APSN Banner

The silent watchers

Source
Sydney Morning Herald - July 12, 1999

Documents at the Australian Archives show the Federal Government turned a blind eye to the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians after an alleged communist coup, writes David Jenkins.

It had been nearly a year since Colonel Sarwo Edhie had returned from an 18-month course at the Australian Army Staff College at Queenscliff, Victoria. Now, on November 10, 1965, he was leading 400 soldiers on a sweep through the lushly beautiful ricefields of Central Java, at war not with a foreign enemy but with fellow Indonesians whose sympathies lay with President Sukarno and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

November 10 is Heroes' Day in Indonesia. But there were no heroes among the patrol that swept through the Boyolali district, 40 kilometres north-east of Jogjakarta, that day, led by men of the feared RPKAD (special forces) regiment, or Kopassus as it is known these days.

At 6.30am, as the soldiers approached a village at the foot of Mount Merapi, firing "test shots" into the air, between 100 and 200 people, many of them women and children, appeared at the side of the road.

The villagers, who advanced on the troops with cries of "Nekolim", meaning "Neo-colonialists and imperialists", were armed with bamboo spears, knives and "one or two guns", the Australian Embassy in Jakarta reported to Canberra nine days later, having received a first-hand account of the "action" from an Indian journalist, B.K.Tiwari, who had spent 11 days in Central Java as Sarwo Edhie's guest.

"Shots fired over their heads by the patrol failed to deter them and the army was obliged to shoot at them, killing seven and wounding 17."

This rather matter-of-fact account of a morning's slaughter in Central Java lies buried in a mountain of once-secret documents at the Australian Archives in Canberra.

It is one of many hundreds of reports which reveal that Australian diplomats were keeping the closest possible watch on developments in Indonesia after an abortive coup on September 30, 1965, and a particular eye on the ferocious anti-Communist witch-hunt being directed by Major General Soeharto, the new army commander and future president.

It also provides some of the earliest evidence that the Indonesian army was training civilian death squads, a practice to which it would return in later years, not least in East Timor. Colonel Sarwo Edhie, the embassy report noted, drawing further on the interview with Tiwari, had "spoken of the training he was giving Muslim groups (as yet no arms had been issued)". Muslim youths were acting "as the ears and eyes of the army, guiding patrols and generally informing".

Two days earlier, the embassy had noted that army-Muslim operations in the Boyolali area were progressing steadily. It added, ominously: "The behaviour of RPKAD troops has been pretty rough."

According to the embassy, it had apparently become the practice in factories and other workplaces "for the army to assemble the labour force and ask them whether they wish to continue work as usual. Those who decline are asked again and, unless they change their mind, summarily shot."

In short, Australian diplomats had a ringside seat as the Indonesian army directed one of the worst bloodbaths of the 20th century, unleashing a wave of terror against the PKI, at that time the third largest communist party in the world, with three million members.

For several months in late 1965 and early 1966, Indonesia was caught in a nightmare of killing, with the worst pogroms taking place in three densely settled provinces – Central Java, East Java and Bali.

As the Australian Embassy reported two days before Christmas 1965: "Estimates of the number of people killed vary between 100,000 and 200,000, the latter being the figure accepted by the American and West German embassies.

"The West Germans have heard that 70,000 people have been killed in East Java alone. Without having any firm basis for making an estimate we would if we had to name a figure put it at between 100,000 and 150,000. This works out at about 1,500 assassinations per day since September 30th."

Australia raised not one word of protest as the Indonesian Army and its Muslim allies went about this systematic slaughter. Canberra was, in fact, privately pleased by the turn of events in Indonesia. It welcomed the "dismantling" of the Communist Party. It was hoping that Sukarno would be unable to reassert his authority.

All of this was in keeping with the mood of the times. In 1965, the Menzies Government was deeply concerned about communist advances not just in South Vietnam, Laos and north-eastern Thailand but also in Indonesia, where an increasingly unpredictable Sukarno had courted the People's Republic of China, proclaimed a Jakarta-Phnom Penh-Beijing-Pyongyang axis, withdrawn from the UN and sent soldiers and saboteurs across the border into Malaysia.

These developments had led, during the year, to significant Australian military deployments in South-East Asia. In January, Canberra had agreed to the deployment of a combat battalion and 100-strong SAS unit to Borneo, to counter Indonesian infiltrators. In April, it had committed the first battalion of Australian infantry to South Vietnam.

In Indonesia itself there was an air of crisis and expectation in 1965, with Sukarno trying, with growing difficulty, to balance two powerful and mutually hostile institutions – the army and the communist party.

That "triangle" was damaged beyond repair on the night of September 30, 1965, when a group of left-leaning army officers kidnapped and killed six of the nation's most senior generals.

The army's surviving leaders insisted that the PKI had been behind the murders and added, falsely, that their dead colleagues had had their eyes gouged out and their genitals hacked off.

In this confrontation, Australia was pinning its hopes on Soeharto and his fellow generals, though striving in public to maintain a low profile, not wanting to give the army "the kiss of death".

Five days after the September 30 coup the Australian Ambassador in Jakarta, Mr K.C.O. "Mick" Shann, advised Canberra that it was "now or never" for the Indonesian Army to deal with the PKI.

At that time, it is true, no-one knew just how brutal the army campaign was going to be, nor in fact whether the army was even prepared to take decisive action against its opponents.

The crucial question, Shann advised Canberra, "is whether the generals will succeed in establishing their supremacy over Sukarno or whether he will re-emerge as the dominant figure ... The latest indications are that Sukarno has already persuaded the generals not to take drastic measures against the communists."

Within 10 days, there was no longer any doubt that drastic action was indeed being taken. "Almost daily," the embassy advised on October 15, "offices, houses and bookshops have been ransacked or burned and the momentum does not seem to be faltering."

A week later, the embassy reported that Indonesia was experiencing "a mounting wave of anti-communist demonstrations and sentiment and a general army-condoned, or perhaps army-inspired, blackening of the communist image."

This "cleansing operation" included "nocturnal army operations" at all levels of the society. Shann himself had seen about 250 prisoners being "whisked off" by military police. "It is impossible," the embassy said, "to make any estimate of the number of people killed or detained. It cannot be small."

None of this seemed to trouble the embassy. "He would be a very cautious man," it declared on October 22, six days after Soeharto took charge of the army, "who did not derive some encouragement from events in Indonesia over the past week."

A week after that the embassy was reporting that "on all sides and in all areas 'cleansing', 'purging' and 'freezing' [of PKI assets] proceeds apace".

A report by the Canadian Embassy, passed on to the Australians and filed away in Canberra, claimed that in certain areas in Sumatra and Sulawesi "where there are rabid Muslim religious groups all PKI members have been beheaded and for good measure [had their] heads impaled on spikes."

Australia's reluctance to utter a word of protest as this wave of terror swept Indonesia is all the more striking given the fact that none of the major Western embassies believed that the PKI had initiated the September 30 coup, a line the army was running as strongly as it could in an attempt to whip up anti-PKI sentiment.

According to the archive material, the Australian Embassy in Jakarta thought that the coup had been an internal army affair, which had attracted only last-minute backing from some PKI leaders. It was "unlikely" that the party directed the coup, the embassy reported on October 9. "It appears to have been ready to exploit a situation of which it was aware but which was not its creation."

The United States came to a similar conclusion, the archive documents show. So, too, did Britain. Whatever the origins of the coup, the Australians, Americans and British believed that events were moving in the right direction.

"Change there will be," Shann advised Canberra in a secret report on October 6, lapsing into the sometimes intemperate language that characterised his despatches. "We will never get back to the status quo ante. But if Sukarno and his greasy civilian cohorts get back into the saddle it will be a change for the worse."

By October 12 officials in Canberra were taking heart from developments in Indonesia, where the army was showing no mercy towards the Left. Arrests and murders were in full swing and mobs had ransacked the houses of PKI cabinet ministers.

In a memo to the Minister of External Affairs, Mr Paul Hasluck, a first assistant secretary in the department, Gordon Jockel, said: "Since our last note to you the army has been more vigorous and independent. Despite the president's call for unity, the army and the Muslim groups are taking strong practical action to disarm the PKI and disrupt its organisation." These trends were "favourable", Jockel said, although there were "still great uncertainties".

In a secret report on October 15, Shann complained that no attempt had been made "to rid the place of [Foreign Minister] Subandrio ... and the other snakes that infest the country".

Turning to the anti-PKI witchhunt, Shann said "at least a few 'suspects' have been brutally murdered. We will never know how many people have lost their lives. We think it is a lot."

The army, Shann thought, would no doubt be better, if less efficient, than the communists. But there was likely to be no great joy for the West if the army came to power. It would remain "implacably anti-imperialist and therefore ... anti-American, anti-British and, to the extent that we bother them much, anti-Australian."

Despite some promising developments, Shann said, "the discouraging thing is that we are dealing with such an odd, devious, contradictory mess like the Indonesian mind. They will confuse anything, including, and even deliberately and especially, themselves." By November 19, when the extent of the massacre was becoming more widely known, Shann's embassy was reporting that Indonesians were getting over their fear of the PKI. "But," it said, "the Indonesians are a dreadfully pliable lot and a little [PKI] terror could go a long way."

In the event, the PKI lay low. It was, instead, the army which orchestrated a campaign of terror. That campaign, which may have claimed 200,000 to 500,000 lives, was carried out under the direction of two men, the army commander, Soeharto, and the Defence Minister, General A.H. Nasution, who had narrowly escaped death on the night of September 30. Before long, Soeharto had sidelined both Sukarno and Nasution and assumed the presidency, ruling Indonesia for 32 years.

Only now, with Soeharto forced from office, are Indonesians beginning to ask questions about this army-backed orgy of killing.

There are questions, too, that might be asked about Australia's response to the massacres, even if that task is hampered somewhat by archive rules that block access to hundreds of pages of material compiled on developments in Indonesia in the six months after September 30, 1965.

Country