Civilian Participation

The movement was not designed as a purely military action. The conspirators had recruited members of PKI-afﬁliated organizations to serve as auxiliary troops and to provide logistical support, especially food and water. Supardjo notes that the troops went hungry because the civilians who were supposed to supply them did not show up. Accord- ing to Supardjo, Jakarta had been divided into three sectors (north, central, and south) and a commander had been assigned to each sector. The

102 t The Supardjo Document

sector commanders “had been assigned to take care of administrative matters for the troops in their individual sectors.” But on the day of the action these sector commanders were nowhere to be found: “When these sectors were contacted, not one was at its station.” The commanders of the sectors had disappeared. It turned out that “all these sectors that had been drawn up beforehand existed only on paper.” Supardjo criticizes the organizers of the action for not inspecting the sectors beforehand and ensuring that the sector leaders knew exactly what they were supposed to do.

Supardjo’s analysis of the sectors appears to be inaccurate, again re- flecting his unfamiliarity with the PKI and certain aspects of the movement. Njono, the head of the PKI’s Jakarta chapter and a member of the Politburo, claimed at his Mahmillub trial that he had divided the city into sectors. 27 But he stated that there were six sectors, not three, as Supardjo states, and that the personnel grouped into the sectors were civilian militiamen who were not responsible for supplying the regular troops with food. 28 Njono had mobilized two thousand men, largely from the PKI’s youth organization, Pemuda Rakjat, to serve as reserve manpower for the military operations. These youths had received military training at Lubang Buaya in the previous months. The militiamen who had occupied the telecommunications building were from one sector (the Gambir sector). Some confusion among the movement participants can be seen in their conflicting recollections about the sectors. While Supardjo thought the sectors were supposed to supply food to the troops, Njono thought the opposite, that the troops at Lubang Buaya were supposed to supply food to the sectors. Njono recalled that his militiamen spent the day idle while waiting to receive rice, uniforms, and weapons from the troops at Lubang Buaya. During the day of Oc- tober 1 the instruction from those officers was for the sectors to stand by. Njono became aware that the movement had become “jammed up” when these supplies did not arrive by the afternoon. According to his testimony, the civilian recruits remained inactive: they “didn’t do any- thing.” 29 It is a known fact that the only militiamen who surfaced in support of the movement were those who occupied the buildings near Merdeka Square in the afternoon. Njono’s story about the “Gambir sector” and the confusion about supplies is a credible explanation for the general passivity of the sectors.

One civilian involved in the Gambir sector was Juwono, a pseudo- nym for a twenty-year-old member of the PKI’s youth wing, Pe- muda Rakjat, in the Menteng district of Jakarta. He followed the

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organization’s instructions to participate in the military trainings held at Lubang Buaya. In the weeks before the movement Pemuda Rakjat held frequent meetings to discuss the political situation, especially the dan- ger of a coup by the Council of Generals. On September 29 a leader of the military training instructed Juwono to report to the neighborhood of Pejompongan, not far from the city’s main stadium. Once there, he found a gathering of hundreds of youths from all over the city. He recalled that Gambir was the term for the group. On the afternoon of October 1 he and about thirty other youths were given weapons and told to guard the telecommunications building. They stood around the building, doing nothing, until troops suddenly arrived. Juwono and the others were unprepared for an actual gunﬁght. After surrendering their weapons, they were trucked to the military police headquarters, where they were jailed, interrogated, and tortured. Juwono spent the next thir- teen years as a political prisoner. 30

In addition to mobilizing youths to act as a militia, the movement appears to have asked Gerwani, the Indonesian Women’s Movement, to open communal kitchens around the city. The kitchens were to feed both the troops and the militias. In a conservative-minded patriarchal gesture the movement left the cooking to women. 31 The Dutch scholar Saskia Wieringa interviewed former Gerwani members in the early 1980s who claimed to have been asked by the Jakarta branch of the PKI to be at Lubang Buaya for duties related to the anti-Malaysia cam- paign. 32 Perhaps the kitchens did not materialize because so few women showed up. Wieringa reports that only about seventy women were at Lubang Buaya on October 1. They included members of Gerwani; the PKI’s youth organization, Pemuda Rakjat; the trade union organization SOBSI (Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia, the All- Indonesia Central Workers Organization); and the peasant’s associa- tion BTI (Barisan Tani Indonesia—the Indonesian Peasants Front). Also among them were wives of the palace guard troops. These women were assigned tasks other than cooking. Some sewed tricolor striped badges onto the uniforms of the movement troops. 33

It would be surprising if there was not frequent miscommunica- tion between the movement and the civilians recruited to assist it. The movement could not reveal the plan in any detail to the civilian members of the party without increasing the risk of exposure. The tight military secrecy that allowed the kidnappings to achieve the element of surprise simultaneously doomed mass civilian participation. Since the party members were not told exactly what would happen, they were

104 t The Supardjo Document

confused about their tasks. A former high-level PKI leader conﬁrmed that many people in Jakarta assigned to the sectors were hopelessly confused and decided, by default, to do nothing. 34 By combining a mass movement with a military conspiracy, the movement leaders were at- tempting the impossible. The party members (including the highest levels of the leadership) could not be informed of the details of the conspiracy without endangering the secrecy on which its success depended. The bizarre character of the movement that has so confounded all ob- servers partly derives from its not having been designed as an exclu- sively military operation. Many civilians were integrated into the action, in ways that were confusing to all the participants.

Sjam may have inserted the civilians into the design of the movement over the objections of the military officers. One member of the PKI Politburo, Peris Pardede, testified at the first Mahmillub trial that Sudisman (a member of the Politburo) had informed him in September that the officers in the movement did not have sufficient troops for their action. Sudisman had explained that the party would supply a contin- gent of civilian youths to supplement their strength “even though the officers don’t actually like it and would prefer just to act by themselves.” 35

Given the paradigm that the movement established in Jakarta, it appears that the intended role for civilians within the movement, apart from assisting the troops, was to rally behind the officers who declared themselves supporters of the movement. In response to Untung’s call, officers around the country would initiate the formation of revolution councils. Civilians would then meet these officers and decide how the councils would govern. In Jakarta the movement appointed forty-five people to serve as members of the national Indonesian Revolution Council. The officers in the regions, in forming local revolution councils, were supposed to accommodate nationalists, Muslims, and Com- munists under Sukarno’s Nasakom formula.

If the movement had been able to sustain itself longer, mass demonstrations might have occurred in a number of cities in support of the movement and its revolution councils. Njono claimed that he drew up not only six sectors for the militiamen in Jakarta but also a network of what he called posts (presumably members’ houses and party ofﬁces). The personnel at these posts were PKI members at the level of the Sec- tion Committee (Comite Seksi). They were instructed to stay at their posts on the day of the action and keep listening to their radios. 36 It seems that Njono would have mobilized the PKI masses for demonstrations if the movement had not collapsed prematurely.

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Supardjo was under the impression that the movement was count- ing on mass demonstrations once the military operation had been com- pleted. He notes at one point in his analysis that Sjam and the Special Bureau thought that the PKI masses were ready for some sort of mili- tant action: “The mistaken strategy of the September 30th Movement also derived from the fact that many comrades in the regions reported that the masses could no longer be restrained. If the leadership did not take action, the people would proceed on their own (for the revolution).” By using the term revolution, Supardjo does not necessarily mean

a Communist revolution. Revolution was a commonly used term in the Sukarnoist discourse of the time. From constant usage its meaning had become polyvalent, jargonistic, and ambiguous. Even Suharto, in suppressing the movement, claimed to be defending the “revolution” against an attempted “counterrevolution.”

Sjam does appear to have been expecting some sort of mass action in support of the movement. In his courtroom testimony he described the collapse of the movement: “And after weighing the options on how to keep the movement going while its strength kept decreasing [during the night of October 1 and early morning October 2], when meanwhile there were no signs that the mass movement would support and join the September 30th Movement, I ﬁnally decided to stage a retreat.” 37

The PKI, as is well known, did not call its members out into the streets to support the movement. However, its public line—that the movement was an internal army action—did not preclude the possibil- ity of organizing demonstrations in support of it. Demonstrations did occur in Yogyakarta. The movement in Jakarta appears to have counted on a “mass movement” as a kind of secondary phase. Judging from the party’s passivity in Jakarta (and everywhere else except Yogyakarta), the movement was probably designed to succeed on the basis of its military operations alone. Demonstrations, to be organized later, would provide public legitimation for the insurgents and help convince enemies that any counterattack would not enjoy popular support. As the movement was collapsing, Sjam held out the hope that the “mass movement” could reinvigorate it, but most likely he had not planned from the start on civilian actions as the key to its victory.

Civilian Participation