Communist Party of Indonesia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Communist Party of Indonesia, known by its Indonesian initials PKI, was at one moment the third-largest communist party in the entire world. In the 1955 elections, it claimed two million members and captured 16 percent of the national vote. In East Java, that share climbed to nearly 30 percent. By 1965, its total membership in the party and affiliated mass organizations was claimed to represent one-fifth of the Indonesian population. Then, within months, it was gone. What built a party of that scale inside a postcolonial nation still finding its footing? What broke it apart so violently? And who decided who would live and who would die? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Dutch Beginning

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  Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch socialist, founded the Indies Social Democratic Association in 1914. The organization he built, known by its Dutch initials ISDV, had just 85 members and was born from a merger of two Dutch socialist parties. Of its roughly 100 initial members, only three were Indonesian. That imbalance would not last. When Sneevliet moved the ISDV's headquarters from Surabaya to Semarang, Indonesians from like-minded movements across the Dutch Indies began to join. The ISDV launched its first Dutch-language publication, Het Vrije Woord, meaning The Free Word, in October 1915. By 1917, it had started Soeara Merdeka, its first Indonesian-language publication. The ISDV also began a tactic known as the "block within" strategy, infiltrating other political groups rather than confronting them directly. The most significant target was Sarekat Islam, a nationalist-religious organization advocating pan-Islam and freedom from colonial rule. Figures including Semaun and Darsono were drawn into radical leftist ideas through this infiltration. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sneevliet's influence grew sharply. Dutch authorities grew nervous enough that they forced him to leave the Dutch East Indies entirely in 1918.

• 3. From ISDV to PKI

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  At its congress on the 23rd of May 1920 in Semarang, the ISDV changed its name to Perserikatan Komunis di Hindia, the Communist Union of the Indies. Semaun became party chairman and Darsono the vice-chairman. The highest committee members remained predominantly Dutch. The Sarekat Islam's sixth congress in 1921 proved a turning point: a motion introduced by Agus Salim, the organization's secretary, banned dual membership in other parties. Tan Malaka and Semaun opposed the motion, but it passed. The communists were forced out of Sarekat Islam and left as the only active extremist organization in a space the Dutch colonial authorities were steadily narrowing. In 1922, while Semaun was attending the Far Eastern Labour Conference in Moscow, Tan Malaka tried to turn a strike by government pawnshop workers into a national general strike. The plot failed. Malaka was arrested and given a choice between internal or external exile; he chose to leave for the Soviet Union. By September of that year, Semaun had returned and helped form the Union of Indonesian Labour Organizations. At the Fifth Comintern Congress in 1924, the directive was clear: communist parties must control trade unions to make revolution possible. The party changed its name that year to Partai Komunis Indonesia, giving rise to the abbreviation PKI that would echo through Indonesian history for decades.

• 4. The 1926 Revolt

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  A May 1925 plenary session of the Comintern executive committee ordered Indonesian communists to build a broad anti-imperialist coalition. But extremist factions led by Alimin and Musso pushed for outright revolution. At a conference in Prambanan, Central Java, PKI-controlled trade unions settled on a plan: railroad workers would strike first, triggering a general strike, and then the PKI would replace the colonial government entirely. Tan Malaka, who served as the Comintern's agent for Southeast Asia and Australia, disagreed. He believed the PKI lacked sufficient mass support for an uprising to succeed. Colonial security crackdowns early in 1926 ended the right of assembly and led to a wave of arrests, pushing the party underground. The resulting dissension over timing and strategy produced poor coordination. The revolution was postponed in June 1926. Still, a limited revolt broke out in Batavia on the 12th of November; similar uprisings followed in Padang, Bantam, and Surabaya. The Batavia revolt was crushed in a day or two, the others within a few weeks. The aftermath was severe: 13,000 people were arrested, 4,500 imprisoned, 1,308 interned, and 823 exiled to the Boven-Digoel camp in Western New Guinea. The party was outlawed by the Dutch East Indies government in 1927. PKI leader Musso returned from Moscow in 1935 to try to rebuild the underground organization, but his stay was brief and the leadership of the illegal branch, including Djokosoedjono, were soon arrested and exiled to Boven-Digoel as well.

• 5. The Aidit Years

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  In January 1951, D. N. Aidit was chosen General Secretary at a meeting of the Central Committee. The party he inherited was a fragment: somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 members. Under his leadership, that figure reached 165,000 by 1954 and 1.5 million by 1959. Aidit guided the PKI toward an alliance with President Sukarno, actively supporting Sukarno's plans for Guided Democracy before the 1955 election. That election placed the PKI fourth nationally with 16 percent of the vote. It won 39 seats out of 257 in the legislature and 80 out of 514 in the Constituent Assembly. The party's reputation for being one of the least corrupt in Indonesia gave it real electoral credibility. By the mid-1950s, U.S. officials were openly concerned that the PKI might be impossible to beat through elections alone. Richard Nixon, then vice president, reportedly said that a democratic government was probably not the best kind for Indonesia. On the 3rd of December 1957, trade unions largely under PKI control began seizing Dutch-owned companies, paving the way for the nationalization of foreign-owned businesses. In March 1962, the PKI formally joined the government; Aidit and Njoto were appointed advisory ministers. By 1965, annual inflation had exceeded 600 percent, and the party's membership in front organizations was claimed to represent one-fifth of the entire Indonesian population.

• 6. 30 September and the Purge

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  During the night of the 30th of September and the 1st of October 1965, six of Indonesia's senior army generals were killed and their bodies thrown down a well. The killers announced the following morning that a Revolutionary Council had seized power under the name the "the 30th of September Movement," or G30S. General Suharto took control of the army and suppressed the coup by the 2nd of October. The army blamed the PKI immediately and launched a nationwide anti-communist propaganda campaign. Evidence linking the PKI to the killings remains inconclusive; some scholars have argued that Suharto organized the events himself and used the communists as a pretext. On the 6th of October, PKI minister Njoto attended Sukarno's cabinet meeting; a resolution denouncing G30S was passed and Njoto was arrested on the spot. A mass demonstration two days later demanded a PKI ban. On the 13th of October, the Ansor Youth Movement held anti-PKI rallies across Java. Five days after that, Ansor killed about a hundred PKI members. On the 22nd of November, Aidit was captured and summarily executed by the army. Suharto formally banned the party on the 12th of March 1966. In the violence that followed, scholars estimate that at least 500,000 people were killed; the range given in the source runs between 100,000 and two million. A CIA study described the anti-PKI massacres as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century. A tribunal held in The Hague in 2016 concluded the massacres were crimes against humanity. On the island of Bali alone, approximately 80,000 people, about 5 percent of the island's population, were killed.

• 7. American Involvement

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  The United States played a direct role in what followed the coup. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied kill lists containing the names of thousands of suspected high-ranking PKI members to the Indonesian military. Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, described the process: U.S. embassy officials compiled the lists, handed them to the army, and instructed them to kill everyone on the lists and return the marked copies afterward. Economic, technical, and military aid flowed from Washington to the Indonesian military as the killings began. Declassified U.S. diplomatic cables released in 2017 confirmed this picture. UCLA historian Geoffrey B. Robinson concluded that the army's campaign of mass killings would not have occurred without U.S. and Western government support. A 2016 tribunal in The Hague found that the U.S. backed the Indonesian military knowing it was engaged in a programme of mass killings. General Suharto, who consolidated control over both the military and the government in the years that followed, was appointed president in 1968.

• 8. Remnants and Legacy

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  After the 1965-1966 killings, the party's leadership was crippled at every level. Sudisman, the fourth-ranking PKI leader before October 1963, took over after Aidit and Njoto were killed. He attempted to rebuild the party on a structure of interlocking cells of three members, but was captured in December 1966 and sentenced to death in 1967. A small PKI remnant consolidated in Blitar, a rural area of East Java where the party had strong peasant support. Among the leaders there were the Politburo member Rewang, the party theorist Oloan Hutapea, and the East Java leader Ruslan Widjajasastra. Violence erupted in Blitar in March 1968 when local peasants attacked members of Nahdlatul Ulama in retaliation for the group's role in anti-communist persecution; about 60 NU members were killed. The military crushed the Blitar enclave by mid-1968. In West Kalimantan, a separate remnant joined with armed groups in the border regions and was eventually wiped out through a series of military operations. Former PKI members remained blacklisted from government jobs and many professions for decades. In 1999, President Abdurrahman Wahid invited PKI exiles to return to Indonesia and proposed lifting restrictions on discussing communist ideology, citing Indonesia's original 1945 constitution, which did not mention communism. In April 2000, the Indonesian Islamic Front rallied ten thousand people in Jakarta against that proposal. Some of the events of 1965 were fictionalized in the 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously, the same decade in which the party that had once claimed one-fifth of Indonesia's population as its own remained a word too dangerous to speak aloud.