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| Indonesian Communist Leader Aidit. |
More important, the professors were no longer necessary; in fact, they
were probably an increasing political liability.
Sumitro's first string had re-turned with their degrees and resumed control of the school.
Sumitro's first string had re-turned with their degrees and resumed control of the school.
The Berkeley team had done its job, "kept the thing
alive," Glassburner recalls proudly. "We plugged a
hole .. and with the Ford Foundation's money we trained them
40 or so economists."
What did the University get out of it? "Well, some overhead money, you know." And the satisfaction of a job well done.
What did the University get out of it? "Well, some overhead money, you know." And the satisfaction of a job well done.
School for Soldiers
"The marvel is that the modernists have had so much of a chance to
steer events. They got in because this military regime, unlike some others in the
world, chose to make an alliance with the intellectual and academic
community." — Fortune, June
1, 1968
In 1959 Pauker set out the lessons of the PSI's electoral
isolation and Sumitro's abortive Outer Islands Rebellion in a
widely-read paper entitled "Southeast Asia as a Trouble Area in the
Next Decade."
Parties like the PSI were "unfit for vigorous competition"
with communism, he wrote. "Communism is bound to win in South-east
Asia . . . unless effective countervailing power is found." The
"best equipped" countervailing forces, he wrote, were "members
of the national officer corps as individuals and the national armies as
organizational structures."
From his exile in Singapore, Sumitro concurred, arguing
that his PSI and Masjumi parties, which the Army had attacked, were
really the Army's "natural allies." Without them, the Army would find
itself politically isolated, he said.
But to consummate their alliance "the Sukarno regime must be
toppled first." Until then, Sumitro warned, the generals should
keep "a close and continuous watch" on the growing and powerful
Communist peasant organizations. Meanwhile, Sumitro's Ford-scholar proteges in Djakarta began
the necessary steps towards a rapprochement.
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| SESKOAD's Emblem. |
There, generals decided organizational and political matters; there,
senior officers on regular rotation were "upgraded" with manuals and
methods picked up at the U.S. command school back
in Fort Leavenworth. Kansas.
When the Berkeley team phased itself out in
1962, Sadli, Widjojo and others from the Faculty began regular
trips to Bandung to teach at SESKOAD. Ford's Frank Miller - who
replaced Harris in Djakarta and who, like Harris, had worked under
Ford President Hoffman in Germany - says that they taught "economic
aspects of defense."
Pauker tells a different story. Since the mid-'50s, he
had come to know the Army General Staff rather well, first on the MIT team,
then on trips for RAND. One good friend was Colonel Suwarto (not to
be confused with General Suharto), the deputy commander of SESKOAD
and a 1959 Fort Leavenworth graduate. In
1962, Pauker brought him to RAND.
Besides learning "all sorts of things about international
affairs" while at RAND, Suwarto also saw how RAND "organizes
the academic resources of the country as consultants," Pauker says.
According to Pauker, Suwarto had "a new idea"
when he returned to Bandung. `"The four or five top economists became
'cleared' social scientists lecturing and studying the future political
problems of Indonesia in SESKOAD."
In effect, this group became the Army's high-level civilian advisors.
They were joined at SESKOAD by other PSI and Masjumi alumni of the
university programs - Miriam Budiardjo from Pauker's MIT
study group, and Selosoemardjan from Kahin'sprogram at Cornell,
as well as senior faculty from the nearby Bandung Institute of Technology,
where the University of Kentucky had been
"institution-building" for AID since 1957.
The economists were quickly caught up in the generals' anti-communist
conspiracy. Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, Army commander-in-chief,
had drawn around him a "brain trust" of generals. It was an "open secret," says Pauker,
that Yani and his brain trust were discussing "contingency
plans" which were to "prevent chaos should Sukarno die
suddenly."
The contribution of Suwarto's mini-RAND, according to Colonel
Willis G. Ethel, U.S. defense attaché in Djakarta at the
time, was that the professors "would run a course in this contingency
planning."
Col. Ethel was a close confidant of
Commander-in-Chief Yani and others of the Army high command. He even
introduced them to golf.
Of course, it wasn't "chaos" the Army planners were worried
about, but the PKI. "They weren't about to let the Communists take over
the country," Col. Ethel says. Moreover, any but the most dense officer or
advisor knew that since there was immense popular support for Sukarno and the
PKI, a lot of blood would flow when the show-down came.
Other institutions joined the Ford economists in preparing the military.
High-ranking Indonesian officers had begun U.S. training programs in
the mid-'50s. By 1965 some 4000 officers had been taught big-scale army command
at Fort Leavenworth and counter-insurgency at Fort Bragg.
Beginning in 1962, hundreds of visiting officers at Harvard
and Syracuse were provided with the skills for maintaining a huge
economic, as well as military, establishment, with training in everything from
business administration and personnel management to air photography and
shipping.
AID's "Public Safety Program" in
the Philippines and Malaya trained and equipped the Mobile
Brigades of the Indonesian military's fourth arm, the police.
While the army developed expertise and perspective (courtesy of the
generous American aid program), it also increased its political and economic
influence.
Under the martial law declared by Sukarno at the time of the Outer
Islands Rebellion, the Army had become the predominant power in Indonesia.
Regional commanders took over provincial governments - depriving the Communist
PKI of its plurality victories in the 1957 local elections.
Puzzled by the Army's reluctance to take complete power, journalists
called it a "creeping coup d'état." General Nasution termed
it the "Middle Way."
The Army also moved into the economy, first taking "supervisory
control," then key directorships of the Dutch properties that the PKI
unionists had seized "for the people" during the confrontation over
West Irian in late 1957.
As a result, the generals controlled plantations, small industry,
state-owned oil and tin, and the state-run export-import companies, which by
1965 monopolized government purchasing and had branched out into sugar milling,
shipping and distribution.
Those high-ranking officers not born into the Indonesian aristocracy
quickly married in, and in the countryside they firmed up alliances - often
through family ties - with the santri Moslem landowners who
were the backbone of the Masjumi Party.
"The Army and the civil police," wrote
Robert Shaplen of the New York Times, "virtually
controlled the whole state apparatus." American University's
Willard Hanna called it "a new form of government-military-private
enterprise."
The economists' "economic aspects of defense" thus became a
wide-ranging subject. To make it even broader, the professors undertook
preparing post-Sukarno economic policy at SESKOAD, too.
Deprived of their victory at the polls and unwilling to break with
Sukarno, the Communist PKI tried to make a poor best of this "guided
democracy," participating with the Army in coalition cabinets.
Pauker has described the PKI strategy as "attempting to keep
the parliamentary road open," while seeking to come to
power by "acclamation." That meant building up PKI prestige as
"the only solid, purposeful, disciplined, well-organized, capable
political force in the country," to which Indonesians would turn
"when all other possible solutions have failed."
By 1963, three million Indonesians, most of them in heavily populated
Java, were members of the PKI, and an estimated 17 million were members of its
associated organizations in 1963 - making it the world's largest Communist
Party outside Russia and China. At Independence the party
had numbered only 8000.
Though landlords' holdings were not large, less than half of the
Indonesian farmers owned the land they worked, and of these, the majority had
less than an acre. As the peasants' "unilateral action" gathered
momentum, Sukarno, seeing his coalition endangered, tried to check its force by
establishing land reform courts which included peasant representatives.
But in the countryside, police continued to clash with peasants and made
mass arrests. In some areas, saritri youth groups began
murderous attacks on peasants.
Since the Army held state power in most areas, the peasants'
"unilateral action" was directed against its
authority. Pauker calls it "class struggle in the
countryside" and suggests that the PKI had put itself "on a collision
course with the Army."
But unlike Mao's Communists in pre-revolutionary China, the PKI had
no Red Army. Having chosen the parliamentary road, the PKI was stuck with it.
In early 1965, PKI leaders demanded that the Sukarno government (in
which they were cabinet ministers) create a people's militia - five million
armed workers, ten million armed peasants. But Sukarno's power was hollow. The
Army had become a state within a state. It was they - and not Sukarno or the
PKI - who held the guns.
Communist Coup?
The test of strength came in September 1965. On the night of the 30th,
troops under the command of dissident lower-level Army officers, in alliance
with officers of the small Indonesian Air Force, assassinated General Yani and
five members of his SESKOAD "brain trust."
Led by Lt. Colonel Untung, the rebels seized
the Djakarta radio station and next morning broadcast that their
September 30th Movement was directed against the "Council of
Generals," which they declared was CIA-sponsored and had itself planned a
coup d'etat for Armed Forces Day, four days later.
Untung's preventive coup quickly collapsed. Though he did not
denounce it, Sukarno, hoping to restore the pre-coup balance of forces, gave it
no support; on the other hand, the PKI had prepared no street demonstrations,
no strikes, no coordinated uprisings in the countryside.
For their part, the dissidents missed assassinating
General Nasution and apparently left General Suharto off their list;
Suharto rallied the elite para-commandos and units of the West
Java division, the Siliwangi. Against Untung's colonels.
Untung's troops, unsure of themselves. their mission and
their loyalties, made no stand as Suharto drove them from their strong points.
It was all over in a day.
The Army high command quickly blamed the Communists for the coup. A line
the Western press has followed ever since.
Yet the utter lack of activity in the streets and the countryside makes
PKI involvement unlikely, and many Indonesia specialists believe, with Dutch
scholar W. F. Wertheim, that "the Untung coup was what its
leader . . . claimed it to be - an internal army affair reflecting serious
tensions between officers of the Central Java Diponegoro Division and the
Supreme Command of the Army in Djakarta . . . "
Leftists, on the other hand, assumed after the ensuing massacres and
Sukarno's overthrow that the CIA had a heavy hand in the affair. Indeed,
embassy officials had long wined and dined the student apparatchiks who
rose to lead the demonstrations that brought Sukarno down.
And old Indonesia hands casually mention the CIA's connections
with the Army, especially with Intelligence Chief Achmed Sukendro,
who retrained his agents after 1958 with U.S. help and then studied
at the University ofPittsburgh in the early '60s.
But Sukendro and most other members of the Indonesian high
command were equally close to the embassy's military
attachés, who seem to have made Washington's chief contacts with the
Army both before and after the attempted coup.
And considering the make-up and history of the generals and their
"modernist" allies and ad-visors, it is clear that at this point
neither the CIA nor the Pentagon needed to play any more than a subordinate
role.
The professors may have helped lay out the Army's
"contingency" plans, but no one was going to ask them to take to the
streets and make the generals' "revolution."
Fortunately, they could leave that to their students. Lacking a mass
organization, the Army depended on the students to give authenticity and
"popular' leadership in the events that followed.
It was the students who demanded - and got - Sukarno's head; and it was
the students - as propagandists - who carried the cry of jihad (religious
war) to the villages. (Jihad against Godless-Commies and Buddhist and Christian sympathizers of PKI. Like their counterparts CPM in Malaysia most KPI cadres were also Chinese-Indonesians or part-Chinese. Convenient Jihad was onto them infidels and the result was a million deaths of 1965 genocide.)
In late October, Brigadier General Sjarif Thajeb - the
Harvard-trained Minister of Higher Education - brought student leaders together
in his living room to create the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI).
Many of the KAMI leaders were the older student apparatchiks who
had been courted by the U.S. embassy. Some had traveled to
the U.S. as American Field Service exchange students, or on year-long
jaunts in a "Foreign Student Leadership Project" sponsored by the
U.S. National Student Association in its CIA-fed salad years.
Only months before the coup, U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green had arrived
in Djakarta, bringing with him the reputation of having masterminded the
student overthrow of Syngman Rhee in Korea and sparking
rumors that his purpose in Djakarta was to do the same there.
Manuals on student organizing in both Korean and English were supplied
by the embassy to KAMI's top leadership soon after the coup.
But KAMI's most militant leadership came from Bandung,
where the University of Kentucky had mounted a ten-year
"institution-building" program at the Bandung Institute of
Technology, sending nearly 500 of their students to the U.S. for
training.
Students in all of Indonesia's elite universities had been given
paramilitary training by the Army in a program for a time advised by an ROTC
colonel on leave from Berkeley. Their training was "in anticipation
of a Communist attempt to seize the government,"
writes Harsja Bachtiar, an Indonesian sociologist (alumnus of Cornell
and Harvard).
In Bandung, headquarters of the aristocratic Siliwangi division,
student paramilitary training was beefed up in the months preceding the coup,
and santri student leaders were boasting to
their Kentucky friends that they were developing organizational
contacts with extremist Moslem youth groups in the villages.
It was these groups that spearheaded the massacres of PKI followers and
peasants.
Mass Slaughter of a Million Communists
" With relish they called out their
followers, stuck their knives and pistols in their waistbands, swung their
clubs over their shoulders, and embarked on the assignment for which they had
long been hoping."
For starters, they burnt the PKI headquarters. Thousands of PKI and
Sukarno supporters were arrested and imprisoned in Djakarta; cabinet
members and parliamentarians were permanently "suspended";
and a purge of the ministries was begun.
On October 17, Col. Sarwo Edhy took his elite paratroops
(known as the "red berets") into the PKI's Central
Java stronghold in the Bojolali-Klaten-Solo triangle. His
assignment, Hughes says, was "the extermination, by
whatever means might be necessary, of the core of the Communist Party
there."
He found he had too few troops. "We decided to encourage the
anti-communist civilians to help with the job," he told Monitor
correspondent Hughes. "In Solo we gathered together the youth, the
nationalist groups, the religious [Moslem] organizations. We gave
them two or three days training, then sent them out to kill Communists."
Providing necessary spare parts for these radios was one of the ways
the U.S. embassy found of helping the generals' anti-communist
pogrom that followed.
Time magazine described the slaughter in Java in mid-December 1965:
"Communists, Red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by
the thousands. 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, (Buddhists, Christians, and other non-Moslems) killing entire families and
burying the bodies in shallow graves. . . . The murder campaign became so
brazen in parts 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 decaying flesh. Travellers from
these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged
with bodies; river transportation has at places been seriously impeded."
Graduate students from Bandung and Djakarta were
dragooned by the Army to research the number dead. Their report, never made
public, but leaked by correspondent Frank Palmos - something of an
insider - estimated a million victims.
The KAMI students' most important task was bringing life
in Djakarta to a standstill with anti-Communist, anti-Sukarno
demonstrations whenever necessary. By January, with Col. Edhy back
in Djakarta addressing KAMI rallies, his elite corps providing KAMI
with trucks, loudspeakers and protection, KAMI demonstrators could tie up the
city at will.
"The ideas that Communism was public enemy number one, that Communist
China was no longer a close friend but a menace to the security of the state,
and that there was corruption and inefficiency in the upper levels of the
national government were introduced on the streets of Djakarta,"
says Bachtiar, whose scholarly output includes re-cording these
activities.
Berkeley Mafia at Work
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| President Sukarno and General Suharto. |
One of the economists, Emil Salim, recently returned with a
Berkeley PhD, was counted among the KAMI leadership. Salim's father
had purged the Communist wing of the major pre-war nationalist organization,
and then served in the pre-Independence Masjumi cabinets.
In January the economists made Djakarta headlines with a
week-long Economic and Financial Seminar at the Faculty. "Principally . .
. a demonstration of solidarity among the members of KAMI, the anti-Communist
intellectuals, and the leadership of the Army," Bachtiar says,
the seminar heard papers from Gen. Nasution, Adam Malik and
others who "presented themselves as a counter-elite challenging the
competence and legitimacy of the elite led by President Sukarno."
It was Djakarta's post-coup introduction to Ford's economic
policies.
In March Suharto stripped Sukarno of formal power and had
himself named Acting President, tapping old political warhorse
Adam Malik and the Sultan of Jogjakarta to join him in a ruling
triumvirate.
The generals whom the economists had known best as SESKOAD
- Yani and his brain trust - had all been killed. But with the help
of Kahin's protegé, Selosoemardjan, they first caught the
Sultan's and then Suharto's ear, persuading them that the Americans would demand
a strong attack on inflation and a swift return to a "market
economy."
On April 12, the Sultan issued a major policy statement out-lining the
economic program of the new regime - in effect announcing Indonesia's
return to the imperialist fold. It was written
by Widjojo and Sadli.
In working out the subsequent details of the Sultan's program, the
economists got aid from the expected source. When Widjojo got stuck
in drawing up a stabilization plan, AID brought in Harvard economist Dave Cole,
fresh from writing South Korea's banking regulations, to provide him with
a draft.
Sadli, too, required some post-doctoral tutoring. According to an
American official, Sadli "really didn't know how to write an
investment law. He had to have a lot of help from the embassy." It was a
team effort. "We were all working together at the time - the 'economists,'
the American economists, AID," remembers Calvin Cowles, the first AID man
on the scene.
Armed with Sadli's January 10, 1967, investment law, the
economists could put on their old school ties and play host to the lords of the
great American corporations. In August the Stanford Research Institute - a
spin-off of the university-military-industrial complex - brought 170
"senior executives" to Djakarta for a three-day parley and
look-see.
"The Indonesians have cut out the cancer that was destroying their
economy," an SRI executive later reported approvingly. Then, urging that
big business invest heavily in Suharto's future, he warned that "military
solutions are infinitely more costly."
In
November, Malik, Sadli, Salim, Selosoemardjan and the
Sultan met in Geneva with a select list of American and European
businessmen flown in by Time-Life. Surrounded by his economic advisors, the
Sultan ticked off the selling-points of the New Indonesia - "political
stability ... abundance of cheap labor . . . vast potential market ..
. treasure house of resources."
The universities, he added, have produced a "large number of
trained individuals who will be happy to serve in new economic
enterprises."
David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, thanked
Time-Life for the chance to get acquainted with "Indonesia's top economic
team." He was impressed, he said, by their "high quality of
education."
Berkeley Mafia and Indonesia's 1965 Genocide - Part 1
Berkeley Mafia and Indonesia's 1965 Genocide - Part 3 & Final
Berkeley Mafia and Indonesia's 1965 Genocide - Part 1
Berkeley Mafia and Indonesia's 1965 Genocide - Part 3 & Final