No Concessions: The Life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian Human Rights Lawyer

Ten. Into New Order Indonesia

219 ten Into New Order Indonesia O n the morning of 1 October 1965, two months after he and Abidin had finished their defense of Liem Koe Nio in Surabaya, Yap drove as usual to his office on Jl. Gajah Mada. He noticed that it was unusually quiet for Jakarta, but thought little of it. Only after he arrived at the office did he learn of the violent events of the previous night. The attempted coup that had occurred changed Indonesia’s life, and with it Yap’s. Much about the coup, including basic issues of origins and causes, remains murky.1 Even the term “coup” is ambiguous, for there were actually two attempts to unseat the government: a first that failed, and a second, the army’s, that crept up behind it and succeeded utterly. Only the essentials for understanding what happened, and how Yap responded, will be taken up here. Given the spiraling tension during the early 1960s, a dramatic denouement was inevitable. If a turning point in the Guided Democracy period can be located, it was probably November 1963, when First Minister Djuanda, a moderating influence, died. To succeed him, President (and Prime Minister) Soekarno chose Foreign Minister Subandrio as first deputy prime minister. A medical doctor by training who had been a diplomat since 1947 and foreign minister since 1957, Subandrio had a reputation for arrogance and opportunism . Attached to no party and without other visible means of political support , he was utterly dependent upon Soekarno, who entrusted him with huge responsibilities: first as deputy prime minister, then as foreign minister, chief 220 Into New Order Indonesia of the Central Intelligence Bureau (BPI), head of the Government Institutional Retooling Commission (Kotrar), and much else. As the economy slid into inflationary chaos, foreign affairs claimed center stage but hardly dampened the heat of domestic political turmoil. The confrontation with Malaysia produced a war along the Indonesia-Malaysia border in Kalimantan that led nowhere. Soekarno pronounced new alliances on the international left, invited the United States to “go to hell with its aid,” and at the end of 1964 withdrew Indonesia from the United Nations. Foreign adventure, however, fed back into the frenzied activity of political conflict at home, where the PKI seemed to grow more influential by the day. Indonesian politics during the last two years of Guided Democracy was complex, intense, brutal, and uncontained by institutional rules.2 Politics was all sandlot with no arena or umpires except for Soekarno himself. Formal institutions had collapsed into corruption, abuse, and inefficacy. As if to spread responsibility, Soekarno expanded the cabinet enormously, culminating in the “Cabinet of a Hundred Ministers” (seventy-seven actually) of September 1964. Oei Tjoe Tat was appointed to the cabinet at that time.3 The press, controlled, cautious, and generally bound by party lines, was a poor source of information. Bloated rumor circuits took up the slack, contributing substantially to public enervation. Soekarno, as the pivot of the political system, had relatively little control over it. Nor did anyone else. All was contention, with the PKI as the most aggressive party, the army as the one force with enough raw power to contain the communists, and other parties and interests distributed uncomfortably around these two poles. The PKI alone seemed to know what it was doing. Sticking closely to Soekarno, who appreciated its dynamism and support, the party became increasingly confident in its initiatives. The most important of these was land reform, promulgated as law in 1960 but consistently blocked by landed interests associated especially with the Nahdlatul Ulama and a wing of the PNI built around the pamong praja regional administration. In 1964 the communist Indonesian Peasants’ Front (BTI, Barisan Tani Indonesia) began to force the issue by means of “unilateral actions” against recalcitrant landowners and government forest reserves. In Central and East Java, Bali, and North Sumatra, tension spread as Communist, Nahdlatul Ulama, and PNI interests attacked each other. The terrible violence that followed the coup in late 1965 was adumbrated a year earlier particularly in those areas. In December 1964 Soekarno had called party leaders together to negotiate an end to conflict, but Into New Order Indonesia 221 to no effect, partly because the PKI Central Committee could no longer fully control the provincial BTI. At the same time, however, the PKI parried all efforts to limit its growing power and effectively undercut its most determined opposition on nearly...