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Introduction The truth about the usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable. We must see that it is regarded as authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we do not want it soon to end. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670) For historians who have tried to make sense of the course of modern Indonesian history, a matter of some frustration is that the most enigmatic episode happens to be one of the most significant. In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, the commander of the army, Lieutenant General Achmad Yani, and five generals on his staff were kidnapped from their homes in Jakarta and trucked to a desolate grove south of the city. The abductors killed Yani and two other generals in the course of capturing them. Back at the grove sometime later that morning, the abductors executed the three remaining generals and dumped all six corpses down a well. A lieutenant, grabbed by mistake from the home of a seventh general, suffered the same watery subterranean end. The people behind these killings also seized the national radio station that morning and identified themselves over the air as troops loyal to President Sukarno .1 Their stated aim was to protect the president from a clique of right-wing army generals who were plotting a coup d’état. The abductors revealed the name of their leader, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, commander of an army battalion responsible for guarding the president, and the name of their group: the September 30th Movement (referred to hereafter as “the movement”). In a show of force hundreds of the movement’s soldiers occupied the central square of the capital city. Later in the afternoon and during the evening of October 1, as if responding to a signal from Jakarta, troops in the province of Central Java kidnapped five of their commanding officers. Part of the difficulty in understanding the movement lies in its defeat , which occurred before most Indonesians knew it existed. It collapsed just as suddenly as it had erupted. In the absence of Yani, Major 3 General Suharto took command of the army during the morning of October 1 and launched a counterattack that evening. The movement’s troops abandoned the radio station and the central square only twelve hours after occupying them. All the rebel troops were either captured or sent fleeing from Jakarta by the morning of October 2. In Central Java the movement did not last beyond October 3. It evaporated before its members could clearly explain its aims to the public. The movement’s leaders did not even have the chance to hold a press conference and pose for photographers. Despite its brief lifespan, the movement had epochal effects. It marked the beginning of the end of Sukarno’s presidency and the rise to power of Suharto. At the time Sukarno had been the single most important national leader for more than two decades, from the time he and a fellow nationalist, Mohammad Hatta, had proclaimed Indonesia’s independence in 1945. Sukarno had been the nation-state’s only president . With his charisma, eloquence, and passionate patriotism, he remained widely popular amid all the postindependence political turmoil and economic mismanagement. By 1965 his hold on the presidency was unrivaled. It is testimony to his popularity that both the movement and Major General Suharto justified their actions as means to defend him. Neither side dared appear disloyal to the president. Suharto used the movement as a pretext for delegitimizing Sukarno and catapulting himself into the presidency. Suharto’s incremental takeover of state power, what can be called a creeping coup d’état, was disguised as an effort to prevent a coup. If for President Sukarno the movement’s action was a “ripple in the wide ocean of the [Indonesian national] Revolution,” a minor affair that could be quietly resolved without any major shake-up in the power structure, for Suharto it was a tsunami of treason and evil, revealing something profoundly wrong with Sukarno’s state.2 Suharto accused the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) of masterminding the movement and then orchestrated the extermination of people affiliated with the party. Suharto’s military rounded up more than a million and a half people. All were accused of being involved in the movement.3 In one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of individuals were massacred by the...

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