Pranoto’s Appointment

By default the movement relied on Sukarno to protect it from the on- slaught of Suharto’s troops. Yet the organizers knew by the afternoon of October 1 that Sukarno had lost the power to command the army. Su- harto refused to permit Major General Pranoto, Sukarno’s appointee as temporary commander of the army, to fulﬁll the president’s summons. As the historian of Indonesia’s military, Harold Crouch, put it, “Suharto blatantly disobeyed Sukarno’s instructions. Pranoto’s appointment was ignored, and Suharto issued a veiled command to the president that he should leave Halim. The relationship between the president and the commander of the army that had prevailed through most of the Guided Democracy period ended on 1 October 1965.” 42

110 t The Supardjo Document

When he was writing his postmortem analysis, Supardjo still believed that the movement could have been saved if Pranoto had asserted the power that Sukarno had invested in him. On the afternoon of Oc- tober 1 the movement was hoping that Pranoto would oppose Suharto and take command of the army. While he was conferring with Sukarno, Supardjo had suggested Pranoto and two other generals as candidates for army caretaker. Pranoto was one of the few members of the army general staff who was not an anti-Communist. In Supardjo’s opinion Pranoto should have taken more initiative. If Pranoto had exercised “some authority, the situation would not have become as bad as it did. With that letter of instruction [from Sukarno], he should have quickly delivered a speech over the radio and announced his appointment. The second step should have been to order the two sides not to engage in combat. Pranoto also should have arranged the force of the brigades near him and directly taken command of them. . . . Then he should have immediately, using temporary expedients, ﬁlled the vacant positions on the army’s general staff.” Unfortunately for the movement and for Pranoto himself, who was later imprisoned for twelve years, he al- lowed Suharto to retain control of the army. 43

Given Pranoto’s position in the army and the uncertain context of that day, it was unfair of Supardjo to have expected him to seize the army command from Suharto. Pranoto was Yani’s assistant in charge of personnel. He was neither the direct successor to Yani’s position nor the most senior officer. Pranoto recounted in a brief essay years later that he and a group of officers at army headquarters sent a note to Suharto on the morning of October 1, once Yani’s disappearance was confirmed, asking Suharto to serve as the temporary army commander. After all, Suharto had served as the caretaker of the army on previous occasions when Yani was out of the country. Pranoto had already placed himself under Suharto’s command by the time Sukarno appointed Pranoto as caretaker. Pranoto’s response was to wait until he received a written order from Sukarno. Although Supardjo referred to a “letter of instruction,” Pranoto did not receive a written order, only an oral message from

a courier. It is understandable that Pranoto did not immediately challenge Suharto and side with Sukarno because Pranoto could not have understood the stakes involved—he could not have predicted that Su- harto would eventually overthrow Sukarno and orchestrate the killing of hundreds of thousands of people. Pranoto was one of the movement’s last hopes, but he can hardly be blamed for not fulﬁlling the role that Sukarno had assigned him.

The Supardjo Document t 111 The Movement and Suharto

One of the odd silences in Supardjo’s analysis, a silence that will greatly disappoint readers today, concerns Suharto. Supardjo criticizes the movement for many things but not for failing to kidnap or in some way neutralize Suharto beforehand. Implicitly, Supardjo chalks up the movement’s failure to deal with Suharto to the more general failure to do any detailed contingency planning. He mentions neither Untung and Latief ’s close relationship with Suharto nor the story that Latief disclosed much later at his trial in 1978, that he had told Suharto about the movement beforehand. Because Supardjo was not involved in the planning meetings in August and September and had no connection with Untung and Latief, Supardjo may have known little or nothing about those matters. In this document he does not reveal a knowledge of what the core organizers had decided before the action with regard to Suharto. Supardjo’s discussion of Suharto focuses on one argument: that the movement should have attacked Suharto’s Kostrad headquarters in the afternoon or evening of October 1. Supardjo frankly admitted in his courtroom testimony that he thought the movement should have bombed Kostrad. 44

In his written analysis he explains why he urged an aerial attack on Suharto’s headquarters. He was fairly conﬁdent that the movement could have defeated Suharto and Nasution if it had attacked them before their consolidation of power in the evening. Supardjo thought the army was in a state of panic for twelve hours after the operation began (or had been detected), which would have meant from about 5 a.m. to

5 p.m. Suharto began to move conﬁdently only after Battalion 530 sur- rendered around 4 p.m. Nasution arrived at Kostrad in the evening and the radio station was retaken around 7 p.m. Supardjo demanded that the movement attack Suharto before he could reverse its progress. If the movement had attacked Suharto that afternoon, “it is very likely that the opponent would have raised his hands in surrender, because at that time Nato [Nasution-Suharto] did not have a grip on the Indonesian military in the city.” The movement stood a good chance of eliminating its antagonists: “In the ﬁrst hours, Nato [Nasution and Suharto] and company reorganized their command. Their position at that time was very weak. At that moment, the leadership of the operation should have ambushed the enemy without thinking at all about the risk to our troops.” Supardjo may have been demanding a bombing run over Kostrad well into the night. Suharto caught wind of the discussions at

112 t The Supardjo Document

Halim and abandoned his headquarters around 11:30 p.m. (according to the journalist John Hughes) for fear of an aerial attack by the air force. 45

It is debatable whether the movement could have emerged victori- ous from a showdown with Suharto since Supardjo demonstrated that the movement itself did not have a solid command structure, the troops were lacking both food and morale, and the propaganda material broad- cast over the radio was too brief and ambiguous to be of any use. Launching an offensive might have resulted in a defeat as crushing as the one the movement ultimately experienced. Given its own weak- nesses in ground troops, the movement would have had to rely on the air force’s aerial bombardments of Suharto’s headquarters to buy time to mobilize more infantry troops and regroup. It is possible that aerial attacks could have provided the movement with a margin of victory. Supardjo’s point was that the organizers had to attempt an attack because they had no other means of defending themselves; they had to ﬁght and make the best of a bad situation, regardless of “the risk to our troops.” When one is heading for defeat, there is little point in rejecting

a potentially effective tactic for fear that it will not guarantee victory.

According to Supardjo, the air force commander, Omar Dani, was involved in these discussions at Halim air base and was in favor of at- tacking Kostrad. The movement’s organizers, however, were not: “After hearing the news that General Harto [Suharto] was preparing a counterattack and Vice Marshal Dani’s offer of integration [of air force and September 30th Movement troops] for fending it off, the offer should have been accepted at that time.” Dani was supposedly serious about his offer: “Dani had already made preparations to the point of or- dering rockets to be installed on the planes.” 46 Omar Dani was deeply loyal to Sukarno and may well have believed that the president needed protection from the right-wing army generals. Supardjo mentions that Dani’s recommendation to the movement organizers was that they “continue the revolution together with Bung Karno.” Dani’s assent to a bombing run on Kostrad (if indeed he did assent to one) was probably motivated by a desire to protect the president, who was still at Halim. Ultimately, the air force decided against an attack on Kostrad. Heru Atmodjo recalls that the ofﬁcers at Halim were worried about the pos- sibility of civilian casualties. If a bomb missed its target, it could easily land in the nearby residential areas. 47

Supardjo insisted even up to the last moments that the movement resist the troops that Suharto had sent to attack Halim. Supardjo mentions that he offered to take command of the remaining troops near the

The Supardjo Document t 113

air base to fight off Suharto’s troops. For Supardjo it was better to attempt resistance and lose than to flee helter-skelter. The movement’s organizers, Sjam and Untung especially, neither accepted nor rejected Supardjo’s proposal. As was the case during all previous rounds of decision making, they did not come to a decision. They did nothing. When the troops of the army’s Special Forces began to enter the area around Halim, the movement’s troops, many of whom were from the Central Java battalion, scattered in all directions in a desperate flight for their lives. As Supardjo notes, the soldiers unfamiliar with the city became the easy prey of Suharto’s troops.

It is significant that Supardjo never mentions Suharto without pair- ing him with Nasution. He viewed them as a team, as a “joint command.” He abbreviated the two names to make a clever neologism that referred to their pro-Western orientation: they were “Nato” (Nasution- Suharto). The term enemy in the document always refers to Nato, not Suharto himself. Supardjo appears not to have considered Suharto a powerful commander in his own right. Supardjo was under the mis- taken impression that Nasution, not Suharto, had forbidden Pranoto to go to Halim and meet Sukarno. The lack of any extended discussion of Suharto in the document suggests that Supardjo, even after the defeat of the movement, did not view Suharto as the key adversary. Heru Atmodjo told me that Supardjo had a low opinion of Suharto’s capabil- ities as an officer and thought that his position as Kostrad commander was insignificant. 48

Supardjo’s assessment of Suharto is not altogether surprising. For the first two weeks of October the U.S. embassy was under the impression that its old ally Nasution was in charge and that Suharto was just carrying out his orders. On the basis of embassy reporting, Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote on October 13 that Nasution appeared to be the one “calling the shots.” 49 Ambassador Green reversed that judgment in early November: “Suharto, not Nasution, is one who gives orders, con- ceives his own strategy and faces Sukarno directly.” 50 Compared with Nasution, who had been prominent on the stage of Indonesian politics since the early 1950s, Suharto was a minor figure. At first, many people could not believe that he was acting on his own initiative.

Supardjo might not have known that Latief had tipped off Suharto and, if he had known, either before or after the action, he might not have thought it a decisive factor. Perhaps the movement did not abduct Suharto or otherwise neutralize him because it underestimated his power. Kostrad did not possess any troops of its own; it borrowed troops

114 t The Supardjo Document

from the regional commands. Most troops in Jakarta on October 1 under Kostrad command were precisely the ones that the movement was going to use (Battalions 454 and 530). Even if Sjam thought Suharto might turn against the movement, Sjam, like Supardjo, might have thought that Suharto had neither the fortitude nor intelligence to defeat the movement. Suharto was known as stubborn (Sukarno’s description of him) and stern (Latief ’s description of him) but not as a right- wing ofﬁcer allied with Nasution. 51 Indeed, it was widely thought that the two were enemies since Nasution had removed Suharto from his post as commander of the Central Java division in 1959 for corruption. 52

Supardjo, writing his analysis in mid-1966, seems unaware that Nasution’s role in the attack on the movement was negligible compared with the role of Suharto and his Kostrad ofﬁcers (namely, Yoga Sugama and Ali Moertopo). The image of Nasution as the army’s grand patri- arch was so indelibly printed in the minds of the movement plotters that they could not imagine that Suharto, a relative nobody, could sud- denly emerge as the leader of an ambitious plot to overthrow Sukarno and attack the PKI. They could have proﬁted from thinking in terms of the chess game once proposed by Bertold Brecht: “A game in which the positions do not always remain the same; where the function of the pieces changes if they have stood for a while on the same square: then they become either more effective or weaker.” 53

Supardjo also seems unaware of Suharto’s role in sabotaging the president’s bellicose policy toward Malaysia before October 1965. The army high command was opposed to Sukarno’s Confrontation with Malaysia as the hostilities were escalating in 1964–65. The generals were, however, not conﬁdent enough to challenge the president. Yani and Major General S. Parman, the head of army intelligence, covertly undermined Confrontation by deputing Suharto to send agents to contact Malaysian and British ofﬁcials and assure them that the army did not want war. Suharto’s Kostrad was the center of the army’s effort to maintain clandestine contact with the other side. Moreover, Suharto, as the vice commander of the forces used for Confrontation, ensured that the troops along the border with Malaysia were understaffed and underequipped. Supardjo was the commander for Confrontation troops stationed in Kalimantan. He knew that his superiors were trying to put the brakes on Sukarno’s policy, but he does not appear to have known that Suharto was the key player in that effort. I will return to this issue in chapter 6.

The Supardjo Document t 115

Pranoto’s Appointment