Image courtesy  of Flickr user Chez Julius Livre 1

Image courtesy of Flickr user Chez Julius Livre 1

Indonesia 1965: the attempted coup and the rise of Suharto

2 May 2017

More information

Emeritus Professor

You might also like

Early on the morning of 1 October 1965, seven detachments of troops drove through the quiet streets of Jakarta, bound for the homes of the most senior generals of the Indonesian army. On arrival, the troops demanded that the generals accompany them to see Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Three generals complied, three resisted and were shot on the spot, one general escaped.

The living and the dead were bundled into the trucks, which headed to Halim Airforce Base, just south of the city. There, the remaining three were killed and the bodies of all six, along with that of lieutenant caught up by mistake in place of the escaped general, were dumped in a well. The location was ominously known as Lubang Buaya (‘Crocodile Hole’).

Later that morning, other troops seized key positions in the centre of Jakarta, including the radio station, which broadcast an announcement from Lieutenant Colonel Untung, commander of Sukarno’s Palace Guard, that his troops, with the support of others, had acted as the ‘30th September Movement’ to forestall a coup by the generals and to protect the president. Those generals had indeed good reason to be planning a coup.

Indonesian politics was a tense standoff between the conservative military leaders and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), then the third largest Communist Party in the world. President Sukarno balanced the two, bolstered by a large group of ‘Sukarnoists’ who supported the President’s radical ideas but didn’t want communist rule. Sukarno favoured the PKI in his rhetoric but never allowed them close to the levers of power. The President, however, was ailing, and both sides knew that the balance would be overthrown sooner or later. Each had incentive to move first.

Troops in Central Java declared support for the Untung movement and later killed two other officers. Early in the afternoon of 1 October, the Untung group issued a further proclamation claiming power in the name of a 45-member Revolutionary Council, most of whose members hadn’t been consulted about their inclusion. By then, however, the Untung operation had begun to unravel. The commander of the Army’s Strategic Reserve, General Suharto, rallied his own forces and persuaded the rebel troops in central Jakarta to surrender. A few hours later his troops seized Halim and the 30th September Movement was over.

These events in Jakarta had far-reaching consequences. Suharto used the emergency powers that he assumed to suppress the Movement to consolidate his own position and eventually to displace Sukarno as president.

Indonesia moved from being a leader of the radical left in world affairs to being a bastion of anti-communism. Suharto supervised Indonesia’s economic recovery from the neglect of the Sukarno era to unprecedented levels of prosperity, albeit with unprecedented levels of corruption.

He also presided over the killing of around half a million members and associates of the PKI. In some places such as East Java, those killings arose out of bitter local political antagonisms, but everywhere they were authorized—and in many cases—directly organized by the army. Over a million leftists spent time in detention.

The Suharto group, and later the Suharto regime, justified the killings and detentions by claiming that the 30th September Movement had been the work of the PKI and asserting—entirely without foundation—that it was planned as the first step in a massive, brutal seizure of power by the communists. The army alleged that PKI members planned to slaughter their anti-communist neighbours, seize their property, sovietise Indonesian society and suppress Islam. The murder of the generals—a shocking event in its own right—was embellished with false stories that they had been tortured and sexually mutilated by young communist women.

The West, delighted that the PKI had been removed from the political scene, largely overlooked the scale of the killings and accompanying repression. Few direct reports of the violence were available, and those that appeared often underplayed the scale of military involvement, stressing ritual elements in the killings that seemed to place them in a world of pre-modern savagery, rather than of modern political extermination. The Suharto forces which had incited the killings were congratulated for their capacity to keep order in a turbulent society.

The Suharto government’s claim that Indonesia’s communists planned the Jakarta coup as the first step towards a bloodbath of their opponents was malicious fantasy, but the question of whether anyone but Untung was behind the events of 1 October 1965 has fascinated observers for half a century.

To read the entire article by Robert Cribb, visit the ASPI Strategist website.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Chez Julius Livre 1.

Updated:  29 March 2024/Responsible Officer:  Bell School Marketing Team/Page Contact:  CAP Web Team