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x-URL: http://www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo.html
From Steve Weissman, ed., with members of the Pacific Studies Center
Author's note: Much of the material appearing
in this article was gathered in numerous personal interviews
conducted between May 1968 and June 1970. The interviews were with
a broad range of past and present members of the State Department
and the Ford Foundation, faculty members at Harvard, Berkeley,
Cornell, Syracuse, and the University of Kentucky, and Indonesians
both supporting and opposing the Suharto government. Where
possible, their names appear in the text. Other information in the
article is derived from a wide reading of the available literature
on the history and politics of Indonesia. Consequently, only those
items are footnoted which directly quote or paraphrase a printed
source.
In the early sixties, Indonesia was a dirty word in the world of
capitalist development. Expropriations, confiscations and rampant
nationalism led economists and businessmen alike to fear that the
fabled riches in the Indies -- oil, rubber and tin -- were all but
lost to the fiery Sukarno and the twenty million followers of the
Peking-oriented Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
Then, in October 1965, Indonesia's generals stepped in, turned
their counterattack against an unsuccessful colonels' coup into an
anti-communist pogrom, and opened the country's vast natural
resources to exploitation by American corporations. By 1967,
Richard Nixon was describing Indonesia as "the greatest prize in
the Southeast Asian area."1 If
Vietnam has been the major postwar defeat for an expanding American
empire, this turnabout in nearby Indonesia is its greatest single
victory.
Needless to say, the Indonesian generals deserve a large share of
credit for the American success. But standing at their side and
overseeing the great give-away was an extraordinary team of
Indonesian economists, all of them educated in the United States as
part of a twenty year strategy by the world's most powerful private
aid agency, the billion-dollar Ford Foundation.
But the strategy for Indonesia began long before the Ford Foundation
turned its attention to the international scene.
Following Japan's defeat in World War II, revolutionary movements
swept Asia, from India to Korea, from China to the Philippines.
Many posed a threat to America's well-planned Pax Pacifica. But
Indonesian nationalists, despite tough resistance to the postwar
invasion by Holland in its attempt to resume rule over the Indies,
never carried their fight into a full-blown people's war. Instead,
leaders close to the West won their independence in Washington
offices and New York living rooms. By 1949 the Americans had
persuaded the Dutch to take action before the Indonesian revolution
went too far, and then to learn to live with nationalism and like
it. American diplomats helped draft an agreement that gave
Indonesians their political independence, preserved the Dutch
economic presence, and swung wide the Open Door to the new cultural
and economic influence of the United States.
Among those who handled the diplomatic maneuvers in the U.S. were
two young Indonesian aristocrats -- Soedjatmoko (many Indonesians
have only one name) and Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, an economist with
a Ph.D. from Holland. Both were members of the upper-class,
nominally socialist PSI, one of the smaller and more
Western-oriented of Indonesia's myriad political parties.
Distressed by the specter of Sukarno and the strong left wing of
the Indonesian independence forces, the American Establishment
found the bland nationalism offered by Soedjatmoko and Sumitro a
most comfortable alternative. The Marshall Plan strategy for Europe
depended on "the availability of the resources of Asia,"
Soedjatmoko told a New York audience, and he offered them an
Indonesia open to "fruitful cooperation with the
West."2 At the
Ford Foundation-funded School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington in early 1949, Sumitro explained that his kind of
socialism included "free access" to Indonesian resources and
"sufficient incentives" for foreign corporate
investment.3
When independence came later that year, Sumitro returned to
Djakarta to become minister of trade and industry (and later
minister of finance and dean of the faculty of economics at the
University of Djakarta). He defended an economic "stability" that
favored Dutch investments and, carefully eschewing radicalism, went
so far as to make an advisor of Hjalmar Schacht, economic architect
of the Third Reich.
Sumitro found his support in the PSI and their numerically stronger
"modernist" ally, the Masjumi Party, a vehicle of Indonesia's
commercial and landowning santri Moslems. But he was clearly
swimming against the tide. The Communist PKI, Sukarno's Nationalist
PNI, the Army, the orthodox Moslem NU -- everybody, in fact, but the
PSI and Masjumi -- were riding the wave of postwar nationalism. In
the 1955 national elections -- Indonesia's first and last -- the PSI
polled a minuscule fifth place. It did worse in the local balloting
of 1957, in which the Communist PKI emerged the strongest party.
Nevertheless, when Sukarno began nationalizing Dutch holdings in
1957, Sumitro joined Masjumi leaders and dissident Army commanders
in the Outer Islands Rebellion, supported briefly by the CIA. It
was spectacularly unsuccessful. From this failure in Sumatra and
the Celebes, Sumitro fled to exile and a career as government and
business consultant in Singapore. The PSI and the Masjumi were
banned.
America's Indonesian allies had colluded with an imperialist power
to overthrow a popularly elected nationalist government, headed by
a man regarded as the George Washington of his country -- and they
had lost. So ruinously were they discredited that nothing short of
a miracle could ever restore them to power.
That miracle took a decade to perform, and it came outside the
maneuvers of diplomacy, the play of party politics, even the
invasion of American troops. Those methods, in Indonesia and
elsewhere, had failed. The miracle came instead through the
hallowed halls of academe, guided by the noble hand of
philanthropy.
Education had long been an arm of statecraft, and it was Dean Rusk
who spelled out its function in the Pacific in 1952, just months
before resigning as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern
Affairs to head up the Rockefeller Foundation. "Communist
aggression" in Asia required not only that Americans be trained to
combat it there, but "we must open our training facilities for
increasing numbers of our friends from across the
Pacific."4
The Ford Foundation, under the presidency of Paul Hoffman (and
working closely with the Rockefeller Foundation), moved quickly to
apply Rusk's words to Indonesia. As head of the Marshall Plan in
Europe, Hoffman had helped to arrange Indonesian independence by
cutting off aid funds to Dutch counterinsurgency and by threatening
a total cutoff in aid to the Dutch. As the United States supplanted
the Dutch, Hoffman and Ford would work through the best American
universities -- MIT, Cornell, Berkeley, and finally Harvard -- to
remold the old Indonesian hierarchs into modern administrators,
trained to work under the new indirect rule of the Americans. In
Ford's own jargon, they would create a "modernizing elite."
"You can't have a modernizing country without a modernizing elite,"
explains the deputy vice-president of Ford's international
division, Frank Sutton. "That's one of the reasons we've given a
lot of attention to university education." Sutton adds that there's
no better place to find such an elite than among "those who stand
somewhere in social structures where prestige, leadership, and
vested interests matter, as they always do."
Ford launched its effort to make Indonesia a "modernizing country"
in 1954 with field projects from MIT and Cornell. The scholars
produced by these two projects -- one in economics, the other in
political development -- have effectively dominated the field of
Indonesian studies in the United States ever since. Compared to
what they eventually produced in Indonesia, however, this was a
fairly modest achievement. Working through the Center for
International Studies (the CIA-sponsored brainchild of Max
Millikan and Walt W. Rostow), Ford sent out a team from MIT to
discover "the causes of economic stagnation in Indonesia." An
interesting example of the effort was Guy Pauker's study of
"political obstacles" to economic development, obstacles such as
armed insurgency.
In the course of his field work, Pauker got to know the
high-ranking officers of the Indonesian Army rather well. He found
them "much more impressive" than the politicians. "I was the first
who got interested in the role of the military in economic
development," Pauker says. He also got to know most of the key
civilians: "With the exception of a very small group," they
were "almost totally oblivious" of what Pauker called modern
development. Not surprisingly, the "very small group" was composed
of PSI aristocrat-intellectuals, particularly Sumitro and his
students.
Sumitro, in fact, had participated in the MIT team's briefings
before they left Cambridge. Some of his students were also known
by the MIT team, having attended a CIA-funded summer seminar run at
Harvard each year by Henry Kissinger. One of the students was
Mohammed Sadli, son of a well-to-do santri trader, with whom
Pauker became good friends. In Djakarta, Pauker struck up
friendships with the PSI clan and formed a political study group
among whose members were the head of Indonesia's National Planning
Bureau, Ali Budiardjo, and his wife Miriam, Soedjatmoko's sister.
Rumanian by birth, Pauker had helped found a group called "Friends
of the United States" in Bucharest just after the Second World War.
He then came to Harvard, where he got his degree. While many
Indonesians have charged the professor with having CIA connections,
Pauker denies that he was intimate with the CIA until 1958, after
he joined the RAND Corporation. Since then, it is no secret that he
briefs and is briefed by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State
Department. Highly placed Washington sources say he is "directly
involved in decision-making."
In 1954 -- after the MIT team was in the field -- Ford grubstaked a
Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell. With an initial $224,000 and
periodic replenishments, program chairman George Kahin built the
social science wing of the Indonesian studies establishment in the
United States. Even Indonesian universities must use Cornell's
elite-oriented studies to teach post-Independence politics and
history.
Among the several Indonesians brought to Cornell on Ford and
Rockefeller grants, perhaps the most influential is
sociologist-politician Selosoemardjan. Right-hand man to the
Sultan of Jogjakarta, Selosoemardjan is one of the strong-men of
the present Indonesian regime.
Kahin's political science group worked closely with Sumitro's
Faculty of Economics in Djakarta. "Most of the people at the
university came from essentially bourgeois or bureaucratic
families," recalls Kahin. "They knew precious little of their
society." In a "victory" which speaks poignantly of the illusions
of well-meaning liberals, Kahin succeeded in prodding them to "get
their feet dirty" for three months in a village. Many would spend
four years in the United States.
Together with Widjojo Nitisastro, Sumitro's leading
protégé, Kahin set up an institute to publish the village
studies. It has never amounted to much, except that its American
advisors helped Ford maintain its contact in the most difficult of
the Sukarno days.
Kahin still thinks Cornell's affair with Ford in Indonesia "was a
fairly happy marriage" -- less for the funding than for the
political cover it afforded. "AID funds are relatively easy to
get," he explains. "But certainly in Indonesia, anybody working on
political problems with [U.S.] government money during this period
would have found their problem much more difficult."
One of the leading academic Vietnam doves, Kahin has irritated the
State Department on occasion, and many of his students are far more
radical than he. Yet for most Indonesians, Kahin's work was really
not much different from Pauker's. One man went on to teach-ins, the
other to RAND and the CIA. But the consequences of their
nation-building efforts in Indonesia were much the same.
MIT and Cornell made contacts, collected data, built up expertise.
It was left to Berkeley to actually train most of the key
Indonesians who would seize government power and put their
pro-American lessons into practice. Dean Sumitro's Faculty of
Economics provided a perfect academic boot camp for these economic
shock troops.
To oversee the project, Ford President Paul Hoffman tapped Michael
Harris, a one-time CIO organizer who had headed Marshall Plan
programs under Hoffman in France, Sweden, and Germany. Harris had
been on a Marshall Plan survey in Indonesia in 1951, knew Sumitro,
and before going out was extensively briefed by Sumitro's New York
promoter, Robert Delson, a Park Avenue attorney who had been
Indonesia's legal counsel in the United States since 1949. Harris
reached Djakarta in 1955 and set out to build Dean Sumitro a broad
new Ford-funded graduate program in economics.
This time the professional touch and academic respectability were
to be provided by Berkeley. The Berkeley team's first task was to
replace the Dutch professors, whose colonial influence and
capitalist economics Sukarno was trying to phase out. The Berkeley
team would also relieve Sumitro's Indonesian junior faculty so that
Ford could send them back to Berkeley for advanced credentials.
Sadli was already there, sharing a duplex with Pauker, who had come
to head the new Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies.
Sumitro's protégé Widjojo led the first crew out to
Berkeley.
While the Indonesian junior faculty studied American economics in
Berkeley classrooms, the Berkeley professors turned the Faculty in
Djakarta into an American-style school of economics, statistics,
and business administration.
Sukarno objected. At an annual lecture to the Faculty, team member
Bruce Glassburner recalls, Sukarno complained that "all those men
can say to me is 'Schumpeter and Keynes.' When I was young I read
Marx." Sukarno might grumble and complain, but if he wanted any
education at all he would have to take what he got. "When Sukarno
threatened to put an end to Western economics," says John Howard,
long-time director of Ford's International Training and Research
Program, "Ford threatened to cut off all programs, and that changed
Sukarno's direction."
The Berkeley staff also joined in the effort to keep Sukarno's
socialism and Indonesian national policy at bay. "We got a lot of
pressure through 1958-1959 for 'retooling' the curriculum,"
Glassburner recalls. "We did some dummying-up, you know -- we put
'socialism' into as many course titles as we could -- but really
tried to preserve the academic integrity of the place."
The project, which cost Ford $2.5 million, had a clear, and some
times stated, purpose. "Ford felt it was training the guys who
would be leading the country when Sukarno got out," explains John
Howard.
There was little chance, of course, that Sumitro's minuscule PSI
would outdistance Sukarno at the polls. But "Sumitro felt the PSI
group could have influence far out of proportion to their voting
strength by putting men in key positions in government," recalls
the first project chairman, a feisty Irish business professor named
Len Doyle.
When Sumitro went into exile, his Faculty carried on. His students
visited him surreptitiously on their way to and from the United
States. Powerful Americans like Harry Goldberg, a lieutenant of
labor boss Jay Lovestone (head of the CIO's international program),
kept in close contact and saw that Sumitro's messages got through
to his Indonesian friends. No dean was appointed to replace him; he
was the "chairman in absentia."
All of the unacademic intrigue caused hardly a ripple of disquiet
among the scrupulous professors. A notable exception was Doyle. "I
feel that much of the trouble that I had probably stemmed from the
fact that I was not as convinced of Sumitro's position as the Ford
Foundation representative was, and, in retrospect, probably the CIA,"
recalls Doyle.
Harris tried to get Doyle to hire "two or three Americans who were
close to Sumitro." One was an old friend of Sumitro's from the MIT
team, William Hollinger. Doyle refused. "It was clear that Sumitro
was going to continue to run the Faculty from Singapore," he says.
But it was a game he wouldn't play. "I felt that the University
should not be involved in what essentially was becoming a rebellion
against the government," Doyle explains, "whatever sympathy you
might have with the rebel cause and the rebel objectives."
Back home, Doyle's lonely defense of academic integrity against the
political pressures exerted through Ford was not appreciated.
Though he had been sent there for two years, Berkeley recalled him
after one. "He tried to run things," University officials say
politely. "We had no choice but to ship him home." In fact, Harris
had him bounced. "In my judgment," Harris recalls, "there was a
real problem between Doyle and the Faculty."
One of the younger men who stayed on after Doyle was Ralph Anspach,
a Berkeley team member now teaching college in San Francisco.
Anspach got so fed up with what he saw in Djakarta that he will no
longer work in applied economics. "I had the feeling that in the
last analysis I was supposed to be a part of this American policy
of empire," he says, "bringing in American science, and attitudes,
and culture ... winning over countries -- doing this with an awful
lot of cocktails and high pay. I just got out of the whole thing."
Doyle and Anspach were the exceptions. Most of the academic
professionals found the project -- as Ford meant it to be -- the
beginning of a career."This was a tremendous break for me,"
explains Bruce Glassburner, project chairman from 1958 to 1961.
"Those three years over there gave me an opportunity to become a
certain kind of economist. I had a category -- I became a
development economist -- and I got to know Indonesia. This made a
tremendous difference in my career."
Berkeley phased its people out of Djakarta in 1961-62. The constant
battle between the Ford representative and the Berkeley chairman as
to who would run the project had some part in hastening its end.
But more important, the professors were no longer necessary, and
were probably an increasing political liability. Sumitro's first
string had returned with their degrees and resumed control of the
school.
The Berkeley team had done its job. "Kept the thing alive,"
Glassburner recalls proudly. "We plugged a hole ... and with the
Ford Foundation's money we trained them forty or so economists."
What did the University get out of it? "Well, some overhead money,
you know." And the satisfaction of a job well done.
In 1959 Pauker set out the lessons of the PSI's electoral isolation
and Sumitro's abortive Outer Islands Rebellion in a widely read
paper entitled "Southeast Asia as a Trouble Area in the Next
Decade." Parties like the PSI were "unfit for vigorous competition"
with communism, he wrote. "Communism is bound to win in Southeast
Asia ... unless effective countervailing power is found." The "best
equipped" countervailing forces, he wrote, were "members of the
national officer corps as individuals and the national armies
as organizational structures.5
From his exile in Singapore, Sumitro concurred, arguing that his
PSI and the Masjumi party, which the Army had attacked, were really
the Army's "natural allies." Without them, the Army would find
itself politically isolated, he said. But to consummate their
alliance "the Sukarno regime must be toppled first." Until then,
Sumitro warned, the generals should keep "a close and continuous
watch" on the growing and powerful Communist peasant organizations.
Meanwhile, Sumitro's Ford-scholar protégés in Djakarta
began the necessary steps toward a rapprochement.
Fortunately for Ford and its academic image there was yet another
school at hand: SESKOAD, the Army Staff and Command School.
Situated seventy miles southeast of Djakarta in cosmopolitan
Bandung, SESKOAD was the Army's nerve center. There, generals
decided organizational and political matters; there, senior
officers on regular rotation were "upgraded" with manuals and
methods picked up during training in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
When the Berkeley team phased itself out in 1962, Sadli, Widjojo
and others from the Faculty began regular trips to Bandung to teach
at SESKOAD. They taught "economic aspects of defense," says Ford's
Frank Miller, who replaced Harris in Djakarta. Pauker tells a
different story. Since the mid-'50s, he had come to know the Army
General staff rather well, he explains, first on the MIT team, then
on trips for RAND. One good friend was Colonel Suwarto (not to be
confused with General Suharto), the deputy commander of SESKOAD
and a 1959 Fort Leavenworth graduate. In 1962, Pauker brought
Suwarto to RAND.
Besides learning "all sorts of things about international affairs"
while at RAND, Pauker says, Suwarto also saw how RAND "organizes
the academic resources of the country as consultants." According
to Pauker, Suwarto had "a new idea" when he returned to Bandung.
"The four or five top economists became 'cleared' social scientists
lecturing and studying the future political problems of Indonesia
in SESKOAD."
In effect, this group became the Army's high-level civilian
advisors. They were joined at SESKOAD by other PSI and Masjumi
alumni of the university programs -- Miriam Budiardjo from Pauker's
MIT study group, and Selosoemardjan from Kahin's program at
Cornell, as well as senior faculty from the nearby Bundung
Institute of Technology, where the University of Kentucky had been
"institution-building" for AID since 1957.
The economists were quickly caught up in the anti-communist
conspiracy directed at toppling the Sukarno regime and encouraged
by Sumitro from his Singapore exile. Lieutenant General Achmad
Yani, Army commander-in-chief, had drawn around him a "brain trust"
of generals. It was an "open secret," says Pauker, that Yani and
his brain trust were discussing "contingency plans" which were to
"prevent chaos should Sukarno die suddenly." The contribution of
Suwarto's mini-RAND, according to Colonel Willis G. Ethel, U.S.
defense attaché in Djakarta and a close confidant of
Commander-in-Chief Yani and others of the Army high command, was
that the professors "would run a course in this contingency
planning."
Of course, the Army planners were worried about "preventing chaos."
They were worried about the PKI. "They weren't about to let the
Communists take over the country," Ethel says. They also knew that
there was immense popular support for Sukarno and the PKI and that
a great deal of blood would flow when the showdown came.
Other institutions joined the Ford economists in preparing the
military. High-ranking Indonesian officers had begun U.S. training
programs in the mid-'50s. By 1965 some four thousand officers had
learned big-scale army command at Fort Leavenworth and
counterinsurgency at Fort Bragg. Beginning in 1962, hundreds of
visiting officers at Harvard and Syracuse gained the skills for
maintaining a huge economic, as well as military, establishment,
with training in everything from business administration and
personnel management to air photography and
shipping.6 AID's "Public Safety
Program" in the Philippines and Malaya trained and equipped the
Mobile Brigades of the Indonesian military's fourth arm, the
police.
While the Army developed expertise and perspective -- courtesy of
the generous American aid program -- it also increased its political
and economic influence. Under the martial law declared by Sukarno
at the time of the Outer Islands Rebellion, the Army had become the
predominant power in Indonesia. Regional commanders took over
provincial governments -- depriving the Communist PKI of its
plurality victories in the 1957 local elections. Fearful of a PKI
sweep in the planned 1959 national elections, the generals prevailed
on Sukarno to cancel elections for six years. Then they moved
quickly into the upper reaches of Sukarno's new "guided democracy,"
increasing the number of ministries under their control right up to
the time of the coup. Puzzled by the Army's reluctance to take
complete power, journalists called it a "creeping coup
d'état."7
The Army also moved into the economy, first taking "supervisory
control," then key directorships of the Dutch properties that the
PKI unionists had seized "for the people" during the confrontation
over West Irian in late 1957. As a result, the generals controlled
plantations, small industry, state-owned oil and tin, and the
state-run export-import companies, which by 1965 monopolized
government purchasing and had branched out into sugar milling,
shipping, and distribution.
Those high-ranking officers not born into the Indonesian aristocracy
quickly married in, and in the countryside they cemented alliances
-- often through family ties -- with the santri Moslem
landowners who were the backbone of the Masjumi Party. "The Army
and the civil police," wrote Robert Shaplen of the New York
Times, "virtually controlled the whole state apparatus."
American University's Willard Hanna called it "a new form of
government -- military-private
enterprise."8 Consequently,
"economic aspects of defense" became a wide-ranging subject at
SESKOAD. But Ford's Indonesian economists made it broader yet by
undertaking to prepare economic policy for the post-Sukarno period
there, too.
During this period, the Communists were betwixt and between.
Deprived of their victory at the polls and unwilling to break with
Sukarno, they tried to make the best of his "guided democracy,"
participating with the Army in coalition cabinets. Pauker has
described the PKI strategy as "attempting to keep the parliamentary
road open," while seeking to come to power by "acclamation." That
meant building up PKI prestige as "the only solid, purposeful,
disciplined, well-organized, capable political force in the
country," to which Indonesians would turn "when all other possible
solutions have failed."9
At least in numbers, the PKI policy was a success. The major labor
federation was Communist, as was the largest farmers' organization
and the leading women's and youth groups. By 1963, three million
Indonesians, most of them in heavily populated Java, were members
of the PKI, and an estimated seventeen million were members of its
associated organizations -- making it the world's largest Communist
Party outside Russia and China. At Independence the party had
numbered only eight thousand.
In December 1963, PKI Chairman D.N. Aidit gave official sanction to
"unilateral action" which had been undertaken by the peasants to
put into effect a land-reform and crop-sharing law already on the
books. Though landlords' holdings were not large, less than half
the Indonesian farmers owned the land they worked, and of these
most had less than an acre. As the peasants' "unilateral action"
gathered momentum, Sukarno, seeing his coalition endangered, tried
to check its force by establishing "land-reform courts" which
included peasant representatives. But in the countryside, police
continued to clash with peasants and made mass arrests. In some
areas, santri youth groups began murderous attacks on peasants.
Since the Army held state power in most areas, the peasants'
"unilateral action" was directed against its authority. Pauker
calls it "class struggle in the countryside" and suggests that the
PKI had put itself "on a collision course with the
Army."10 But unlike Mao's Communists
in pre-revolutionary China, the PKI had no Red Army. Having chosen
the parliamentary road, the PKI was stuck with it. In early 1965,
PKI leaders demanded that the Sukarno government (in which they
were cabinet ministers) create a people's militia -- five million
armed workers, ten million armed peasants. But Sukarno's power
was hollow. The Army had become a state within a state. It was
they -- and not Sukarno or the PKI -- who held the
guns.11
The proof came in September 1965. On the night of the 30th, troops
under the command of dissident lower-level Army officers, in
alliance with officers of the small Indonesian Air Force,
assassinated General Yani and five members of his SESKOAD "brain
trust." Led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung, the rebels seized the
Djakarta radio station and next morning broadcast a statement that
their September 30th Movement was directed against the "Council of
Generals," which they announced was CIA-sponsored and had itself
planned a coup d'état for Armed Forces Day, four days later.
Untung's preventive coup quickly collapsed. Sukarno, hoping to
restore the pre-coup balance of forces, gave it no support. The PKI
prepared no street demonstrations, no strikes, no coordinated
uprisings in the countryside. The dissidents themselves missed
assassinating General Nasution and apparently left General Suharto
off their list. Suharto rallied the elite paracommandos and units
of West Java's Siliwangi division against Untung's colonels.
Untung's troops, unsure of themselves, their mission, and their
loyalties, made no stand. It was all over in a day.
The Army high command quickly blamed the Communists for the coup, a
line the Western press has followed ever since. Yet the utter lack
of activity in the streets and the countryside makes PKI
involvement unlikely, and many Indonesia specialists believe, with
Dutch scholar W.F. Wertheim, that "the Untung coup was what its
leader ... claimed it to be -- an internal army affair reflecting
serious tensions between officers of the Central Java Diponegoro
Division, and the Supreme Command of the Army in
Djakarta...."12
Leftists, on the other hand, later assumed that the CIA had had a
heavy hand in the affair. Embassy officials had long wined and
dined the student apparatchiks who rose to lead the
demonstrations that brought Sukarno down. The CIA was close with
the Army, especially with Intelligence Chief Achmed Sukendro, who
retained his agents after 1958 with U.S. help and then studied at
the University of Pittsburgh in the early sixties. But Sukendro and
most other members of the Indonesian high command were equally
close to the embassy's military attachés, who seem to have
made Washington's chief contacts with the Army both before and
after the attempted coup. All in all, considering the make-up and
history of the generals and their "modernist" allies and advisors,
it is clear that at this point neither the CIA nor the Pentagon
needed to play any more than a subordinate role.
The Indonesian professors may have helped lay out the Army's
"contingency" plans, but no one was going to ask them to take to
the streets and make the "revolution." That they could leave to
their students. Lacking a mass organization, the Army depended on
the students to give authenticity and "popular" leadership in the
events that followed. It was the students who demanded -- and
finally got -- Sukarno's head; and it was the students -- as
propagandists -- who carried the cry of jihad (religious
war) to the villages.
In late October, Brigadier General Sjarif Thajeb -- the
Harvard-trained minister of higher education (and now ambassador to
the United States) -- brought student leaders together in his living
room to create the Indonesian Student Action Command
(KAMI).13 Many of the KAMI leaders
were the older student apparatchiks who had been courted by
the U.S. embassy. Some had traveled to the United States as
American Field Service exchange students, or on year-long jaunts in
a "Foreign Student Leadership Project" sponsored by the U.S
National Student Association in its CIA-fed salad years.
Only months before the coup, U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green had
arrived in Djakarta, bringing with him the reputation of having
masterminded the student overthrow of Syngman Rhee in Korea and
sparking rumors that his purpose in Djakarta was to do the same
there. Old manuals on student organizing in both Korean and
English were supplied by the embassy to KAMI's top leadership soon
after the coup.
But KAMI's most militant leadership came from Bandung, where the
University of Kentucky had mounted a ten-year
"institution-building" program at the Bandung Institute of
Technology, sending nearly five hundred of their students to the
United States for training. Students in all of Indonesia's elite
universities had been given paramilitary training by the Army in a
program for a time advised by an ROTC colonel on leave from
Berkeley. Their training was "in anticipation of a Communist
attempt to seize the government," writes Harsja Bachtiar, an
Indonesian sociologist and an alumnus of Cornell and
Harvard.14
In Bandung, headquarters of the aristocratic Siliwangi division,
student paramilitary training was beefed up in the months preceding
the coup, and santri student leaders were boasting to their
American friends that they were developing organizational contacts
with extremist Moslem youth groups in the villages. It was these
groups that spearheaded the massacres of PKI followers and peasants.
At the funeral of General Nasution's daughter, mistakenly slain in
the Untung coup, Navy chief Eddy Martadinata told santri
student leaders to "sweep." The message was "that they could go out
and clean up the Communists without any hindrance from the
military, wrote Christian Science Monitor Asian
correspondent John Hughes. With relish they called out their
followers, stuck their knives and pistols in their waistbands,
swung their clubs over their shoulders, and embarked on the
assignment for which they had long been
hoping."15 Their first move was to
burn PKI headquarters. Then, thousands of PKI and Sukarno
supporters were arrested and imprisoned in Djakarta; cabinet
members and parliamentarians were permanently "suspended"; and a
purge of the ministries was begun.
The following month, on October 17, 1965, Colonel Sarwo Edhy took
his elite paratroops (the "Red Berets") into the PKI's Central Java
stronghold in the Bojolali-Klaten-Solo triangle. His assignment,
according to Hughes, was "the extermination, by whatever means
might be necessary, of the core of the Communist Party there." He
found he had too few troops. "We decided to encourage the
anti-communist civilians to help with the job," the Colonel told
Hughes. "In Solo we gathered together the youth, the nationalist
groups, the religious Moslem organizations. We gave them two or
three days' training, then sent them out to kill
Communists."16
The Bandung engineering students, who had learned from the Kentucky
AID team how to build and operate radio transmitters, were tapped
by Colonel Edhy's elite corps to set up a multitude of small
broadcasting units throughout strongly PKI East and Central Java,
some of which exhorted local fanatics to rise up against the
Communists in jihad. The U.S. embassy provided necessary spare
parts for these radios.
Time magazine describes what followed:
Graduate students from Bandung and Djakarta, dragooned by the Army,
researched the number dead. Their report, never made public, but
leaked to correspondent Frank Palmos, estimated one million
victims. In the PKI "triangle stronghold" of Bojolali, Klaten, and
Solo, Palmos said they reported, "nearly one-third of the
population is dead or missing."18
Most observers think their estimate high, putting the death toll at
three to five hundred thousand.
The KAMI students also played a part -- bringing life in Djakarta
to a standstill with anti-communist, anti-Sukarno demonstrations
whenever necessary. By January, Colonel Edhy was back in Djakarta
addressing KAMI rallies, his elite corps providing KAMI with
trucks, loudspeakers, and protection. KAMI demonstrators could tie
up the city at will.
"The ideas that Communism was public enemy number one, that
Communist China was no longer a close friend but a menace to the
security of the state, and that there was corruption and
inefficiency in the upper levels of the national government were
introduced on the streets of Djakarta," writes
Bachtiar.19
The old PSI and Masjumi leaders nurtured by Ford and its professors
were home at last. They gave the students advice and money, while
the PSI-oriented professors maintained "close advisory
relationships" with the students, later forming their own
Indonesian Scholars Action Command (KASI). One of the economists,
Emil Salim, who had recently returned with a Ph.D. from Berkeley,
was counted among the KAMI leadership. Salim's father had purged
the Communist wing of the major prewar nationalist organization,
and then served in the pre-Independence Masjumi cabinets.
In January the economists made headlines in Djakarta with a
week-long economic and financial seminar at the Faculty. It was
"principally ... a demonstration of solidarity among the members of
KAMI, the anti-Communist intellectuals, and the leadership of the
Army," Bachtiar says. The seminar heard papers from General
Nasution, Adam Malik, and others who "presented themselves as a
counter-elite challenging the competence and legitimacy of the
elite led by President Sukarno."20
It was Djakarta's post-coup introduction to Ford's economic policies.
In March Suharto stripped Sukarno of formal power and had himself
named acting president, tapping old political warhorse Adam Malik
and the Sultan of Jogjakarta to join him in a ruling triumvirate.
The generals whom the economists had known best at SESKOAD -- Yani
and his brain trust -- had all been killed. But with the help of
Kahin's protégé, Selosoemardjan, they first caught the
Sultan's and then Suharto's ear, persuading them that the Americans
would demand a strong attack on inflation and a swift return to a
"market economy." On April 12, the Sultan issued a major policy
statement outlining the economic program of the new regime -- in
effect announcing Indonesia's return to the imperialist fold. It
was written by Widjojo and Sadli.
In working out the subsequent details of the Sultan's program, the
economists got aid from the expected source -- the United States.
When Widjojo got stuck in drawing up a stabilization plan, AID
brought in Harvard economist Dave Cole, fresh from writing South
Korea's banking regulations, to provide him with a draft. Sadli,
too, required some post-doctoral tutoring. According to an American
official, Sadli "really didn't know how to write an investment law.
He had to have a lot of help from the embassy." It was a team
effort. "We were all working together at the time -- the
'economists,' the American economists, AID," recalls Calvin Cowles,
the first AID man on the scene.
By early September the economists had their plans drafted and the
generals convinced of their usefulness. After a series of crash
seminars at SESKOAD, Suharto named the Faculty's five top men his
Team of Experts for Economic and Financial Affairs, an idea for
which Ford man Frank Miller claims credit.
In August the Stanford Research Institute -- a spinoff of the
university-military-industrial complex -- brought 170 "senior
executives" to Djakarta for a three-day parley and look-see. "The
Indonesians have cut out the cancer that was destroying their
economy," an SRI executive later reported approvingly. Then, urging
that big business invest heavily in Suharto's future, he warned
that "military solutions are infinitely more
costly."21
In November, Malik, Sadli, Salim, Selosoemardjan, and the Sultan
met in Geneva with a select list of American and European
businessmen flown in by Time-Life. Surrounded by his economic
advisors, the Sultan ticked off the selling points of the New
Indonesia -- "political stability ... abundance of cheap labor ...
vast potential market ... treasurehouse of resources." The
universities, he added, have produced a "large number of trained
individuals who will be happy to serve in new economic
enterprises."
David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, thanked
Time-Life for the chance to get acquainted with "Indonesia's top
economic team." He was impressed, he said, by their "high quality
of education."
"To some extent, we are witnessing the return of the pragmatic
outlook which was characteristic of the PSI-Masjumi coalition of
the early fifties when Sumitro ... dominated the
scene,"22 observed a well-placed
insider in 1966. Sumitro slipped quietly into Djakarta, opened a
business consultancy, and prepared himself for high office. In
June 1968 Suharto organized an impromptu reunion for the class of
Ford -- a "development cabinet." As minister of trade and commerce
he appointed Dean Sumitro (Ph.D., Rotterdam); as chairman of the
National Planning Board he appointed Widjojo (Ph.D., Berkeley,
1961); as vice-chairman, Emil Salim (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1964); as
secretary general of Marketing and Trade Research, Subroto
(Harvard, 1964); as minister of finance, Ali Wardhana (Ph.D.,
Berkeley, 1962); as chairman of the Technical Team of Foreign
Investment, Mohamed Sadli (M.S., MIT, 1956); as secretary general
of Industry, Barli Halim (M.B.A., Berkeley, 1959). Soedjatmoko, who
had been functioning as Malik's advisor, became ambassador in
Washington.
"We consider that we were training ourselves for this," Sadli told a
reporter from Fortune -- "a historic opportunity to fix the
course of events."23
Since 1954, Harvard's Development Advisory Service (DAS), the
Ford-funded elite corps of international modernizers, has brought
Ford influence to the national planning agencies of Pakistan,
Greece, Argentina, Liberia, Colombia, Malaysia, and Ghana. In
1963, when the Indonesian economists were apprehensive that Sukarno
might try to remove them from their Faculty, Ford asked Harvard to
step into the breach. Ford funds would breathe new life into an old
research institute, in which Harvard's presence would provide a
protective academic aura for Sumitro's scholars.
The DAS was skeptical at first, says director Gus Papanek. But the
prospect of future rewards was great. Harvard would get acquainted
with the economists, and in the event of Sukarno's fall, the DAS
would have established "an excellent base" from which to plan
Indonesia's future.
"We could not have drawn up a more ideal scenario than what
happened," Papanek says. "All of those people simply moved into the
government and took over the management of economic affairs, and
then they asked us to continue working with them."
Officially the Harvard DAS-Indonesia project resumed on July 1,
1968, but Papanek had people in the field well before that joining
with AID's Cal Cowles in bringing back the old Indonesia hands of
the fifties and sixties. After helping draft the stabilization
program for AID, Dave Cole returned to work with Widjojo on the
Ford/Harvard payroll. Leon Mears, an agricultural economist who
had learned Indonesian rice-marketing in the Berkeley project, came
for AID and stayed on for Harvard. Sumitro's old friend from MIT,
Bill Hollinger, transferred from the DAS-Liberia project and now
shares Sumitro's office in the Ministry of Trade.
The Harvard people are "advisors," explains DAS Deputy Director
Lester Gordon -- "foreign advisors who don't have to deal with all
the paperwork and have time to come up with new ideas." They work
"as employees of the government would," he says, "but in such a way
that it doesn't get out that the foreigners are doing it."
Indiscretions had got them bounced from Pakistan. In Indonesia; "we
stay in the background."
Harvard stayed in the background while developing the five-year
plan. In the winter of 1967-68, a good harvest and a critical
infusion of U.S. Food for Peace rice had kept prices down, cooling
the political situation for a time. Hollinger, the DAS's first
full-time man on the scene, arrived in March and helped the
economists lay out the plan's strategy. As the other DAS
technocrats arrived, they went to work on its planks. "Did we
cause it, did the Ford Foundation cause it, did the Indonesians
cause it?" asks AID's Cal Cowles rhetorically. "I don't know."
The plan went into force without fanfare in January 1969, its key
elements foreign investment and agricultural self-sufficiency. It
is a late-twentieth-century American "development" plan that sounds
suspiciously like the mid-nineteenth-century Dutch colonial
strategy. Then, Indonesian labor -- often corvée --
substituted for Dutch capital in building the roads and digging the
irrigation ditches necessary to create a plantation economy for
Dutch capitalists, while a "modern" agricultural technology
increased the output of Javanese paddies to keep pace with the
expanding population. The plan brought an industrial renaissance
to the Netherlands, but only an expanding misery to Indonesia.
As in the Dutch strategy, the Ford scholars' five-year plan
introduces a "modern" agricultural technology -- the so-called
"green revolution" of high-yield hybrid rice -- to keep pace with
Indonesian rural population growth and to avoid "explosive"
changes in Indonesian class relationships.
Probably it will do neither -- though AID is currently supporting a
project at Berkeley's Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies
to give it the old college try. Negotiated with Harsja Bachtiar,
the Harvard-trained sociologist now heading the Faculty's
Ford-funded research institute, the project is to train Indonesian
sociologists to "modernize" relations between the peasantry and the
Army's state power.
The agricultural plan is being implemented by the central
government's agricultural extension service, whose top men were
trained by an AID-funded University of Kentucky program at the
Bogor Agricultural Institute. In effect, the agricultural agents
have been given a monopoly in the sale of seed and the buying of
rice, which puts them in a natural alliance with the local military
commanders -- who often control the rice transport business -- and
with the local santri landlords, whose higher returns are
being used to quickly expand their holdings. The peasants find
themselves on the short end of the stick. If they raise a ruckus
they are "sabotaging a national program," must be PKI agents, and
the soldiers are called in.
The Indonesian ruling class, observes Wertheim, is now "openly
waging [its] own brand of class
struggle."24 It is a struggle the
Harvard technocrats must "modernize." Economically the issue is
Indonesia's widespread unemployment; politically it is Suharto's
need to legitimize his power through elections. "The government ...
will have to do better than just avoiding chaos if Suharto is going
to be popularly elected," DAS Director Papanek reported in October
1968. "A really widespread public works program, financed by
increased imports of PL 480 commodities sold at lower prices, could
provide quick economic and political benefits in the
countryside."25
Harvard's Indonesian New Deal is a "rural development" program that
will further strengthen the hand of the local Army commanders.
Supplying funds meant for labor-intensive public works, the program
is supposed to increase local autonomy by working through local
authorities. The money will merely line military pockets or provide
bribes by which they will secure their civilian retainees. DAS
Director Papanek admits that the program is "civilian only in a
very broad sense, because many of the local administrators are
military people." And the military has two very large, and rather
cheap, labor forces which are already at work in "rural
development."
One is the three-hundred-thousand-man Army itself. The other is
composed of the one hundred twenty thousand political prisoners
still being held after the Army's 1965-66 anti-communist sweeps.
Some observers estimate there are twice as many prisoners, most of
whom the Army admits were not PKI members, though they fear they may
have become Communists in the concentration camps.
Despite the abundance of Food for Peace rice for other purposes,
there is none for the prisoners, whom the government's daily food
expenditure is slightly more than a penny. At least two journalists
have reported Sumatran prisoners quartered in the middle of the
Goodyear rubber plantation where they had worked before the
massacres as members of a PKI union. Now, the correspondents say,
they are let out daily to work its trees for substandard wages,
which are paid to their guards.26
In Java the Army uses the prisoners in public works. Australian
professor Herbert Feith was shown around one Javanese town in 1968
where prisoners had built the prosecutor's house, the high school, the
mosque, and (in process) the Catholic church. "It is not really hard
to get work out of them if you push them," he was
told.27
Just as they are afraid and unwilling to free the prisoners, so the
generals are afraid to demobilize the troops. "You can't add to the
unemployment," explained an Indonesia desk man at the State
Department, "especially with people who know how to shoot a gun."
Consequently the troops are being worked more and more into the
infrastructure labor force -- to which the Pentagon is providing
roadbuilding equipment and advisors.
But it is the foreign-investment plan that is the payoff of Ford's
twenty-year strategy in Indonesia and the pot of gold that the Ford
modernizers -- both American and Indonesian -- are paid to protect.
The nineteenth-century Colonial Dutch strategy built an
agricultural export economy. The Americans are interested primarily
in resources, mainly mineral.
Freeport Sulphur will mine copper on West Irian. International
Nickel has got the Celebes' nickel. Alcoa is negotiating for most
of Indonesia's bauxite. Weyerhaeuser, International Paper, Boise
Cascade, and Japanese, Korean, and Filipino lumber companies will
cut down the huge tropical forests of Sumatra, West Irian, and
Kalimantan (Borneo). A U.S.-European consortium of mining giants,
headed by U.S. Steel, will mine West Irian's nickel. Two others,
U.S.-British and U.S.-Australian, will mine tin. A fourth, U.S.-New
Zealander, is contemplating Indonesian coaling. The Japanese will
take home the archipelago's shrimp and tuna and dive for her
pearls.
Another unmined resource is Indonesia's one hundred twenty million
inhabitants -- half the people in Southeast Asia. "Indonesia today,"
boasts a California electronics manufacturer now operating his
assembly lines in Djakarta, "has the world's largest untapped pool
of capable assembly labor at a modest cost." The cost is ten cents
an hour.
But the real prize is oil. During one week in 1969, twenty three
companies, nineteen of them American, bid for the right to explore
and bring to market the oil beneath the Java Sea and Indonesia's
other coastal waters. In one 21,000-square-mile concession off
Java's northeast coast, Natomas and Atlantic-Richfield are already
bringing in oil. Other companies with contracts signed have watched
their stocks soar in speculative orgies rivaling those following
the Alaskan North Slope discoveries. As a result, Ford is
sponsoring a new Berkeley project at the University of California
law school in "developing human resources for the handling of
negotiations with foreign investors in Indonesia."
Looking back, the thirty-year-old vision for the Pacific seems
secure in Indonesia -- thanks to the flexibility and perseverance
of Ford. A ten-nation "Inter-Governmental Group for Indonesia,"
including Japan, manages Indonesia's debts and coordinates
Indonesia's aid. A corps of "qualified" native technocrats formally
make economic decisions, kept in hand by the best American advisors
the Ford Foundation's millions can buy. And, as we have seen,
American corporations dominate the expanding exploitation of
Indonesia's oil, ore, and timber.
But history has a way of knocking down even the best-built plans.
Even in Indonesia, the "chaos" which Ford and its modernizers are
forever preventing seems just below the surface. Late in 1969,
troops from West Java's crack Siliwangi division rounded up five
thousand surprised and sullen villagers in an odd military exercise
that speaks more of Suharto's fears than of Indonesia's political
"stability." Billed as a test in "area management," officers told
reporters that it was an exercise in preventing a "potential fifth
column" in the once heavily-PKI area from linking up with an
imaginary invader. But the army got no cheers as it passed through
the villages, an Australian reporter wrote. "To an innocent eye from
another planet it would have seemed that the Siliwangi division was
an army of occupation."28
There is no more talk about land reform or arming the people in
Indonesia now. But the silence is eloquent. In the Javanese
villages where the PKI was strong before the pogrom, landlords and
officers fear going out after dark. Those who do so are sometimes
found with their throats cut, and the generals mutter about "night
PKI."
1. Richard M. Nixon, "Asia After Vietnam," Foreign
Affairs, October 1967, p. 111.
2. Soedjatmoko, "Indonesia on the Threshold of
Freedom," address to Cooper Union, New York, 13 March 1949, p. 9.
3. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, untitled address to School
of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., 1949, p. 7.
4. Dean Rusk, "Foreign Policy Problems in the
Pacific," Department of State Bulletin, 19 November 1951, p.
824 ff.
5. Guy J. Pauker, "The Rise and Fall of the Communist
Party of Indonesia," Rand Corporation Memorandum RM-5753-PR,
February 1969, p. 46.
6. Michael Max Ehrmann, The Indonesian Military in
the Politics of Guided Democracy, 1957-1965, unpublished Masters
thesis (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, September 1967),
p. 296, citing Col. George Benson (U.S. Army), U.S. military
attaché in Indonesia 1956-1960.
7. Daniel S. Lev, The Transition to Guided Democracy:
Indonesian Politics, 1957-1959 Ithaca NY: Modern Indonesia
Project, Cornell University, 1966), p. 70.
8. Robert Shaplen, "Indonesia II: The Rise and Fall
of Guided Democracy," New Yorker, 24 May 1969, p. 48;
Willard Hanna, Bung Karno's Indonesia (New York: American
Universities Field Staff, 25 September 1959), quoted in J.A.C.
Mackie, "Indonesia's Government Estates and Their Masters,"
Pacific Affairs, Fall 1961, p. 352.
9. Guy J. Pauker, "The Rise and Fall of the Communist
Party of Indonesia," pp. 6, 10.
10. Ibid., p. 43.
11. W.F. Wertheim, "Indonesia Before and After the
Untung Coup," Pacific Affairs, Spring/Summer 1966, p. 117.
12. Ibid., p. 115.
Ford Country:
Building an Elite for Indonesia
by David Ransom
and the North American Congress on Latin America, The Trojan
Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid (Palo Alto CA: Ramparts
Press, 1975 revised edition), pp. 93-116.
____________
____________
Communists, Red sympathizers and their families are being massacred
by the thousands. Backlands army units are reported to have
executed thousands of Communists after interrogation in remote
jails.... Armed with wide-blade knives called parangs,
Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing
entire families and burying the bodies in shallow graves.... The
murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java that
Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them
through villages. The killings have been on such a scale that the
disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in
East Java and Northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek
of decaying flesh. Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers
and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river
transportation has at places been seriously
impeded.17