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5. Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement
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5 Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement For the PKI, work can only be performed properly and with excellence if it is accompanied by loyalty or solidarity. . . . It is this basis of Communist morality that conditions the practice of democratic centralism— centralism based on democracy, and democracy with a center—in which collective and individual responsibility are made one. Sudisman, Analysis of Responsibility (1967) The evidence so far suggests that Aidit at least approved of Sjam’s collaboration with military officers for staging a preemptive strike against the army high command. Sjam was the primary organizer of the movement , according to the Supardjo document. He was Aidit’s loyal subordinate , according to Hasan. If these two claims are true, one has to suspect that Aidit was more than a gullible dupe of the movement. At this point the unanswered question is whether Aidit initiated the movement and ordered Sjam to carry it out (as the Suharto regime’s version claimed) or allowed Sjam to work with the military officers on the assumption that the officers were leading the movement. What did Aidit know about the relationship between the Special Bureau members and the military officers? What did Sjam tell him? What information did he hear from other sources about the disposition of military officers who joined the movement? Was Aidit the mastermind, commanding and supervising Sjam’s every move, or was he a supporter of the movement and under the impression that the military officers were masterminding the action? 139 It is difficult to assess Aidit’s role because there is no direct, conclusive evidence about it. Given the clandestine nature of the organizing, only two men were in a position to fully understand Aidit’s role: Sjam and Aidit himself. The army executed Aidit in November 1965 before he had a chance to give an account of his actions. Sjam, appearing at a Mahmillub trial in 1967, asserted that he had acted on orders from Aidit. His assertion is impossible to verify. The only approach to the question of Aidit’s role is indirect, a matter of piecing together bits of evidence and considering the plausibility of different possibilities. In this chapter I consider statements by former PKI leaders, Aidit’s political strategy in the months before the movement, and his views on military coups. I also consider the party’s statement about the movement in the October 2, 1965, edition of its daily newspaper, Harian Rakjat. Sudisman’s Analysis The most significant statement by a PKI leader about the movement was by Sudisman, the party’s secretary general who managed to survive the great massacres. He was captured in December 1966 and brought before the Mahmillub in July 1967. He was one of a group of five young men who had taken over the leadership of the party in 1951. These five—Aidit, Lukman, Njoto, Sakirman, and Sudisman himself— enjoyed great success in rebuilding the party. In his defense plea Sudisman referred to the unity among these five men as similar to that of the five Pandawa brothers of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata: “The four of them are I, and I am the four of them. . . . With the four of them, I have been five-in-one. . . . We five have always been together.”1 The Communist Party’s success from 1951 to 1965 was in part due to this unity of the leadership. No splits fragmented the party into rival organizations (such as occurred in the Communist movement in India), even in the midst of the Sino-Soviet conflict. Sudisman’s defense plea, though presented in the Mahmillub— “in the grip of the enemy,” as the ex-PKI activists would say—is a candid , well-written document that exhibits remarkable intelligence and composure. He did not shrink before the court in fear, shift blame onto others, feign ignorance, or plead for his life. As the highest party leader left alive, he felt a responsibility to the party’s supporters to explain what went wrong. Aware that he was going to be sentenced to death, he composed his defense plea as a political statement to the broader public outside the courtroom. Indeed, because he refused to recognize the 140 Aidit, the PKI, and the Movement t [3.235.42.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:51 GMT) legitimacy of the Mahmillub, he denied that it should be called a defense plea (pledoi). He called it an “analysis...