Interpretations of the 1965 Indonesian Coup: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

O N THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 30, I965 several hundred dissident military personnel, as well as members and followers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its front groups, staged abortive coup d'etat in Djakarta and in a few scattered locations in Central and West Java. Largely quelled within seventy-two hours, the coup marked a major turning point in Indonesia's post-war history. Its failure was to inaugurate drastic realignments in the country's domestic and foreign policies, and led directly to former President Sukarno's fall from power and to the assumption of the presidency by General Suharto who had led the campaign against Gestapu (Gerakan Tiga Puluh September or Thirty September Movement), the term commonly given by Indonesians today to the coup.1 Despite a spate of publications on the coup that have appeared both in Indonesia and abroad in the past five years, critically important aspects of it have remained and controversial. No student of Gestapu has denied that both the Indonesian Army and the PKI were involved in it. The controversy, rather, has focussed on the degree of involvement of each, particularly with respect to initiative and planning. Professor W. F. Wertheim, of the University of Amsterdam, a leading specialist on modern Indonesia, has regarded it as highly probable that the coup was an internal army affair reflecting serious tensions between certain officers in the Central Java Diponegoro Division, supported by the Air Force, and Army headquarters in Djakarta; not only was the role of the PKI leadership in the events of September 30 hazy and unclear but is little to prove that it was the PKI which started the whole affair, whereas there were other indications disproving such a possibility. Essentially the same view was presented in the pages of the New