreed upon. Instead of institutions to support Sukarno, the councils were abruptly recast as the basis of a new form of government.

With Supardjo’s analysis, one can venture the hypothesis that the radio announcement in the afternoon that decommissioned Sukarno’s cabinet was Sjam’s response to Sukarno’s refusal to support the movement. If the movement had gone according to plan and Sukarno had

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supported it, the revolution councils would have been set up to comple- ment the existing cabinet rather than replace it. The later radio announcements must have been intended to be read in the morning, not long after the first announcement. They were delayed because of the protracted debate and indecision among the movement’s leaders after Sukarno had ordered the action to be called off. Eventually, Sjam ig- nored the wishes of the officers and tried to keep the movement going by having a revised announcement broadcast. The decommissioning of the cabinet was perhaps a last-minute, last-ditch attempt by Sjam to give a new direction to the movement while his coconspirators from the military dithered. For the positions of deputy commanders of the movement, Sjam chose officers who happened to be around him that day (Supardjo and Atmodjo) or who had reputations as progressives (Sunardi and Anwas).

The movement was paralyzed. On the one hand, Sjam was hoping that a “mass movement” of soldiers and civilians would magically ap- pear and save the movement. On the other hand, his military coconspirators were exhausted, confused, and nervous. They were unwilling to support the continuation of the movement if that would lead to a confrontation with Sukarno. When their supreme commander ordered them to call off the movement, they obeyed. And so the discussions among the core leaders rambled on. The leaders did not issue a state- ment to call off the movement, organize concrete actions to continue it, or attempt to persuade Sukarno to support a wider war against Suharto and Nasution. They simply drifted ineluctably onward toward disaster.

The Movement and Sukarno