The Destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 and the Road Not Taken
Written by Mani /Wednesday, 26 March 2008
Forty two years ago, one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was committed in Indonesia. On October 7, 1965, right-wing mobs ransacked the offices of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and its mass organizations in Djakarta, the capital city. Executions of PKI members began. They were directed by General Suharto and other top commanders of the Indonesian army who had developed plans with the CIA and U.S. military for just such a campaign to crush the PKI.
A week later, in densely populated Central and East Java, army Special Forces units led the attack on the PKI. Tens of thousands of PKI cadre and supporters were rounded up at night, detained, and executed. Anti-communist youth groups were supplied with weapons by the army and sent out to murder communists in thousands of towns and villages. In one area of Central Java known as a stronghold of the PKI, one-third of the population died in the massacre. According to Time magazine:
Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of Communists after interrogation in remote jails…Armed with wide-blade knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families and burying the bodies in shallow graves…The murder campaign became so brazen in part of rural East Java that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages. The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of decayed flesh. Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river transportation has at places been seriously impeded.[1]
In order to justify this campaign of extermination, the army told people in the towns and villages that the PKI was about to go on a wild killing spree against all non-communists: PKI members were accused of digging mass graves, compiling lists of people to be executed, and stockpiling special instruments to gouge out eyeballs.[2]
The massacres, which were most intense on the islands of Java and Bali, spread to Aceh in northern Sumatra, Sulawesi (the Celebes), and Kalimantan (Borneo). In total, between 500,000 and 1 million people were slaughtered. The only recent massacre of this magnitude was the attempted genocide of the Tutsi people of Rwanda in 1994, which left 800,000 dead.
The U.S. Role in the Massacre
In the 1990s, the details of the U.S. hand in the massacre became known as several former State Department officials admitted their role publicly. Political officers at the U.S. embassy in Djakarta handed the Indonesian army lists of PKI leaders in unions, peasant and student organizations that it had compiled. From this, Indonesian army intelligence was able to create a “shooting list” of 5,000 PKI leaders. In the weeks and months that followed, the U.S. embassy and the CIA’s intelligence directorate in Washington D.C. checked off the names as they were “eliminated.” [3] According to Robert Martens, a former member of the U.S. embassy’s political section who had spent two years compiling the lists:
It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at the decisive moment.[4]
As the anti-PKI bloodbath was just getting underway, the U.S. provided essential logistical equipment to General Suharto’s forces. These included light aircraft, jeeps and most importantly, hundreds of the highest-powered mobile radios available at that time. The radios were secretly flown into Indonesia at the last minute by U.S. planes based at Clark Field in the Philippines. They plugged a major hole in army communications by enabling army units in Java and the outer islands to talk directly with Suharto’s command (KOSTRAD) in Djakarta. These radios were monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency throughout the massacre.[5]
In 1965 the U.S. imperialists were alarmed at the situation developing in Southeast Asia. A high-level U.S. intelligence report prepared in early September 1965 predicted that the Indonesian government would become completely dominated by the PKI within two to three years.[6] U.S. officials saw events in Indonesia and Vietnam as closely intertwined and believed that decisive action had to be taken in both countries. In a 1965 speech in Asia, Richard Nixon argued in favor of bombing North Vietnam in order to protect Indonesia’s “immense mineral potential.” [7] According to William Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs:
By 1965 [Indonesia] was hostile to us, engaged in a sterile but dangerous military confrontation with Malaysia and Singapore, and headed very shortly for Communist control and an effective alliance with Communist China…. The situation in Vietnam in 1965, stood, alongside the trend in Indonesia, as the major dark spot in the area. And in early 1965, it became clear that unless the United States and other nations introduced major combat forces and took military action against the North, South Vietnam would be taken over by communist force.[8]
William Colby, the head of CIA operations in Southeast Asia from 1962-1966, not only welcomed the massacre in Indonesia, but applied its lessons as head of the infamous Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam.[9] If Vietnam was the major post-World War II defeat for U.S. imperialism, the destruction of the PKI was its greatest single victory.
How Did This Happen?
In 1965, the PKI appeared to be a formidable organization. It had 3.5 million members, and its allied organizations had a combined membership of nearly 20 million. It had ministers and staffers in governmental bodies from the national cabinet to local municipalities. The PKI was openly conducting political education classes in the armed forces.
However, since the early 1950s, the PKI had adopted a political line and strategy of a peaceful path to socialism. By building an alliance with the “progressive sectors” of the government, the PKI believed that Indonesia’s reactionary pro-imperialist forces, with their core in the army, could be prevented from making a decisive move to close off its gradual march to power. Thus, the PKI and its followers were politically and militarily disarmed in 1965 and were easy prey for the army-led death squads.
At the decisive moment, the PKI expected President Sukarno and sympathetic military officers would come to their aid. While Sukarno called for “peace,” pro-American General Suharto ignored him and proceeded to gradually strip Sukarno of power. Suharto’s three decade-long military dictatorship turned Indonesia into a compliant U.S. ally in Southeast Asia.
The role of the CIA and the U.S. military in this bloody counter-revolution has become more visible over the years. However, its internal causes have not been examined closely enough outside academic circles. This is not simply a question of setting the historical record straight. A deeper analysis of these events provides some critical lessons for communist and anti-imperialist forces worldwide, especially concerning countries where peaceful, electoral paths to “socialism,” or some variant, are being pursued.
The Japanese Occupation
The roots of this traumatic defeat for the PKI can be found during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia from 1942-1945 and the independence struggle against Dutch imperialism from 1945-1949. During those years the main political forces in Indonesia began to take shape: (1) Bourgeois nationalists grouped around Sukarno, the charismatic son of a Javanese teacher, who developed a hybrid form of nationalism, Islam and socialism to guide the independence struggle. During World War II, Sukarno helped secure popular acceptance of Japanese rule and mobilized support for the Japanese war effort[10] (producing later charges that he had been a “fascist collaborator”). In Sukarno’s view, he was using the dismantling of Dutch control by the Japanese imperialists to advance the independence struggle[11]; (2) Muslim landlords, capitalists and other anti-communists who looked to the U.S. and Britain for assistance to break free from the Dutch; and (3) the PKI.
The PKI’s forces were divided politically and geographically. One group, carrying out the Popular Front line of the Comintern, worked with the U.S. and British imperialists in Australia during World War II. A group of Indonesian intellectuals spent the war years working underground in the Netherlands with the Dutch CP. A third group organized an “illegal PKI” clandestinely in the youth groups that had been set up by the Japanese.
Due to political and organizational weaknesses, none of these PKI groups developed a strategy of agrarian revolution and guerilla warfare against the Japanese imperialists. Conditions were ripe for such a struggle against the Japanese occupation forces, which brutally oppressed the Indonesian people. Forced labor (“romusha”) sent 250,000 Indonesian men as far away as Burma to build roads from which only 70,000 returned. Thousands of Indonesian women were forced into sexual slavery to service the Japanese troops. The Japanese confiscated food, clothing and other provisions, creating widespread hunger and suffering.
In 1943, the Japanese began to organize local “self-defense” forces attached to Japanese military units. By the end of the war, two million Indonesians served in these forces. 120,000 members of these forces on Java, the PETA, became the core of the new Indonesian army when the Republic of Indonesia was proclaimed in August 1945.
Communist Strategy in China and the Philippines
In contrast to the Indonesian experience, the Communist Party of China (CCP), under the leadership of Mao Zedong, was able to make great leaps in advancing the revolutionary struggle during World War II.
After repudiating the strategy of attempting to capture major cities in southern China without sufficient political and military power in the countryside, the CCP-led Workers and Peasants Army marched to northwest China in 1934-1935 on the famous Long March. From its new base in Yenan, the CCP was positioned to launch guerilla warfare against the Japanese imperialists, who were occupying north and central China with millions of troops. From 1937-1945, the communist armies became the main force that engaged and defeated the Japanese forces on mainland Asia.
At the same time, the CCP forced the pro-American Guomindang dictatorship, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, to form an unstable, broad united front for the purpose of fighting the Japanese imperialists. Though the GMD did little fighting against the Japanese and repeatedly attacked the communist forces during the war, the principled stand of the CCP won it widespread support in the cities and the countryside.
At the end of World War II, the CCP, its military forces and the multi-class political forces under its leadership were in a strong position to take to a new level the revolutionary struggle against the bureaucratic capitalists, the big feudal landlords and the U.S. imperialists, who threw their full force behind the GMD. Four years later, the Chinese revolution won an historic victory, as Mao Zedong announced in Beijing, “the Chinese people have stood up.”
In the Philippines, still a colony of the U.S. during World War II, the Philippine Communist Party (PKP), faced a similar situation to that of the PKI in Indonesia. After the Japanese became the new imperialist occupiers of the Philippines in 1942, the PKP correctly aimed its struggle against the Japanese military. While bourgeois nationalist forces joined U.S.-led guerilla units, the PKP formed its own units in the countryside (the Anti-Japanese National Army, or Hukbalahap). The Hukbalahap coordinated military action with the U.S.-led forces, but maintained its political and military independence.
The PKP, however, fell into serious errors when U.S. occupation forces, commanded by General MacArthur, returned to the Philippines in 1944. They were not prepared, politically or militarily, to continue the struggle against the U.S. imperialists. In some areas, PKP units gave up their arms in exchange for promises of legal participation in the neo-colonial government that the U.S. was getting ready to proclaim in 1946. After facing violent suppression, the PKP veered to the “left,” calling for armed uprisings in 1949-1952 that would lead to a quick seizure of power. This military adventurism was easily crushed by the Philippine army, fortified with U.S. military aid and advisors.[12]
These errors were not rectified until the late 1960s, with the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the Philippines based on Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and with the development of agrarian revolution and people’s war in the countryside as the main form of struggle.
The Independence Struggle: 1945-1949
The Indonesian independence struggle of 1945-1949 followed the Philippine experience much more closely than the revolutionary struggle in China. On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender to the Allied imperialists, a Republic was declared by Sukarno and his anti-communist deputy Mohammed Hatta. They received assistance and some arms from the departing Japanese, who wanted to create problems for the incoming Western military forces. Protecting imperialist interests in Southeast Asia, the British moved in troops under the pretext of “accepting the Japanese surrender.” Fighting immediately broke out between Indonesian nationalist forces, including PKI units, and the British at Surabaya in central Java in October 1945. During this battle, 600 Indian troops defected from the British army and joined the Indonesians. Even with the use of air power and naval bombardment, it took the British three weeks to retake Surabaya.[13]
The Dutch imperialists soon took over from the British. They came to reclaim their profitable colony, much as the French colonialists did in Indochina after World War II. The Dutch armed forces seized key ports and cities on Java and Sumatra. The next four years were characterized by protracted negotiations as well as on-and-off fighting between the Indonesian Republic and the Dutch. The Linggajati talks in September 1946 produced a truce. In the summer of 1947, the Dutch launched attacks that shrank the areas of nationalist control to the central part of Java and Sumatra.
After five months of fighting, an agreement was signed on the U.S. carrier Renville. The Renville agreement set up a “United States of Indonesia” (federated with the Netherlands) and provided for elections to be held throughout the islands, including the Dutch areas. A year later, the Dutch repudiated the agreement and launched a second major attack, occupying the main Republican controlled areas. As the Dutch resorted to scorched-earth policies in some areas, guerilla warfare heated up.
From 1945-1948, the PKI attached itself to the Sukarno-Hatta government. It supported the Linggajati and Renville agreements, thereby undercutting its ability to rally the most radical sections of the independence movement within the united front against the Dutch colonialists. Opportunities to develop politically independent military forces were missed by the PKI during this period, while rightist nationalist forces were building up their own army. During these years, the Murba (Proletarian) Party, led by Tan Malaka, was able to outflank the PKI by opposing these agreements with the Dutch.[14]
During 1947 and 1948, the growth of the PKI began to alarm the Sukarno-Hatta forces and their military commanders. They initiated a campaign to “rationalize” the widely dispersed Republican military units, numbering 800,000, into a national army under central control. This included attempts to demobilize PKI-led militias and pro-communist military units within two divisions of the Republican army.[15]
The 1948 “Madiun Affair”
This political polarization within the Republic was magnified by developments in the international communist movement, especially the formation of the Cominform in 1947 and its reversal of the Popular Front line of the 1930s. Support for revolutionary struggles in Indochina, Malaya, China and elsewhere was proclaimed as part of a worldwide battle between two camps—the capitalist camp led by the U.S., and the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.
This new orientation was brought back to Indonesia in August 1948 by Musso,[16] who had spent 12 years in the Soviet Union. On his arrival in the Central Java Republican zone, Musso forcefully advocated that the Republic set up diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and denounced the agreements with the Dutch. Within weeks, he reorganized the PKI, brought several other socialist parties into its ranks, and put it on track for confrontation with the Republican leadership. Musso’s strategy was to launch a political offensive to take leadership of the Republic from Sukarno and Hatta; if this was unsuccessful, the PKI would take military action to do so.
In late August, Musso and his allies set out on a tour of PKI rural and urban strongholds. Meanwhile, there was growing friction between the Republican and PKI-led military forces in the cities of Solo and Madiun in East Java. After a series of kidnappings of PKI cadre carried out by the Tan Malaka forces in league with the Republican army, fighting broke out in Solo. Two days later in nearby Madiun, mid-level leaders of the PKI and its militia, fearing an attack by the right-wing Silangasi division from West Java, staged a revolt. They disarmed other groups and declared a regional Republic.[17]
This adventurist action was reinforced by the arrival of Musso, who declared a new all-Indonesian Republic and denounced Sukarno as a collaborator with the Japanese and the Dutch. President Sukarno responded by making a speech calling for the forcible suppression of the revolt, which took just days. The top PKI leaders, including Musso, were killed in action or executed. 35,000 PKI members and supporters were imprisoned; thousands more were killed. This white terror only ended when the Dutch attacked the Republic in early 1949.[18]
This defeat of the PKI led to a dramatic shift in the attitude of the U.S. imperialists to the Indonesian Republic. From 1945-1948, the U.S. had backed the Dutch, as part of trying to rebuild and politically fortify Western Europe against the Soviet Union by means of the Marshall Plan. However, the U.S. increasingly saw an opportunity to bring into being an “independent” Indonesia led by anti-communist forces under which the U.S. would replace the Dutch as the dominant imperialist power. This reflected the U.S.’ new post-war, post-European colonial strategy in Asia, i.e. a strategy of neo-colonialism.
In the middle of the Dutch offensive in 1949, the U.S. intervened, through the United Nations, to force an end to the fighting and to the signing of another neo-colonial “independence” agreement. The Hague Agreement called for federation with the Netherlands, payment of reparations to the Dutch for seized property, and a guarantee against further nationalizations. The Dutch kept the eastern province of West Irian. China and the Soviet Union immediately denounced this agreement, and called the new Sukarno-Hatta government a “reactionary, neo-colonial regime.”
Thus, from 1945 to 1949, the PKI threw away favorable opportunities for developing guerilla warfare among the peasantry within a broad anti-imperialist, anti-feudal united front.[19] Such a strategy, as practiced in China, had the potential of mobilizing the vast majority of the people against the Dutch, including the middle strata. It would have strengthened the PKI for a protracted political and military struggle against the post-1949 bourgeois state and its imperialist backers. The “Madiun affair,” which like all military putschs seeks a quick path to power,[20] led to an enormous setback for the PKI’s forces, and gave Sukarno and Hatta ammunition to denounce the PKI as traitors to the independence struggle.
Wrong Lessons
What lessons did the PKI draw from the 1945-1949 period? Unfortunately it learned the wrong ones. Under the leadership of D.N. Aidit, returning from exile in 1951, the PKI announced its intention to support Sukarno, rebuild the PKI by renouncing armed revolutionary struggle, and find a peaceful path to a “people’s democratic government.”
While giving lip service to criticism of the rightist errors of the PKI during the independence struggle, the Aidit leadership again placed itself under the wings of the Sukarno-Hatta Republican forces. According to Rex Mortimer in Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno, “The PKI sought a peaceful road to power in Indonesia…. This was an aim from which the Aidit leadership never deviated… The party resolved to stick like a leech to Sukarno and, by a combination of ingratiation and carefully staged pressure, to insert itself into his power structure.”[21]
The PKI hailed Sukarno as the leader of the revolution, and claimed that its ideology and Sukarno’s were essentially the same. For more than ten years, the Aidit leadership promoted Sukarno’s ideology of “Nasakom,” an acronym for Nationalisme, Agama (religion) and Komunisme, and “Pantjasila,” Sukarno’s five principles for the Indonesian state: belief in God, nationalism, humanism, social justice and people’s sovereignty.[22] Sukarno, for his part, came to view the PKI as the most consistent and hard working supporter of his nationalist foreign policy and episodic progressive domestic initiatives, such as the repudiation of 85% of Indonesia’s debt to the Netherlands in the mid-1950s.
The Bandung Conference
President Sukarno’s assertion of Indonesia’s leadership among the “non-aligned nations” took shape in his hosting of the Bandung Conference in 1955. Held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, this conference was a meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent and had conflicts with one or another imperialist power. It included countries such as Egypt, India and Indonesia, as well as the socialist People’s Republic of China.[23]
Even though Sukarno’s nationalism was not firmly anti-imperialist, it was seen as a threat by the U.S., which was attempting to build a wall of reactionary states around the Soviet Union and China. Thus, the U.S. supported a series of unsuccessful revolts by reactionary Islamic forces in Indonesia’s outer islands during 1957-58 in an attempt to dismember Indonesia. Two attempts were made on Sukarno’s life.
Sukarno took the opportunity to declare martial law in 1957, and shortly thereafter introduced a system of “guided democracy.” Sukarno ruled by decree with the aid of a hand-picked National Assembly, which brought military officers into the government for the first time. After the seizure of Dutch properties by PKI-led workers in 1957, Sukarno authorised the military to take over control and management of the companies. While Sukarno was thumbing his nose at the U.S. politically, Permina was built as a state oil company by American and Japanese multinationals. A typical Sukarno speech railed at “colonialism and imperialism,”[24] but during these years Sukarno forged an alliance with the armed forces, which was a major and ultimately decisive component of the continuing imperialist domination of Indonesia.
The PKI Advances along a Peaceful Path
During this period, the PKI made significant advances along the peaceful path to power it had mapped out. By 1957, it was the largest political party on the most densely populated island, Java. It was able to operate freely by not challenging Sukarno’s “guided democracy.” In the late 1950s, the governor of Bali brought PKI members into the civil service. Aidit and Political Bureau member Njoto were appointed as advisory ministers to Sukarno in 1962, and Njoto became a member of an enlarged cabinet in 1964.[25]
The PKI burnished its nationalist credentials by supporting Sukarno’s campaigns to West Irian (Papua) from Dutch colonialism in 1962, to oppose the formation of a neo-colonial Malaysia in 1963-64, and to pull Indonesia out of the United Nations in 1965 after Malaysia was admitted. During these years, the PKI stressed the importance of national struggle against imperialism over class struggle. This posture allowed the PKI to avoid sharp conflicts with the forces of internal reaction, strengthen the party’s relationship with the president, and enable it to grow rapidly during the early 1960s.
Sukarno addressed the PKI’s Sixth Congress in 1959, where he stated that he was “very pleased with the PKI…because the PKI clearly states that it is indispensable to have national unity.”[26] Sukarno increasingly defined himself as a visionary exponent of “Indonesian socialism,” and even announced in 1965 that Indonesia was entering the stage of socialism. Sukarno also peppered his speeches with overheated references to “revolution” (e.g., “the world today is a revolutionary ammunition dump” and “our revolution is a summing up of many revolutions in one generation”) with no hint of any of the specific changes he wanted to make in Indonesia or how to realize them.[27] All of this verbiage amounted to rhetorical calls for more social justice in a neo-colonial country in which the critical levers of power were held by big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists and, most importantly, by the army.
In relation to the armed forces, the PKI’s strategy was to avoid a confrontation at all costs. Instead, it relied on Sukarno and “progressive forces” within the government and military to keep the “reactionary forces” in check, while the PKI worked to insert its cadre as government personnel and shift the balance of forces in its favor. Partly as a result of the West Irian and Malaysia campaigns, the PKI had developed an extensive network of supporters in the armed forces. It was more influential in the air force and navy than the more right-wing and much larger 300,000 strong army.
Party cadre provided political education to junior officers and enlisted men, and recruited among all three services. In a lecture to the army staff and command school in 1963, Aidit stressed that the armed forces were an instrument of the people, and their function was to implement Sukarno’s policies. In another lecture at the Naval Academy in 1964, Aidit called for the armed forces to “serve the struggle of the Indonesian people” and advocated “the doctrine of the oneness between the armed forces and the people.”[28] These efforts, of course, attracted the attention of the Indonesian generals and the military attaches and CIA agents operating out of the American embassy.
Aidit’s Theory of a “State with Two Aspects”
In early 1963, Aidit announced the new theory that the Indonesian state had a “pro-people’s aspect” and an “anti-people’s aspect.” The first aspect was composed of the “progressive stands and policies of President Sukarno supported by the PKI and other groups of the people….The second aspect represents the enemies of the people manifested by the stands and policies of the right-wing forces and die-hards. The people’s aspect has now become the main aspect and takes the leading role in the Republic.”[29] In a series of speeches at the army staff school in 1964, Aidit elaborated, “The important problem in Indonesia now is not to smash the state power as in the case in many other states, but to strengthen and consolidate the pro-people’s aspect…and to eliminate the anti-people’s aspect.”[30]
This peaceful transformation would take place by “revolutionary action from above and below.” By “revolution from above” the PKI meant that it would “encourage the state power to take revolutionary steps aimed at making the desired changes in the personnel and in the state organs.” By means of ‘revolution from below,” the PKI would “arouse, organize and mobilize the people to achieve the same changes.” [31]
This theory of “a state with two aspects” revised and directly opposed the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the nature of the capitalist state. The state can be an instrument in the hands of either the exploiting classes or the proletariat, but it cannot serve the interests of both these bitterly contending classes. The bourgeoisie will not hesitate to use its state to violently suppress any serious challenge to its rule. Thus no basic change in the social system can be brought about without overthrowing this reactionary state machine, especially its armed forces.
The PKI and the International Communist Movement
The theory that the Indonesian state had “two aspects” was adopted by the PKI even as it publicly sided with the CCP against the CPSU in the early 1960s. As polemics raged, the PKI leaders took whatever fit their own political strategy from the Soviet and Chinese parties.
In the late 1950s, the PKI leadership was squarely in line with the CPSU: Maintaining world peace, and promoting peaceful competition and peaceful coexistence with imperialism and the peaceful transition to socialism (the “three peacefuls”) were the foremost tasks of Communist Parties.[32] After the 81 Parties meeting in Moscow in 1960, the PKI took an intermediate position. It endorsed most Soviet positions but backed the Chinese on the need for more militant anti-imperialist struggle and a focus on the peasantry. However, the PKI was not interested in the CCP’s views on the necessity for armed struggle and the importance of struggling for communist leadership in nationalist movements.
So when the PKI finally came down on the side of the CCP, “for all practical purposes the PKI came to endorse the road of armed struggle as applicable to everyone but itself.” Mortimer recollects that in talks with PKI leaders in November 1964, he was struck by “their ability in the same breath to insist on the necessity of armed struggle and to justify their own peaceful strategy.”[33]
Overall, the Chinese Communist Party had a revolutionary foreign policy during the 1960s. It supported the struggle of the Vietnamese people politically and militarily, provided arms and training to national liberation struggles in Africa and the Middle East, and promoted a general line of revolutionary struggle against U.S. imperialism and reactionary regimes all over the world.
However, in its relations with the PKI, the CCP, or at least a portion of its leadership, did not follow this general line during the critical years from 1963 to 1965. In 1963, PKI Chairman Aidit traveled to Beijing for several months. During this trip, he made several speeches at the Higher Party School of the CCP Central Committee in Beijing which included his theory of a “state with two aspects.” At the same time, Aidit was hailed as “a brilliant Marxist-Leninist theoretician” and firm opponent of Soviet revisionism by Peng Zhen, the Beijing mayor and the main liaison between the CCP and the PKI. On May 20, Red Flag, the CCP’s leading ideological journal, published a major article praising the PKI. On a visit to Indonesia in May 1965, Peng praised the “creativity” and the “correct line and policies” of the PKI. Foreign Languages Press in Beijing also honored Aidit by publishing his Selected Works in 1963.[34]
The CCP’s support for the PKI was the result of two interrelated factors. First, in the early 1960s, there were powerful revisionist forces lodged at the top levels of the CCP. Peng Zhen had more in common with Aidit than he did with Mao, as he was one of the first high-ranking revisionist leaders to be knocked down during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966.
In addition, the “Bandung line” of the late 1950s continued to have an influence on Chinese foreign policy during the early 1960s. On the level of state-to-state diplomacy, socialist China was able to work within the Non-Aligned Movement that emerged from the Bandung Conference to break out of international isolation and frustrate the U.S.’s containment strategy. However, as a strategic political line for Marxist-Leninists in countries oppressed by colonialism and neo-colonialism, the Bandung line took a heavy toll in diminishing and denying the independence and initiative of communists within the united front against imperialism. It subordinated the struggle for new democratic revolution and socialism to support for bourgeois nationalist governments such as Sukarno’s.[35]
In the early 1960s, the Chinese government had strong political and economic ties with the Sukarno government. But the CCP was apparently not willing to jeopardize these relationships by placing strong pressure on the PKI to abandon its peaceful path to power and to initiate agrarian revolution and armed struggle in the Indonesian countryside.[36] The content of private discussions between PKI and CCP leaders are not known, but the Chinese Communist Party did not publicly criticize the revisionist strategy of the PKI until after the right-wing coup in 1965.
Sukarno, the National Bourgeoisie and the PKI
During the 1962 West Irian struggle, the PKI provided the foot soldiers for Sukarno’s agitational campaign, which involved more noise than military action. Sukarno was also relying on U.S. mediation efforts to get the Dutch to leave.[37] At the same time, the U.S. made an offer of over $200 million in economic aid, linked to an austerity plan of the International Monetary Fund. Sukarno and his advisers were leaning towards this solution to deep economic trouble. [38] This was emblematic of Sukarno’s and the national bourgeoisie’s tendencies to conciliate with U.S. imperialism, and their inability to implement a thoroughgoing anti-imperialist, anti-feudal program throughout the 1945-1965 period.
As it turned out, the confrontation with the British over Malaysia scuttled the U.S.-IMF plan and allowed the PKI to ride a wave of nationalism. This led to takeovers of some British companies (but not oil installations)[39] and the burning of the British embassy in Djakarta. Senior military officers again benefited from this popular upsurge, since they took over management and the profits from these newly nationalized enterprises. During this period, the Indonesian army developed into a powerful bureaucratic section of the capitalist class with close ties to U.S. imperialism.
During the confrontation over Malaysia, Sukarno issued a call for millions of “volunteers” to fight the British. The PKI led the movement, hoping that its members and supporters would receive military training and arms. Very few did, and the army kept close tabs on the rifles handed out at parades of volunteers.[40]
Up to 1964, even in a situation where real wages were rapidly declining and living conditions for the workers and peasants were becoming more desperate, the PKI avoided mass agitation and struggle that might have antagonized Sukarno—and the military. Instead, they placed greater emphasis on development programs for self-reliant economic development. Furthermore, the PKI concentrated its educational work on preparing intellectuals to serve the needs of the work with the national bourgeoisie, and to supply cadres for various positions in the government:
To raise the prestige of the PKI in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, and to make it respected as the party of intellectuals, the four-year plan stipulated that all cadres of the higher ranks must obtain academic education, cadres of the middle ranks high school education, and cadres of the lower ranks lower middle school education. For this purpose, the party set up a great number of academies, schools and courses. So deeply-rooted was the intellectualism gripping the party leadership that all party leaders and prominent figures of the popular movements were obliged to write four theses in order to obtain the degree of “Marxist Scientists.”[41]
U.S. Imperialism Regroups
From a position of support for the anti-communist Sukarto-Hatta governments in the early 1950s, the U.S. government grew increasingly concerned about Sukarno’s independent foreign policy and about the rebirth and rapid growth of the PKI. The Cold War was at its height, and the U.S. imperialists did not want a large gap in the ring of reactionary states surrounding the People’s Republic of China.
From U.S. bases in the Philippines, the U.S. supported the 1957-1958 rebellions in the outer islands, which were aimed at dismembering Indonesia. After these revolts failed, the U.S. regrouped and mapped out a long range neo-colonial strategy of identifying, funding, advising and supplying the internal forces needed to prevail in a showdown with the PKI.
The first step was to begin an upgraded military assistance program to the Indonesian army to counter the PKI, in the order of $20 million annually. Beginning in the late 1950s, two pro-American generals, Nasution and Suwarto, developed a new strategic doctrine for the Indonesian army which gave priority to counter-insurgency. An important part of this was the army’s organization of its own political infrastructure down to the village level in the guise of “civic action” programs.[42]
The Kennedy administration set up a U.S. military training group (MILTAG) in 1962 to assist in this effort. Published U.S. accounts of these programs described them as benevolent civic projects--building roads and draining swampland to create new rice paddies. However, a 1964 memo to President Johnson from Secretary of State Dean Rusk made it clear that the chief importance of MILTAG was its contact with anti-communist elements in the Indonesian army and political groups: “Our aid to Indonesia…we are satisfied…is not helping Indonesia militarily. It is, however, permitting us to maintain some contact with key elements in Indonesia which are interested in and capable of resisting a Communist takeover. We think this is of vital importance to the entire Free World.”[43]
In total, 2,800 Indonesian military officers trained in the U.S. between 1955 and 1965, nearly 25% of the officer corps.[44] The U.S. military had identified a rising colonel by the name of Suharto and started to groom him for his future role. Students in all of Indonesia’s elite universities were given paramilitary training by the Army in a program advised by a U.S. colonel in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Brigadier General Thajeb brought student leaders together to create the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI), which led the first assaults on PKI offices in Djakarta in October 1965.[45]
On another regime-change track, the U.S. was making contact with leading intellectuals in the Masjumi Party, a vehicle of big commercial and landowning Muslims, and the nominally “socialist” Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI). They were brought to the U.S. to study for advanced degrees in economics and administration at the University of California at Berkeley, MIT and Cornell with funds supplied by the Ford Foundation. When they returned to Indonesia, these newly minted professors became the Army’s high-level civilian advisors. These U.S. graduates made up a majority of the General Suharto’s first cabinet after he consolidated power in 1966.[46]
The army also began to develop as a state-within-a-state that could compete with the PKI politically, as well as prepare itself to take power in the future. It had its own party-type organization (Golkar), a trade union, newspapers and sympathetic cultural figures. The army also entered the economy in a big way after the nationalization of Dutch enterprises in 1957. Top army commanders became big businessmen and accumulated funds for their political wings and front groups. [47]
The PKI’s Work in the Countryside
In the Indonesian countryside, less than half the peasants owned the land they worked, and of these the average landholding was 0.65 hectares.[48] In the late 1950s, the PKI’s strategy hardly threatened the power of the landlords. It called for the formation of peasant cooperatives, and for increases in production through improved farming methods. These campaigns paralleled Sukarno’s exhortations for the Indonesian people to work harder and make more sacrifices for the nation.
In 1959, in order to create more organized connections with the villages, the PKI organized a “Go Down” campaign modeled on China’s land reform movement in the 1950s.[49] This campaign was based on implementing the Basic Agrarian Law proclaimed by Sukarno in 1959. Over the next few years, the PKI-led peasant organization (BTI) made some progress in gaining rent reductions and increasing peasants’ shares of their crops. However, land redistribution was much slower due to landlord resistance, official corruption, and gaping holes in the land reform law. By the end of the first stage of the government’s land reform in late 1963, just 1% of the landlords’ surplus land had actually reached the peasants.[50] When landlords failed to respect the law, the BTI chairman advised its peasant members to go to the police or the public prosecutor for assistance.[51] In a 1963 speech, Aidit reported that the PKI was raising the slogan, “For the maintenance of civil order, help the police.”[52]
By 1964, the PKI felt strong enough (the membership of the BTI had grown to seven million) to launch more militant struggle in the countryside. The PKI hoped this would build up its mass base and secure for itself a more prominent place in Sukarno’s administration. As peasant upheaval in mid-1964 developed outside the scope of the land reform laws (so-called “unilateral actions), it ran into heavy resistance from landlords and right-wing Islamic forces in Java and Bali, many of which were funded by the army and U.S. civic action teams. Armed clashes resulted, with the local authorities usually intervening on the side of the landlords and anti-communists.
As the BTI began to take losses, the PKI leadership grew alarmed, and appealed to Sukarno to intervene. BTI leader Asmu warned that “terror must not be opposed by terror, but with mass actions uniting the people together with the army and other patriotic forces.”[53] In the fall of 1964, the PKI retreated and began to place greater emphasis on social welfare and cultural work in the countryside. Rex Mortimer contrasts the PKI’s peasant strategy to that of the CCP:
In a sense, Aidit had arrived at a peaceful version of Mao Tsetung’s strategy in the Chinese revolution. Mao too advocated an alliance with the national bourgeoisie and was prepared to cooperate with the Chiang Kai-shek government at various times, but never at the price of surrendering exclusive control over his peasant bases and peasant armies. Apart from the question of armed struggle, however, there was another crucial difference between the Chinese and Indonesian cases: Mao had the immense advantage that the consolidation of his control over extensive peasant areas preceded his overtures to the KMT [GMD] and did not, as was the case with the PKI, have to be built up within the confines of a top-level alliance.[54]
1965: The Year of Decision
In spite of the reverses it had suffered in the countryside, by 1965 the PKI leaders believed it was in a better position than ever—with a membership of 3.5 million, leadership over mass organizations with 20 million members, and strong ties to Sukarno—to press its campaign for inclusion in the national government. The PKI’s estimate of the balance of forces was that:
The strength of the pro-people’s aspect [of state power] is already becoming steadily greater and holds the initiative and the offensive, while the anti-people’s aspect, although moderately strong, is being relentlessly pressed into a tight corner. The PKI is struggling so that the pro-people’s aspect will become still more powerful and finally dominate, and the anti-people’s aspect will be driven out of state power. … The struggle of the revolutionary Indonesian people is carried out by combining people’s revolutionary mass actions from below with revolutionary actions by the bodies of the state power from above.[55]
The PKI opened 1965 with a propaganda offensive against bureaucratic capitalists, corrupt officials and U.S. neo-colonialism. PKI-led demonstrations forced the U.S. to close down its consulates outside Djakarta and withdraw the Peace Corps. The PKI singled out the army leadership for attack. Aidit thought the party could neutralize the anti-communists in the army by wooing pro-Sukarno officers in the air force, navy and police. The PKI spoke approvingly of Sukarno’s pronouncement, “The Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia will form an invincible power if they unite with the people like fish in water.”[56]
Another element was added in 1965. The PKI proposed the establishment of a “fifth force,” a large militia independent of the armed forces.[57] It also advocated the attachment of “political advisers” from the three ideological streams of Nasakom (nationalists, Islamic groups and communists) at all levels of the military. The air force commander came out in support of the “fifth force” and announced that Marxism would be taught in the air force command and staff school. In the summer of 1965, several thousand volunteers, mainly from PKI-led youth organizations, received weapons training at Halim air force base near Djakarta as part of Sukarno’s campaign against Britain’s decision to create Malaysia as a neo-colonial state.[58]
The PKI was acutely aware that it lacked a military force, and sought to build it among the “progressive sections” of the armed forces. This strategy was bound to fail. There could be no last-minute solution to the fact that the PKI had not developed the agrarian revolution and a people’s army with mass support in the countryside, which was the only way the revolutionary movement could stand up to military suppression, and advance towards the conquest of political power.[59]
The army generals and the U.S. embassy monitored the PKI’s maneuvers closely. Declassified U.S. government documents reveal that the army high command and the U.S. had reached a decision by the beginning of 1965 to suppress the PKI by armed force. They formed a working group that was later referred to as a “council of generals.” According to the CIA’s published analysis of this period, Army commander Achmad Yani and four other right-wing generals began meeting in January 1965 “to discuss the deteriorating political situation and what the Army should do about it.”
Around this time, Yani told a U.S. military adviser that “We have the guns, and we have kept the guns out of their [the Communists’] hands. So if there’s a clash we’ll wipe them out.” At a meeting of State Department officials in the Philippines in March 1965, Ambassador Harold Jones indicated what advice the U.S. was providing to Yani and his council of generals: “From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.”[60]
These generals and the U.S. developed a strategic plan for a “rolling coup d’etat”: The first stage was to suppress the PKI; the second was to remove Sukarno and his supporters from power. There were two major obstacles to this plan. Sukarno was too popular to attack directly, and there was a danger that an unprovoked attack on the PKI would be denounced by Sukarno, who had a history of protecting the PKI from itical elimination. In order to carry out this operation, the U.S.-backed generals needed a pretext to justify suppressing the PKI and eventually removing Sukarno from power.
Exactly how this pretext was created has been a long-standing issue and subject of debate among scholars and political activists. From our analysis of the available evidence, it appears that the PKI leadership, in the person of Chairman Aidit, fell into a trap set by the U.S. and the right-wing generals. (See Appendix A for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)
Army psychological operations specialists spread a stream of rumors that a “council of generals” was preparing a coup to overthrow Sukarno and suppress the PKI, and that the PKI had received arms from China. The price of rice quadrupled between June 30 and October 1, and the black market price of the dollar skyrocketed.[61] In a further effort to create an atmosphere of crisis, clashes broke out in the provinces in late September between the PKI and anti-communist Muslims. On September 27, General Yani came out publicly against the fifth force and the Nasakomisation of the armed forces. Through these actions, the right-wing generals and the U.S. hoped to provoke the PKI to make the first move in order to justify decisive action by the army.
Based on reports by the PKI’s Special Bureau—a secret unit responsible for developing contacts within the armed forces—the PKI Political Bureau was convinced that a right-wing army coup was close at hand. It gave Chairman Aidit the power to prepare the party’s response without supervision by the rest of the leadership. Aidit worked closely with the head of the Special Bureau to form a movement of pro-PKI junior officers that would mobilize a sufficient force to arrest the “generals’ council,” gain Sukarno’s approval of their pre-emptive action, and organize popular support for their action to “safeguard Sukarno and his revolutionary policies.”
This was not a plan for a left-wing coup d’etat. The September 30 Movement, as it called itself, had the more limited goals of removing the right-wing generals, bringing the PKI into the Sukarno government based on the Nasokom model (with an emphasis on the “kom”), and creating new political space for the PKI to make use of in its peaceful road to power. Thus, this pre-emptive action was in accord with Aidit’s revisionist strategy of strengthening the “pro-people aspect” and weakening the “anti-people’s aspect” of the Indonesian state.
These plans failed on all levels. On October 1, the hastily formed units from Halim air force base that were sent to kidnap the generals instead killed three who resisted and executed three others after they were captured.[62] Sukarno refused to endorse the Movement, throwing the officers and Aidit (who was working with them at Halim) into disarray. Two battalions of rebel troops sent to the main government buildings at Merdeka Square milled around for a day without orders or food. The rebels occupied the government’s radio station and announced the formation of a “Revolution Council” without a coherent political program or function. Two thousand members of a PKI youth group who had been mobilized to support the Movement were never brought into action.
While the Movement floundered, General Suharto, the commander of KOSTRAD, the army reserve force, took stock of the situation and implemented the contingency plans that were already in place. Suharto declared himself the new army commander, replacing the murdered Yani, and united the key military commanders in Djakarta behind his leadership. Suharto then mobilized Special Forces (RPKAD) units to take the rebels’ base. The Movement’s leadership decided not to put up a fight and fled. The September 30 Movement had lasted for all of 12 hours.
The PKI leadership spent the week following the events of October 1 reassuring party members and its popular base, urging them to refrain from provoking the army and anti-communist groups.[63] The PKI Central Committee issued a declaration that they would fully abide by Sukarno’s orders. Then on October 7, right-wing mobs in Djakarta began to destroy and burn PKI offices and houses. The army banned PKI activities and initiated large-scale roundups of party leaders and suspected members. The PKI leadership went into hiding, expecting that President Sukarno would intervene and come to their rescue.
A vivid illustration of the paralysis that gripped the party cadre is provided in this account by a PKI member and wife of a Central Committee member:
After September 30, we went on with our work for some days in the normal manner, but no one with whom we came in contact was able to inform us as to what had happened or what we were expected to do. As the atmosphere in Djakarta grew worse, we just sat at home and waited for instructions. My husband had been given no guidance about what to do in such an eventuality. We did not expect things to turn out so badly; we thought there would be a setback for the party but that eventually it would be sorted out by Sukarno. That is why the party disintegrated so rapidly.[64]
In the face of this crisis, Sukarno insisted on a political solution and forbade punitive actions. However, the army, with U.S. backing, simply ignored the president. On October 17, army commando units were ordered into Central Java to sikat (“sweep” or “clean out”) the PKI and its supporters in the province. A ruthless campaign of extermination was set in motion. The death tolls were highest in Central and East Java and in Bali, which had been the sites of violent clashes over land reform the previous year. The massacres continued well into 1966.
Aidit was arrested and executed by the army in Central Java in late November. By the end of 1966 all members of the PKI Political Bureau had been executed or taken prisoner except Jusef Adjitorop, who was in China at the time.
Stage two of the “rolling coup d’etat” was aimed at President Sukarno. General Suharto left Sukarno in place in order to legitimize the new regime. On October 16, Sukarno was forced to appoint Suharto army commander. In March 1966, Suharto took over the authority to appoint and dismiss cabinet ministers, while maintaining Sukarno as a figurehead president until the following year.
1966 Self-Criticism of the PKI Leadership
In the wake of the bloodbath, two PKI groups emerged which repudiated the line of the PKI under Aidit’s leadership. The underground “Political Committee of the PKI” was based in Central Java and was under the leadership of Sudisman until his capture in December 1966. It issued a statement criticizing Aidit’s concept of a state with “two aspects” and pointed to the bourgeoisification of party leaders and cadre due to their positions in the Sukarno government.[65]
From September 1966 on, the Beijing-based expatriates led by Adjitorop and the underground organization in Indonesia made a more extensive critique of “Aiditism” as an Indonesian variant of modern revisionism, and called for a Maoist line of agrarian revolution and armed struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed Suharto regime. A statement by the underground, published in Beijing in early 1967, criticized Aidit’s political line and strategy as based on parliamentarianism, capitulation to Sukarno and the national bourgeoisie, denial of class struggle, and adoption of a peaceful road to socialism.
The reorganized Political Bureau of the PKI, based in Beijing, called for the ideological, political and organizational rectification of the party, and for a renewed effort to build a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, armed people’s struggle, and a revolutionary united front of all classes opposed to imperialism and feudalism. In all of this work, the Political Bureau emphasized work in the countryside.
In rebuilding the Party, the Indonesian Marxist-Leninists must devote their attention to the creation of the conditions to lead the armed agrarian revolution of the peasants that will become the main form of struggle to win victory for the people's democratic revolution in Indonesia. This means that the greatest attention should be paid to the rebuilding of Party organizations in the rural areas. The greatest attention must be paid to the solution of the problem of arousing, organizing and mobilizing the peasants in an anti-feudal agrarian revolution….
The tasks faced by the Indonesian Marxist-Leninists are very arduous. They have to work under the most savage and barbarous terror and persecution which have no parallel in history. However, the Indonesian Marxist-Leninists do not have the slightest doubt that, by correcting the mistakes made by the Party in the past, they are now marching along the correct road, the road of people's democratic revolution. No matter how protracted, tortuous and full of difficulties, this is the only road leading to a free and democratic New Indonesia, an Indonesia that will really belong to the Indonesian people. For this noble cause, we must have the courage to traverse the long road.[66]
Similar Defeats in China (1927-1930) and Chile (1973)
The situation faced by the PKI in the 1950s and early 1960s was not unique historically. Only three decades earlier, the newly formed CCP operated in very similar political conditions, with similar results. In the 1920s, as the CCP built a united front with the GMD, it became GMD members and military instructors in the GMD army, and opposed the development of CCP-led militias in the countryside. By not maintaining its own political and military independence in the united front with the GMD, the CCP set itself up for successive bloodbaths in 1927 and the early 1930s when Chiang Kai-shek, with U.S. and British backing, turned on them. Only in the wake of these defeats, and a repudiation of a “left” line of prematurely attempting to storm the cities from the countryside, did Mao’s strategy of protracted people’s war based in the countryside win out.
The promotion of bourgeois nationalist governments over mass based revolutionary struggle led in Chile to a repeat of the disastrous experience in Indonesia. In 1973, a CIA-backed coup of right-wing generals headed by Pinochet overthrew President Allende, leading to the massacre of more than 30,000 revolutionary activists and supporters.
As the U.S. moved to undermine Chile's "socialist" President, Salvador Allende, it received indispensable assistance from the pro-Soviet Chilean Communist Party. The CP, the largest left organization in Chile, told its working class base to turn in their weapons in order to assure the army of their peaceful intentions. The CP claimed that Chile's "constitutionalist generals" would uphold democracy, and it toed Moscow’s line about working for a peaceful transition to socialism in Chile. These actions directly played into the hands of the fascists and the U.S. imperialists, who were able to unleash a coup and a bloody massacre against a movement that had been disarmed politically and militarily.[67]
Some Lessons for Today
There are a number of countries whose political conditions are similar in some ways to the Sukarno government between 1949-1965, or to the Allende government from 1970-1973. This is particularly true of Venezuela and Bolivia, where a combination of mass struggle, political ferment among junior military officers, and electoral campaigns has brought social-democratic, nationalist governments to power. With large oil reserves and high oil prices on the international market, Venezuela has been able to implement some progressive reforms, especially in the areas of education and medicine. However, these countries are still caught in the web of imperialist and capitalist economic relations. According to James Petras:
Venezuela, Bolivia and the entire spectrum of social movements, trade union confederations, parties and fractions of parties do not call for the abolition of capitalism, the repudiation of the debt, the complete expropriation of US or EEC banks or multinational corporations, or any rupture in relations with the US. For example, in Venezuela, private national and foreign banks earned over 30% rate of return in 2005-2006, foreign-owned oil companies reaped record profits between 2004-2006 and less than 1% of the biggest landed estates were fully expropriated and titles turned over to landless peasants. Capital-labor relations still operate in a framework heavily weighted on behalf of business and labor contractors who rely on subcontractors who continue to dominate hiring and firing in more than one half of the large enterprises. The Venezuelan military and police continue to arrest suspected Colombian guerrillas and turn them over to the Colombian police. Venezuela and US-client President Uribe of Colombia have signed several high-level security and economic co-operation agreements.[68]
Ever since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has had sharp political and economic conflicts with U.S. imperialism. But this hasn’t removed Iran from the imperialist system. The Iranian government has instead formed a network of relationships with the European Union and especially the Russian imperialists to replace its dependence on U.S. imperialism. Vis-à-vis the masses of the Iranian people, it is a thoroughly reactionary regime. Workers and peasants are exploited by a new bourgeoisie dominated by high-ranking religious leaders, and the Kurdish, Azeri, Arab, and Baluchi minority nationalities face oppression in all areas of life. Iran’s theocrats have implemented some of the most backward and reactionary restrictions on the lives of women in the world today. And the regime violently crushes any outbreaks of struggle among workers,[69] women, students and the minority nationalities. Nevertheless, some forces call this reactionary regime “anti-imperialist” and “progressive.” [70]
In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and ZANU led the struggle against Rhodesia’s white settler regime. But its victory in 1980 did not break the chains of imperialism, nor did it redistribute the large white-owned farms to landless peasants. Repeating the same experience as in dozens of other countries in Africa, neo-colonial structures of exploitation and domination replaced European colonialism. Today, Mugabe rules by a combination of naked force and populism. His recent declarations that the government will expropriate (with compensation) larger parcels of land and distribute them to ZANU supporters are a demagogic attempt to shore up popular support for his regime, not the beginning of radical land reform and peasant empowerment. The most glaring example of the repressive nature of the Mugabe government was its forcible destruction of shanty towns in Zimbabwe’s major cities in 2005. “Operation Clean Up” left hundreds of thousands homeless. While trade sections by the U.S. and European Union have worsened conditions for the masses of Zimbabweans, the bulk of the damage has been done by the Mugabe regime and its reactionary policies.
In all of the bourgeois nationalist countries, the workings of imperialism and the continuing strength of the internal forces of reaction create a broad section of allies and potential allies for revolutionary forces who base themselves principally among, and represent the interests of, the workers and peasants/farm workers. As mass-based struggle for a full rupture with imperialism and for revolutionary social transformations come to the fore, a new and more favorable political polarization takes place. It then becomes possible to win many of the social forces currently represented by Chavez, Morales, Mugabe and Ahmadinejad to the struggle for new democratic revolution and socialism. But this can only happen if the political independence and initiative of the masses of people are developed for revolutionary struggle, not as a pressure group or a cheering squad for bourgeois nationalist governments.
At the same time, anti-imperialists and revolutionary communists must defend these countries against overt and covert attacks by the U.S. or other imperialists and surrogates. It is critical to have a working understanding of the strategies employed by the U.S. in particular to deal with regimes with varying degrees of conflict with imperialism. In Latin America these strategies have included: Cooptation (Brazil model), using economic and military means to undermine (1980s Nicaragua model), overthrowing populist governments from within (1991 Haiti, 1954 Guatemala and 1973 Chile models), and direct military intervention (1989 Panama and 1984 Grenada models).[71] In Iran, the U.S. resorted to an internal coup in 1953 to overthrow the nationalist Mossadegh government. Since 1979, the U.S. has sought to undermine and isolate the Islamic Republic by economic and political means, and in 1980 armed and prodded Saddam Hussein to launch a proxy war against Iran.
High profile political clashes between these countries and the U.S. imperialists in recent years have led some to the position that struggles for national sovereignty, not people’s movements, are the most important challenge to imperialism today. This is cause for some forces to deny support to people’s movements within these countries. This is a particularly sharp question around Iran today. Some argue that in order to oppose the U.S. imperialists’ threats to launch a military attack on Iran, it is essential to defend the Iranian government. Instead, while we must build opposition to a U.S. attack on Iran, it is necessary to extend our solidarity to the Iranian people and the revolutionary forces who are reorganizing and gaining strength. Their struggle will not only remove the reactionary theocrats from power, but will pursue a thoroughgoing anti-imperialist political program.
Indonesia Today
After two decades of military dictatorship and a return to “democracy” in 1998, Indonesia remains a neo-colony of the U.S. and other Western powers. Bureaucrat capitalists allied with imperialism have opened up the country to exploitation by multinational oil, mining and logging corporations and low-wage assembly plants. Big landlords, who also run export-oriented plantations, dominate the countryside. While waves of small farmers have been driven into the cities, the majority of the people still live in the countryside.
The vast majority of the 180 million people of Indonesia have suffered from a succession of U.S. and IMF-imposed austerity plans. The Indonesian military, hardened by counter-insurgency campaigns in East Timor, Aceh (on the northern tip of Sumatra) and other islands, still holds the key reins of power. These conditions have not changed substantially since Indonesia achieved formal independence in 1949.
In a 1999 statement, Armando Liwanag, Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, described the favorable physical, historical and social conditions for the development of a revolutionary movement and people’s war in Indonesia today. In this statement, Liwanag points to the many similarities between the Philippines and Indonesia as archipelagos under the sway of U.S. imperialism, and analyses the experience of developing protracted people’s war based in the Philippine countryside. Liwanag concludes, "The people’s war in the Philippines was launched in 1969 to serve the Filipino people and to extend support to the Indonesian people and to the people of the rest of the world. It will certainly become stronger when the PKI launches people’s war. In this regard, the Filipino and Indonesian peoples can engage in mutual support and make a significant contribution to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a global scale.”[72]
Maoist parties are also leading powerful revolutionary movements and armed struggle in India, Turkey, Nepal[73] and other countries, and are making new breakthroughs in the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that will be of great assistance to today’s young and veteran revolutionaries in Indonesia.
Bibliography
D.N. Aidit, “Set Afire the Banteng Spirit! Ever Forward, No Retreat!” Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, December 1963
J.D. Armstrong, Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine, 1977
Arnold Brackman, The Communist Collapse in Indonesia, 1969. Virulently anti-communist and anti-Sukarno.
Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990. www.namebase.org/kadane
J.D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography, 1972
Armando Liwanag, Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, “On the Indonesian Revolutionary Struggle,” August 17, 1999
Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959-1965, 1974. Recently reprinted, this is the best book available in English on the political thinking and practice of the PKI in the early 1960s. Mortimer was a leading member of the pro-Soviet revisionist Communist Party of Australia, and during the early 1960s he was the principal liaison between the CPA and the PKI. While critical of the PKI’s strategy, Mortimer believes that it was not realistic for the PKI to take the road of armed struggle.
David Mozingo, Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia, 1949-1967, 1976
James Petras, “U.S.-Latin American Relations: Measuring the Rise or Fall of U.S. Power,” November 1, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15464.htm, In the second half of this article, Petras discusses Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.
David Ransom, “Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia,” reprinted in The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, ed. Steve Weissman, 1975. www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo
John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia, 2006. Roosa’s book is an invaluable source of information about these events. He provides a detailed analysis of the origins and actions of the September 30 Movement, which provided Suharto and the U.S. with the pretext to move decisively against the PKI.
Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985. www.namebase.org/scott
Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, 1975,
“Self-Criticism of the Political Bureau of the Indonesian Communist Party,” August 17, 1966 and September 1966, Red Flag (Beijing), No. 11, 1967 www.massline.info/Indonesia/PKIscrit
Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Werning, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View, 1989
Ann Swift, The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948, Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Monograph Series, 1989
W.F. Wertheim, “Suharto and the Untung Coup—The Missing Link,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 1, No. 1 (1970); and “Whose Plot?—New Light on the 1965 Events,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 9, No. 2 (1979)
“Evaluating the Cultural Revolution and its Legacy for the Future,” March 2007 (85 pp.)
“Chinese Foreign Policy during the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today,” Feb. 2007 (40 pp.)
“Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century,” January 2007 (17 pp.)
“The Political, Military and Negotiating Strategies of the Chinese Communist Party (1937-1946) and Recent Developments in Nepal,” February 2007 (20 pp.)
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[1] Time, December 17, 1965. Cited in David Ransom, “Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia,” reprinted in The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, ed. Steve Weissman, 1975. www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo
[2] John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia, 2006, p. 26. Roosa’s book is an invaluable source of information about these events. He provides a detailed analysis of the origins and actions of the September 30 Movement, which provided Suharto and the U.S. with the pretext to move decisively against the PKI.
[3] Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990. www.namebase.org/kadane.html
[4] Ibid.
[5] Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985, pp. 7-8. Citations are from the internet version at www.namebase.org/scott.html
[6] Roosa, p. 14.
[7] Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, 1975, p., 241.
[8] Department of State Bulletin, May 22, 1967. The reactionary actor John Wayne stated more bluntly: “We went into Vietnam, and Indonesia got enough guts to throw the Communists out of Indonesia.” New York Times, December 24, 1967. Both quotes are from Arnold Brackman, The Communist Collapse in Indonesia, 1969, pp. 190, 202-203. Brackman’s book is one of the most virulently anti-communist and anti-Sukarno books on this period.
[9] Operation Phoenix was a joint U.S.-South Vietnamese program set up by the CIA in 1967 to uproot the political infrastructure of the National Liberation Front by assassinations of its cadres and supporters. It was modeled after and planned by the same CIA operatives who oversaw the destruction of the PKI in 1965-66.
[10] J.D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography, 1972, pp. 149-180.
[11] Sukarno often concluded his speeches with “Long Live Japan!” followed by “Long Live the Land and the People of Indonesia!” Ibid., p. 163.
[12] Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Werning, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View, 1989. pp. 41-44.
[13] Legge, p. 216.
[14] Ann Swift, “The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948,” Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Monograph Series, 1989, p. 11; Legge, pp. 220-221.
[15] Swift, p. 44.
[16] Many Indonesians use one name.
[17] Ibid, pp. 67-74.
[18] Ibid., p. 90.
[19] A self-criticism by the PKI Political Bureau after the 1965 right-wing coup summarized the political weaknesses of the party during this period: “The P.K.I. entered the 1945 August Revolution without adequate preparations. Its serious shortcoming in theory and its lack of understanding of the concrete conditions of Indonesian society had resulted in its inability to formulate the nature of the revolution, its tasks, its programme, tactics and slogans, as well as the correct principles and forms of organization….. The P.K.I. was unable to make use of this highly favourable opportunity given by the August Revolution of 1945 to overcome its shortcomings. The P.K.I. did not consistently lead the armed struggle against Dutch imperialism, did not develop guerrilla warfare that was integrated with the democratic movement of the peasants, thus winning their full support, as the only way to defeat the war of aggression launched by the Dutch imperialists. On the contrary, the P.K.I. even approved of and itself followed the policy of reactionary compromises of Sjahrir's right-wing socialists. The P.K.I. did not establish the alliance of the working class and the peasantry by leading the anti-feudal struggle in the countryside, and did not establish, on the basis of such a worker-peasant alliance, a united front with all other democratic forces. The P.K.I. did not consolidate its strength, on the contrary, it even relegated to the background its own role.” “Statement of the Political Bureau of the Indonesian Communist Party,” August 17, 1966, www.massline.info/Indonesia/PKIscrit p. 8.
[20] As a political strategy aiming at a shortcut to liberation, putschism shares much in common with armed revisionism. As practiced by pro-Soviet parties in the 1970s and 1980s, armed struggle became a form of pressure—a bargaining chip—to gain a share of political power in reactionary states. In South Africa and El Salvador, the practice of armed revisionism by the SACP and the FMLN, respectively, parlayed the sacrifices of countless revolutionaries into careerist agreements to dissolve the people’s revolutionary movements and establish and administer new structures of neo-colonialism. This strategy, as well as focoism (which claims that the initiation of armed struggle by small groups of guerillas would by their example bring forward the masses of the peasantry), arose in opposition to the line of protracted people’s war, which is based on the development of a mass popular base before the initiation, and throughout the period, of revolutionary warfare.
[21] Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959-1965, 1974, p. 393. Recently reprinted, this is the best book available in English on the political thinking and practice of the PKI in the early 1960s. Mortimer was a leading member of the pro-Soviet revisionist Communist Party of Australia, and during the early 60s he was the principal liaison between the CPA and the PKI. While critical of the PKI’s strategy, Mortimer believes that it was not realistic for the PKI to take the road of armed struggle, and he gives short shrift to the self-criticism of the remaining PKI leadership in 1966.
[22] Some scholars have characterized Sukarno’s method of governance as a long-running “theatre state,” reflecting an effort “to focus attention on what the government was rather than on what it was doing.” Legge, p. 334.
[23] The political line that developed out of the Bandung Conference, the “Bandung line,” developed in the context of and was framed by the struggles for independence against old-style direct-rule European colonialism. As such, it failed to comprehend and challenge a dramatic change: Under the banner of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, the United States was applying the more disguised and comprehensive controls characteristic of neo-colonialism. One of these mechanisms was that the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement were being actively, and for the most part successfully, cultivated and recruited into the U.S. neo-colonial empire. Some resisted, such as Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana, Mossadegh in Iran, and Arbenz of Guatemala, and were overthrown by military coups engineered by the U.S.
The “Bandung line” also incorrectly understood the class character of these newly independent states and the neo-colonial relations developing within them. On the one hand, most of them were ruled by the national bourgeoisie (represented, for example, by Sukarno in Indonesia and Nkrumah in Ghana) with varying degrees of popular support from the petty bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. On the other and, comprador bourgeois and feudal elements held strong points of economic and political power, backed up by the European and U.S. imperialists. Thus, these countries had not broken out of the Western economic orbit, and their political independence rested on shaky ground.
[24] “Colonialism and imperialism are living realities in our world. Their sentiment of superiority, of arrogance towards us who were once their colonial subjects is thrust down our throats by their press, by their politicians, by their very tourists who only reflect attitudes inculcated in them by the forces in their own societies. Their political, economic or military interference is always with us, sometimes subtly, often insultingly.” Legge, p. 344.
[25] Mortimer, p. 126. Njoto also served as a principal speechwriter for Sukarno and largely wrote his 1965 Independence Day speech. Brackman, p. 34.
[26] Mortimer, p. 84.
[27] Legge, p. 351.
[28] Mortimer, p. 115.
[29] “Self-Criticism by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Indonesian Communist Party,” September 1966, www.massline.info/Indonesia/PKIscrit p. 18.
[30] Mortimer, p. 135.
[31] PKI Self-Criticism, p. 19.
[32] Ibid., p. 15.
In 1956, the PKI echoed the revisionist theses of the 20th Congress of the CPSU by adopting the line of “achieving socialism peacefully through parliamentary means.” The 1959 PKI constitution stated, “There is a possibility that a people’s democratic system as a transitional stage to socialism in Indonesia can be achieved by peaceful means, in a parliamentary way. The PKI persistently strives to transform this possibility into a reality.” In order to cover its tracks and distinguish itself from the revisionist line of the CPSU, the PKI leadership often spoke of “two possibilities”—the possibility of a peaceful road and the possibility of a non-peaceful road.
[33] Mortimer, pp. 351, 352.
[34] Ibid., pp. 133-134. See also David Mozingo, Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia, 1949-1967, 1976, pp. 217, 228; J.D. Armstrong, Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine, 1977, pp. 142-144.
[35] For further discussion of the Bandung line, see “Chinese Foreign Policy during the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today,” pp. 7-11, by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group, February 2007. Available at www.mlmrsg.com
[36] The desire of the CCP to win the PKI from the Soviet revisionists during the sharp polemics between the CCP and CPSU may have also played a role. This again points to the ongoing tension between China’s national interests as reflected in power-bloc maneuvering and the revolutionary internationalist stance and policies promoted during the Cultural Revolution.
[37] Mortimer, p. 191. Robert Kennedy and Ellsworth Bunker represented the U.S. in these negotiations.
[38] Ibid., p. 206.
[39] In 1963, Sukarno granted a 20 year guarantee to British and American oil companies operating in Indonesia. Armstrong, p. 123.
[40] Mortimer, p. 243.
[41] PKI Self-Criticism, p. 22.
[42] Scott, pp. 4-5. Citations are from the internet version at www.namebase.org/scott.html
[43] Ibid,, p. 16, footnote 46. A document by the National Security Council in 1959 outlines the U.S.’ consistent orientation from that time forward: The U.S. should prioritize “requests for assistance [from the Indonesian military] in programs and projects which offer opportunities to isolate the PKI, drive it into positions of open opposition to the Indonesian Government, thereby creating grounds for repressive measures politically justifiable in terms of Indonesian self-interest.”: Roosa, p. 182.
[44] Ibid., p. 183.
[45] Ransom, pp. 10, 11.
[46] Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[47] Roosa, pp. 184-185. According to Ransom, “The generals controlled plantations, small industry, state-owned oil and tin, and the state-run export-import companies, which by 965 monopolized government purchasing and had branched out into sugar milling, shipping and distribution.”
[48] Mortimer, p. 287.
[49] Ibid., p. 278. But note that the CCP, as opposed to the PKI, had already uprooted the power of the landlords with the victory of the revolution in 1949.
[50] D.N. Aidit, “Set Afire the Banteng Spirit! Ever Forward, No Retreat!” Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, December 1963, p. 25. A banteng is a wild bull.
[51] Mortimer, p. 295.
[52] Aidit, pp. 7-8.
[53] Mortimer, p. 322.
[54] Ibid., p. 299.
[55] Ibid,, p. 380.
[56] Mortimer, p. 384.
[57] Sukarno later stated that the idea of a “fifth force” had been suggested to him by Zhou Enlai on one of his trips to Beijing, and there were rumors, probably spread by the CIA and Indonesian army intelligence, that the Chinese had shipped small arms to the PKI. Ibid., p. 381; Scott, p. 11.
[58] Mortimer, pp. 382-383.
[59] The question of where Sukarno and the nationalist sections of the bourgeoisie that he represented would have ended up politically if the PKI had held and implemented a revolutionary line during these years needs further analysis and discussion. One thing is certain: A process of polarization between the forces of the armed revolution and those of the armed counter-revolution would have developed, compelling the Sukarno forces to choose sides at some point.
[60] Roosa, pp. 189, 190.
[61] Mortimer, p. 385-86. Through currency speculation and other actions, the CIA may have been attempting to destabilize the Indonesian economy, just as it did in the months prior to the right-wing generals coup in Chile in 1973.
[62] In short order, army psy-ops specialists issued claims that PKI members had tortured, mutilated and castrated the captured generals. According to one story in the newspapers, 100 women of the pro-PKI Indonesian Women’s Movement had used razors to slice up the genitals of the generals. The Suharto regime set up a “Museum of PKI Terror” at the site where the generals’ bodies were buried. The claim that the murder of the generals was the start of a massive, ruthless campaign by the PKI against all non-communist forces was a key part of the legitimizing ideology for the 23 year long Suharto dictatorship. Roosa, pp. 7-10, 198.
[63] Mortimer, p. 388. According to another scholar, Aidit flew to Yogyakarta in Central Java, where he attempted to prevent a PKI uprising. Legge, p. 390.
[64] Mortimer, p. 391.
[65] Ibid., p. 397.
[66] PKI Self-Criticism, pp. 25, 26.
[67] See Jorge Palacios, Chile, An Attempt at “Historic Compromise”: The Real Story of the Allende Years, 1979, pp. 329-349.
[68] See James Petras, “US-Latin American Relations: Measuring the Rise or Fall of US Power,” November 1, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15464.htm, In the second half of this article, Petras discusses Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a somewhat different question due to its particular history and claims to be a socialist state. The DPRK, too, is increasingly dependent on nearby capitalist countries, South Korea and China, for food and energy assistance, and by means of investment in maquiladora-like economic zones similar to those in China.
[69] The suppression of the bus drivers’ union in Teheran and the arrest of its leaders is but one recent example.
[70] In the U.S., this viewpoint has been argued most strongly by the Workers World Party and its affiliate, the International Action Center. See www.workers.org/2007/world/iran-0510/index.html It took the same position in support of Saddam Hussein’s reactionary regime prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
[71] The U.S. uses military aid and training agreements to keep both individual countries and all of Latin America under imperialist domination. This strategic investment allows the U.S. to develop a political base in the officer corps of these countries for future contingencies. An interesting example of this strategy came to light at a recent conference to build opposition to U.S. military bases worldwide that was held in Ecuador, one of the Latin America countries that claims to provide a “democratic alternative” to neo-liberalism. At this conference, Ecuador’s Defense Minister supported the removal of U.S. bases from Latin America, but insisted that the Ecuadorean military would continue to send its officers for training at the infamous School of the Americas (renamed WHISC) at Ft. Benning in the U.S.
[72] Liwanag, “On the Indonesian Revolutionary Struggle,” August 17, 1999.
[73] After liberating 4/5ths of the country through ten years of people’s war, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has joined an interim government with seven parties representing the interests of Nepal’s bureaucratic capitalists and big landlords, who have close ties to India and the U.S. In order to reach this agreement, the CPN(M) has dissolved its liberated areas, sequestered its troops and arms under UN supervision, and agreed to merge the People’s Liberation Army with the Nepalese Army, the renamed Royal Nepalese Army. Serious investigation and debate concerning this question has already begun among revolutionaries around the world. One useful study guide is a bibliography compiled by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group, titled “Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century.” This includes two statements by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that are critical of the new strategy of the Nepalese comrades. The MLM Revolutionary Study Group has also written an article on the political, military and negotiating strategy of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 to 1946, and its relevance to the situation in Nepal today.
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