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3. The Supardjo Document
- University of Wisconsin Press
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3 The Supardjo Document The blaring overture that announced the contest dies away in a pusillanimous snarl as soon as the struggle has to begin, the actors cease to take themselves au serieux, and the action collapses completely, like a pricked bubble. . . . The revolution itself paralyzes its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Torture-induced confessions, dissimulating testimonies, fabricated media stories by army psychological warfare specialists—amid the abundance of information about the movement, precious little can be considered reliable evidence. Analysts have been unable propose anything more than educated guesses about the identity of the real leaders and their motivations. Were Sjam and Aidit in charge, as Sjam himself testified at his trial? Or were Untung and the other military officers in charge, as they testified at their trials? Or were they working together as a team with neither clearly in charge? Or was Suharto somehow behind them as the dalang, the puppet master, of the entire miserable drama? In the absence of any unimpeachable evidence, these questions cannot be answered with any certainty. Given that the evidence about the movement has been confused and suspect, it should not be surprising to discover that a crucial piece of evidence has been overlooked. One of the conspirators of the movement present at Halim air base on the day of October 1, Brigadier General Supardjo , wrote a postmortem analysis of their failure. He titled it “Some Factors That Influenced the Defeat of ‘the September 30th Movement’ as Viewed from a Military Perspective” (see appendix 1). Analysts have so 82 far not recognized this document for what it is: the most important primary source on the movement. It is the only document that has surfaced to date that was written by a participant in the movement before his arrest . As such, the information that it contains is of unique reliability and frankness. Supardjo was writing for the benefit of his colleagues, not for hostile interrogators and prosecutors. If we are to analyze the movement afresh, we should begin with this document, see what conclusions can be drawn from it, and then reexamine the remaining evidence in light of it. It hardly needs to be said that the Supardjo document cannot answer all the questions about the movement. The author was an individual with his own particular angle of vision. Supardjo was not one of the core organizers. Only five individuals led the movement and, presumably , understood all or most of its intricacies and subterfuges: Sjam, Pono, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, Colonel Latief, and Major Soejono. On the day of the action Supardjo was with these five individuals at Halim Air Force Base in Jakarta, and he served as their representative to President Sukarno. But he had not attended any of their planning meetings in the weeks before. He had arrived in Jakarta only three days before the action. While Supardjo was able to fulfill the promise of the title—“factors that contributed to the failure” of the movement—he did not understand all the reasons for that failure. As he saw the action unfold , he was mystified as to the underlying logic of certain decisions. This is where his unfamiliarity with the discussions and planning sessions during the previous weeks proved to be a limitation to his analysis. Moreover, he knew little about the status of the movement in Central Java, the province where it was strongest. Supardjo attempted to be strictly rational in writing his analysis: in the first section of the text he reports the events that he witnessed and then in the second section he lists his interpretations of those events. Of course, he might have misperceived certain events or misinterpreted what he had perceived. In this chapter I present background information about Supardjo and then describe the document’s significant claims concerning the leadership of the movement, the movement’s plan of action, the implementation of that plan, and the movement’s strategies in regard to President Sukarno and Major General Suharto. Supardjo’s Background and His Analysis When I first began researching the events of the mid-1960s, I was struck by the oddity of Supardjo’s participation in the movement. He The Supardjo Document 83 t [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:33 GMT) was named in the second radio announcement (Decree no. 1) of October 1, 1965, as the number two...