30 September Movement
In the early hours of 1 October 1965, a group of Indonesian National Armed Forces members, known as the Thirtieth of September Movement, assassinated six Indonesian Army generals in a failed coup. The group announced that they had taken control of media and communication outlets and had taken President Sukarno under their protection. Although the coup attempt failed in Jakarta, there was an attempt to take control of an army division and several cities in central Java. By the end of the rebellion, two more senior officers had died. The army blamed the coup attempt on the Indonesian Communist Party and initiated a campaign of mass killing, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists.
During President Suharto's "New Order" regime, the movement was referred to as "G30S/PKI" to associate it with the PKI, and propaganda called the group Gestapu. The Army quickly blamed the PKI as the masterminds of the movement, and anti-PKI demonstrations and violence broke out. The number of people killed in the violence varied from 78,000 to one million. The Army captured PKI leader Aidit on 25 November and executed him shortly after. The Army's accusations of PKI involvement were reinforced by the government and school textbooks. The trials of key conspirators were used as evidence to support this view, but it has been challenged by some Indonesian accounts. The Thirtieth of September Movement claimed to prevent a planned seizure of power by a "Council of Generals" and that they acted to save Sukarno from these officers allegedly led by Nasution and including Yani, who had planned a coup on Armed Forces Day.
Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey wrote an essay in 1971, referred to as the Cornell Paper, where they suggested that the 30 September Movement was an internal affair of the army, as claimed by the PKI. They believed that dissatisfied junior officers who faced difficulties in getting promoted and had hostility towards corrupt and decadent generals were behind the action. Anderson also argued that the coup attempt was mostly a matter of a divided military, with the PKI playing only a small role. He claimed that the right-wing generals assassinated on 1 October 1965 were the Council of Generals who planned to assassinate Sukarno and establish a military junta. Anderson further suggested that Suharto was aware of the assassination plot.
Colonel Abdul Latief, a little-known figure in the Indonesian army, played a crucial role in Anderson's theory. Latief, a Sukarno loyalist and Suharto's friend, was imprisoned after the coup attempt and accused of being a conspirator. At his military trial, Latief accused Suharto of being a co-conspirator and betraying the group for his own purposes. Suharto admitted to meeting Latief twice on 30 September 1965, but his accounts of the meetings were contradictory. Anderson believed that Suharto was being disingenuous in the first account and lied in the second.
Anderson's theory, for all the exhaustive research it has entailed, still leaves open a number of questions of interpretation. If, as Anderson believes, Suharto did have inside knowledge of the G30S plot, this still leaves open several possibilities: (1) that Suharto had truly taken part in the plot and defected; (2) that he had been acting as a spy for the Council of Generals; or (3) that he was uninterested completely in the factional struggle of G30S and Council of Generals. Given that Suharto has since died these questions are unlikely to be answered easily.
The Independent newspaper published a series of exposxs in 1997 revealing the involvement of the United Kingdom's Foreign Office and MI6 intelligence service in the unseating of Pres. Sukarno. The Foreign Office coordinated psychological operations to spread black propaganda against the PKI, Chinese Indonesians, and Sukarno to weaken the regime. These efforts were carried out from the British High Commission in Singapore, where journalists were open to manipulation due to Sukarno's refusal to allow them into the country. The BBC was one of the news agencies that filed their reports from Singapore, and they reported that Communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta, which was based on a forgery planted by a propaganda expert with the IRD. Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British ambassador in Jakarta, expressed his belief that some violence in Indonesia would be necessary for effective change. However, there is no evidence to support the claim that Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy agreed to "liquidate President Sukarno."
Sir Denis Healey, who was Secretary of State for Defence during the Indonesian war, stated in the 16 April 2000 Independent that the IRD was active during that period, but denied any involvement by MI6 or personal knowledge of the British arming the right-wing faction of the Army. However, he did say that he would have supported such a plan if it existed. In a 2006 book, historian John Roosa disputes the official version of events, arguing that it was forced and based on black propaganda and torture-induced testimonies. He notes that Suharto never explained why most of the movement's leaders were Army officers.
Roosa questions why the poorly planned movement was attributed to military officers, and suggests that a plan had already been established by certain US officials and Indonesian Army officers to blame the PKI for an attempted coup. The US then allegedly aided the Indonesian military in suppressing the PKI, including providing lists of party members and radio equipment. Roosa concludes that the movement was led by Sjam, aided by Aidit, Pono, Untung, and Latief, but not the party as a whole. He believes that Suharto knew of the movement beforehand and that the Army had already prepared for it, giving them an advantage in defeating the movement. Sjam served as a link between the PKI members and the Army officers, but the lack of proper coordination was a significant factor in the movement's failure.
