Guest Post: Avery M. Reviews Vincent Bevins' "The Jakarta Method"

There are some great things in this book. I especially liked the accounts by Indonesian victims of 1965 and the American diplomat Howard P. Jones. The author told the stories of these witnesses to history responsibly and integrated them into a historical narrative. The author does a service to Indonesian voices that have never been heard before.

However, I do not recommend this book for two reasons. The first is that while it reveals a lot of important background about the CIA methods for engineering coups, the book doesn’t end up proving its principal thesis that the events of 1964-65 constituted a “Jakarta Method" by American actors. The second is that it’s poorly written.

When discussing Suharto’s 1964 coup and the ensuing mass murders of 1965, historians integrate internal and external causes. It is a complex state failure, not a Disney story with a single villain behind everything. The internal economic situation in Indonesia declined in the early 1960s after an initial period of prosperity and Sukarno became increasingly reliant on foreign aid. Sukarno’s frequent visits to the USA were linked to his desire for such aid, which the USA provided while the USSR, shamefully, did not. Here Sukarno was in trouble. If Indonesia became a US ally this would have likely provoked armed reaction from the communist PKI, as the PKI rightly suspected the US of dominating and exploiting its Third World allies. The “year of living dangerously” in 1964 was an act of desperate flailing by Sukarno, trying to provoke the USSR or China into sending him some aid so that he wouldn’t have to depend on the US. The US reacted by beginning to cut aid, meant as more of a warning than a direct rejection.

These economic issues take up only one page of this book, hidden under the heading “Konfrontasi” (which refers to something quite different, Indonesia’s military confrontation with British Malaysia). But it is impossible to understand why Suharto’s coup was accepted without this economic context. Sukarno’s power sharing between the military and PKI flourished in the good times, but in the bad times the only thing preventing civil war was the charisma of Sukarno himself, and this was a cause of concern for every educated person in the country. This is why the Indonesian military was accepting the CIA’s assistance in the first place! It is not like they were happy with the CIA’s bungled 1958 invasion. Furthermore, Suharto had already independently developed the economic power moves that the author claims the army didn't know until the CIA taught them (the "civic action program" mentioned in the text on pages 89, 116 and 125), so he was likely using them mostly for their money. I recommend David Jenkins’ article “One Reasonably Capable Man: Soeharto’s Early Fundraising” which is freely available online for anyone who wants to understand how Suharto obtained power by internal means.

If you understand the economic motivation for the coup, you can also understand the horrible, inhumane logic of the mass killings. The rightists had a common goal: to empower a centralized government given the problems that the weak, charismatic government of Sukarno had caused. There was a problem standing in the way: the mass popular movement of the PKI prepared to stand their ground against authoritarianism. The solution was to eliminate the PKI, and as we all learned from the film “The Act of Killing,” they had plenty of local paramilitary allies stupid and mean enough to do it. Even if the CIA pushed for this murder, they had a poor understanding of Indonesian history and culture (as evidenced in the book, they did not even know that prominent Army figures had been trained in America) and they could not have orchestrated it as well as Indonesia’s own military men did.

The author presents no new evidence that the CIA was behind Suharto’s coup. He only suggests that such evidence might yet be secret. Claiming that "most Indonesians had no idea who Suharto was ... but the CIA did" he overstates the case that the USA knew who Suharto was. They knew he was an army general, but there is no evidence they ever talked to him personally. As memorably described in the book “The Sukarno File” (2006), on October 1, 1964, diplomats in Washington woke up, read the news, and frantically telegrammed their counterparts in Jakarta, asking “who the hell is Suharto?” This should have been mentioned in this book—it doesn’t even contradict the CIA plot thesis, necessarily—but it is omitted. It is important to understand how little-known Suharto was because the truth of the matter is he was not hand-picked by anyone to be Sukarno's replacement. Over the course of the Konfrontasi and the "civic action program," Suharto observed the situation silently and stayed below the radar of external and political forces even as his personal power grew. The CIA may have given Suharto some suggestions on how to propagandize to Indonesians as discussed at the end of chapter 6, but again, their understanding of the culture was poor and Suharto probably used their advice to his own ends.

The film “The Dancer” (Sang Penari, 2011) available on Netflix gives a more accurate portrayal of the Sukarno years and their decline and end than this book. This book may still be a good read if you want to learn about the crimes and failures of the CIA. However, you’d probably have a better time reading Tim Weiner’s epochal book “Legacy of Ashes,” or Chomsky’s older “The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism,” because of the other flaw in this book, its egregious writing style. Here is an example:

A Dutchman named Henk Sneevliet, the local Comintern boss, had helped found Asia’s first Communist Party outside the former Russian Empire—the Indonesian Communist Party—and thought the Chinese party could learn from the success that Indonesian Communists had working with the Islamic Union mass movement. Mao’s job was to support the ‘bourgeois’ Nationalists, and play a secondary role in the construction of a capitalist nation. A loyal Communist, Mao obeyed. This did not work out so well for the Chinese Communists. In 1927, Chiang turned on them.

The text is a series of little bumps, and when you read it, it’s like riding in a car down a bumpy road. Imagine a whole book written like this. It gets exhausting fast, and the text sometimes feels more like disjointed thoughts jotted down as a prelude to an actual manuscript. I can easily rewrite that entire paragraph as follows:

The Indonesian Communist Party, the oldest Communist Party in Asia, had found success in partnering with a mass movement called the Islamic Union, and its leadership believed that the Chinese would benefit from a similar partnership. Mao followed their guidance and partnered with the Chinese Nationalists. This alliance, however, ended in betrayal.

Confusingly, this paragraph comes from page 18, but the Indonesian Communist Party is actually reintroduced on page 35 and it is only on page 35 that we learn about its history and its common acronym, PKI. Rearranging the text to offer a parallel between the 1927 massacre and the 1965 massacre would have been deeply enlightening. This is representative of the poor flow of the entire book. For example, the "civic action program" is also introduced twice, and both times given an acronym that is never used.

Briefly, some other issues: the author has a terrible habit of introducing new topics in the final sentence of a paragraph, instead of the first sentence of the next paragraph, which creates additional little bumps. It feels like more of a distorted historical memoir by the author, making connections between his personal background living in two countries far from the thoughts of most Americans, but equally affected by bloody CIA-influenced right wing coups 60 years before.

To conclude, this is far from the worst book written about Indonesia and you might get some useful knowledge from it. It is overall a good thing to bring 1965 to the awareness of Americans, and I wish I could have seen this book displayed prominently to idle browsers in physical storefronts (a sad thing that the coronavirus has taken from us), but there are better books and films out there on these subjects.

I once saw a prewar film about white adventurers in Borneo which included ridiculous footage of the white heroes "teaching" the natives how to build a wooden raft, or rather, shouting some nonsense for the camera's sake while the Indonesians waited patiently to resume work. The CIA wanted their Washington superiors to believe that they were the white heroes in Indonesia, and Bevins falls for this narrative to an embarrassing extent. The CIA provided funding and training to the Indonesian military, but only after badly bungling their relationship with them and proving themselves distrustworthy. The CIA may have thought themselves clever by setting up classes to "teach" the Indonesian Army various Machiavellian ideas, but Indonesian generals had already come up with these ideas independently. This is not something worthy of being called a "method" and the chief agents behind 1964 and 1965 were Indonesian, not American.