The true story of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people linked to the Indonesian Communist Party has remained buried since 1965. Now with the fall from power of President Soeharto, Indonesians are beginning to confront their own holocaust, writes Louise Williams.
One by one he shook the hands of his friends and tried to imagine they were leaving for a family picnic as they were escorted out by the guards to face the firing squad. And then, he was the only one left.
On death row in Jakarta's miserable, maximum security Cipinang jail, he waited, believing vehemently in his own innocence, but mentally surrendering to his fate as a pawn in the bloodiest political power play in Indonesia's modern history; in fact, one of the darkest chapters in the history of the 20th century anywhere in the world.
Former Sergeant Major Bungkus was a member of Indonesia's elite presidential guard when, on the afternoon of September 30, 1965, he attended a briefing given by his immediate superior, Lieutenant Dul Arief, at the so-called "crocodile hole", a well at the main air force base in Jakarta.
At the briefing, Bungus and other NCOs were told that seven of the nation's most senior army officers had set up a "Dewan Jenderal", or Council of Generals, and were planning to stage a coup against President Sukarno.
The men of the presidential guard were ordered to bring in the seven generals, either dead or alive. The mission was to be carried out that night. Dul Arief divided his force into seven teams, with Bungkus ordered to seize Major General M.T. Harjono, a key assistant to the Army Minister, General Achmad Yani, whose name was also on the death list.
By early the next day, seven corpses had been dumped down the crocodile hole, their bodies horribly mutilated or merely peppered with bullets, depending on what version of the story you choose to believe.
Unfortunately for Bungkus, the plan went horribly awry. The squad sent to the home of the Indonesian Defence Minister, General A.H. Nasution, botched the job. Nasution escaped. In the confusion his young adjutant was taken away.
And for reasons that remain unclear, no-one was sent to the home of General Soeharto, the commander of the Army Strategic Reserve. On a day of bloodshed and confusion, Soeharto launched a counter coup, retaking Jakarta. Bunkus and another army plotter, the left-leaning Colonel Abdul Latief, were arrested. They were tried and sentenced to death.
"I knew I was being used for someone else's agenda, but at first I didn't know who to blame," says Bungkus. "I knew I was going to die, because the trial was a simple process. My defence was very good, I was merely following orders, but there was nothing we could do because the accusation was coming from the top."
Now, 34 years later, Bungkus and Latief are the only two surviving key players in the alleged coup of 1965, a defining moment of modern Indonesian history.
In March this year, the two men were released from jail and thrown back into their forgotten villages, to live out the last days of their elderly lives in a nation they no longer recognise.
But the knowledge they carry with them may change how history is viewed in Indonesia, and raise very disturbing questions over who could have prevented the deaths of more than half a million people which followed the failed putsch.
Officially, the "coup" attempt was engineered by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Within hours of the generals' deaths, the official version runs, Soeharto was saving Indonesia from a "red threat".
The army crackdown on the PKI led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of alleged communist sympathisers. Many were lynched, mutilated and decapitated. Others were tried by kangaroo courts. By 1967, Soeharto had replaced Sukarno as president.
Doubts have arisen, however, about the official version. Latief insists that he reported the "coup plot" to Soeharto days before the killings. Why, if that were the case, did Soeharto take no action?
The answer, says Latief, is that it suited Soeharto to have the arrests go ahead. That way, rival officers were killed and the PKI was left to shoulder the blame, paving the way for the party and the entire leftist movement to be literally "cut out" of Indonesian society.
Bungkus, an NCO and thus a junior player, insists that the officers from whom he took his fateful orders were not linked to the PKI. He thinks, as do many foreign scholars, that the "coup" was an internal military power struggle, carefully engineered by Soeharto to destroy the Indonesian Left.
In the meantime, the purge of the PKI has become the subject of extensive forensic work. PKI survivors, many now well into their 70s, have been conducting a clandestine research project to document the horrors of 1965 and 1966, and to uncover the mass graves of which Indonesians fear to speak. Numerous grave sites have been identified around central and east Java, and written testimonies are being prepared.
While there is new pressure, since Soeharto's fall, to establish who was responsible for the bloodbath, many former Soeharto loyalists want the aged political prisoners silenced.
Jakarta's National Commission on Human Rights has refused, officially, to open the hornet's nest with an official investigation of 1965, probably because too many people associated with Soeharto's rise remain in power. Privately, its members are not discouraging independent research which may uncover a new version of history.
From 1984 until last year, all Indonesian TV stations had to show a "documentary" version of the 1965 coup every year, perpetuating the myth of the "evil" communists and the heroism of Soeharto as the nation's saviour. Former PKI prisoners and their families were social lepers.
This is no longer so acceptable. At a recent conference of history teachers in Jakarta, prominent historian Taufik Abdullah lamented the highly politicised official history taught in all Indonesian schools.
Bungkus is an old man, but his trim, fit frame still carries the pride of an elite military man. He was merely following orders, he says, when he and his men burst into the bedroom of Harjono. In the dark, he says, his men opened fire. When they switched on the lights the general lay slumped on the floor, mortally wounded.
"Straight after the action our whole group was arrested. I didn't understand what was going on but after we were interrogated I knew we were being accused of being rebels," he says.
The interrogation, within the terrible, damp confines of the old Dutch Cipinang prison, he says "was very tight". That is all he will say about the strenuous torture and beatings of PKI prisoners, especially the military officers.
His family believed he was dead, he says. His fears for their safety was so great that he didn't even dare try to contact them to tell them he was still alive, in case they got caught up in the bloodbath that was sweeping across Java.
"As soon as the PKI was accused of being behind the coup, we knew we would be hit," says another former political prisoner, whose association with the PKI was indirect. "I fled by bus through East Java and when we came to the town of Porong, there were two decapitated corpses, a couple, strung up in a banana tree, with a child below crying to be breastfed.
"They had the words PKI written across them in blood. No-one even dared to look directly at the bodies, no-one even dared to help the child in case they would be next."
The rural roads, he says, were swarming with men in black, armed with harvesting knives. Much of the killing was not carried out by the army. The soldiers just sat back and let the deep social divisions play themselves out. In many cases members of Ansor, the youth wing of the Nahdlatul Ulama (Muslim Scholars' League), ran the lynchings. In others landowners, angered over PKI-formented peasant uprisings, took their chance at revenge.
This man has compiled a list of mass graves. One, he gestures, lies under a housing project on the outskirts of Surabaya, a suburb haunted by the ghosts of history. Others lie deep in the plantations where locals remember the smell of rotting bodies so foul that even the dogs did not go near.
His fear, he explains, has ebbed only slightly since Soeharto's fall. In the past he wouldn't have even dared schedule the meeting, but still he is too frightened to allow us to publish his name.
Bungkus is also scared: "I have to limit myself. I have given some interviews before and you know what I said. It is up to me to correct history, or is it up to the historians?"
He will not mention the name "Soeharto", and clearly he is now scared, following threats made against former PKI prisoners in the local press following their release.
There is much misery and much happiness on death row, Bungkus laments. All his men went to court one by one, 130 in all. All the platoon commanders, including Bungkus, were sentenced to death.
"I was ready to take my turn. Many of the men were not afraid, they were soldiers, so they lived their last days just like every other day and came to shake our hands to say goodbye."
But the letter confirming Bungkus's sentence was lost, so he just waited and waited. When it was retrieved from somewhere within the bureaucracy, 17 years had passed, Indonesia was in the international spotlight, and some of the appetite for PKI executions had been blunted by the new economic miracle.
"But the sentence was still pending, so I prayed, I appealed and lost, I was told several times the sentence would be carried out. During the day I could just make handicrafts to occupy my time.
Beside him languished former Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Latief, who is now 73. "Pak Harto [Soeharto] knew for sure that on September 30, the seven generals were to be brought to Bung Karno [Sukarno]," Latief said on his release.
"The plan to arrest the generals was related to the existence of a [secret] 'Council of Generals' which was first revealed through the leaking of a British Embassy document which said the council was to supervise Sukarno's policies.
"The document, a letter from the British Ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchirst, also revealed the British were working with the CIA."
At that time the political climate was "very hot" and Sukarno was occupying a very delicate position between the armed forces and Muslims on the political right and the PKI on the left. He had launched the policy of "Konfrontasi" against Malaysia and had sent soldiers to Kalimantan to back up his threats.
The PKI supported the campaign and asked the Government for weapons to arm its worker and peasant members.
At 2am on September 29, 1965, a meeting was held at Latief's house where a group of military officers, later accused of being influenced by the PKI, decided they should take the members of the Council of Generals before Sukarno.
"I went to see Soeharto to tell him of the plan when he was at the military hospital where his son, Tommy, had just been born. He nodded," said Latief. (Tommy had actually been born earlier and had been brought in sick).
In his ghosted autobiography, Soeharto claims there was no mention of "the taking" of the generals and that Latief had come to kill him, but did not have the heart to go through with it.
"Now, I am wondering, who really did this coup?" asked Latief. "Was it me? Was it Soeharto? I reported it to him as the commander, and he took no action. I think it is clear Pak Harto used the opportunity of the arrest of the generals to blame the PKI and reach power."
Latief has not publicly commented any further and is now ill. He is frequently in hospital and is being protected from any further media requests by his family.
But why were the generals killed, instead of just being arrested? This question has not been adequately addressed.
Bungkus and his wife don't want to be photographed. But, the neighbours are all pushing up against the front porch, anyway, forever denying them the anonymity they crave.
"When Soeharto fell it was just like being blind and being able to see again, or drowning and being able to breathe, but we are still in a political transition, there are still people loyal to Soeharto," he says.
"When I came home I felt proud that I was still alive, I was so emotional seeing my family, and proud that they had coped. But, all my friends are dead, and now I don't know where I should go and what I should do," he says, his eyes watering.