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Introduction: The September 30th Movement, 1965
In the early morning of October 1,1965, self-proclaimed left-wing troops raided the houses of seven top army generals in Jakarta. In the process, six of the generals were killed-three were shot during the kidnapping attempt, while the others were taken to Lubang Buaya, an air force base located in the south of Jakarta, and then killed. The seventh general, Nasution, managed to escape. The perpetrators announced on national radio that they were troops loyal to President Sukarno, and they aimed to protect the president from the danger posed by the right-wing "Council of Generals"-who, they said, were planning to launch a military coup d'état. These troops called themselves the September 30th Movement (abbreviated in Indonesian as the G30S), and named Lieutenant Colonel Untung, a commander of the presidential guard, as their leader.1
This movement was very short-lived. Within one day, it collapsed. Major General Suharto, then the commander of the army's strategic reserve (KOSTRAD)-who "surprisingly was not captured," although he was "logically" one of the "prime targets for the strike"-took control of the army during the morning of October 1 and quickly crushed the movement.2 Details of what happened behind the scenes with this movement remain murky, although some interpretations have suggested that the G30S was an internal struggle within the army.3 Nevertheless, one thing is clear: what happened on October 1, 1965 marked the fall of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto, who was soon to rule Indonesia under his military dictatorship for more than three decades. The brutality of Suharto's New Order is probably not news for people familiar with Indonesia. But there is "an episode the West would prefer to forget," as journalist John Pilger put it, that accompanied Suharto's rise to power: the destruction of Communism and the mass killings that followed-a phenomenon claimed by Time magazine in 1966 as "The West's best news for years in Asia" or, as presented in the title of James Reston's 1966 column in the New York Times, "A Gleam of Light in Asia."4
Having taken control of the situation, Suharto declared the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) as the dalang, or "puppet master" behind the G30S - an accusation that was never supported by evidence.5 The following years...