On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  In East Java, where estimates of the number of killings ranged from 100,000 to 300,000, most of the executions of Communists took place in the district of Kediri, which had been dominated politically by the Communists. The systematic execution of Communists was organized by the military commander, Major Willi Sudyono. His brother, Lieutenant General Sutoyo, was one of the six generals killed in the Jakarta putsch. There were religious as well as political motives for the population’s participation in the killings carried out in Kediri, the center of Muslim religious instruction in East Java. Even before September 30, there had been clashes between Communist youth groups and Ansor, the youth organization of the Muslim Scholars Party. In the purge of the Communists, most of the killings were done by army-trained squads of Ansor, mainly youths in their teens and early twenties who were students at the Muslim university and religious schools in the Kediri district. Haj Marcus Ali, the fifty-seven-year-old religious leader of the district and a top leader of the Muslim Scholars Party, told me that Ansor had “fulfilled the command of the army” and that the “killings were the will of God.” He said that 20,000 Communists had been killed in the Kediri district. Asked if there had been any resistance in the villages, he said he knew of fifteen members of Ansor and one army man who had been killed in the mop-up. He said he had two complaints against the Communists: they had offended Muslims, and they had taken “one-sided action” in their enforcement of land distribution and crop-sharing laws. In Central Java, where estimates of executions ranged from 50,000 to 300,000, members of the Nationalist and Muslim Scholars parties had also joined the army as executioners.

  Apart from the Jakarta area, there was no mass killing in West Java, where there were no major centers of Communist influence. But reports from Sumatra and other islands of the archipelago, which I did not visit, told of purges that took many thousands of lives. In North Sumatra, I was told, hundreds were massacred in the Medan region, among them many Chinese merchants and their families. Mobs swept into the Chinese quarters, looting and killing.

  On the idyllic island of Bali, when I arrived, the smell of death no longer hung heavily in the villages built with red-stone Hindu shrines at their centers. Once again, the people were going out to fish in the sea where not long ago hundreds of bodies floated on the waters torn at by the creatures of the depths. Maiden dancers, their black tresses plaited with fragrant white blossoms, danced entrancingly to the drums and gongs of the gamelan orchestras and tossed petals of hibiscus to me. Balinese smiled gently in response to my questions, saying that the terrible happenings were a “family affair” and they hoped American tourists would come back again, now that the Communists were gone. Yet the wounds festered amid the beauty. The prisons in Denpasar were still crowded. It was easy to rent a house because so many houses had been used by the army as depots for the rounding-up and execution of Communists. The Balinese, fearful that the spirits had not been exorcised, would not live in them. In Negra, there was one house where 300 Communists were said to have been shot. The well in the garden was stuffed with bodies. Children whispered about the fate of their teachers. Some 2,000 teachers were said to have died in the massacre. Most of the island’s teachers, unable to live on their monthly pay because of the inflation, had joined Communist organizations seeking relief from their poverty.

  No one knows precisely how many men, women, and children were slain on Bali. Estimates ranged from 20,000 to 100,000. Foreigners who lived on the island were convinced that about 50,000 of the population of 2 million had been killed. The army began its round-up of Communists at the end of October 1965, and it continued until mid-January. The army had required Communist Party officials before September 30 to hand over lists of members of the party and its affiliate organizations. Most of those on the lists were subsequently hunted to be killed. When I asked Parwanto, the prosecuting attorney of the Bali government, if there was any legal basis for the killings, he replied: “It was a revolution.”

  Most of the killings were carried out by army-selected civilian executioners who were known as Tamins. They were young men who were given loose black shirts and black trousers to identify them. They operated in teams, usually by night, and apparently met little or no resistance from the terrorized villagers. There were reports, which I could not confirm, that whole villages were wiped out. One responsible Balinese told of what happened to his typical village of about two thousand persons. Twenty-seven Communists had been killed there. The village headman, who was a member of the party, hanged himself. Others took poison. Some escaped. That evidently was the pattern for the several thousand villages on Bali.

  The largest scale of killings occurred in the Jembrana Regency in the western part of the island, a center of Communist influence. There, the palace of the rajah of Negara, one of the eight traditional kings of Bali, was destroyed because he had allowed PKI members to meet on his grounds. His son, the pro-Communist governor of Bali, was in jail in Jakarta at the time. Eyewitnesses said the rajah’s retainers were dragged from the palace to have their bowed heads crushed by rocks hurled by the mob. The rajah died as his palace was being sacked by the mob, and members of his family were slaughtered.

  Describing the Ansor squads, a Christian pastor said: “We always wondered if they would eventually turn on us.” The pastor told of listening in helpless agony to the cries for help in the night as Ansor squads pursued fugitives through the streets, and hearing the thud of great peasant sickles as the executioners slashed their victims to death. Toward the end of the mass killings, when whole families were sometimes put to death at one time, the Ansor executioners began to wear masks. There were often instances where men were killed who were mistaken for Communists or denounced because of some personal grudge. Old scores were settled under political pretexts. On the first day of the mass killings, one army officer in civilian dress cheerfully left Kediri city carrying a machine gun to shoot squatters who had refused to get off his untilled land.

  After the interview with the Christian pastor I returned to the hotel where I was staying, an elegant hostelry built for tourists vacant except for Frank Palmer, my assistant, and me. I lay awake that night unable to shut out the ghastly accounts of the massacres. The stories of the descent of the Tamins on the frightened people in villages evoked vividly for me the memory of what my mother, Anna, had told me of the pogrom carried out by Cossacks against the Jews in her Ukrainian village. My mother was born in the ghetto village of Zamerhover. Her father, Morris, was a peddler. He would hitch up his horse cart, go out to the countryside where he would buy vegetables from the peasants, and then sell them to the people in the village. The family lived in a small cottage heated by wood in a brick wall stove. One morning mounted Cossacks raided the village. They were looking for loot, and they were seizing young men for the czar’s army. Gazing out the cottage window, my grandmother, Pearl, saw that her sixteen-year-old son, David, who had been standing by the road, had been seized by two Cossacks. As my mother, then six years old, watched through a window, Pearl ran out, tore David from their hands, and he ran off. But Pearl was then struck down by baton-wielding Cossacks and trampled by their horses. The family carried her into the cottage, where she died with my mother weeping at her bedside. She was not the only Jew who died in the pogrom that day. What moved men to inflict such atrocities on innocents? It was a question I asked myself repeatedly that night and then over the next years as genocidal massacres were carried out in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Africa, and the Middle East.

  I did not detect any visible signs of remorse among those who did the killings in Bali, what until then was seen as the “island paradise.” During religious festivals in Bali the young, black-clad executioners bowed before chanting Hindu priests who cleansed them of the taint of the blood of the tens of thousands they had slaughtered. The executioners marched proudly in parades. Their black garments were the vogue for many youngsters.

  Amid all the carnage, I still came upon plain evidence in Central and East Java of continuing support f
or Sukarno, which gave the army reason enough for hesitancy in abruptly ousting him. Driving east out of Jakarta, passing through prosperous West Java, the army’s political stronghold, I entered Sukarnoland. Here in Central Java and in East Java, where some 50 million of Indonesia’s 107 million people lived, I found that the mystique of the “Great Leader” still prevailed. The rice paddies and plantations were tilled mostly by subsistence-level farmers, and although his Communist allies were no longer in power, the farmers continued to look to Sukarno as the father figure. After the army purge the regions had come under the control of the Nationalist and Muslim Scholars parties. The two parties, as a buffer against domination by the army, had joined in tacit political alliance with the beleaguered president.

  Driving along the roads bisecting the farmlands and wending about the mist-capped volcanic mountains, I saw signposts everywhere bearing slogans hailing Bung Karno—”Brother Sukarno.” His photograph hung on arches in the villages and on the bamboo walls of the peasant huts. They were displayed in the limestone houses of officials and in the Chinese shops of Jogjakarta, Solo, and Surabaya. Educated Indonesians in those cities told me they knew of Sukarno’s collaboration with the Japanese in World War II, his assignment of Indonesians to the death labor camps, his political links to the Communists, and his notorious dalliance with women. Yet, they said, Sukarno had given them an ideology, a national identity, and the dream of a “Greater Indonesia,” which made him the linchpin of the some three hundred ethnic groups living in the vast archipelago. In Surabaya, a professor of medicine said: “Sukarno is like a great mystical tree and we need him.” In Jogjakarta, a prominent and well-informed Indonesian said: “If something happens to Sukarno in Jakarta, there might be civil war.” Sukarno’s continued influence extended beyond to the island of Bali, where, I was to learn, the people were swayed more by the fact that the president’s mother was Balinese than by the vagaries of his politics.

  In the aftermath of the Gestapu, Sukarno exploited to the hilt this continued reverence for him. In his private sparring with General Suharto and Foreign Minister Malik, he sometimes hinted that he might incite civil war in Central and East Java if he was crowded too much by the army. Once, Malik recalled, he had angrily snapped back at the president: “All right, go to Central Java and start a civil war, and see who will win.” Yet General Suharto continued to move cautiously, fearful of civil strife, weighing a constitutional solution whereby the president would accept a figurehead role and bestow legitimacy on an army-run regime. The army did not challenge the president directly to explain publicly his role in the plotting of the September 30 Movement and the Gestapu. Even some of his enemies who knew the answer remained silent perhaps because they felt that preserving the image of the founder of Indonesian independence was more important than exacting vengeance. Certain facts were plain. Sukarno wanted the generals Nasution and Yani and their deputies out of the way so he could replace them with pliant military men who would not obstruct his plans for a Communist-led Nasakom cabinet that would bring about his socialist “Greater Indonesia.” The president knew that Aidit, Subandrio, and other leftist politicians, Dhani, and some army officers loyal to him personally were planning action to satisfy his wishes. But the secret is buried as to whether he intended that the seven targeted generals be killed.

  In 1967, the People’s Consultative Congress, faulting Sukarno for failing “to meet his constitutional responsibilities,” ousted him from the presidency and replaced him with General Suharto. The Congress heard Suharto testify that Sukarno was not “the direct instigator or the mastermind” behind the Gestapu plot. But Sukarno was found guilty to the extent that Suharto was able to keep to keep the “Great Leader” under house arrest until his death in 1970.

  There have been suggestions that the U.S. government and its agencies played a clandestine role in bringing about the Communist debacle. There is no question that the CIA in cooperation with British and Australian operatives was providing support and encouragement to the anti-Sukarno factions before September 30. There was reason enough for the opposition to Sukarno, given his confrontation with Malaysia and the anti-Western policies he was fomenting elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The Johnson administration was concerned that Sukarno’s pro-Communist stance in the southern arc might eventually affect the American war effort in Vietnam. According to CIA documents, declassified in later years, the American Embassy may have been involved in the transfer of funds to anti-Sukarno factions in the army. There was also a suggestion by some academic researchers, which I found naïve, that the CIA, which kept lists of the membership of the PKI, had turned them over to the army for use in the purge. The PKI operated mainly in the open as a legal political party enjoying the encouragement of Sukarno. The leadership was well known to the army. The army had kept a wary eye on the membership of the PKI and its affiliated organizations from the time of the Communist uprising in Madiun in 1948. The CIA officers, who operated under the cover of the embassy, did not have to use cloak-and-dagger methods to obtain the names of those in the leadership. They needed only to buy a subscription to Harian Rakyat, the official PKI newspaper, which did not hesitate to publish names. During the purge of the Communists, the army and its collaborators did raid local offices to obtain lists. I detected no evidence in Jakarta or in the former Communist strongholds in Central and East Java or in Bali of any direct American involvement in the political confrontation leading up to the Gestapu coup or in the army counterthrust and purge of the PKI. Marshall Green, the American ambassador, making a point of staying clear of the confrontation, confined himself in retrospect to stating in a meeting with correspondents: “The United States military presence in Southeast Asia emboldened the army, but it had no decisive effect on the outcome. It is perhaps better to look at it in negative terms. If we hadn’t stood firm in Southeast Asia, if we hadn’t maintained a military presence, then the outcome might have been different.”

  Ironically, Sukarno in death exacted revenge against Suharto, his warden. In 2001, his daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, was elected president of Indonesia. Her pedigree was undoubtedly a factor in her victory. In the years prior to her election she became a symbol of the resistance to Suharto’s autocratic and corrupt rule and played a part in forcing his resignation as president in 1998. Suharto was charged with embezzling as much as $15 billion in public funds on behalf of his family and friends. His trial on corruption charges was suspended in September 2000 when judges ruled that the former president was not medically fit to stand trial. His lawyers successfully withstood the pressure for a trial up until his death on January 27, 2008. As he lay dying in a Jakarta hospital, a parade of Indonesia’s elite, including President Yudhoyono, visited his bedside in what seemed to be a compassionate spirit of forgiveness for the years of his corrupt and brutal repressive rule. It was recalled that Suharto had given Indonesia some years of economic stability following the turmoil of Sukarno’s demise. As for Sukarno’s daughter, Megawati, her fame was short lived. After an undistinguished term of office as president, she was defeated in 2004 in a landslide election by a former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Her defeat closed the book on the faded Sukarno mystique.

  31

  CHINA WATCHING

  THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

  During the years I served as chief correspondent, Southeast Asia, for the New York Times, 1963 to 1966, I spent about half my time reporting on China from my base in Hong Kong and the balance covering the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as developments in other countries of the region. It was in Hong Kong that I first detected the gathering storm of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China.

  In Hong Kong, Audrey and I lived with our four daughters in a hillside apartment overlooking the magnificence of Repulse Bay. I would be away usually for three weeks or a month on my reporting swings through the region, mainly in Indochina. I would then fly back to Hong Kong for reunion with the family and my China-watching job. Audrey, who was editing the Mandarin Magazine,
a periodical distributed worldwide by the Hong Kong Mandarin Hotel, would be waiting patiently. Relaxing on our balcony with Charlie, our Australian cockatoo, which Audrey had rescued from a Chinese opium peddler on Cat Street, we would gaze out over the bay to the faintly visible islands off the China mainland. Weekends, Ah Liang, our boat boy, would bring our red-sailed Chinese junk, the Valhalla, into the bay, and we would picnic on board with the comfort of a jug of Portuguese rosé wine imported from Macao and water-ski pulled by the speedboat of a close friend, Dr. Dawson Grove, distinguished veteran of the 1941 Battle of Hong Kong.

  Audrey treasured the Valhalla, which she named after the settlement founded in 1911 by her grandfather, a Lutheran minister, in a valley of the Peace River District of northern Alberta. She came upon the thirty-three-foot hull of the Valhalla in a small shipyard and hovered over Chinese shipbuilders as they made it seaworthy. She adorned it with a phoenix, a dragon, and other good-luck carvings which she found on the prow of an ancient junk that had been cast up on the shore of a deserted island. We entertained a parade of interesting visitors aboard the Valhalla, Teddy Kennedy and his wife, Joan, among them. Inevitably, I talked with Kennedy about my days with his brothers in Saigon.

  Hong Kong was the chief observation post for hundreds of China watchers, an array of diplomats, intelligence agents, propagandists, academics, and journalists. The nations, such as Britain, France, and India, which formally recognized the People’s Republic of China had the advantage of embassy observation posts in Peking, but their diplomats enjoyed only very limited access to the closed Chinese society and were restricted in their travels. More information was available in Hong Kong about internal developments in China than what the diplomats in Peking managed to gather. The few journalists, citizens of countries with diplomatic relations, who were posted in the Chinese capital fared no better than the diplomats.