The Jakarta Method

‘The story spread by Suharto hits on some of the darkest fears and prejudices held by Indonesians, and indeed men in general—around the world. A surprise night raid on your home. Slow torture with blades. The inversion of gender roles, the literal assault on strong men's reproductive organs carried out by demonic, sexually depraved communist women. It's the stuff of a well-written, reactionary horror film, and few people believe Suharto came up with it himself.

The similarities with the Brazilian legend of the Intentona Comunista are striking. Just a year after a coup in the most important nation in Latin America was inspired partly by a legend about communist soldiers stabbing generals to death in their sleep, General Suharto tells the most important nation in Southeast Asia that communists and left-wing soldiers whisked generals away from their homes in the dead of night to be murdered slowly with knives, and then both Washington-aligned anticommunist military dictatorships celebrated the anniversary of those rebellions in very much the same way for decades.

Historian Bradley Simpson at the National Security Archives in Washington, DC, notes, “Though we lack access to many of the classified US and British materials, it is highly likely that a key element of US and British covert operations in this period involved the creation of ‘black' propaganda inside Indonesia,” with the goal of demonizing the PKI.

There are many ways Suharto's propaganda team could have taken “inspiration” from Brazilian anticommunist legend. Maybe some US official handed Suharto the idea or helped craft his narrative for him. Thousands of Brazilian and Indonesian military officers studied at Leavenworth over the same period of time, and maybe someone talked about the Intentona there. Perhaps Indonesian officials simply grabbed at, and hyper-amplified, anticommunist tropes that were floating out there in the global consciousness, in the international anticommunist movement that was already large, well-organized, and interconnected. By then, there was already the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, made up largely of far-right Eastern Europeans; there was the Asian People's Anticommunist League, a kind of counter-Bandung group led by Taiwan and South Korea; and there was the Mexican-led Inter-American Confederation for the Defense of the Continent. Because of the intervention of a Brazilian anticommunist, all three groups had met in Mexico City in 1958, and had stayed in contact afterward. Even regular North Americans knew about those old, absurd references to “reds under the bed.” Or perhaps it's just a coincidence.'



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‘It wasn't only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.

The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed—disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death. The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killing started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. At several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don't—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand.

US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular. In line with Frank Wisner's early strategy of covert direct confrontation, the US government launched secret attacks and murdered civilians in 1958 in the attempt to break up the country, and failed. So American officials adopted Howard Jones's more subtle on-the-ground insights, turning to a strategy of building deep connections with the Armed Forces and building an anticommunist military state within a state. John F. Kennedy's active engagement with the Third World and especially its military, under the guidance of Modernization Theory, provided the structure to expand the power of this operation in Indonesia. When Washington parted ways with Jones and his strategy of working directly with Sukarno, it instructed its secret and not-so-secret agents to destabilize the country and create conflict. When the conflict came, and when the opportunity arose, the US government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible, and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. The US embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. The Indonesian military officers understood very well that the more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, and the happier Washington would be.'