Background on Sjam and the Special Bureau

When did the Special Bureau begin? According to Hasan, Sjam was technically correct when he claimed, in the course of his courtroom testimony, that it began in 1964. 1 Hasan afﬁrms that the name originated around 1964 but says that the organization itself had been functioning since at least the early 1950s, when the party was reorganized under Aidit’s leadership. One branch of the party was assigned the task of cultivating supporters within the military. This clandestine branch functioned within the PKI’s aboveground Organizational Department, which handled matters such as the recruitment, posting, and training of members. Until 1964 this branch had been known as the Military Sec- tion (Bagian Militer) of the Organizational Department. Most of the department’s staff did not know that this branch existed. It was headed by a man named Karto. Sjam testiﬁed that he had been in the Orga- nizational Department since 1960. What he did not say was that he had been working under Karto as a secret member of that department. He became head when Karto died around 1963 or 1964.

Hasan describes Karto as a senior PKI member who joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. Karto was originally from Solo and had been active in the armed revolt against the Dutch forces from 1945 to

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1949. Hasan, a member of a laskar (people’s militia) in Central Java, knew Karto during those years of armed struggle and occasionally met him in later years:

At that time [in the 1940s] he was a member of the Central Committee of the PKI, from the peasants’ sector. He had great influence in the rural areas. He was already old then, already experienced, so a lot of the cadres in the military were his followers. Karto was considered a father figure in Central Java, an old man, from the generation of 1926–27—he might have even been sent to Boven Digul. 2 He had known suffering, very thin he was. He lived in the BTI [Barisan Tani Indonesia—the Indonesian Peas- ants Front] office and never married. Later he came down with cancer and was taken to the Soviet Union for treatment. But the doctors there weren’t able to do anything for him. He was there for six months and then came back to Indonesia and then after about another six months finally passed away. That was in 1963 or 1964. 3

Two former PKI leaders told me that Karto’s nickname was Hadi Bengkring because he was so thin. (Bengkring means emaciated in Java- nese.) Hasan recalls that Karto died of lung cancer because of a lifetime of chain-smoking—a habit that he refused to break even while suffering from cancer. 4

While in prison with former PKI leaders after 1965, Siauw Giok Tjhan, the head of a pro-Sukarno organization of Chinese Indonesians, learned that Karto had been the head of the Military Section. Siauw had known very little about the Communist Party before 1965 and certainly knew nothing of Karto. In prison Siauw became something of a social scientist who collected information about the movement to ﬁgure out how it occurred. He wrote in his unpublished analysis that Karto had been “an old man, a founder of the PKI who was respected by many ﬁgures in the PKI.” 5

A former member of parliament for the Communist Party, Oey Hay Djoen, recalled that Karto was a well-known ﬁgure within the party: “He was the kind of fellow who was everywhere and anywhere, all the time and any time. But he didn’t act cocky. He was a quiet fellow; some- times he’d smile. But he was always present around the party. And

he was respected. People knew that he was an important person, even though he didn’t have an ofﬁcial position. We didn’t make a issue of that.” 6

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Precisely because of his familiarity with many military ﬁgures of the Indonesian revolution, Karto became responsible for continuing the party’s relationship with them after national independence had been won. In the 1950s and early 1960s, while remaining an aboveground party leader in Jakarta, he maintained a secret nationwide network of contacts among the military. In each province several party members contacted ofﬁcers. Hasan explains: “In general, Karto would assign

a person native to that region to head up the Military Section there. But his assistant would be someone sent from Java, someone person- ally trained by Karto. The head would certainly be a local person: in Padang, deﬁnitely a Padang person, in Medan, a Medan person. But Karto would send fellows from Yogyakarta, Solo, East Java out to the other islands to keep an eye on the activities of the local Military Sec- tion and make sure they didn’t make any mistakes. He sent them to Riau, Banjarmasin, North Sulawesi, and so on.”

In his aboveground work Karto was an exacting leader who paid careful attention to the character of the party’s personnel. Hasan con- tinues: “Karto, my goodness! He was a stickler for details. Little things, he’d ask the cadres about the little things. It was that spirit of 1926–27, very strict. Toward the members he could be harsh. He would go into depth about their work: ‘In your village who are the cadre? What have they done? What have you done in the village that has beneﬁted the peasants?’ My goodness, most of them would have to say, ‘Nothing yet.’

A week later he’d remember the conversation and ask them again about the same details.” From Hasan’s description Karto appears to have shared much in common with the perspective of Tan Ling Djie, the party leader ousted by Aidit and his colleagues in 1951. The original model of the party was of an organization of carefully selected, well-trained, committed militants who lived among the peasants and workers and built up their power from below. The older generation believed the party should be designed to survive bouts of repression, such as those under Dutch co- lonialism and the Japanese occupation, and to work toward an armed seizure of state power. Some viewed Aidit’s strategy as the embour- geoisement of the party: members became government officials, lived in large houses in Jakarta, obtained funding from businessmen, and sup- ported Sukarno’s populist politics. Many of the older generation of Communist Party figures did not survive in the party leadership once Aidit’s generation took over. Karto must have found some way of remaining an important party figure, perhaps by compromising while still

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holding to his dissenting opinions. Moreover, his vast network of contacts in the military must have made it difﬁcult for the younger generation to dislodge him.

The Military Section, the proto–Special Bureau, naturally emerged out of the party’s experience with the nation’s sprawling, improvised armed struggle from 1945 to 1949. Many young men supportive of the left-wing movement joined militias and managed to enter the regular military. Once the armed struggle ended, the party did not want to lose these supporters, and vice versa. To develop the Military Section the PKI leaders did not consult the esoteric realms of Communist Party theory. It was simply a matter of sustaining contact with military personnel who had not yet been divorced from their afﬁliations with civilian politics. The former Politburo member Iskandar Subekti says in his conﬁdential 1986 account of the movement that the “Special Bureau was a body that specialized in looking after the comrades within the military.” 7

Contrary to the propaganda of the Suharto regime, the Special Bu- reau was not some strangely fiendish scheme exclusive to the Commu- nist Party. Other political parties had similar networks inside the military. The Socialist Party of Indonesia, for instance, had its own network of officers. 8 Precisely these connections facilitated the collaboration between the Socialist Party of Indonesia and the rebel colonels of the 1967–58 revolts in Sumatra and Sulawesi (see chapter 6 on these revolts). The Suharto regime, in constructing a sacred aura around the military, presented the Special Bureau as an aberrant external infiltration of the military by a determined and peculiarly evil foe. In fact, the postindependence military was full of different cliques based upon political predilections. As Daniel Lev has noted, officers were “in constant contact with civilian groups in the highly politicized atmosphere of post- revolutionary Indonesia.” Military officers “maintained or developed connections with political parties, either on their own or through fam- ily and social connections.” 9

After Karto died, Aidit appointed Sjam as his replacement. Among the PKI political prisoners, it was rumored that Karto had told Aidit before his death not to select Sjam. 10 The story may be true. Hasan notes that Sjam’s temperament—boastful, aggressive, and impatient— was the opposite of Karto’s. According to Hasan, Sjam’s appointment to the Special Bureau was attributable to Aidit’s fondness for him. Sjam was known as Aidit’s man. He had a long-standing friendship with Aidit, unlike Pono and Bono, who were considered Karto’s men.

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Sjam testiﬁed that he began working as head of the Special Bureau in November 1964. Hasan, however, is certain that it had to have been sometime before May 1964. For unknown reasons, by unknown hands, Karto’s network was renamed the Special Bureau around the time of the transition in leadership. Whereas Karto was an experienced, well- known, and well-liked party member who combined aboveground work with secret military networking, Sjam was an anonymous ﬁgure in the party who stuck to the shadows.

Little is known for certain about Sjam’s childhood and youth. In his courtroom testimony he provided a rough outline of his life. He was born in Tuban, a town on the north coast of East Java, around 1924. He attended junior high school and agronomy school in Surabaya. When Japan invaded Java in 1942 and the agronomy school was forced to close down, he had to abandon his studies before obtaining his degree. He shifted to Yogyakarta around that time and enrolled in a business school there. In the course of my oral history research with ex-political prisoners, I met Sukrisno, a man who turned out to be a close friend of Sjam’s in Yogyakarta. 11 (Like Hasan, Sukrisno does not want to be identiﬁed by his real name.) He conﬁrmed that Sjam was born in 1924 and that

he attended business school (sekolah dagang) in Yogyakarta. The two became friends there. Sukrisno also confirmed what some historians have already learned, that Sjam was a member of the so-called Pathuk group. 12 Sukrisno recalls that around 1943 the youths of the city who wished to resist the Japanese occupation began gathering in the Pathuk neighborhood. The leaders of this group were Djohan Sjahrouza and Daino, both of whom were associated with the Socialist Party (Partai Sosialis). On occasion, senior national-level Socialist Party leaders such as Sjahrir would visit. According to Daino’s widow, Ibu Oemiyah, Sjam was indeed part of the Pathuk group. 13 Both she and Sukrisno recall that Sjam participated in the attack on the Japanese government’s main office in Yogyakarta in September 1945. A crowd of people surrounded the office while a group of young militants, among them members of the Pathuk group, lowered the Japanese flag and raised the Indonesian flag.

Sjam’s activities after leaving Yogyakarta have been a mystery. Sjam claimed in his courtroom testimony to have joined the Communist Party in 1949. According to Benedict Anderson, there is documentary evidence showing that he was working as a civil servant of the Dutch puppet state in West Java in 1949 and was serving as the head of the Banten branch of the Socialist Party of Indonesia in 1950–51. 14 Such evidence suggests that he was neither a militant nationalist during the years

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of the armed struggle nor a Communist Party member in the early 1950s. The Socialists and Communists split after the Madiun affair in 1948. Although he had been close to the Socialists while he was in Yog- yakarta, Sjam could not have been simultaneously aligned with both the Socialist Party of Indonesia and the Communist Party in the early 1950s.

Sukrisno cleared up the confusion around Sjam’s activities. He and Sjam left Yogyakarta together in 1947 and moved to Jakarta. They lived in the same house, worked in the same office, studied Marxism- Leninism from the same teacher, and together established a trade union for dockworkers. He was perhaps Sjam’s closest friend from 1943 to 1950. According to Sukrisno, Socialist Party leaders of the Pathuk group sent five youths to Jakarta in 1947. The Dutch had already occupied the city but allowed the Indonesian Republic, based in Yogyakarta, to maintain the offices of certain ministries there. The Socialist Party leaders wanted these five youths to help the Republican officials in Ja- karta smuggle supplies and money back into Yogyakarta. The five were chosen because they were reliable, resourceful, and fairly well educated; they were not just young militants only good for fighting. The five, all in their early twenties, were Munir, Hartoyo, Widoyo, Sjam, and Sukrisno himself. After arriving in Jakarta, they contacted the Republican officials from various ministries. Sjam and Sukrisno began working in the Ministry of Information, whose branch office for West Java was head- quartered in Jakarta. They received a salary and a fairly high civil service rank even though their work was a kind of combination of office boy and covert operative. Sukrisno recalls that Sjam was once instructed to take a huge sum of cash out of the office to buy automobile tires and then arrange for them to be put on a train heading for the interior of Java. The train workers at the Manggarai station in Jakarta helped carry supplies for the Republican forces.

The five lived on Jalan Guntur in a house vacated by the resident of Bogor, an Indonesian nationalist who shifted to the Republic’s capital of Yogyakarta. They soon met several men who had returned from studies in the Netherlands, where they had become members of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) and had joined the under- ground antifascist struggle during the war years. One of these men, Hadiono Kusuma Utoyo, worked with Sjam and Sukrisno at the Jakarta office of the Ministry of Information. He became their mentor in Marxism and Leninism. 15 Once a week, on a regular schedule, the five walked to Utoyo’s house on Jalan Kebon Sirih to study under his direc- tion. Sukrisno recalls that one book they read was Lenin’s State and

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Revolution in Dutch translation. From Communists back in the Neth- erlands they used to receive suitcases full of books that sailors would help smuggle into the city. This political education was an eye-opening experience for them. The Socialist Party leaders of the Pathuk group had provided Sukrisno and his comrades with little more than a place to gather and a general spirit of populism. He said that his initial aspira- tion was to become an important leader in the postindependence state with a high rank and a high salary. In learning about communism from the recently returned CPN members, Sukrisno felt that he was gaining advanced, scientific knowledge. He changed his career plans. He and Sjam quit their jobs at the Ministry of Information, joined the Com- munist Party, and started organizing trade unions, first at the colonial government’s motor vehicle repair shops and then at the port of Jakarta, Tanjung Priok. They founded the Shipworkers and Sailors Trade Union (Serikat Buruh Kapal dan Pelayaran) in late 1948 and were the leading officers of it until February 1950, when it merged with the par- allel union that had operated in Republican territory, Port Workers and Sailors Trade Union (Serikat Buruh Pelabuhan dan Pelayaran, SBPP). Sukrisno and Sjam did not contest the elections for the new union (which maintained the name SBPP). Instead, they were appointed to positions in the Communist Party. With the dissolution of their union they went their separate ways. Sukrisno occasionally ran into Sjam in later years. Sjam once asked for his help in contacting some old friends of the Pathuk group who had become military officers. Sukrisno guessed that Sjam’s role within the Communist Party was to handle the military officers, but he was unaware of Sjam’s precise role and ignorant of the existence of the Special Bureau.

Sukrisno is certain that Sjam was not working for the Dutch puppet government of Pasundan in 1949. He was employed in Jakarta as a civil servant of the Republican government from 1947 to 1948 and was preoc- cupied with trade union organizing from 1948 to 1950. The confusion perhaps arose because Sjam was working within Dutch-held territory and was working for the West Java branch of the Ministry of Informa- tion. Sukrisno is also certain that Sjam was not a member of the Socialist Party of Indonesia in the early 1950s. Sjam was correct when he testified that he joined the Communist Party in 1949. Sukrisno joined at the same time. Although all five Pathuk group members sent to Jakarta joined the PKI in the late 1940s, they remained on friendly terms with the Socialists who had guided them in Yogyakarta. 16 The five continued to socialize with figures in the Socialist Party of Indonesia even while relations

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How Sjam came to know Aidit is a matter of some conjecture. Sukrisno confirms what the historian Jacques Leclerc has reported, that Sjam helped Aidit resurface in mid-1950 after two years of an under- ground existence. In the wake of the Madiun affair in 1948, when the army under Sukarno and Hatta attacked the Communist Party, Aidit fled Central Java and went into hiding in Jakarta—a city he knew well from his time there as a nationalist activist in the mid-1940s. Once the Dutch departed in 1949 and it was safe to reemerge, Aidit and another Communist Party leader, Lukman, chose to appear first at the port of Tanjung Priok, as if they had just disembarked from a ship. They claimed that they had been in Vietnam and China and had witnessed first hand the Communist revolutions there. Sukrisno claims that Sjam was assigned the task of escorting Aidit through the port: “I went with Sjam to Tanjung Priok that day, but I did not accompany him to the docks to meet Aidit. Since I had never seen Aidit, I did not know what

he looked like. I stayed outside.” Sjam apparently had met Aidit before because he was able to recognize him. According to Leclerc, Sjam facilitated Aidit and Lukman’s passage through the immigration ofﬁce where they faced some trouble, given that they lacked the proper papers. 17 At least from that moment in Tanjung Priok, Aidit must have felt indebted to Sjam for his help in pulling off this bit of theater.

Sjam appears to have joined the Military Section under Karto sometime in the 1950s. Although Sjam claimed to have joined the Commu- nist Party’s Organizational Department (under which the Military Sec- tion operated) in 1960, it is likely that he joined well before that. Supardjo stated at his trial that he had known Sjam as a covert agent of the PKI since 1956. 18 Sukrisno notes that Sjam would have had a ready- made pool of contacts in the military just from his friends and acquaint- ances in the Pathuk group who joined the military. It is doubtful that Sjam would have been appointed head of the Special Bureau in 1963 or 1964 if he had not had a long record of covert work on behalf of the party. Sjam must have proved himself to Aidit over the years, to the point that Aidit had full faith in Sjam’s loyalty to the party and in his ca- pabilities in contacting military ofﬁcers.

Background on Sjam and the Special Bureau