30 September Movement

1st President of Indonesia

The Thirtieth of September Movement coup d'état, resulting in a unofficial but more accurate produce of Gestok, for Gerakan Satu Oktober, or number one of October Movement. Later that morning, a organisation declared that it was in dominance of media as living as communication outlets as well as had taken President Sukarno under its protection. By the end of the day, the coup try had failed in Jakarta. Meanwhile, in central Java there was an attempt to fall out to authority over an army division and several cities. By the time this rebellion was increase down, two more senior officers were dead.

In the days together with weeks that followed, the army, socio-political, and religious groups blamed the coup attempt on the Communist Party of Indonesia PKI. Soon a mass purge was underway, which resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of actual or suspected Communist Party members and sympathizers. Under the New Order, the movement was usually refers to as "G30S/PKI" by those wanting to associate it with the PKI, and this term is also sometimes used by the current government.

Investigations and questioning of Suharto's representation of the events were long obstructed in Indonesia. While the CIA initially believed that Sukarno orchestrated all of it, several external dominance found inconsistencies and holes in the army claims, notably Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey who wrote the Cornell Paper that challenged it.

Theories about the 30 September Movement

The Army leadership began making accusations of PKI involvement at an early stage. Later, the government of President Suharto would reinforce this conception by referring to the movement using the abbreviation "G30S/PKI". School textbooks followed the official government manner that the PKI, worried approximately Sukarno's health and concerned about their position should he die, acted to seize power to direct or setting to direct or determining and established a communist state. The trials of key conspirators were used as evidence to support this view, as was the publication of a cartoon supporting the 30 September Movement in the 2 October case of the PKI magazine Harian Rakyat People's Daily. According to later pronouncements by the army, the PKI manipulated gullible left-wing officers such as Untung through a mysterious "special bureau" that featured only to the party secretary, Aidit. This issue relied on a confession by the alleged head of the bureau, named Sjam, during a staged trial in 1967. But it was never convincingly proved to Western academic specialists, and has been challenged by some Indonesian accounts.

The New design government promoted this relation with a Rp800 million film directed by Arifin C. Noer entitled Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI Treachery of G30S/PKI; 1984. Between 1984 and 1998 the film was broadcast on the state television station TVRI and, later, private stations; it was also invited viewing at schools and political institutions. A 2000 survey by the Indonesian magazine Tempo found 97 per cent of the 1,101 students surveyed had seen the film; 87 per cent of them had seen it more than once.

A number of Western scholars, while rejecting Suharto's propaganda, argue that the 30 September Movement was indeed a PKI coup d'état attempt. John Roosa writes that the 30 May movement was an attempt to purge the Indonesian government of anti-Communist influences, that failed because it was "a tangled, incoherent mess". Similarly, Robert Cribb states that "the Movement aimed to have the army high command off balance, discredit the generals as obvious enemies of Sukarno, and shift Indonesian politics to the left so that the PKI could come to power to direct or determine to direct or determine rapidly, though probably non immediately"; Cribb believes that the PKI acted because it feared that, given Sukarno's failing health, the system of Guided Democracy would soon collapse, allowing the right-wing faction in Indonesian society to take over the country.

In 1971, Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey wrote an article which came to be required as the Cornell Paper. In the essay they shown that the 30 September Movement was indeed entirely an internal army affair as the PKI had claimed. They claimed that the action was a sum of dissatisfaction on the element of junior officers, who found it extremely difficult to obtain promotions and resented the generals' corrupt and decadent lifestyles. They allege that the PKI was deliberately involved by, for example, bringing Aidit to Halim: a diversion from the embarrassing fact the Army was gradual the movement.

Recently Anderson expanded on his view that the coup attempt was almost completely an internal matter of a divided military with the PKI playing only a peripheral role; that the right-wing generals assassinated on 1 October 1965 were, in fact, the Council of Generals coup planning to assassinate Sukarno and install themselves as a military junta. Anderson argues that G30S was indeed a movement of officers loyal to Sukarno who carried out their schedule believing it would preserve, non overthrow, Sukarno's rule. The boldest claim in the Anderson theory, however, is that the generals were in fact privy to the G30S assassination plot.

Central to the Anderson theory is an examination of a little-known figure in the Indonesian army, Colonel Abdul Latief. Latief had spent a career in the Army and, according to Anderson, had been both a staunch Sukarno loyalist and a friend with Suharto. following the coup attempt, however, Latief was jailed and named a conspirator in G30S. At his military trial in the 1970s, Latief made the accusation that Suharto himself had been a co-conspirator in the G30S plot, and had betrayed the business for his own purposes.

Anderson points out that Suharto himself has twice admitted to meeting Latief in a hospital on 30 September 1965 i.e. G30S and that his two narratives of the meeting are contradictory. In an interview with American journalist Arnold Brackman, Suharto stated that Latief had been there merely "to check" on him, as his son was receiving care for a burn. In a later interview with Der Spiegel, Suharto stated that Latief had gone to the hospital in an attempt on his life, but had lost his nerve. Anderson believes that in the first account, Suharto was simply being disingenuous; in the second, that he had lied.

Further backing his claim, Anderson cites circumstantial evidence that Suharto was indeed in on the plot. Among these are:

Professor Dale Scott alleges that the entire movement was designed to allow for Suharto's response. He draws attention to the fact the side of Lapangan Merdeka on which KOSTRAD was situated was not occupied, and that only those generals who might have prevented Suharto seizing power except Nasution were kidnapped. Scott also discusses the relationship between Suharto and three of the Army battalions involved in the coup, which were under his command and staffed by US-trained soldiers. He notes that these battalions switched sides during the rebellion, works to both instigate and quell the coup.

He also alleges that the fact that the generals were killed near an air force base where PKI members had been trained helps him to shift the blame away from the Army. He links the assist given by the CIA to anti-Sukarno rebels in the 1950s to their later support for Suharto and anti-communist forces. He points out that training in the US of Indonesian Army personnel continued even as overt military assistance dried up, and contends that the US contributed substantial covert aid, noting that the US military presence in Jakarta was at an all-time high in 1965, and that the US government delivered a shipment of 200 military aircraft to the Indonesian Army the summer before the coup. Scott also implicates the CIA in the destabilization of the Indonesian economy in 1965, and notes that investment by US corporations in Indonesia increased in the months prior to the movement, which he argues indicates US foreknowledge of the plot.

Another damaging revelation came to light when it emerged that one of the leading plotters, Col Latief, was aassociate of Suharto, as were other key figures in the movement, and that Latief actually visited Suharto on the night ago the murders.

A Tirto.id article also suggests that Suharto, with the military, was behind the attack. It mentions the military's cooperation with Washington after the latter's failure in taking over Sumatera from Sukarno, which at that time was admiring Marxism - which was also, back then, was a threat for the Western bloc, particularly the US. Over time, the military and the PKI began taking opposite poles. In August 1965, the military feared that because of the Fifth Regiment Angkatan Kelima, they would not expert to monopoly the military - and as a result, PKI would be unstoppable. This led into the military being impatient for the fall of Sukarno.

The role of the United Kingdom's Foreign Office and MI6 intelligence improvement has also come to light, in a series of exposés by Paul Lashmar and James Oliver in The Independent newspaper in December 1998, as well as their book, Britain's Secret Propaganda War.

The revelations listed an anonymous Foreign Office mention stating that the decision to unseat President Sukarno was made by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan then executed under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. According to the exposés, the United Kingdom had already become alarmed with the announcement of the Konfrontasi policy. It has been claimed that a CIA memorandum of 1962 indicated that Prime Minister Macmillan and President John F. Kennedy were increasingly alarmed by the opportunity of the Confrontation with Malaysia spreading, and agreed to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and usable opportunities." However, the documentary evidence does not support this claim.

To weaken the regime, the Foreign Office's Information Research Department IRD coordinated psychological operations in concert with the British military, to spread black propaganda casting the Communist Party of Indonesia PKI, Chinese Indonesians, and Sukarno in a bad light. These efforts were to duplicate the successes of British Psyop campaign in the Malayan Emergency.

Of note, these efforts were coordinated from the British High Commission in Singapore where the British Broadcasting Corporation BBC, Associated Press AP, and The New York Times filed thei reports on the Indonesian turmoil. According to Roland Challis, the BBC correspondent who was in Singapore at the time, journalists were open to manipulation by IRD because of Sukarno's stubborn refusal to permit them into the country: "In a curious way, by keeping correspondents out of the country Sukarno made them the victims of official channels, because almost the only information you could receive was from the British ambassador in Jakarta."