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7. Assembling a New Narrative
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7 Assembling a New Narrative Now when the lord Chamberlen & these other lordes and knightes were thus behedded & ridde out of the way: then thought the protectour , yet while men mused what the mater ment, while the lordes of the realme wer about him out of their owne strenghtis, while no man wist what to thinke nor whome to trust, ere euer they should haue space to dispute & digest the mater & make parties: it wer best hastly to pursue his purpose, & put himself in possession of the crowne. . . . But now was al the study, by what meane thys matter being of it self so heinouse, might be first broken to the people, in such wise that it might be wel taken. Thomas More, The History of Richard III (1513) The literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov has noted that works of detective fiction combine two different narrative forms: the “story of the investigation ” (how the detective comes to know what happened) and the “story of the crime” (what actually happened).1 The usual pattern of a detective novel, as Slavoj †Zi†zek notes, is to follow the detective in the course of his investigation and then conclude with his reconstruction of the crime. And so this book ends “not when we get the answer to ‘Whodunit?’ but when the detective is finally able to tell ‘the real story’ in the form of a linear narration.”2 Each of my first four chapters focused on a particular piece of evidence or type of evidence. The chapters progressed according to the logic of a detective’s investigation rather than the chronology of a storyteller’s narration; each proposed a solution to one part of the puzzle after reviewing a limited range of evidence. However, what follows in this chapter should not be considered “the real story.” My only claim here is that events probably happened in this 202 way. The limitations of the existing evidence make it impossible for the historian-detective to account for every anomaly, fill in every blank space, and identify the precise role of every person involved. My investigation began with the Supardjo document, not because Supardjo was the most important figure in the movement but because his document is the richest and most reliable primary source available. Chapter 3 drew a number of narrow conclusions from his text. The most significant concerns the long-standing, unresolved question about the identity of the movement’s leadership: Were the military officers (Untung , Latief, and company) or the PKI figures (Sjam, Pono, and the rest) leading the movement? The Supardjo document indicates that, of the five core leaders gathered at Halim air base, the main leader was Sjam. This invalidates the interpretations of Anderson and Crouch (described in chapter 2), which suggest that the military officers played the dominant role. With that conclusion in hand, chapter 4 turned to the question of Sjam’s identity. That chapter, based largely on an oral interview with a former PKI leader who knew Sjam, drew another narrow conclusion: Sjam was a loyal subordinate of Aidit’s. This invalidates Wertheim’s hypothesis (also described in chapter 2) that Sjam was an army intelligence operative who was working to frame the PKI. Chapter 5 then focused on Aidit and presented evidence derived from statements by former PKI leaders, either in their courtroom defense statements or in oral interviews with me, that indicate that Aidit collaborated with Sjam to organize the movement as a preemptive strike against the right-wing army high command. This conclusion is not a confirmation of the interpretation of Suharto’s regime as it points to the culpability of only Aidit and Sjam, not the entire party leadership. The identity of the people participating in the movement and their reasons for joining were the focus of the investigation in chapters 3 to 5. The sixth chapter turned to a question pertaining to the army’s response to the movement: Why did the army under Suharto’s leadership exaggerate its significance and turn it into an epochal event? How did the movement become fetishized to the point that it could displace the mass killings of 1965–66 from Indonesia’s social memory? Chapter 6, which draws largely upon declassified U.S. government documents, argued that the upper echelons of the army officer corps were waiting for an opportune moment to attack the PKI and displace President Sukarno . They were prepared to take state power. They turned the movement into their long-awaited...