On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  After thirteen days in the French Embassy compound, Schanberg and other foreigners were hauled in a Khmer Rouge truck convoy to the Thai border. On arrival in Bangkok, after recovering from the trauma of his experience, Schanberg went to the Times office and wrote a series of stories on what he had witnessed, which were published on May 19 on more than two pages of the Times.

  With the occupation of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot, head of the Center, the leadership group of the Khmer Rouge, proclaimed the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea and took the title of premier. Immediately, he set about creating what he envisioned as a racially pure Khmer, classless, essentially agrarian society “cleansed of all foreign influence.” To consolidate his absolute power, Pol Pot ordered the evacuation of the cities, which he viewed as potential centers of opposition. Their inhabitants were force-marched into the countryside, where they were herded into prison camps or into labor gangs. Schools, hospitals, factories, and monasteries in the urban areas were shut down. Executions ensued immediately of Cambodians who had served as officers in Lon Nol’s army or as officials in his civilian administration. An estimated 20 percent of the population, about 1.57 million people, died in the holocaust at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in the years 1975 to January 1979 through execution, starvation, unattended illnesses, overwork, or other mistreatment. The Vietnamese and Chinese resident minorities were prime targets of Pol Pot’s execution squads. The holocaust ended when a Communist Vietnamese army battling through Cambodia seized Phnom Penh in January 1979. The Khmer Rouge had been scuffling with the Vietnamese for years over rival claims to the Mekong Delta. Pol Pot fled by helicopter to a retreat in the jungle of northern Cambodia, bordering on Thailand, where he died in a hut in 1998 and was cremated on a funeral pyre of discarded tires and other junk.

  Prior to Pol Pot’s death, Sihanouk was witness to much of the carnage instigated by the dictator. Returning to Phnom Penh from Peking after the Khmer Rouge occupation of the Cambodian capital, he was installed by Pol Pot as a powerless head of state. But in the next year, on April 4, 1976, he was deposed, later denounced as a traitor to the revolution, and spent some time under house arrest. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in December 1978, Pol Pot rehabilitated Sihanouk politically and dispatched him to New York to appeal to the United Nations for help. Sihanouk failed, and the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia for the next ten years. In 1993, Sihanouk was restored in Phnom Penh as king but later, in ill health, retired to self-imposed exile in Peking. He abdicated the throne in October 2004 in favor of his son, Norodom Sihamoni.

  The Vietnamese seizure of Cambodia provided Dith Pran, who had saved Schanberg’s life, with the opportunity for escape. During the Pol Pot repression, posing as a simple peasant, he had suffered beatings and starvation. Visiting his hometown after the Vietnamese invasion, he found that more than fifty members of his family had been slaughtered. Covered with graves, its wells filled with bones and skulls, the village land had become known as the “killing fields.” Later, Pran was able to send a message to Schanberg through Eastern European journalists who were visiting the village where Pran was working under the Vietnamese as an administrative chief. In July 1979, Pran covertly made his way to the Thai border and crossed over to a refugee camp, where he contacted Schanberg through an American relief officer. Schanberg had been making ceaseless efforts to find Pran. When he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting in 1976 for “his coverage of the Communist takeover in Cambodia, carried out at great risk,” he accepted the prize on behalf of Dith Pran and himself. Within a week after learning that Pran had reached Thailand, Schanberg found him in the refugee camp and brought him to New York. In Schanberg’s book The Death and Life of Dith Pran, written in 1980, and in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, Dith Pran was lauded as a heroic, selfless holocaust survivor. From the time of his arrival in New York in 1980, where he worked as a photographer for the New York Times, until his death in a New Jersey hospital of pancreatic cancer on March 30, 2008, Dith Pran remained a passionate advocate and worker for human rights. In my many encounters with him at the Times, although he was treated as a hero, I found him to be the most modest of men.

  30

  THE INDONESIAN HOLOCAUST AND THE DOWNFALL OF SUKARNO

  On the night of September 30, 1965, and in the early morning hours of October 1, life changed violently for the 107 million people of Indonesia. Before dawn six top army generals were murdered in a failed leftist coup that became known as the Gestapu. In the next days, the senior generals who survived the coup launched a massive retaliatory purge of the huge Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which they accused of perpetrating the assassinations. President Sukarno, who had become allied politically with the Communists, was rendered powerless. He had been the unchallenged ruler of Indonesia for two decades. In the army purge and its aftermath, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people were killed. The victims included hundreds of thousands of members of the Communist Party and those seen as associated with the PKI. Many thousands of others died in sectarian violence unleashed in the chaotic power struggle.

  The elimination by the army of the PKI as a force in the southern archipelago, which extends for 3,500 miles over more than 17,000 islands, profoundly altered the balance of power in East Asia. It thwarted Sukarno’s plans and those of his Communist allies for transforming Indonesia into a “People’s Democracy” aligned in a “Jakarta-Peking-Hanoi Axis” which would dominate Southeast Asia. It also ended Sukarno’s armed confrontation with the British-founded government of Malaysia, which he had opposed as nothing more than Western colonialism.

  In July 1966, I traveled through the islands of Java and Bali piecing together a chronicle of the events leading to the Gestapu murder of the army generals and the horrific aftermath—one of the greatest massacres in history. The execution of Communists had not yet ended, and the jails were still crowded with the army’s captives. Thousands were dying of maltreatment. Returning to Jakarta after touring the blood-drenched villages, I became a witness to the end game being played out in the ousting of Sukarno from power by the army. The political drama unfolded vividly for me as an onlooker at a strange evening reception given by President Sukarno on July 27 in the great hall of the Negara Palace for an assembly of Indonesian generals, government officials, and a few foreigners.

  Under the crystal chandeliers of the great hall, President Sukarno stood in his stocking feet on a Persian carpet exhorting the Indonesian elite assembled before him to obey “all my teachings.” A year earlier during the Independence Day celebration, I had watched in Merdeka (“Freedom”) Square as more than 100,000 of his people cheered the “Great Leader” wildly as he proclaimed a new “anti-imperialist axis” linking Indonesia to China, North Vietnam, and North Korea. The United States, Britain, and other Western powers must “get out of the whole of Southeast Asia altogether,” he had shouted.

  Now, gazing wild-eyed about the glittering Negara Palace hall at the Indonesian officials, many of whom were deliberately slighting him by turning their backs or chatting with each other, the sixty-five-year-old president, flushed and infuriated, cried out that he still held supreme state authority. Out of him poured a storm of epithets about Western neocolonial plots and the need to continue Indonesia’s armed confrontation with Malaysia. He reiterated his demands for adherence to policies he had put in place before the events of September 30: creation of the Jakarta-Peking-Hanoi Axis; rejection of all Western financial aid; and continued boycott of the United Nations, from which he had withdrawn his nation.

  But as the palace scene conveyed, the political landscape had changed radically. The army under the command of General Suharto had assumed absolute power. The right-wing generals had put down the Movement of September 30, the political coalition of Sukarno and other leftist politicians, accused of inspiring the Gestapu coup.

  Sukarno, once worshiped as a demigod by most Indonesians, was now a virtual prisoner, under close guard at his palace at Bogor, forty miles south of the capital. But
still Sukarno clung defiantly to the outer trappings of power. The army hesitated to use force to eject him formally and publicly from the presidency, since in some regions of the islands the people still idolized him as the “Great Leader of the Revolution.” Displacing him forcibly would risk civil war, army officers told me, even though they were denouncing and plotting against him. Thus the scene being played out on this night in the Negara Palace—full of hidden implications, expressed in the subtle Javanese style in whispers and glances—mirrored the historic juncture at which the Indonesian nation was poised in the struggle for ultimate power.

  Standing erect directly before Sukarno’s palace dais and looking up at him were General Suharto and the two other Indonesian leaders, who made up the triumvirate now effectively ruling Indonesia. They frowned and stirred uneasily, glancing at each other, as they listened to Sukarno’s outburst. Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX, the leader of Central Java and the minister of economic affairs, did not betray his concern openly, although he was dismayed by the president challenging his plan designed to rescue the nation from disaster. Only a few people in the room knew that the sultan had privately approached the United States and the “Tokyo Club,” a consortium of non-Communist nations to which Indonesia was heavily in debt. He had asked for a loan of $500 million to halt the runaway inflation and so retrieve the country from its economic disorder. The sultan had been told that until Sukarno ceased his hostile polemics and ended the armed confrontation with Malaysia, he could not expect Western countries to act on requests for large-scale aid. At the time, about 7,000 British and 2,400 Malaysian soldiers were fighting off raids into Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo) by guerrillas armed and trained under Sukarno’s direction. The appeal to desist from such guerrilla raids made to him personally by Robert Kennedy during their meeting in Tokyo in January 1964 had been unavailing.

  Gazing up at the raging Sukarno, Adam Malik, the foreign minister, was less able to conceal his fury. By his antics, Sukarno was undermining Malik’s plans for a rapprochement with the United States, ratification of the agreement reached in June in Bangkok to end the Malaysian confrontation, and his yet unannounced intention to reseat Indonesia in the United Nations. Malik, as he told me later in the evening, whispered to the impassive army officer at his right: “Shall I walk out or not?” The officer beside him was General Suharto, the army chief, who on March 11 had compelled President Sukarno to surrender executive power to him. “Be patient,” the general replied. The peppery foreign minister shrugged and obeyed.

  With a last angry glance about the hall, Sukarno put on his shoes and stalked out. It was his custom at some ceremonial occasions to take off his shoes while holding forth. General Suharto watched the president exit and then, turning to Malik, asked him to circulate about the room and advise the diplomats and other foreigners present to ignore Sukarno’s tirade and reassure them that he would act within two weeks to restore de facto relations with Malaysia.

  Several weeks before the palace episode, Sukarno had been publicly humiliated by the nation’s People’s Consultative Congress. The Congress was summoned by its chairman, General Abdul Haris Nasution, who alone among the seven senior generals targeted in the Gestapu putsch had managed to escape when the death squads descended on their homes. It convened as street demonstrations were being staged throughout the capital by Kami, the militant anti-Communist student organization, demanding the formal ouster of Sukarno as president. Responding to the outcry, the Congress scrapped the designation of Sukarno as “President for Life” and ratified the March 11 delegation of executive power to General Suharto. It approved of the army chief’s dissolution of the Communist Party and the ban on propagation of Communism and Marxism-Leninism. Elections were to be held within two years. In foreign policy, the Jakarta-Peking-Hanoi Axis with its tie to North Korea was junked, and the country returned to its previous nonaligned status. As for the formal removal of Sukarno as president, General Suharto quieted the students by saying: “It is not yet time.”

  When Sukarno went to Merdeka Square on August 17, 1966, for his annual Independence Day speech, his reception was very different from what I had witnessed the previous year. This time, when he told the massed thousands: “I am your great leader . . . Follow my leadership, obey my directives,” the crowd booed, and some one thousand students left the stadium shouting denunciations of him. In his speech, Sukarno unconvincingly deplored the killing of the six generals. The next day the Kami student groups, other mass organizations, and newspapers in West Java responded by demanding that Sukarno explain what he knew about the murders.

  The September 30, 1965, putsch had its origins in the rivalries between two political blocs. One was the right-wing army generals, headed by General Nasution, the defense minister, and General Achmad Yani, the chief of staff. The generals confronted a coalition of leftist politicians led by Sukarno. The coalition embraced in the first instance D. N. Aidit, leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, which claimed a membership of 3 million. The party was affiliated with front organizations with a total membership of about 18 million, among them the highly militant Pemuda Rakyat, a youth organization of some 2 million, and Gerwani, a women’s organization also of about 2 million. Affiliated also were some 12 million members of peasant and trade union organizations. Other key members of Sukarno’s political coalition were Dr. Subandrio, the pro-Peking foreign minister, who was the president’s closest adviser, and the chief of the Indonesian Air Force, Marshal Omar Dhani.

  The alliance between Sukarno and Aidit had been forged four years prior to the September 30 crisis. It was then that Sukarno, impatient with the inefficient and corrupt political parties with which he had been associated, turned to the Communists. He was persuaded by Aidit that the PKI, while leaning to Peking, would remain independent in the international Communist movement and that the party would be willing to share power with the Nationalist politicians. A professed Marxist himself, Sukarno was drawn to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of the PKI. He saw in its dedicated leadership and its mass organization techniques the means of building the socialist “Greater Indonesia” he had long envisioned. Steadily, up to September 30, Sukarno fostered the growth and influence of the Communist Party. He compelled the right-wing generals to accept his principle of “Nasakom,” unity based on a front of Nationalist, religious, and Communist forces. Under his patronage, the Communist Party was able to set up the most pervasive political organization in the country. It took control of many local governments, successfully infiltrated the air force, and indoctrinated some army officers. Sukarno brought Aidit and his chief lieutenants into his cabinet as ministers without portfolio. Only the top army generals, notably Nasution and Yani, blocked the formation of a Nasakom cabinet. Sukarno intended that the cabinet would be one in which the Communists would rule as ministers with executive power preparatory to Indonesia’s entry into a “Socialist stage.”

  In early 1965, Sukarno began to foster what he called the Jakarta-Peking Axis and spoke of extending it to North Vietnam and North Korea. Subandrio, the foreign minister, accompanied by senior military advisers, arrived in Peking on January 23, just twenty-three days after Sukarno announced that he was withdrawing Indonesia from the United Nations. Subandrio met with Chinese leaders, including Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, and Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, and at the conclusion of the talks, a joint statement was issued expressing “a mutual desire to strengthen friendly contacts in the military field.” The statement reaffirmed opposition to the founding by Britain of Malaysia through the merger of Singapore and Malaya, the policies of the South Vietnamese government, and the American stand in the Vietnam War. It was during those talks that Zhou Enlai endorsed a proposal by Aidit for the creation in Indonesia of a “Fifth Force” of millions of Indonesians in a People’s Militia and offered to supply it with 100,000 small weapons. It would obviously be a force to counter the power of the army and its right-wing generals. Chen Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, traveled to Jakarta to confer
with Sukarno and attended the Independence Day celebration in Merdeka Square. I glimpsed Chen Yi as, with hands clasped across his ample middle, he fell asleep in the hot sun while watching a two-hour “People’s Parade.” In his speech that day Sukarno publicly put forward the idea of a “Fifth Force” and soon after secretly dispatched Marshal Dhani, the air force commander, to Peking to arrange the delivery of the arms promised by Zhou Enlai.

  It was later that month that rumors spread that Sukarno, then sixty-four years old and troubled by a persistent kidney ailment, had become seriously ill, and both the army and the Communists began to prepare for a showdown over the anticipated succession. The army managed to stall the Sukarno-backed proposal for a political Fifth Force and blocked the delivery of the Chinese weapons promised by Zhou Enlai. The army leaders knew the PKI intended to employ Sukarno’s proposed Fifth Force to broaden its power base in the country for an eventual bid for total power. They were aware that the PKI had begun secretly training its own militia at Halim Air Base near Jakarta, making use of a small number of weapons smuggled in from China and other clandestine sources. Hundreds of trainees were drawn from Pemuda Rakyat, the Communist youth organization, and Gerwani, the Communist women’s organization.

  It was in this increasingly tense atmosphere that the September 30 Movement was born. Determined to go forward with the creation of the Nasakom cabinet he envisioned, Sukarno raged against the generals for obstructing his plans. Aidit and Subandrio together with other leftist politicians listened attentively as did Marshal Dhani, who had arranged the secret training of Communist militia near the Halim base. At the meetings a plan to eliminate those of the army who were opposing Sukarno’s goals began to take shape. What the conspirators planned, I was told as I reconstructed the events, was not to be a coup d’état, that is, a seizure of total control of the government, nor was an immediate Communist takeover of Indonesia planned. Instead, the plotters intended to bring about a political power shift to the left. Those obstructing Sukarno’s program for a Nasakom cabinet— that is, the top right-wing generals—were to be purged, somehow put out of the way. This move supposedly was also intended to forestall any possible attempt by a newly formed Council of Generals to seize total power. The purge of the generals would upset the existing delicate power balance between the army and the Communist Party, which Sukarno had previously fostered, but the president had been convinced by Aidit that the PKI would be content to share power. Was that an accurate appraisal of Aidit’s intentions? In an interview in his Jakarta office, six weeks before Gestapu, I asked Aidit if his acceptance of Nasakom was a tactical move to gain power or a doctrinal adaptation of his Communist Party to Indonesian realities. “We remain Communist,” Aidit replied, “but we have to be tolerant of nationalism and religion.” But the PKI leader also said that his party would remain free to act as it deemed necessary. He did not exclude the possibility that it might follow the example of some European Communist parties and exploit creation of a national political front as a vehicle for the eventual assumption of supreme power.