Suharto’s Counterattack

Suharto was able to act on October 1 with “uncanny efﬁciency” (as Wert- Suharto was able to act on October 1 with “uncanny efﬁciency” (as Wert-

Once Suharto committed himself that morning to defeating the movement, he resolved to disregard Sukarno’s orders, whatever they might be. The long-anticipated showdown with the PKI had come. Su- harto was not going to allow the president to protect the participants in the movement or the party’s members. Suharto’s refusal to allow Pra- noto and Wirahadikusumah to go to Halim and his insistence on Su- karno’s departure from Halim indicate that Suharto was determined to ignore the president’s will. A general without a preconceived plan would have deferred to Sukarno. Suharto responded to the movement on his own, without so much as consulting his commander-in-chief. From the morning of October 1 Suharto knew that the movement had the poten- tial to serve as the longed-for pretext for bringing the army to power. The rapidity by which the army blamed the PKI, organized anti- Communist civilian groups, and orchestrated a propaganda campaign suggests preparation. The generals had done some contingency planning. The postmovement behavior of the army cannot be explained as a series of purely improvised responses.

The military ofﬁcers in the movement who were meeting at Halim (Untung, Latief, Soejono) were ready to call off the operation before they knew about Suharto’s counterattack. Sukarno had instructed them to quit late that morning. Unlike Aidit and Sjam, they were willing to abide by the president’s instructions. Sometime in the late morning Un- tung signed the documents calling for the establishment of the Indone- sian Revolution Council, but he considered his own participation in the

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Suharto was planning a counterattack, they did not organize their forces for self-defense. Supardjo insisted that they would have to ﬁght Suharto and Nasution. He tried to regroup the movement troops that had been in Merdeka Square and form an alliance with Omar Dani’s air force. But Supardjo found the core leaders unresponsive, confused, and tired. The ofﬁcers were already angry with Sjam for betraying their original intentions with his radio announcement decommissioning Sukarno’s cabinet. They had not bargained for a coup. In the midst of the emergency Latief talked at length about irrelevant matters. Untung and Latief had expected their old friend Suharto to either remain neu- tral or come out in support of them. When informed of his actions in the afternoon, they thought that Suharto might have some trick up his sleeve, that he might not actually attack the movement.

Once Suharto’s troops retook the central square and the radio sta- tion around 6 p.m. and read out an announcement about an hour later denouncing the movement as counterrevolutionary, the five core leaders of the movement realized that they had been defeated in Jakarta. Dis- pirited and bewildered by all the deviations from the original plan, they were unable to decide upon a strategy for dealing with Suharto. They did not push the air force officers at Halim to bomb Kostrad on the night of October 1. They did not use Battalion 454, which was standing around a road just south of Halim, to defend themselves against the ap- proaching Special Forces troops on the morning of October 2. The battalion commander, acting on his own initiative, nearly engaged the Spe- cial Forces troops in battle but retreated in response to the pleas of air force officers who did not want combat around the air base. Once Bat- talion 454 dispersed that morning, the movement had no sizable body of troops left.

Its only hope lay in the provinces. Central Java was where the PKI was the strongest and where the Special Bureau had the widest network of contacts in the military. It was, for this reason, the one province where the movement manifested itself. Aidit and Sjam, having already committed themselves to a continuation of the movement, decided that Aidit should fly out to Central Java and lead the resistance from there. At night they asked Supardjo, who was on good terms with Omar Dani, to ask him for assistance in flying Aidit out. Dani arranged for a plane for Aidit and, for good measure, one for himself. Although Dani had not been responsible for the movement, his statement of support for it, drafted before the announcements dismissing Sukarno’s cabinet, had been aired on the radio. He fled to protect himself.

Once Aidit arrived in Yogyakarta, he did not know where to go or whom to meet. This move was not in the original plan. He wound up being unable to organize a movement of resistance. The military side of the movement quickly collapsed in Central Java too, and, as a result, the civilian side hesitated to come out in favor of it. The province was largely quiet from October 3 to the arrival of Special Forces troops in the provincial capital of Semarang on October 18. Aidit remained underground, waiting for Sukarno to bring the army into line and stop the repression of the PKI. Aidit did not organize or order resistance to the army. An all-out war between the PKI and the army would not only have led to the deaths of many party supporters, it would have made it difﬁcult for Sukarno to reassert his authority over Suharto. The collapse of the movement forced Aidit into this about-face. On the afternoon of October 1 he thought the movement would spread and become power- ful enough to reshape the entire state. He assented to the radio announcement decommissioning Sukarno’s cabinet. But once the movement collapsed, he reverted to the party’s traditional reliance on Sukarno to protect the party.

The disappearance of Aidit from Jakarta, the sudden about-face in strategy, and the aggressiveness of Suharto’s army thoroughly confused the party leaders in Jakarta. The strength of the party had been based on its rigid hierarchy, with orders and information coming down from the top. Even the core members of the Politburo (such as Lukman, Njoto, and Sudisman) were perplexed by an action that, contrary to their ex- pectations, announced the decommissioning of Sukarno’s cabinet and then quickly collapsed. With the PKI off guard and passive, Suharto’s army had little trouble attacking it. If the PKI had decided to resist, it could have seriously hindered Suharto’s troops. Railway workers could have sabotaged the trains carrying the troops to Central Java; unionized mechanics in the military’s motor pools could have sabotaged the jeeps, trucks, and tanks; peasants could have dug up the roads to block troop movement; sympathetic officers and soldiers in the military could have attacked Suharto loyalists; youths of Pemuda Rakjat could have fought the anti-Communist youths mobilized by the army. Yet the party did not resist the army’s offensive. Many people affiliated with the Com- munist Party or left-wing organizations willingly reported to army in- stallations and police stations when summoned in October–November 1965, believing that they would be released after a brief period of ques- tioning. Having done nothing to support the movement, they did not expect to be detained indefinitely without charge and accused of playing

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a role in some grand scheme to commit mass murder. 12 The commotion was thought to be a storm that would pass soon and leave Sukarno’s au-

thority intact.

Suharto’s Counterattack