The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

At the police station, officers began to yell at her, interrogating her. They told her they knew she was a member of the Gerwani, the Women’s Movement affiliated with the Communist Party. She wasn’t. She didn’t know what to say to them, except that she wasn’t. According to the mythology spread by Indonesia’s new command, this meant she was part of the group that danced naked while mutilating the military high command’s genitals. She was in Jakarta, they said. Maybe she was even at the slaughter. She didn’t know anything about this, she told them.

She’s not sure how long she was at the second police station before two police officers raped her. She was Gerwani, in the minds of the police, which meant that she was not a human being, and not a woman, but a sexually depraved murderer. An enemy of Indonesia and Islam. A witch. These men were in charge of her now.

Two weeks later, the White House authorized the CIA station in Bangkok to provide small arms to its military contact in Central Java “for use against the PKI” alongside medical supplies that would come in from the CIA station in Bangkok.15

Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list.

As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.

Sakono heard rumors, as did everyone in the region. They were taking some people to the Serayu River in the middle of the night. They tied up their hands and threw them into the water. Or maybe they shot them first. Or maybe they stabbed them. That there were mass killings became obvious. There were so many bodies piling up that they were blocking rivers, and unleashing a horrible stench across the country. But as to who was killed, and where and how, all the survivors had were rumors.

This was a new characteristic of the mass violence. People weren’t killed in the streets, making it very clear to families that they were gone. They weren’t officially executed. They were arrested and then disappeared in the middle of the night. Loved ones often had no idea if their relatives were still alive, making them even more paralyzed with fear. If they complained, or rebelled, could that be what cost their imprisoned loved ones their lives? Might they be taken too? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that mass murder is occurring, the human instinct is to hold out hope that your son, or your daughter, might still be saved. This freezes people, and makes populations much more quiescent—easier to exterminate and easier to control.

Historians who study violence in Asia believe this was the first time forced “disap...

The country’s largest Muslim organization had a youth wing and an armed wing, the Ansor and Banser. These were acronyms, but the founder of the Banser said that he wanted the word to sound like Panzer, Hitler’s famous tanks. He also said he had been studying Mein Kampf, starting in 1964, in order to learn how to deal with the Communists.18 These groups participated in the killings in Central and East Java. In Aceh, the military press-ganged and threatened suspicious civilians, politically suspect individuals or outcasts, into carrying out the murders. Afterward, they would often down alcohol to numb themselves to what they had just done.

The military told the world Aidit confessed to plans to take over the country, and this account was later published in Newsweek. After the issue came out, a cable from the embassy told the State Department that embassy staff knew it was “impossible to believe that Aidit made such a statement” because according to the military’s version, he allegedly referenced a fake document, one they knew “was obviously being disseminated as part of an anti-Communist ‘black propaganda’ operation.”21

US officials were in close contact with the military, making it clear to them that direct assistance could resume if the PKI were destroyed, Sukarno was removed, and attacks on US investments halted. Aid flows were also conditional on Indonesia’s willingness to adopt IMF- and US-approved economic plans.

But US officials were also very alarmed that the military government-in-waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno’s plans to take over US oil companies, by far their most important economic concern at the time. They “bluntly and repeatedly warned the emerging Indonesian leadership” that if nationalization went forward, support from Washington would be withheld, and their grip on power was at stake, according to historian Bradley Simpson’s analysis of the declassified communications.

On December 16, a telegram from Jakarta to the State Department described the victory. Suharto arrived at a high-level meeting by helicopter, strode into the room, and “made it crystal clear to all assembled that the military would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies.” Then he walked out.

The people of Bali knew something was very suspicious about the outbreak of violence. People were being killed with big machetes. Machetes are not native to the island. Balinese people use the klewang, a thinner, local blade. Someone must have brought the heavy weapons in from another island. And, as elsewhere, locals were participating in the killing. Agung heard that it was actually a neighbor, a man known by the family, who took away his father.

The machetes arrived around the same time that military anticommunist propaganda campaigns, nationally coordinated, arrived in Bali.

Propaganda teams toured rural areas, spreading stories like this, driving home the message that the people must “be on the side of the G30S or stand behind the government in crushing the G30S. There is no such thing as a neutral position.”

Young Wayan Badra, the thirteen-year-old son of the Hindu priest in the Seminyak neighborhood, noticed that the two nice communist teachers at his school went away and never came back.

In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people, probably the highest proportion in the country.29

Sukarno’s reaction to the killings was both resignation and desperation. Though he wasn’t getting full reports from around the country, he knew violence was taking place, and seemed overwhelmed by the avalanche of anticommunist propaganda. He told one group of officers and journalists, “Over and over it’s the same thing… razors, razors, razors, razors, razors, a grave for a thousand people, a grave for a thousand people… over and over again, the same thing!”33 He urged restraint, entirely ineffectively, as Suharto’s forces literally hacked away at the number of people on the left wing of Indonesian politics.

According to Subandrio, his former foreign minister, Suharto intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic goods like rice, sugar, and cooking oil.34 Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.

As student protests raged around him, Sukarno called top government officials to the Jakarta Presidential Palace on March 10 in an attempt to retain control. Instead, paratroopers loyal to Suharto, led by General Sarwo Edhie, surrounded him the next day. Sukarno jumped onto a helicopter to flee, Subandrio running behind him barefoot, and rushed back to Bogor. But there, Sukarno was forced to sign a letter handing over executive power to Suharto.

There are still controversies about this letter, the so-called Supersemar. No one has ever seen the original.

In his first acts, he officially banned what was left of the Communist Party, then arrested much of Sukarno’s cabinet, including Subandrio. The United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.

None of Francisca’s friends would talk to her anymore. In fact, no one was talking to anyone. Gone were the days of literary discussions and language classes with progressive intellectuals from around the world. There was a new rule of conduct.

On April 13, 1966, C. L. Sulzberger penned a piece, one of many in this genre, with the headline “When a Nation Runs Amok” for the New York Times. As Sulzberger described it, the killings occurred in “violent Asia, where life is cheap.” He reproduced the lie that Communist Party members had killed the generals on October 1, and that Gerwani women slashed and tortured them. He went on to affirm that “Indonesians are gentle… but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.”

No one has any evidence of mass murder of this kind happening in Indonesian history, except for when foreigners were involved.

In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps.

Their silence was the point of the violence. The Armed Forces did not oversee the extermination of every single communist, alleged communist, and potential communist sympathizer in the country. That would have been nearly impossible, because around a quarter of the country was affiliated somehow with the PKI. Once the killings took hold, it became incredibly hard to find anyone who would admit to any association with the PKI.

It’s also true that some murderers used the chaos to settle personal scores, and that thousands were killed because of their race. This was especially true for the ethnic Chinese population.

Magdalena, an apolitical teenage member of a communist-affiliated union, was innocent. Sakono, an active member of the People’s Youth and enthusiastic Marxist, was innocent. His teachers and friends, card-carrying party members all, were innocent. Agung’s father in Bali was innocent. Sumiyati and the other members of her Gerwani chapter, innocent. Sakono’s childhood friends and Magdalena’s union comrades didn’t deserve to be killed. They didn’t even deserve a small fine. They didn’t do anything wrong at all.

In addition to the crime of extermination, an International People’s Tribunal assembled later in the Netherlands found the Indonesian military guilty of a number of crimes against humanity, including torture, unjustified and long-term detainment in cruel conditions, forced labor amounting to enslavement, and systematic sexual violence. The judges found that all this was carried out for political purposes—to destroy the Communist Party and then “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime”—with the assistance of the United States, the UK, and Australia.

It wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.

The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed—disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.

US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular. In line with Frank Wisner’s early strategy of covert direct confrontation, the US government launched secret attacks and murdered civilians in 1958 in the attempt to break up the country, and failed. So American officials adopted Howard Jones’s more subtle on-the-ground insights, turning to a strategy of building deep connections with the Armed Forces and building an anticommunist military state within a state. John F. Kennedy’s active engagement with the Third World and especially its military, under the guidance of Modernization Theory, provided the structure to expand the power of this operation in Indonesia. When Washington parted ways with Jones and his strategy of working directly with Sukarno, it instructed its secret and not-so-secret agents to destabilize the country and create conflict. When the conflict came, and when the opportunity arose, the US government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible, and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. The US embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around...

And in the end, US officials got what they wanted. It was a huge victory. As historian John Roosa puts it, “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.”51 This was something for almost everyone in the US government and elite media circles to celebrate, given the thinking that was dominant at the time. James Reston, a liberal columnist at the New York Times, published a piece under the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” He noted, correctly, that “There was a great deal more contact between the anti-Communist forces in that country and at least one very high official in Washington before and during the Indonesian massacre than is generally realized… it is doubtful if the coup would have ever been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.” Reston said that the “savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under General Suharto is, of course, the most important” of a number of “hopeful political developments in Asia” that he saw as outweighing Washington’s more widely publicized setbacks in Vietnam.52

The annihilation of the world’s third-largest communist party, the fall of the founder of the Third World movement, and the rise of a fanatically anticommunist military dictatorship violently rocked Indonesia, setting off a tsunami that reached almost every corner of the globe.

When influential officials in Washington realized how decisive their victory was in Jakarta, they came to a conclusion. They could afford to lose the battle in Vietnam, because the war was already won.

However, the Soviets did not actually take any decisive international action. Relations worsened between the two countries as Suharto consolidated power, of course, and the Soviets slowly wound down aid to Indonesia and its military. But there were no fierce denunciations at the UN or threats of retaliation.11 Harsh comments made by the consul general of East Germany, to the effect that “the PKI has seriously failed in connection with the incidents of 30 September,” may indicate that privately, some major officials in the Soviet orbit believed the Indonesians had it coming.12 At least, they found justification for staying out of the way as communists were annihilated, as they often had before.

Things got even more confusing when the Indonesian embassy called them in to sign some declarations. First, they were asked to sign something condemning the murder of the six generals. They did happily. But then later, they were asked to sign a form declaring allegiance to the new Suharto government. They hesitated; this didn’t make much sense. They barely knew who this Suharto man was. This demand for allegiance split the sizable student population in Moscow.

Because they didn’t sign, they had their passports revoked and lost their citizenship—which is to say, they lost their country. The same thing happened to thousands of Indonesians around the world, all of whom became stateless, condemned to seek assistance from the place where they were stuck or wander across borders—without a passport—until they could find a government that would take them.14 They could not communicate with their families in Indonesia. They were marked as communists, and as a result were fully and truly outcasts.

In September 1965, a man named John Gordon Mein was appointed US ambassador to Guatemala. He had served as first secretary of the embassy in Indonesia before Howard Jones began his ambassadorial post, and then alongside Jones as the director of the Office of Southwest Pacific Affairs in the State Department. Soon after, Mein

requested the services of John P. Longan, a former Border Patrol officer in the US who had worked with the CIA, in Thailand and elsewhere.18 Longan had worked for the same Bangkok office that had authorized the supply of weapons to the Indonesian military during the killings.19 Soon after Longan arrived from Venezuela, he formed death squads. Within three months they carried out Operation Cleanup, or Operación Limpieza, which kidnapped, tortured, and executed thirty prominent left-wing figures in March 1966, just as Sukarno was stepping down in Indonesia. They didn’t just kill them, though—they kidnapped and then disappeared them, murdering them without informing anyone what had happened.

As Suharto consolidated control over a new regime in Indonesia, anticommunists used the coincidence of that date to make bad faith accusations that China had somehow engineered the September 30th Movement. Beijing had neither the ability nor the intention to change Indonesia’s government; instead, Chinese officials were profoundly confused as to what was happening.

Then, the image of a Chinese diplomat who was injured in an embassy attack in Jakarta became a media sensation across the country. Six hundred thousand Red Guards protested in front of Indonesia’s embassy in Beijing. As ethnic Chinese refugees fleeing the violence in Indonesia arrived in China, they joined the Indonesian students and leftists already stranded there.27 Their stories of the horrors in their homeland became iconic during the Cultural Revolution, used as potent symbols of the dangers of right-wing violence and the need to heroically resist imperialism.

In January 1966, Senator Bobby Kennedy said, “We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?” No other prominent US politician condemned the massacre.

Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.

At least one million Indonesians were still in concentration camps, comprising one of the largest populations of political detainees anywhere in the world. They were subject to starvation, forced labor, physical and psychological torture, and attempts at anticommunist re-education.32 The families of up to another million victims were reeling from the disappearance of their loved ones, without explanation and often without confirmation they were even dead. Bodies were strewn about the country.

Judging by the materials prepared after the conference, titled “To Aid in the Rebuilding of a Nation,” the meeting in Geneva was a roaring success. Under Secretary of State George Ball was there. New Foreign Minister Adam Malik, a longtime Washington favorite in Indonesia, gave a speech emphasizing the importance of the military as “the only credible political power in Indonesia.” And David Rockefeller made some very encouraging final remarks: “I have talked with a good many people over the course of the last couple days and I think I have found universal enthusiasm.”

In his 1965 book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he wrote that “neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.” According to Nkrumah, the new way of the world was that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation, rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world,” and that imperial powers no longer even had to admit what they were doing—not even to themselves.

By the end of the 1960s, it was safe to say that the Third World movement was in disarray, if not destroyed. The “Bandung Spirit” had become a ghost. The leaders of the progressive wing of the postcolonial movement were gone: Nehru had died in 1964; Sukarno was languishing in Indonesia as his allies bled out, waiting to die soon himself; Ghana’s Nkrumah and Burma’s U Nu had been deposed in military coups. Many of Iraq’s leftists were already dead, and US-backed Saddam Hussein would finish them off soon; Egypt’s Nasser had been weakened by the collapse of the United Arab Republic following a coup in Damascus, whose leaders in turn purged the Syrian Communist Party.