The Jakarta Method
Operation Annihilation. That’s what the Indonesian Army called it – Operasi Penumpason. As Vincent Bevins’ difficult and provocative new book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World details, it represented the greatest and most significant victory in the Cold War for the US-led capitalist bloc, one which led to its ultimate victory that still defines the current world order today.
The 1965-1966 Indonesian state-orchestrated massacres of communists – or anyone suspected of being a communist, including ethnic Chinese specifically because they were suspected of being communists, or even associated with the left at all – were a horrific series of mass killings that left up to 3 million dead. Bevins sticks with the figure 1 million, emphasizing that estimates are the only thing we’ve got; the Indonesian government won’t support a commission to determine the scale of the crime, not least because they don’t think it was a crime at all.
Rather than a mass act of mindless violence, by crazed Asians run ‘amok’ who didn’t appreciate the value of human life – as the American press reported it at the time – Bevins convincingly lays out the case that the violence was part of a programme of transnational extermination led by an organized anticommunism directed and encouraged by the United States, the most deadly (and successful) tool against world communism. He links it with the coup in Guatemala in 1954, the installation of the military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964, the coup against Allende’s democratic socialist government in Chile in 1973, and a slew of actions against other nascent, powerful, or at the time growing left wing forces in the Third World.
The beginning of the book charts the development of the Third World as the Third World, from the Indonesian proclamation of Independence in 1945 to the Second World Festival of Youth and Students in Budapest in 1949, to the mighty Konferensi Asia-Afrika in April of 1955. This was held in Bandung in West Java, a ‘remarkable gathering [which] brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union.’
At the conference Sukarno, the hero of Indonesian independence and President of the country, was elevated to global status alongside India’s Nehru as a leader of the Third World – a leader of the formerly colonized nations and those still fighting for their independence. With enthusiasm, Sukarno called it ‘the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!’ This made the United States nervous, and not just because their racist State Department called the affair a ‘Darktown Strutters Ball.’ They saw Sukarno’s comfort with left wing anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism as a threat to an order that they saw balancing on a knife’s edge. From China to Southeast Asia to Latin America, to the massive Indonesian nation itself, they were terrified that the rapidly expanding communist bloc would expand even further.
Indonesia was a particularly ripe target and a worry, with a huge population of 105 million people. Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk said Johnson would be willing to go to war over it; losing Indonesia to the communist camp, agreed Under Secretary of State George Ball and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, would be ‘the biggest thing since the fall of China.’
The same year, 1955, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) won fourth place in the elections with 17 percent of the vote. In 1958 Sukarno beat off CIA supported rebels with the PKI’s help. Sukarno then only got more and more comfortable with the left and the (PKI) after Badung. Even as things heated up in Indochina for the US, Indonesia remained their top priority, and ‘The political lines were clear to anyone paying attention – Communists and Sukarno on one side; Army and the West on the other.’
Luckily for the West, they had an ideological ally in the anticommunist Indonesian Army. They cultivated this alliance further by training officers in the United States and deepening support for the army’s role in the economic life of the country through providing training and equipment to the army in Indonesia in fishing, farming and construction. This all to the end of helping construct a negara dalam negara, a ‘state within a state,’ with the reliably anticommunist generals at the helm ready to strike when the situation became right.
At the same time, in the Western Hemisphere, something happened that the American ambassador Lincoln Gordon called ‘the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.’ That was the slick extinguishing of democracy in Brazil by their own US-supported generals and the establishment of a military dictatorship that would take the already virulent anticommunism in Brazilian society to the heights of national religion.
Brazil was a dream for the American Cold Warriors whose worries about Latin America falling to communism had been inflamed by Fidel Castro taking power in Cuba in 1959. Back in 1954 the coup in Guatemala was known throughout the world to have been engineered by the Americans, as Jakarta’s People’s Daily, the Harian Rakyat, reported more accurately than the New York Times, presciently observing that what was happening ‘threatens world peace, and could threaten Indonesia as well.’
While US complicity and aid in service to the coup was well known, it was an autochthonous cadre of anticommunists who took power in Brazil in 1964. Though they were almost in lockstep with the Americans ideologically, it would be inaccurate to call them puppets – they represented the authentic reactionary ambitions of a local ruling class unwilling to accept democratic control or left-wing reform. In this, Brazil would become a model. First, an alleged imminent threat of communist takeover; then a real or imagined uprising portrayed as the first salvo in a satanic communist offensive against capitalism and Godly traditional society; suppression of this attempt by the anticommunist army, then removal of the communists and the socialists and the left from the political life of the country. And finally the removal of life from the communists.
Indonesia’s innovation was in its brutal extent and the volume of killings. They launched this campaign in something we now call the September 30th movement, which may have involved a small uprising by left wing officers ostensibly directed by the PKI in an attempt to take power. The details are still murky today. Bevins points out that all the generals killed by Suharto, who came to power after Sukarno and ruled for over three decades, were those who would have been able to challenge Suharto’s power.
A campaign of propaganda immediately followed; hate and lies whipped up against the communists, which the army and the reactionary nationalist organizations used to mobilise for mass slaughter. Dark stories about the Gerwani, the communist woman’s movement, being involved in the killings of the Indonesian generals as part of satanic rituals animated the murderous drive against them, casting them as witches and heathens communing with devils as they danced nude and killed with knives. Neutrality was not permitted.
‘Locals in Central Aceh understood, they recall, that they were being instructed to help kill the communists, or be killed themselves.’
Extermination comes in the seventh chapter of this book. It is a suffocating chapter. Over the past few years and all across the world, Bevins interviewed many survivors of the violence. They are presented sympathetically, intelligent idealistic young men and women involved in left-wing politics out of a desire to build a better world. There is Francisca Pattipilohy, well-educated and multilingual, writing for the cosmopolitan Afro-Asian Journalist, shining with enthusiasm for the construction of an independent Indonesia where her people could have dignity. There is her husband Zain, a polyglot writing about international affairs at the People’s Daily in Jakarta, translating the rush of stories from abroad to show his fellow Indonesians where they stood in the world. And from a peasant family from the village of Purwokerto in Central Java, there is Magdalena – who moved to Jakarta at sixteen for work at a t-shirt factory overseen by the communist led union SOBSI, not that she had any awareness of this fact beyond knowing working conditions were decent in her factory thanks to the union.
Bevins tells these and many others’ stories sensitively. He doesn’t go heavy on the graphic details of the extermination and the deprivation and the torture; neither does he eschew them. What is so affecting about this chapter, broken up by subheadings bringing us through the events day by day as the events unfold, is that by this point we know these people. They are good people. They were thrust into a whirlwind of violence and trauma that is unimaginable. The anger about this fact is palpable.
‘Except for a tiny number of people possibly involved in the planning of the disastrous September 30th movement, almost everyone killed and imprisoned was entirely innocent of any crime... They didn’t even deserve a small fine. They didn’t do anything wrong at all... They were sentenced to annihilation, and almost everyone around them was sentenced to a lifetime of guilt, trauma, and being told they had sinned unforgivably because of their association with the earnest hopes of left-wing politics.’
The glee with which the Americans reacted to what they unfolded was grotesque. Bevins juxtaposes Magadalena’s horrific treatment in police custody, where at the age of 17 she was raped repeatedly, then imprisoned for years, with a cable the American ambassador – Howard Green – sent back to Washington on October 20th 1965: ‘Army has... been working hard at destroying PKI and I, for one, have increasing respect for its determination and organization in carrying out this crucial assignment.’
All this was done with the knowledge, approval, and support of the Americans. In fact, it was the outcome of efforts they’d been making for years. The CIA and an embassy political officer named Robert Martens drew up lists of thousands of suspected communists and leftists that the Indonesian Army worked through methodically. Martens later said, ‘I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.’ Managers of plantations owned by US interests also gave names of union organisers and communists to the army, who used them as they used all the other names.
If Brazil was the prototype then Jakarta was the finished product. It also became a warning and a premonition. Bevins found 11 countries where state organized anticommunist violence referenced this metaphor of Jakarta. In the early 70s in Chile graffiti began appearing on walls in the well-to-do Eastern sections of Santiago, ‘Yakarta Viene,’ or ‘Jakarta se acera.’ Sometimes just ‘Jakarta.’ The Patria y Libertad party sent flimsy postcards to communists and members of the left. On the bottom side the spidery logo of the fascist movement that would soon help Pinochet come to power in an orgy of anticommunist violence. On the top it simply read ‘Jakarta is coming.’ And in 1973 it did.
‘Even the anticommunists’ great enemy, the supposed reason for all this terror, did not deploy this kind of violence,’ Bevins writes towards the end of the book. ‘Using numbers compiled by the US-funded Freedom House organization, historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960-1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.’
Bevins then is cautious to clarify that he is ‘not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder.’ Instead, he goes on, ‘I do want to claim that this loose network of extermination programmes, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.’
Yes, but I think he’s a little too cautious here after everything he’s just told us.
When Bevins asks Winarso, the head of one of the rare organizations for survivors of the Indonesian violence in 1965, Sekretariat Bersama ‘65, who won the Cold War, Winarso answers clearly. The U.S. won. Capitalism won. Bevins follows up by asking Winarso how.
‘You killed us.’
The Jakarta Method
Vincent Bevins
Public Affairs, May 2020
9781541742406