T

he Indonesian government is taking with a grain of salt archival United States government accounts of what happened during the last days of former president Sukarno when the Indonesian Army launched a campaign to purge thousands of members of the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

A trove of US government files containing diplomatic dispatches from its embassy in Jakarta on the 1965-1966 mass killings of the PKI’s cadres and alleged sympathizers were released on Tuesday, providing some new details on what transpired at the time.

Jakarta, however, has downplayed the accounts, saying the documents reflected the “US point of view of the incident” that needed to be fact-checked first.

“The files contain communications that involved the US Embassy in Indonesia at that time, but we need to check the accuracy of the documents,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arrmanatha Nasir told reporters
on Wednesday.

Some 30,000 pages of files from the US Embassy in Jakarta reveal US diplomats’ detailed and ongoing knowledge of the political upheaval that swept through Indonesia at the height of the Cold War in 1965.

In a telegram dated Oct. 12, 1965 sent by then US ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green to the US secretary of state, Green reported a conversation with the German ambassador to Indonesia, who revealed the possibility of the Army deposing Sukarno.

The Army’s representative was said to have approached the German ambassador after Sukarno refused to read papers providing evidence of “PKI complicity in the Sept. 30 movement” presented by the Army, referring to the failed coup attempt that took the lives of six Army officers.

The representative, however, emphasized that the Army had yet to come to a decision about deposing Sukarno. “If it was done, it would be through a sudden move without warning and Sukarno would then be replaced by a combined civilian-military junta,” the telegram said, quoting the statement of the Army’s representative.

In a memorandum of a conversation dated Oct. 23, 1965, Adnan Buyung Nasution, an assistant to Indonesia’s attorney general, told the US Embassy’s second secretary that the Army had already executed many communists, but the information must be closely held because the Army needed more time to break the PKI.

A Dec. 21, 1965 cable from the embassy’s first secretary Mary Vance Trent to the US State Department noted that at least 100,000 people had been killed in anti-PKI violence, with some 10,000 killings occurring in Bali by mid-December. The killings continued for several more months, resulting in an estimated 80,000 dead.

Nasution said that it was critical for Sukarno not to learn about the extent of Army repression, especially from foreign media. The second secretary, Robert G. Rich, said the US government was “making every effort to avoid stimulating press speculation.”

When asked about the documents, current Indonesian Military (TNI) commander Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo said he had not yet read the US files and thus he could not comment on the matter.

The files also cite the pivotal role of Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama and its youth wing Ansor, which remain the country’s biggest mainstream groups, in organizing executions in many parts of the country under the direction of the Army.

A Dec. 6, 1965 cable from the US Consulate in Medan to the US Embassy in Jakarta reported that preachers in Muhammadiyah mosques were telling congregations that all who had consciously joined the PKI must be killed, saying that they “are classified as the lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blood is comparable to killing chicken.”

Muhammadiyah secretary-general Abdul Mu’ti said the US files should be further verified to ensure their reliability. He added that even if it was true that Muhammadiyah preachers called for the killing of PKI members, “personal statements could not be considered as the stance of the organization.”

Meanwhile, historian Asvi Warman Adam from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said the declassification of the US files could push the Indonesian government to pay more attention to the 1965 massacre, which remains a sensitive topic until now.