F or Supardjo the movement largely collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence: it did not have a well-thought-out plan apart from

F or Supardjo the movement largely collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence: it did not have a well-thought-out plan apart from

kidnapping the seven generals, did not take advantage of the radio, could not make decisions, and did not feed its troops. He saw the failure of the movement as an abject lesson in what happens when civilians design a military action. Sjam placed himself at the head of the move- ment, browbeat his subordinates in the Special Bureau to submit re- ports in accordance with his own agenda, and dismissed criticisms from the military officers willing to work with him. In bewildering fashion he adulterated the paradigm of a secretive military action with that of an open mobilization of civilians. Supardjo, and presumably the other of- ficers as well, initially followed Sjam’s lead because they assumed his confidence was based on expert knowledge. They assumed the PKI leadership knew what it was doing. But when the movement did not go according to plan on October 1 and President Sukarno demanded it be called off, the military officers refused to follow Sjam any further. The discussions between the movement’s leaders became deadlocked be- cause neither Sjam nor the officers had the power to overrule the other. Sjam may have been responsible for the radio announcement decom- missioning Sukarno’s cabinet at very moment that Supardjo was nego- tiating with Sukarno.

What is clear from the Supardjo document is that Sjam was the one person most responsible for initiating and designing the movement. By presenting the role of Sjam as more important than that of the military personnel involved, the document suggests that Harold Crouch’s con- tention that the army officers were the originators of movement is in- correct. While many pro-Sukarno and pro-PKI officers were sharing information in mid-1965, bouncing ideas off one another, and con- templating a variety of strategies for dealing with the right-wing army generals, the movement represented Sjam’s particular invention. The officers who participated in the movement (Untung, Latief, Soejono, Supardjo) were those who were willing to follow Sjam’s lead.

Supardjo concluded that the movement was led “directly by the party” because he knew Sjam was a representative of the PKI. But he did not specify how “the party” led the operation. Given the need for pro-PKI military officers such as Supardjo to keep their contact with the party secret, it is unlikely that he had contact with anyone other than Sjam. He probably knew little about Sjam’s relationship to the party’s leaders. In stating that the movement was led by the PKI, Supardjo was

116 t The Supardjo Document

not affirming that the Politburo and the Central Committee had dis- cussed the action and approved it (as the Suharto regime alleged). All that Supardjo could have known was that among the five core leaders, Sjam was the one most responsible for the movement. From that fact Supardjo inferred the leadership of the party. Nothing in the document suggests that he had firsthand knowledge of the role of Sjam’s superiors in the movement.

In blaming a civilian for the failure of the movement, Supardjo was not trying to uphold the dignity of his own institution, the Indonesian military. He wrote the document as a committed Communist Party fol- lower who wished to edify the “comrades in the leadership.” Despite his regrets that he had placed too much trust in Sjam even after he realized that the plan for the movement “did not add up,” Supardjo did not re- gret his loyalty to the party. In one passage he condemns his fellow offi- cers for being unable to carry out “revolutionary duties” and overcome an ingrained deference to their superior officers. Supardjo took his pro- fession seriously; he was well versed in military strategy. But he believed that the military should serve revolutionary politics rather than the elit- ist, pro-Western politics that Nasution advocated. Supardjo’s postmor- tem analysis of the movement cannot be read as an officer’s attempt to clear the military’s name by blaming civilians. It was instead an internal critique: it represented the perspective of a party loyalist angered and disappointed by the actions of certain party leaders.