Indonesian communism's drive to power

BACKGROUND:

Indonesian

Communism’s

On Jan. 31, 1965 millions of Americans heard Indonesia’s President Sukarno declare during a television interview that he would not mind if the Communists were to take over his country “so long as they are not damaging or making trouble against (sic) the state.” Sukarno was asked, if the Communist take-over “evolved slowly without trouble, it would be all right?” “Of course, why not?” Sukarno replied. In the same interview Sukarno also went out of his way to praise Communist China because “China respects the freedom to be free.” Shortly thereafter, on Feb. g, in his annual address on the occasion of the Muslim festival of Idulfitri in Djakarta, Sukarno asserted that “The situation in South Vietnam is the result of United States intervention” and urged the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. ‘Some correspondents,” the Indonesian President continued, “asked me: ‘does the President like to have South Vietnam turned Communist by demanding U.S. withdrawal?,’ and I replied: ‘If they want the Communist system let them do so.’ ” Astute politician that he is, Sukarno has long served as the principal political weather vane of his country and his apparently “accommodationist” attitude toward a Communist take-over of Indonesia or of Vietnam closely reflects the steadily rising power of the Indonesian Communist party (Partai Komunis IndonesiaPKI) today. Claiming a membership of nearly 3,000,ooo and additional millions in labor, peasants’, youth and women’s front organizations, the PKI is not only the largest party in Indonesia but probably the largest such party outside the Communist bloc and, as will be indicated, its influence as a political force in its own right is being increasingly felt throughout Southeast Asia. PKI Grew

Swiftly

Under

Aidit

The PKI’s currently commanding position in the whole pattern of Indonesian politics is the culmination of a slow but skillful reconstruction of the Party since September 1948, when organized Indonesian Communism virtually destroyed itself by its abortive coup against the revolutionary Indonesian government then struggling for independence from the Dutch. Under the direction of new, younger and self-styled “Leninist” leaders-the Sumatran, Dipa Nusantara Aidit, soon to become secretary-general and Party chairman, was the most important-the Party soon acquired a new prominence by effecting tight organizational discipline and intense theoretical training, and by skillfully exploiting a national front policy closely geared to mounting popular frustration over adverse economic conditions, bureaucratic corruption and parliamentary incompetence. As Aidit has pointed out, the PKI during the Indonesian Revolution (1945-i 949) had had no more than 10,ooo members, but by 1954 it had grown to a little over 126,000 and, by the time of the Party’s sixth 111 2 h!hawi~ru~,

1965

congress, reached.’

Drive to Power in

1959, the

PKI Poses

As An

1.5 million

“Indonesian”

mark

had

been

Party

Above all, the Party found that its most useful tactic was to identify itself as closely as possible with the currents of revolutionary nationalism and with Indonesia’s chief official ideologist, Sukamo. Alternately leaning on, hiding behind or fronting for President Sukarno (whose own position requires a continuously dexterous balancing of frequently antagonistic power factions such as the armed services, religious-political groups, the government bureaucracy, organized labor and the entrepreneurial element), the Party has managed to appropriate to a considerable degree the symbols of Indonesian nationalism, giving them interpretations that have fitted within its own radical strategy and using them effectively to fend off attacks by its enemies, especially the army. It was typical of this PKI technique that Aidit could declare in August 1961, when the party was under sharp attack, that anti-communism in Indonesia was the equivalent of sabotaging the “Manipol” (an acronym standing for Sukamo’s “Political Manifesto,” which since 1959 has served as the official blueprint of the Indonesian state.)* But the road back from the nadir of 1948 has not always been easy for the Party, and occasionally it has made tactical errors which almost seemed to spell a new disaster. An example was the PKI’s strategy in the period lg5g-lg60, when the Indonesian government formally embarked on an intensification of its campaign of “total confrontation” to acquire Dutch-held West New Guinea. The Party, alert to every opportuni~ to retain and expand its own freedom of operations (particularly in the face of extensive army-administered martial law controls imposed over partisan political life during the West New Guinea campaign), hoped to exploit the mass mobilization and the officially induced revolutionary fervor accompanying the drive to acquire West New Guinea. Late in 1959, and through the first half of 1960, the Party embarked upon a campaign of sharp criticism of the government’s economic and foreign policies in the hope of forcing it to accede to PKI demands and so allow it to enter the cabinet. But incensed anti-PKI army commanders briefly arrested the chief Party leaders and banned the Party in a number of provinces (July-August 1g6o), while other military leaders were reportedly contemplating an even broader anti-Communist coup. ID. N. Aidit, “Pembangunan Organisasi Penting, Tapi Lebih Pen&g Legi Pembangunan Idaologi’.” Bintang Merah, VOL 15 (ig5g), p. 237, and D. N. Aidit, %?ihu?z TuZiswa (Djakarta: Bajasan Pembaruan, lg5g), vol. 1, p. a~. *Cf. D. N. Aidit, “Anti-Kom unisme adalah dalih Untuk Mansabot Ma&ml,” pp. 74-81, in Agitpmp Department, Cantral Cornr&tee, Communist Party of Indomsia, Serba-Serbi Dokwnen Partai 1961 (Djakarta: Agitprop CCPIU, 1961).

3

The storm blew over, largely through the intercession of Sukamo, who criticized both army commanders and PKI leaders, and who by March 1962 had appointed Aidit and PKI Vice-Chairman M. H. Lukman to minor cabinet posts. But, above all, the 1g5g-ig6o crisis seemed to demonstrate to the Party leadership that the tactic of capitalizing on official Indonesian policy of arousing aggressive popular fervor against some foreign objective (e.g., the West New Guinea campaign) required that the PKI largely seize the initiative in such a policy from the beginning. The Malaysia campaign, as will be indicated shortly, was to provide the Party with just that kind of opportunity. The relatively abrupt acquisition of West New Guinea by Indonesia in the middle of 1962, as a result of the great pressure exerted by the United States on the reluctant Dutch, had importantly disturbing effects on the Indonesian political scene, which in turn were to form the basis for the PKI’s present new drive to power. At one and the same time the acquisition of West New Guinea seemed to justify the government’s policy of revolutionary militancy and to destroy the basis for a continuation of such a policy in the future. With the successful end of the West New Guinea campaign, Sukamo and other Indonesian leaders were faced with the arduous and long-postponed task of economic stabilization and rationalized developmentto which the United States with the aid of an international consortium was ready to commit itself-as well as the repeal of martial law control over much of partisan political activity and even a retrenchment in the size of the armed forces. hnportant interest groups in Indonesian society, from the overblown civil service to the large Communist-influenced trade unions, however, would be seriously affected by an essentially Western-directed, disciplined economic development and reorganization effort. It is now clear that when he was confronted with this crisis, Sukamo, as always, acted as the balance wheel of Indonesian political life; with the concurrence of military leaders anxious not to debilitate their own strength through an impending demobilization program, he committed his nation, by the close of 1962, to a new West New Guinea-style campaign of foreign militancy. This time it was directed against the planned federation of Malaysia, even though Indonesian spokesmen had previously welcomed the creation of this new nation. An abortive anti-Malaysia coup in Brunei and adjacent areas, early in December 1962, provided Indonesia with a further excuse to oppose what it subsequently called the “British-made neocolonialist project” of the Malaysian Federation. PKI

Spearheads

Anti-Malaysia

Drive

In launching a new “confrontation” campaign, Sukamo handed the PKI an enormous boon. As early as December 1961, not long after Malayan premier Ttmku Abdul Rahman first publicly mooted the idea of a Malaysian federation, and well before the end of the West New Guinea campaign, the PKI had already formally expressed its opposition to the idea of the new state. This opposition was understandable since the Tunku saw a Malaysian state as essentially an anti-communist

4

bulwark in the South China Sea area, a federated unity capable of resisting the encroachments of Peking and its minions in the volatile overseas Chinese communities of the scattered territories of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah. An anti-communist state right on Indonesia’s doorstep-a state moreover, the political and economic viability of which would almost certainly aggravate the strong centrifugal political undercurrents in Indonesia as manifested in the chain of regional and anti-PKI rebellions in Sumatra and Celebes against the Djakarta central government in recent years-was hardly a welcome prospect for the Indonesian Communists. When, by the end of 1962, Indonesia officially began its anti-Malaysia campaign, the PKI could with justice point out that this time the government was following the Party’s initiative. With the subsequent build-up of the campaign according to the previously established West New Guinea “confrontation” pattern, e.g., through the creation of new mass movements, press campaign, para-military recruitment and training, and agitational and psychological pressure, the Party was placed in a position to exert decisive new leverage on foreign and domestic policy. Through the anti-Malaysia campaign, and above all through the Malaysia issue in Indonesian political life, the PKI was enabled to move as a new force into the area of international relations, particularly in relation to Indonesia’s neighbors, while at the same time the campaign assisted the Party in a major realigmnent of domestic Indonesian politics. These “foreign” and “domestic” dimensions of the PKI’s upsurge may here perhaps be considered in some detail. PKl’s

Early

Manipulations

in

Malaysian

Area

Indonesia’s official anti-Malaysia confrontation has greatly enlarged the scope and intensity of PKI meddling in Malaya’s affair. At the close of the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II, Indonesian Communists were already attempting to seize control of the new postwar Malayan nationalist movement by providing leadership to the resurgent Malayan Communist Party (MCP) . Indeed, PKI and MCP appear to have had interlocking spheres of authority, and in the early postwar years Indonesian Communists heavily infiltrated the nascent Malayan labor movement. After the defeat of the Communist-led Chinese insurgents during Malaya’s “Emergency” (lg48-ig6o), and the decision of Malayan Communists to switch to parliamentary and “open front” tactics, PKI influence in the Malayan peninsula continued to manifest itself through the radical Marxist Party Ra’ayat (“People’s Party), founded in 1955. Through the Indonesian consulate general in Singapore, activists of the Party Ra’ayat and their associates in the far-left Socialist Front in Malaya were enabled to attend conferences of the PKI and of its political satellite, the Par&do party, in Java. Via Party Ra’ayat leader Ahmad Boestamam, who repeatedly visited Indonesia, the PKI managed to guide the entire resurgent radical left in Malaya in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Aidit, for example, apparently manipulated the anti-Malaysia resolutions passed at the Malayan Socialist Front conference held in Kuala Lumpur in January 1962. Boestamam apCOMMUNIST AFFAIRS

pointed several permanent representatives in Indonesia, among them Shamsuddin Nur bin Murut. Along with other Party Aa’ayal members, he is known to have had PKI cadre training in Indonesia in 1959, and late in December 1964 he emerged as “Major General” Shamsuddin Nur of a new Indonesia-based guerrilla force in Malaya, the “National Army of Malaya.” Elsewhere in the Malaysian area the PKI spread its agitational wings. In February 1963 more than 100 leaders of the anti-Malaysia Communist front Barisan Sosialis party and its subsidiary organizations were arrested in Singapore, because, according to the charges of the Singapore government, they had been engaged in a conspiracy with the PKI to make a Communist “beachhead” out of Singapore. The continued racial restiveness and instances of terrorism in Singapore in the past year have been attributed to Indonesian agents, among them Communists. PKI branches in Indonesian West Kalimantan (Borneo) have served as havens for the disaffected, Peking-oriented young Chinese in Sarawak and Sabah who, increasingly since 1963, have waged guerrilla action against the Malaysian government, in conjunction with Indonesian military and para-military “volunteer” groups. Besides providing these Communist-led guerrillas with organizational support, the PKI has been working with the rebel remnants of the abortive anti-Malaysia coup in Brunei led by A. M. Azahari (today considered by Indonesia to be the head of the “Unitary State of North Kalimantan”). Recruitment of volunteers for Azahari’s army, the “Revolutionary Front of North Kalimantan” (Barisan Revolusi Kalimantan Utara), has been largely controlled by the PKI front Partindo. Meanwhile Party Ra’ayat representatives in Indonesia, some of whom appear to have become formally affiliated with the Partindo and PKI, took the lead, late in 1964, in setting up what was described as an “Azahari type” Malayan government in exile. Toward the close of January 1965 the Malaysian government announced the arrest of a number of prominent Malayan political leaders, among them former Socialist Front chairman Ishak bin Haji Mohammad. According to an official announcement from Kuala Lumpur, he confessed that he had been receiving “monthly contributions from Indonesia for subversive activities.“s Fusion

of

Peking-Djakarta-PKI

Interests

The PKI’s involvement in various anti-Malaysia operations, particularly in close support of the Pekingleaning element among Malaysia’s Chinese, has not only been an important factor in the generally accelerating rapprochement between Indonesia and People’s China but has also led to a situation in which the Indonesian government is in effect depending upon and working through the PKI and its policies. During Com31n the preceding two sian government’s White Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Oleh Thor Beng Chong, 3-18, 22, and Indonesian Lumpur: Public Printers, Communism’s Expansionist Joma& Spring 1965. III

2

h’hlCH-&RIL,

paragraphs I have drawn on the MalayPapers,” Indonesian Intentions Towards Di-Chetak Di-Jabatan Chetak Kerajaan A.M.N., Pencetak Kerajaan, 1964), pp.

Involvement n.d.), Role

1965

in Eastern Malaysia

p. 28, and in Southeast

Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi’s surprise visit to Djakarta on Nov. 27, 1964 (when the foundation was laid for a new &o-Indonesian political and military alliance which was completed in January by Indonesian Foreign Minister Subantio in Peking), agreement was reportedly reached to intensify the guerrilla activity of the small remnant of rebels led by Cheng Ping, veterans of the Communist insurrectionary period in Malaya, and now operating in the ifiaccessible jungle area along the Thai-Malaysian border. Additional support for Cheng Ping is apparently to be channeled through the PKI and its agents in Malaya, who have already been supplying the guerrilla group with food and arms. In response, Thai-Malaysian patrolling activity under a joint command is to be stepped up. The fusion of official Indonesian, PKI and Communist Chinese interests was perhaps even more blatantly revealed after the arrest in several places in India, early in January, of nearly 1,000 pro-Chinese members of the Indian Communist Party. In the subsequent investigation it was discovered that Indonesian Communists and diplomats, operating out of the Indonesian consulate in Calcutta, had served as paymasters and intelligence agents for the pro-Peking Indian ComThe Indonesian consulate in Calcutta was munists. abruptly closed. On Oct. 4, 1964 Jo& Lukban, director of the National Bureau of Investigation of the Philippines, charged that Indonesian Communists in the Philippines were responsible for a recent violent anti-U.S. demonstration in Manila. The Indonesian government denied that its nationals were involved, but in journalistic circles in the Philippine capital it is a widely accepted fact that Indonesians, including Communists, supplied with considerable sums of money, have been active in mobilizing the Philippine radical left and in fomenting anti-United States sentiment.’ The resurgence of the Communist Hukbalahap guerrillas in Luzon since January confirms the supposition that a new Communist offensive in the Philippines is getting under way, and that Indonesia, and in particular its Communists, as in the case of similar Communist offensives against Sarawak and Malaya, are serving as the “protected rear base area” (in the sense of Mao’s well-known guerrilla strategy) for this specific purpose. Although Manila, too, has had its difficulties with Malaysia (because of the Philippine claim on North Borneo), this has not made for a close entente with Djakarta despite earlier expectations. Manila realizes that it, too, is now within the closing jaws of the Peking-Djakarta nutcracker in Southeast Asia. Peking’s ambition to foster and lead the revolutionary national liberation movement in Southeast Asia, and indeed in the underdeveloped world generally, not only coincides with PKI policy, but with the idea of an Indonesian manifest destiny in Southeast Asia. An eventual conflict between Peking and Djakarta on this point may well become inevitable, but for the time being there appears to exist a close meshing of objectives and munist

(Kuala

on my “Indonesian Asia, Internotional

*The Sunday Press (Manila),

Times Oct.

17,

Oct. e, 1964; Philippines Free 1964; New York Times, Jan. 8 and g.

(Manila),

tactics. Over and over Aidit and other PKI leaders, particularly since 1963, have echoed the Chinese Communist line that Asia, Africa and Latin America are the focal points of world revolution. Indeed, according to Aidit, Southeast Asia being the scene of “the most acute anti-imperialist struggle,” the Indonesian Communists bear a “tremendous responsibility,” in view of “the very great importance of the Indonesian revolution in the national independence struggle in Southeast Asia today.” Repeating Sukamo’s call to his people to “live dangerously,” the PKI has fervently exhorted Indonesians to “develop the banteng (bull) spirit,” a spirit of “firmness and courage,” so that Indonesian foreign policy will be placed in the hands of those “progressives” who are “daring and once again daring,” and who are prepared to “take the road to revolution against Malaysia.” In obvious emulation of the Peking line, the PKI has denounced those who “onesidedly emphasize and give prominence to the ‘peaceful road,’ ” especially in revolutionary “storm centers” like Southeast Asia. In the PKI’s vocabulary the concept of the “revolution of Southeast Asia” has steadily acquired a new prominence since 1963, expressing the Party’s determination to assist in the elimination of all Western influence in the region, bring about closer alliances of Southeast Asian countries with Peking, in the Cambodian manner, and otherwise work toward the revolutionary transformation of existing social systems into radical egalitarian ones.6 PKI Profits

from

Sukarno’s

Revolutionary

Zeal

In this aim the PKI finds itself in essential accord with official Indonesian policy. Sukarno’s concept, first adumbrated three years ago, of a world-wide conflict between the “new emerging forces” (i.e. those new, or underdeveloped countries, whose brand of nationalism Sukarno approves of, as well as the Communist bloc) and the “old established forces” (i.e. generally the West), has provided the matrix of a foreign policy in which Subandrio and other Indonesian foreign ministry officials emphasize Indonesia’s “offensive revolutionary course” in world affairs, particularly in eliminating the vestiges of colonialism and “neo-colonialism” in Southeast Asia, and calling for “unconventional tactics” in the realization of this objective. Sukamo’s ideological mystique of a continuing revolution for his country has thus tended to be projected into a continuing world-wide revolutionary process in which Indonesia actively sides with and promotes all the “new emerging forces” and considers its own revolution to be the final and most glorious of all revolutions that have swept the world since 1789. The Indonesian Communists, needless to say, know how to capitalize fully on this revolutionary terminology to justify and lend force to their own expansionist policy demands. See

generally

ta: Pembaruan, Ma&u Term pp. 53-66; baruan,

a&

tg64),

JOY 15, @4.

6

by D.

lg63), Pantana Riba&

N. Aidit: pp. 24-40;

Lzngit Takkan Run& Kobarkan Semangat

Mundur! (Diakarta: Pembaruan Tinggi Pa&i Revoh.+ (Djakarta: esp. p. 40; Harian Rakiat (Djakarta), Jan.

(Djakar-

Banteng! 106~1.

&&I 17 and

It is, then, in this atmosphere of political chiliasm that not only has the PKI been able to expand its influence in Indonesia, and from Indonesia throughout Southeast Asia, but the Messianic Leninism of the Chinese Communists has made for important points of policy contact with the Indonesians today. Well before the anti-Malaysia campaign, the Peking-Djakarta axis was already evident in the mutual relations of the African-Asian powers in recent years, particularly in the apparent effort of Peking to use a willing Indonesia as a front for the expansion of its own influence among those powers. The relative success of the IndonesianChinese partnership in this game, which might perhaps be called “Afro-Asianism,” falls outside the scope of this analysis,” but it is clear that the Indonesian government’s dependence on and close rapport with Peking, further evident since Indonesia’s official withdrawal from the United Nations on Jan. 7, has greatly strengthened the PKI’s position. Peking’s

Ally

Need

Not

Be Moscow’s

Enemy

At the same time it is well to emphasize that the PKI officially refuses to choose sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Despite its repeated and extensive denunciations of Yugoslav revisionism,’ its ill-concealed glee over Khrushchev’s downfall, its avowed endorsement of Peking-style militancy in world affairs and its decision, communicated to Soviet Ambassador to Indonesia Mikhailov on Dec. 14, 1964, that it would not participate in the “schismatic” conference of Communist parties in Moscow scheduled for March, the Party’s formal position, reiterated since 1961, is that it hopes for a “fraternal” solution of the problem on the basis of “equality and autonomy” of all Communist parties as announced in the 1960 Moscow statement. The PKI thus stays within the framework of official Indonesian policy, for Sukarno is now evidently engaged in exploiting Soviet concern over losing to Communist China leadership in much of the underdeveloped world, especially in Southeast Asia. Indonesia has continued to remain on officially cordial terms with the Soviets, despite the U.S.S.R’s avowed opposition to Indonesia’s withdrawal from the United Nations. During the visit to Djakarta of Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan in June 1964, Indonesia was assured full Soviet support in her anti-Malaysian campaign and was promised additional arms deliveries, including Soviet military transport aircraft. Soviet economic and military aid to Indonesia, since the country’s formal beginning in 1956, now amounts to about $800,000,000 and has ranged from credits for the construction of chemical plants and steel mills (all see my “The &o-Indonesian Partnership,” Orbis, PP. 332-356. ‘Representative of Peking’s iniluence, even in Party vocabulary, was the PUS Central Committee resolution passed during ita plenary session late in December 1963, which addressed an appeal to all Marxist-Leninist parties to “smash revisionism,” by “holding aloft six banners,” i.e. (I) the bamer of Marxism-Leninism against revisionism, (2) the banner of revolution against “capitulation,” (3) the banner of “concrete peace” against “abstract peace,” (4) the banner of proletarian internationalism against “great nation egoisnq” (5) the banner of unity against “splittings and (6) the banner of revolutionary “optimism” against “pessimism.” OFor

details

vol. 8 (w64),

~MMUNISThlWRS

still to be completed) to cargo vessels, an experimental atomic reactor, major naval vessels, jet fighter aircraft, etc. Though Indonesia has been lagging badly in repayment of her Soviet loans, the U.S.S.R. has repeatedly sought to be accommodating and quite evidently is prepared to mitigate her repayment demands in order to retain Indonesian friendship. So long as the PKI continues formally to decline to take sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute, Communist polycentrism tends to serve the PKI’s image as a genuinely Zndonesian party whose aims are national and not dictated by any single “outside” nation or force. And this, in turn, allows the Party a considerable degree of tactical flexibility in adjusting itself to changing national policies. While there is no question that practically and ideologically the PKI is allied with Peking, and that it has served as a major architect of the developing Sino-Indonesian partnership, the PKI leadership is known to have its Moscow-sympathizing “doves,” like Second Deputy Chairman Njoto, whose distrust of Chinese intentions and generally more cautious approach in national front strategy have already produced repeated clashes with Aidit. PKI Promotes

Government-Approved

Acts

vs. West

Just as the Indonesian Communist Party in the past two years has been a principal-perhaps the principalforce in the radicalization of Indonesian policy toward the rest of the world, so too it has sought to radicalize domestic policy by calculated demonstrations of militancy and various forms of pressure on the government. This domestic campaign has had various interlocking facets, ranging from brief “spontaneous” riots to sustained, long-term agitational drives for the benefit of specific population groups or to further other limited Party objectives. An example of the former is the attacks on U.S. Information Service libraries and consular facilities (on Aug. 15, 1964 in Jogjakarta, Central Java; on Dec. 4, 1964 in Djakarta; on Dec. 7, 1964 in Surabaya, East Java; and on Feb. 18, 1965 in Medan, East Sumatra), which resulted in the destruction of allegedly “imperialist” books, the posting of signs reading “property of the Indonesian Republic,” and the eventual closing down and de facto take-over by the Indonesian government of the facilities involved. In every case most of the leadership attacking the USIS centers came from the Pemuda Rakjat (People’s Front), the PKI’s g,goo,ooo-member youth front, while the police and security forces arrived well after the mob had done its worst. Pronouncements by Indonesian officials expressed “understanding” of the “people’s anger” (aroused, according to the government, by U.S. policy in the Congo, or by recent U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam), and promises of compensation to the United States have been generally viewed with skepticism by informed observers. The demonstrations have not only been useful to the Party and its fronts in terms of their overall anti-American campaign, but, perhaps more important, have brought significant numbers of non-cornmunist sympathizers and fellow travelers together in joint action with the PKI and thus have in effect compelled acquiescence to Communist agitational objecI11 1

MARCH-lh%IL,

IQ65

, tives by the state security agencies. In short, the riots have served the PKI as a kind of continuous “reality testing,” a gauge of existing and potential popular fervor that can be channeled into the streets and used to cow opponents or to force the government into a steadily more radical position. A related strategy has been evident in the agrarian sphere, in connection with the steady nationalization of foreign-owned estates and the execution of land riaform measures. Despite paper regulations banning unauthorized seizures, a favorite Communist strategy, usually carried out through the PKI’s estate workers’ trade union front, Sarbupri, is to seize foreign-owned estates, then allow the government in turn to take over control from the workers and gradually impose a complete de facto nationalization on the enterprise, under which the foreign staffs, insofar as they remain at their posts, must have all their operational decisions, including transfer of capital, approved by Indonesian military or civil “supervisors” (and sometimes by “workers’ representatives”). A good example of this procedure was the seizure by Sarbupri, with the loud approval of the PKI and other fronts, of 16 British rubber, tea and coffee plantations in West Java on Jan. 18, 1964, allegedly in retaliation for British support of “neo-colonialist” Malaysia. At the time the United States was making a new effort to settle the Malaysia question, and the Communist show of force was not lost on Sukarno. In compliance with government directives the workers soon handed the estates over to newly appointed “control teams,” and a new government agency “supervising the British estates” was created by September 1964. The estate affairs ministry announced that 104 British estates in Indonesia had been placed under state control, and Agriculture Minister Sadjarwo declared on Oct. 16, 1964 that the British estates would not be returned to their former owners and that it would entirely depend on Britain’s future policies if any compensation would be paid at all. Various cabinet ministers had praised the Communist-led take-over action as “heroic” and “patriotic.” A small handful of Sarbupti leaders were subsequently tried for having technically violated the government’s ban against unauthorized seizures. Their trials provided the Party with a new forum from which to popularize its agrarian demands, and these leaders were subsequently given such light sentences as to provide a virtual vindication for the whole take-over action and encouragement for the future. Sarbupri did not wait long. On Feb. 15, the same day that some 17,000 Communist-led demonstrators in Djakarta protested U.S. policy in Vietnam, American estates in North Sumatra with a total area of 160,000 acres, valued at over $80,000,000, were seized by Sarbupn’, and the estate affairs ministry shortly thereafter announced that the management of the estates had been taken over by the government. Sukarno

Yields

Increasingly

to PKI Demands

The estate take-over campaign was and is, however, but one dimension of Indonesian Communism’s agrarian policy, the other being to press for implementation

7

and extension of the government’s land reform legislation. At a PKI Central Cotittee meeting in December 1963 Aidit charged that the government’s “basic agrarian” and “crop sharing” laws (which provide for a minimum 40% share of the crop to the tenant cultivator, for variable maxima on peasant landholdings, ranging from 5 to 20 hectares per family depending on types of land and its location, and for expropriation with compensation of excess holdings) were, in fact, a dead letter. During the greater part of 1964 the party and its peasant front, the Indonesian Peasant Organization (Bar&n Tani Indonesia-BTI) set in motion a so-called “arbitrary action campaign,” involving peasant demonstrations against allegedly “recalcitrant” landlords and “uncooperative” agricultural officials and, ultimately, “popular confiscations” of lands belonging to presumably resisting landlords. Repeated and violent clashes between Communist-led peasants and state forestry and other officials, most of them occurring in West and Central Java, ultimately compelled the government on Nov. 12, 1964 to establish new “land reform courts” and to revise local “land reform committees” to expedite land redistribution. All this in no way slackened the Communist agrarian campaign. Toward the close of 1964, intensification of cadre control over peasant organizations and rural cooperatives was accompanied by ever more militant demands for a complete “agrarian reorganization,” total expropriation of all foreign estates, establishment of “peasant councils” to regulate local agricultural production, and by the demand, voiced by BTI chairman Asmu as early as October 1964, that the 8,500,000 BTI members be armed in the event that “American imperialists dare touch and encroach on Indonesian territory.” Soon Communist front periodicals also began to demand that peasants and workers be armed in order to “defend the country against the imperialists,” as Aidit put it. At first Sukarno refused to heed the request, but on Feb. 11 he declared that, “if necessary,” he would arm peasants and workers to defend the cotmto shoulder with the regular armed try “shoulder forces.” Whether or not Sukarno will eventually make good his promise, it is plain that rising peasant radicalism, and Communist direction of it, has become one major by-product of Indonesia’s anti-Malaysia campaign.8 PKI

leads

Anti-U.S.

Campaign

Equally useful from the point of view of accelerating the domestic Communist momentum has been the campaign to boycott U.S. films. On May g, 1964 various PKI fronts, ranging from representatives of the party’s principal women’s front to its “Peace Committee,” established a “Committee to Boycott U.S. Films” as part of a broad and continuing Communist campaign against U.S. “cultural imperialism.” Threats of strikes and demonstrations soon compelled movie theatre owners 80x1 PKI agrarian policy see especially by D. N. Aidit: Kobarkan Semangat Banteng, op. cit., pp. 19-25; Kaum Tani Mengganiang Setan-Setan Desa (Djakarta: Pembaruan, 1964), esp. pp. 63-72; and Pemetjahan Masalah Ekonomi dan Ilmu Ekonomi Indonesia Dewasa Ini (Djakarta: Pembaruan, 1964), esp. pp. 19-22. See also Antara Daily News Bulletin (New York), Feb. 15, p. 1.

8

-often at considerable loss to themselvesto cancel showing of American films, and on Dec. 29, 1964 thousands of Communist-instigated youths in Pakabaru, Sumatra, burned an American film in protest against “U.S. imperialist actions in the Congo, Vietnam, Aden and North Borneo.” Meanwhile, the govenunent’s own “Film Censor Committee,” which must rule on the suitability of all films to be shown in Indonesia, began, for undisclosed reasons, to censor new American films, including U.S. Information Service films. It is perhaps noteworthy that the government film censor committee and the Communist-led film boycott committee are headed by the same person-Mrs. Utami Suryadanna, long active in PKI-inspired causes. Recently, in her capacity as head of the Party’s “Peace Committee” front, she hailed Chinese Communist Premier Chou En-lai’s call for the reorganization of the United Nations and the establishment of a “new revolutionary world body.” The new campaign against American “cultural imperialism” has also, since October 1964, resulted in the refusal of Indonesian postal workers to handle all mail, except first class letters, belonging to or destined for the U.S.I.S. and in the refusal of the government-owned “Garuda” airlines to ship as air freight U.S. Indonesian-language magazines. Sukarno

Bans

Anti-PKI

Groups

All such Communist muscle flexing did not fail to arouse opposition in various Indonesian political circles; however, the manner in which the opposition has for the moment been nullified has been indicative of the PKI’s current strength. As early as August 1964 antiPKI elements in the National Indonesian Party, in Muslim groups, in the army-supported Socialist trade union federation, and particularly in the Proletarian Party (Partai Murbah) , a small Trotskyist group not uninfluential among the older radicals of the original Indonesian revolutionary leadership, banded together on behalf of a “Body for Supporting Sukarnoism” (Badan Peladjar Sukaroism-BPS). The BPS’s creed, a vague and heavily romanticized homily about Indonesian nationalism and supposedly drawn from Sukarno’s writings, was given wide publicity in the press. More than a hundred of the country’s newspapers began to support “Sukarnoism,” and it soon was obvious that the BPS had become a rallying point for virtually all those in Indonesian political life alarmed over the PKI’s rising star. The PKI, from the beginning, attacked the BPS as an anti-Communist agency designed to “increase the division among us,” and as its own campaign gained momentum, top Indonesian leaders, like Sukarno and Subandrio, began to intimate their concern over the BPS. On Nov. 27, 1964 Communist China’s Foreign Minister Chen Yi visited Djakarta in order, as has been indicated earlier, to formalize the new political-military rapprochement between Indonesia and People’s China, and in the course of his visit reportedly demanded dissolution of the BPS and of the Park

Murbah.

On Dec. 17, 1964 Sukarno ordered the dissolution of the BPS, and on Jan. 6 he decreed the “temporary” banning of the Murbah party. It is not clear whether he did so at Chen Yi’s request or in response to the COMMUNIST

AFFAIRS

need for PKI support in the new balance of power. At about the same time chairmen of the principal IO parties, including the PKI, signed a pledge to preserve national unity on the basis of NASAKOM (an acronym standing for the unity of nationalist, religious and Communist forces) and to intensify the struggle against Malaysia. Almost at once the PKI began a campaign against the newspapers that had supported BPS, as well as against Murbah-sympathizing cabinet members, like Trade Minister Adam Malik and Deputy Premier Chaerul Saleh. The BPS and Murbah bannings incontestably show that by the beginning of 1965 any organized opposition to Communism had become impossible in Indonesia. PKI

Is

Now

Tail

That

Wags

the

Dog

This circumstance will undoubtedly put new force behind the Party’s continuing drive to obtain more seats in the cabinet. In the cabinet reshuffle of March g, 1962 Aidit and PKI vice-chairman L&man acquired minor cabinet posts, chiefly because of their positions of leadership in the national legislature. Throughout lg6263 Aidit and other PKI spokesmen redoubled their demands for the formation of a true NASAKOM (i.e. Communist coalition) cabinet, but not until the cabinet realignment of Aug. 27, 1964 did another PKI leader, Njoto, join the cabinet in a relatively important cabinet presidium post. Njoto’s earlier-mentioned tactical differences with Aidit, however, may tend to attenuate the party’s influence until additional PKI leaders enter the government. At the same time the steadily rising importance of the PKI in the total formulation of Indonesian policy became quite clear at the time when Indonesia withdrew from the United Nations and when Aidit, apparently at the request of Sukarno, conferred with diplomats from various Communist countries in Djakarta to “explain Indonesian policy.” Ideologically the PKI now seems prepared to seize the initiative. Whereas Aidit has been wont to blend his Communist concepts as much as possible with the ideological elements of Indonesian nationalism, nowadays--despite the furor it may cause in some circles -one may hear him suggest that the sacrosanct SFbols of that nationalism, like the Pantjasila (the ideological “five pillars” of the Indonesian state, invented by Sukamo, and embracing belief in Cod, nationalism, social justice, democracy and humanism), will no longer be needed if the nation is truly united; or, again, that long before Sukamo, Lenin invented the concept of NASAK0M.O To many Indonesians, particularly the more uncritical admirers of Sukamo, such views are little short of treason, but it is indicative of the party’s position in an otherwise continuously censor-ridden country that little or no action is taken any more against such PKI theorizing, however radical it may seem. In the past two years the Party has vastly extended its front organizational structure, in conjunction with such official groups as the “National Front” of all political parties, and the “National Youth Front,” which unites the principal youth organizations in the COLUI~. The irony is that these official organizations, which ‘See Aidit: Membeh Panijasila (Djakarta: and Indonesian Observer (Djakarta), Feb. 15. 111

2

hkmwhm,

1965

Pembaruan,

1g64),

were founded with the main intention of diluting Communist strength by merging Communist with nonCommunist groups, and to enable the government to exercise greater control over various Party fronts, have in many cases succumbed to superior Communist leadership and programming within them. As in the case of the anti-Malaysia campaign, so also in the matter of control over political and organizational life, it is no longer the PKI which is following or adapting to official policy but rather the other way around. Party cadre training has been greatly stepped up through the establishment of numerous new cadre schools, especially in the outer islands, beyond Java, where the Party traditionally has been weak. Recently notable success has been reported in the Party’s work among lower naval personnel, particularly in the large naval establishment in Surabaya, East Java, and in the officer corps of the air corps (whose equipment has largely been Soviet-supplied). PKI

Thrives

on

Brink-of-War

Crises

The momentum of the Malaysia campaign, the acceleration of Indonesian infiltration into Malaysia and of Indonesian naval and air “reconnaissance” sorties, and the heightened tension they are likely to produce in the domestic political temper, are almost certain to justify further the party’s intransigeant militancy and its organizational growth. One finds Sukamo stressing the identity of the Chinese and Indonesian revolutions in defeating Western “imperialism” in Asia, and Aidit emphasizing that “the Indonesian revolution is a dammed stream which can engulf the whole of Southeast Asia if Britain dares to attack it.” It is not likely that either Sukamo or Aidit seeks a total war with Britain and Malaysia, since the positions of both depend on the perpetuation of a condition of crisis just this side of a total conflagration. But it seems equally true that this condition, and the aggravated political and economic instability it has for Indonesia, in the end benefits the PKI most.-J. v. d. K.

Guest Author: Justus M. van der Kroef Justus M. van der Kroef, professor and chairman of the department of political science, University of Bridgeport, was born in Djakarta and has returned repeatedly to Southeast Asia during the postwar period for purposes of research. During 1963-64 he resided in Singapore, where he served as visiting professor at Nanyang University. He is a frequent contributor to such source periodicals as Problems of Communism, Studies on the Soviet Union, Survey, and The China Quarterly. His most recent book, published this spring by the University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, is The Communist Party of Indonesia.

Its History,

Program

and Tactics.

Dr. van der Kroef received his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University, New York. He is scheduled to spend the academic year 1965-66 at Columbia as Senior Fellow of the University’s Research Institute on Communist Affairs.

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