On the late night of September 30 and the early morning of October 1, 1965, seven detachments of troops, packed in trucks and buses, headed to the homes of the seven highest-ranking officers in the Indonesian Armed Forces. Each of these teams was tasked with arresting them and bringing them to Halim Air Force Base. Six of the teams brought back their men, including Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, the Army’s commander. However, one, General Nasution, got away. The armed troops—the members of the September 30th Movement—went to town and occupied Independence Square in Jakarta.
The next morning, at 7.30 am, a radio broadcast, with a message from Lieutenant Colonel Untung, the Commander of the September 30th Movement, was read out. The voice told the public that the movement was formed to prevent the counterrevolutionary force from harbouring evil designs against the republic. At 9 am, when Sukarno finally arrived at Halim Air Force Base to meet with the leaders of the movement, he found all six captured generals killed and their bodies abandoned near the base.
There was so much confusion for the next twelve hours, during which the movement was crushed, and the Army, now headed by Suharto, took direct control of the country. Overnight, Indonesia had transitioned to military rule. What really ensued on September 30 has puzzled scholars for decades. However, in its aftermath, with Bung Karno now ousted and relegated to the presidential palace, Suharto seized control of the country and “told a set of deliberate, carefully prepared lies”.
In a book titled The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, American journalist and writer Vincent Bevins examines the role the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in regime change operations and the mass extermination of communists across the globe.
Years earlier, however, during the period of Guided Democracy, Sukarno talked about the unity of Marxism, Islam, and nationalism—NASAKOM, for Nasionalisme, Agama (Religion), and Komunisme. These three forces were the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), Sukarno, and the military. President Sukarno played them against each other to maintain a delicate balance. The US diplomatic efforts to curb communist influence in Indonesia had collapsed over the years.
The removal of Howard Jones and the installation of the new US ambassador, Marshall Green, in Jakarta had led to an escalation of secret activities across Indonesia. For years, the CIA had been training young Indonesian military officers in the US and had been injecting them with propaganda of curbing communism. It had been supplying the army with intelligence and weapons to fight them, the communists internally.
Suharto, with the covert support of the US, took control of all mass communications after September 30 and accused the Indonesian Communist Party of the supposed failed coup, and of killing the army officials, in demonic rituals. The propaganda broadcast said that the members of Gerwani, the women’s movement, danced naked while the women mutilated and tortured the generals, before killing them. It further stated that China had been funding these operations. Of course, all this was a lie.
Bevin writes: “Soon after the initial confusion, the US government assisted Suharto in the cruel early phase of spreading propaganda and establishing his anti-Communist narrative. Washington quickly and covertly supplied vital mobile communications equipment to the military, a now-declassified October 14 cable indicates.”
By early October, there were widespread military announcements: “The PKI are kafir [infidels]”, “Crush the PKI!”, “Exterminate them down to the roots”, etc. The Indonesian army called it—Operation Annihilation. And the CIA was in close cooperation with the Indonesian Army, supplying weapons, communication channels, and names of thousands of communists and suspected communists who would be murdered and checked off the list as killed.
People suspected of being communist—or just normal people were picked up as suspects, taken away in the middle of the night, had their hands tied, tossed in the river, or just shot, tortured and mutilated, women and children raped, and mass violence ensued. Bodies that piled up in the rivers both blocked the flow of water and carried a pungent stink for months. People weren’t just killed: they were arrested, and then they disappeared. No one could tell what happened to them, and no one really wanted to know out of fear.
In Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 masterful documentary “The Act of Killing”, one, Anwar Congo, an executioner in 1965, shows the places where exterminations took place: “There are many ghosts here, because many people were killed here. They died unnatural deaths. Unnatural deaths. They arrived perfectly healthy. When they got here, they were beaten up and died. Dragged around and dumped. At first, we beat them to death… But there was too much blood. There was so much blood here. So, when we cleaned it up, it smelled awful.”
To avoid the bloody stench, Congo would devise a system: He would tie a thin wire to a pole, and then he would make people sit next to the pole, wrap the wire around their necks and pull it tight until they were dead. Congo said, “We were gangsters. We didn’t have real jobs. So, we would do anything for money, just to buy nice clothes.” In the evenings, Congo would dance to the music, along with some alcohol, some marijuana, and a little bit of ecstasy.
Within just six months, close to a million people—who were dubbed as communists—were killed in Indonesia. This included union members, peasants, intellectuals, journalists, and ethnic Chinese people. Today, Bali is known as a tourist hotspot, with millions of foreigners travelling to glimpse the Balinese smile, but during those bloody days, at least over 5 per cent of the population in Bali was killed. The routine exterminations across the Third World became Washington’s global anti-Communist crusade.
Wherever there was a wave of communism—or socialism—the CIA had put the Jakarta method in place. Brazil’s recent Truth Commission report noted that “The Jakarta Operation” was the name used for the secret extermination plan of communists in Brazil. With Salvador Allende out of the way in a CIA-backed military coup, Augusto Pinochet undertook his own Plan Yakarta—the anti-Communist mass murder. The Jakarta method came to embody “the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States.”
Between 1945 and 1990, at the height of the Cold War, the Third World countries had descended into military dictatorships that had been propped up by the CIA. During this period, at least across twenty-three countries, the US-backed anti-Communist extermination programs were put in place. Much like in Indonesia, Bevin notes that the US officials supplied “kill lists”—lists of suspected Communists to be exterminated in Iraq and Guatemala.
These extermination programmes were in place in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam. In several of these places, Bevin notes that direct references to Jakarta (as a method, as a plan, as a solution) were used.
In The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins highlights how the world came to terms with the global extermination of communists. Even to this day, in some of these countries, fanatical anticommunism continues. Communism continues to be a dirty word. Paranoia continues to be rife. And the ghosts of these massacres still lurk around. Indonesia still bans communism—and this ban continues to shape how politics and protests are shaped and repressed.