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

by Vincent Bevins

Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.

“Politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.”

“When you’re working toward a cause like this, one that’s so much bigger than you, it hardly feels like work at all.”

Java is one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of land,

The Earth may not be overpopulated but Java clearly is.

The mega-city that exists now was largely a Dutch construction, and it still feels different from the rest of Java.

Bukti: Jakarta tidak merasa bagian dari Pulau Jawa.

At least the Japanese were Asians, the thinking went. Their victory had proved whites were not invincible, and they might treat locals better than the Dutch had.

How very terribly wrong :(

Much of colonialism had relied on the logic of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Or in practice, “Do as white say, not as white do.” So while Europeans themselves were extending education to their entire populations, and their intellectuals were debating the merits of socialism and Marxism, much of this was banned in the colonies. The natives might get ideas.

Jadi kalo di masa kini kebodohan dipelihara artinya apaaa?? Betul, penjajahan.

“All those in our colony are unanimous in stating that the blacks are still children, both intellectually and morally.”

Jancoque.

By the time the Dutch withdrew, only around 5 percent of the Indonesian population of sixty-five million could read and write.11 Francisca said, “I think this was one of the worst crimes of colonialism. After three and a half centuries of Dutch occupation we were left with almost no knowledge of our own people, and our own culture.”

Instead, Indonesia picked an easy, seemingly neutral language, and most of the country learned it within a generation or two. This was a significant achievement; nearby countries in Southeast Asia still have not established truly national languages.

Yes, some parts of our nations are not yet free. That is why all of us cannot yet feel that journey’s end has been reached. No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.…

"But we'll never be truly free, until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me"

Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.

Gerwani became one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. It was organized along feminist, socialist, and nationalist lines, and focused on opposing traditional constraints put on women, promoting the education of girls and demanding space for women in the public sphere.

So Indonesian women today owe their rights and position in society to Gerwani.

defend “feminist ideals, and the rights of women to fight to destroy the shackles that bound them, and our rights to learn and to dream.”

Most crucially, planes were circling over Ambon, the home island of Francisca’s family, and dropping fiery death onto its residents. Day after day, bombs fell onto Indonesian military and commercial shipping vessels. Then, on May 15, the explosions hit a market, killing both morning shoppers and Ambonese Christians attending church.

Jancoque (2)

Throughout the course of the CIA’s history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The Agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the Agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess.

“This was the all too common weakness of Americans—to view conflict in black and white terms, a heritage, no doubt, from our Puritan ancestors. There were no grays in the world landscape. There was either good or evil, right or wrong, hero or villain.”

“We just don’t understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?”

“that we had become an imperial power ourselves.”

The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), Washington’s bête noire in Southeast Asia, was the political group that most wanted voting to continue.3 The PKI had no interest in ending elections in Indonesia for one simple reason—it was doing better and better in them.

The recent history of Latin America, the study claims, “indicates that authoritarianism is required to lead backward societies through their socio-economic revolutions.… The trend towards military authoritarianism will accelerate as developmental problems become more acute.”

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Communism was called a plague, a virus, or cancer, terms that were also hurled at communists at the time in nearby Argentina.46 More often than not, communism was associated with pure evil or witchcraft, drawn with the use of demons or Satanic beasts, such as dragons, snakes, and goats. There was often the implication, or outright depiction, of sexual perversion and deviancy.47

“For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn’t actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren’t backwards either. I had always been told, and even thought, that we were very stupid Indonesians who didn’t know what we were doing, trying to build a country without any education or resources,” she said. She was now almost forty years old. “We played our own sports, put on our own dances. This was really an awakening for us. It felt like this was what the West had been trying so hard to keep down, for centuries, and it was finally revealed.”

More than fifty years later, we still don’t have a complete understanding of who planned the Gerakan 30 September, or what the real purpose of the night raid was. What we have is a range of credible theories.

Why, some ask, would Aidit take armed or violent action against the Army when the Communist Party’s position was so well established with Sukarno in office? Aidit knew very well that the PKI’s influence was entirely based on soft power, and that the military had all the weapons. And how is it that trained military men charged with arresting their sleeping superior officers would accidentally end up killing all of them and throwing them in a well?

Then there are the entirely plausible assertions that General Suharto, the man who took over after the dust settled, planned or infiltrated the movement, perhaps with foreign assistance, to engineer his rise to power. He was, after all, close to the leaders of the rebellion. Suharto had a history of conflict with Nasution and Yani, and was the only high-ranking, openly right-leaning Army official not targeted by the movement.

After that, Suharto controlled all mass communications. He accused the PKI of shocking crimes, using deliberate and incendiary falsehoods to whip up hatred against the left across the country.

The Western press did its part too. Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Australia broadcast reports that emphasized Indonesian military propaganda points, as part of a psychological warfare campaign to demonize the PKI. These broadcasts reached inside the country in Bahasa Indonesia as well, and Indonesians remember thinking that the credibility of Suharto’s narrative was more trustworthy because they heard respected international outlets saying the same thing.64

More than three decades later, Benedict Anderson was able to prove not only that the account of the torture of the generals was false, but that Suharto knew it was all false in early October. He himself ordered an autopsy that showed all the men were shot except one, who may have been stabbed with a bayonet in a fight at his home.66

But by 1987, when Anderson’s proof was published, not much of that discovery mattered anymore. The story of a demonic communist plot to take over the country by mutilating good, God-fearing military men in the dark of night had become something like part of the national religion under the Suharto dictatorship.

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.

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.”27

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

But there, Sukarno was forced to sign a letter handing over executive power to Suharto.36 There are still controversies about this letter, the so-called Supersemar. No one has ever seen the original.

The great mystery of Supersemar

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. Sarwo Edhie, the man who ambushed Sukarno in March, once bragged that the military had killed three million people.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, people were killed for their political beliefs or for being accused of having the wrong political beliefs. 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. But the vast majority of real leftists were no more deserving of any punishment than those who were inaccurately accused of being associated with the Communist Party.

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.

But how could the international press, and the State Department, remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through the mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”54

Very cold. Not a shred of humanity can be felt.

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.

It’s believed the events of 1965–66 in Indonesia were the first time Asia suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.

But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?”

In 1966, the MIR newspaper, Punto Final, published a text attributed to philosopher Bertrand Russell. “I fear that the horror of the killings in Indonesia was only possible because in the West we are so saturated with racism that the death of Asians, even in the hundreds of thousands, doesn’t impress us.

But in the system set up in Brazil and Indonesia, the logic of survival required people to attach themselves to a corrupt, rapacious, and wasteful apparatus at the top of society or risk falling down into the abyss themselves, and become a poorly paid worker in the extraction machine.

There was no opposition allowed in Brazil or Indonesia, however, which meant that elites could get away with everything. Venality and violence ruled the day in Jakarta and Brasília. With a population too terrified to speak up, corruption exploded.

His government, along with the US-backed Mobutu regime in the Congo, would go on to set world-historical records for corruption.4 Of course, the regime that Suharto set up was founded on mass violence. And by the late 1960s, Indonesia was operating a system of US-supported concentration camps comparable to the worst years of the Soviet Union.5

The goal of Operação Jacarta was the physical elimination of communists. It called for mass murder, just as in Indonesia. Before the Jakarta Operation, the dictatorship had aimed its violence at open rebellions. Operação Jacarta was a hidden plan to expand state terror to Communist Party members operating openly with civil society groups or in the media.34

attempted to explain what the message meant. The Indonesian Communist Party had played an active role in an “independent, progressive” state, and then—overnight—all that was left of its members was a “sea of blood.”

The right-wing Marcos, re-elected under slightly suspicious circumstances in 1968, and his wife, Imelda, were close friends of California Governor Ronald Reagan, who attended the gala opening of Imelda’s lavish, multimillion-dollar Cultural Center.43

They would not see the light of day until well after a Chilean version of Plan Yakarta was indeed put into effect. Operação Jacarta. Yakarta Viene. Plan Yakarta. In both Spanish and Portuguese, in all three ways it was used, it’s clear what “Jakarta” meant, and it’s a far cry from what the word meant back in 1948, when the Truman administration was guided by the “Jakarta Axiom.” Back then, “Jakarta” stood for independent Third World development that Washington need not view as a threat. Now “Jakarta” meant something very different. It meant anticommunist mass murder. It meant the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States. It meant forced disappearances and unrepentant state terror. And it would be employed far and wide in Latin America over the next two decades.