Transition to the New Order

The overthrow of Sukarno and the violence that followed it was a conflict in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966 between forces loyal to then-President Sukarno and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and forces loyal to a right-wing military faction led by General Abdul Haris Nasution and Maj. Gen. Suharto. On the pretext of stopping a communist coup, Nasution and Suharto led their forces to liquidate the PKI and topple the regime of Sukarno. The pivotal role of Suharto led to his assumption of the Indonesian presidency in 1967.

Prelude to conflict

The Indonesian Civil War came after two decades of independence and rule by the leader of the Indonesian Nationalists, President Sukarno. As president of the newly independent republic, Sukarno stressed socialist policies domestically and an avidly anti-imperialist international policy, underpinned by an authoritarian style of rule dependent upon his charismatic personality. These policies led him to create alliances with the Soviet bloc, People's Republic of China, and to pioneer the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement of post-colonial states at the Bandung Conference. It also created a domestic political alliance with the Communist Party of Indonesia.

File:Soekarno Indonesia.jpg

Former Pres. Sukarno, in undated photo

Military split

These same policies, however, won Sukarno few friends and many enemies in the Western nations. These especially included the United States and United Kingdom, whose investors were increasingly angered by Sukarno's nationalisation of mineral, agricultural, and energy assets. In need of Indonesian allies in its Cold War against the Soviet Union, the United States cultivated a number of ties with officers of the military through exchanges and arms deals. This fostered a split in the military's ranks, with the United States and others backing a right-wing faction against a left-wing faction overlapping with the Communist Party of Indonesia and the Comintern of which it was a part.

When Sukarno rejected food aid from USAID leading to famine conditions, the right-wing military adopted regional command structure through which it could smuggle staple commodities to win the loyalty of the rural population. Several officers, including Suharto, would be caught in such schemes and would be reassigned. In an attempt to curtail the right-wing military's increasing power, the Communist Party of Indonesia and the left-wing military formed a number of peasant and other mass organizations.

Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation

In 1963, a policy of Konfrontasi (Confrontation) against the newly formed Federation of Malaysia was announced by the Sukarno regime. This further exacerbated the split between the left-wing and right-wing military factions, with the left-wing faction and the Communist Party taking part in guerrilla raids on the border with Malaysia, while the right-wing faction largely absent from the conflict (whether by choice or orders of Sukarno is not clear).

The Confrontation further encouraged the West to seek ways to topple Sukarno, viewed as a growing threat to Southeast Asian regional stability (as with North Vietnam under the Domino Theory). The deepening of the armed conflict, coming close to all out warfare by 1965, both increased popular dissatisfaction with the Sukarno regime and strengthened the hand of the right-wing generals whose forces were still close to the center of power in Jakarta.

"G30S" and retaliation

As Major General, Suharto (at right, foreground) attends funeral for assassinated generals 5 October 1965. (Photo by the Department of Information, Indonesia)

On the early hours of October 1, 1965, a company of soldiers from the Palace Guard, the Tjakrabirawa, raided the homes of seven of the right-wing anti-Communist generals in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

Three of the generals were killed immediately, one of them were Lieut-Gen Ahmad Yani, the Chief-of-Staff of the Army. Three other generals were captured. A seventh target, the Defense Minister and Chief-of-Staff of the Indonesian Armed Forces, General Abdul Haris Nasution escaped; his daughter, however, was fatally wounded. Ahmad Yani's assistants were Maj-Gen S. Parman, Maj-Gen Suprapto, Maj-Gen MT Haryono, Brig-Gen Donald Isaac Panjaitan and Brig-Gen Sutoyo Siswomiharjo. The three captured generals and the bodies of the others were taken to a place known as Lubang Buaya ("Crocodile Hole") near the Halim Perdanakusumah Air Force Base in Jakarta. The three generals and Nasution's adjutant, First Lieutenant Pierre Tendean (who claimed he was Nasution to divert the attention of the kidnapping soldiers and allowed Nasution to escape), were subsequently killed and all the bodies were thrown down a well.

The palace guards also seized the RRI (Radio Republik Indonesia) and Telecommunications Building in central Jakarta. From the RRI building, they broadcasted statements calling themselves the "30th of September Movement" (Indonesian: Gerakan 30 September, abbreviated to G30S or Gestapu) led by Lieut-Col Untung bin Syamsuri. They claimed to have arrested several generals belonging to a conspiracy, the "Council of Generals", that had plotted a military coup against the government of President Sukarno. They further alleged that this coup was to take place on "Army Day" (October 5) with the backing of CIA, and that the Council would then install themselves as a military junta.

Furthermore, the soldiers proclaimed the establishment of a "Revolutionary Council" consisting of various well-known military officers and civilian leaders that would be the highest authority in Indonesia. Additionally, they declared President Sukarno's Dwikora Cabinet as invalid ("demisioner").

According to one chief conspirator Lieut-Col Latief, the Palace Guards had not attempted to kill or capture Major General Suharto, commander of KOSTRAD (Komando Strategi dan Cadangan TNI Angkatan Darat - the Army Stategic and Reserves Command), because he was considered as a Sukarno-loyalist and an apolitical general. Suharto, along with the surviving General Nasution, made the counter-allegation that the G30S is a rebellious movement that sought to replace President Sukarno's government with a Communist government. Upon hearing of the radio announcement, Suharto and Nasution began consolidating their forces, successfully gaining the loyalty of Jakarta Garrison Commander Maj-Gen Umar Wirahadikusumah and Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the commander of army special forces RPKAD (Resimen Para Komando Angkatan Darat).

During the evening of October 1, RPKAD soldiers recaptured RRI and Telecommunications Building without any resistance as the rebel soldiers had retreated back to Halim Base. RPKAD forces proceeded to attack Halim Perdanakusumah AF Base on the morning of October 2, but was stopped by the rebel soldiers in a fierce gunbattle in which several fatalities were inflicted on both sides. A direct order from President Sukarno managed to secure the surrender of the rebel soldiers by noon, after which Suhartoist forces occupied the base. The next day, soldiers discovered the buried remains of the kidnapped generals. The corpses were exhumed, displayed to the press, and buried in a sombre ceremony on October 5, 1965.

Internal military power-struggle

After the assassinations of those generals, the highest ranking officer in the Indonesian military, and third highest in the overall chain-of-command, was Defense Minister and Armed Forces Chief-of-Staff Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, a member of the right-wing camp. However, on October 5 Sukarno moved to promote Maj. Gen. Pranoto Reksosamudra, considered a Sukarno-loyalist, to Army Chief-of-Staff.

After the promotion, the New York Times reported that an unnamed Western "diplomatic report" alleged that Pranoto was a former member of the PKI. Pranoto's alleged communism, as well as his timely promotion, led them to promote the view that the PKI and Sukarno conspired to assassinate the generals to consolidate their grip on power. (New York Times, October 6, 1965)

In the aftermath of the assassinations, however, Major Gen. Suharto and his KOSTRAD (Army Strategic Reserves) units were closest to Jakarta. By default, Suharto became the field general in charge of prosecution of the G30S. Later, at the insistence of Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, Pranoto was removed and Suharto was promoted to Army Chief-of-Staff on October 14, 1965. (New York Times, October 15, 1965)

Retaliatory campaign

The installation of Suharto as Army Chief-of-Staff established the right-wing faction's dominance of the Indonesian Army's command. In addition to the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), this faction was also hostile toward Sukarno-loyalists, and the Chinese (both Indonesian Chinese as well as expatriates from the People's Republic of China).

On October 18, a declaration was read over the army-controlled radio stations, banning the Communist Party of Indonesia. The ban included the party itself, and its youth and women's wings, peasant associations, intellectual and student groups, and the SOBSI union. At the time, it was not clear whether this ban applied only to Jakarta (by then controlled by the Army), or the whole Republic of Indonesia. However, the ban was soon used as a pretext for the Indonesian Army to go throughout the country carrying out extrajudicial punishments, including mass arrest and summary executions, against suspected leftists and Sukarno loyalists.

The Army, acting on orders by Suharto and supervised by Nasution, began a campaign of agitation and incitement to violence among Indonesian civilians aimed not only at Communists but the ethnic-Chinese community and toward President Sukarno himself. The regime was quickly destabilised, with the Army the only force left to maintain order. (New York Times, October 19, 1965)

Toppling of Sukarno

As Communists were driven out of government in the months afterward, the troika of Pres. Sukarno, Nasution, and Suharto jockeyed for power. Contemporary reports state that Sukarno was politically weak and desperate to keep power in the hands of his presidency by starting a factional struggle between Gen. Nasution and Suharto, as the two were absorbed in personal ambitions.

General Nasution was believed to have launched his own bid for power on December 16, 1965, when he won appointment to the Supreme Operations Command, and gained a grip over the traditionally civilian-held portion of the military hierarchy. It was reported that Nasution would have preferred forming a military junta to replace Sukarno. (New York Times, December 16, 1965.)

However, on Feb 1, 1966, Pres. Sukarno promoted Suharto to the rank of Lieutenant General. The same month, Gen. Nasution had been forced out of his position of Defense Minister. By March, Suharto would begin the process of taking power for himself. (New York Times, February 22, 1966)

Consequences

For more details on this topic, see New Order (Indonesia)

After being promoted, Suharto was assigned emergency powers on March 11, 1966 through a presidential decree by Sukarno known as the Supersemar. He would then go on to become president in 1967. Due to Suharto-era censorship and propaganda under his New Order government, the true numbers and ennumeration of casualties from the Civil War are heavily disputed. The estimates of the death toll of the conflict range from over 100,000 to 1.5 million. Other effects of the Indonesian Civil War, however, can be understood in the light of greater press freedom in the post-Suharto era.

Political imprisonment

It is known that with Suharto's rise, surviving members of the Communist Party of Indonesia were branded tapol (short for tahanan politik or "political detainee"). During Suharto's reign, tapol were often given harsh prison sentences without trial, and their property was either seized or destroyed. Spouses, children, and relatives of tapol were subjected to guilt by association. To be branded a tapol meant a permanent outcaste status in Indonesian society, even after completion of a sentence; tapol have sued in modern times for restitution of their right to the franchise and for compensation for their losses.

Possible prison sentences included internal exile to penal colonies on desolated islands within the Indonesian archipelago. These included the island of Buru island in the Moluccas. Among its more famous prisoners included author and PEN Freedom to Write winner Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was imprisoned there for alleged membership in a Communist Party literary group, LEKRA. In a book of memoirs (The Mute's Soliloquy), Pramoedya made detailed allegations of forced labour, starvation, torture and other abuses within the colony. (Inside Indonesia, April-June 1999)

Anti-Chinese laws

For more detail on this topic, see Indonesian Chinese and Anti-Chinese legislation in Indonesia

While resentment toward the Indonesian Chinese by Malay-descended peoples of the archipelago dated back to the Dutch East Indies era, persisting through the Post-Independence era, the Indonesian Civil War unleashed both widescale violence and a new tide of anti-Chinese legislation throughout the archipelago. Stereotypes of the Chinese as disproportionately affluent and greedy were common throughout the time (both in Indonesia as well as Malaysia), but with the anti-Communist hysteria, the association of the Indonesian Chinese with the People's Republic of China caused them to also be viewed as a communist fifth column.

As a result of this hysteria, Indonesia's hitherto friendly diplomatic relations with mainland China were severed and the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta burnt down by a mob. Several anti-Chinese laws were passed to curtail Chinese culture and civil rights, including laws banning Chinese language signs on shops and other buildings and mandating closure of Chinese language schools, adoption of "Indonesian" sounding names, and severe limits on Buddhist temple construction. The lasting effects of these laws and anti-Chinese sentiment fostered by the Suharto regime was demonstrated in the organization of anti-Chinese pogroms in 1998.

Military rule

The liquidation and banning of the Communist Party eliminated one of the largest political parties in Indonesia. It had placed third in a 1955 election. It was also among the largest Communist Parties in the Comintern, at an estimated 3 million members. Along with the subsequent efforts by Suharto to wrest power from Sukarno by purging loyalists from the parliament, civilian government in Indonesia was effectively put to an end by the civil war.

In the place of civilian rule, a new system of military rule took hold, based on set-aside seats in the Parliament as well as the dwi fungsi (dual function) doctrine of the military, in taking the roles of both soldiers and administrators. The political parties not banned outright were consolidated into a single party, the Party of the Functional Groups (Indonesian: Partai Golongan Karya), more commonly known as Golkar. Though Suharto would later allow for the formation of two non-Golkar parties, these were kept weak during his regime.

Rise of Islamism

The purging of two secularist parties, the Nationalists and the Communists, had a notable side effect of having given greater space for the development of Islamism in Indonesia. This included liberal, conservative, and extremist groups practicing Islam in Indonesia. It widely believed by observers of Indonesian history and politics that Suharto's forces whipped up anti-Communist sentiment in part by exploiting conservative Muslims' fears of "godless" Communism to instigate a jihad against them during the civil war.

As for more mainstream groups, conservative Islamic groups (called the "Central Axis") became a prop of the regime for some time after the civil war. Liberal Islamic groups, on the other hand, are believed to have defected during the wave of protests before the Indonesian Revolution of 1998.

Improved ties with the West

The change in regime from Sukarno to Suharto, though brutal, brought a shift in policy that allowed for USAID and other relief agencies to operate within the country. Suharto would open Indonesia's economy by divesting state owned companies, and Western nations in particular were encouraged to invest and take control of many of the mining and construction interests in Indonesia. The result was the alleviation of absolute poverty and famine conditions due to shortfalls in rice supply and Sukarno's reluctance to take Western aid, and stabilisation of the economy.

As a result of his victory in the civil war, Suharto would come to be seen as a pro-Western and anti-Communist strongman regime, similar to that of Augusto Pinochet. An ongoing military and diplomatic relationship between the Indonesia and the Western powers was cemented, leading to American, British, and Australian arms sales and training of military personnel.

Revelations and mysteries

Four decades after the beginning of the Indonesian Civil War, questions remain about the veracity of accounts of the events both leading up to and during the war provided by the Western governments and by Suharto. The ousting of the Suharto regime and beginning of the Reformation period in Indonesia and the end of the Cold War for the Western governments has allowed greater freedom of information, leading to a significant process of historical revisionism as well as the formation of conspiracy theories around the Indonesian Civil War. Still, mysteries remain over the time period.

Was PKI actually involved in the G30S?

Supporters of Suharto claim that his actions as field general were justified due to the imminent threat of a PKI-led coup to seize power, as had been attempted in 1948. Several critics of Suharto note, however, that the PKI in 1965 had an inclination that was similar to Eurocommunism and had come to prefer parliamentary electoral politics to armed insurrection; in fact, the PKI placed third in a 1955 presidential election, behind Sukarno's own Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI) and the Islamist party Masyumi.

These critics allege that Suharto purposefully exaggerated PKI involvement in the assassinations of the generals (both during the war and in subsequent propaganda events held on the anniversary) as mere window dressing for what was his own ruthless quest for power. The critics commonly point out that Suharto had already been involved in a 1959 corruption scandal involving sugar smuggling in the Bandung area, and that since the 1990s post-Cold War period that Suharto's regime was known for both dishonesty and brutality.

There are several theories about the involvement of the PKI in the G30S movement. They are as follows:

• The culprit of the G30S was the PKI

The PKI launced a coup d'etat against the Indonesian Army and the government to launch a communist government in Indonesia.

• The G30S was an army Internal Problem

An army clique led by Suharto launched the coup precisely by sneaking into the PKI

• The G30S was done by the CIA

The CIA worked together with an army clique to destroy the PKI. The aim of CIA in Indonesia at that time was clearly to destroy communism in Southeast Asia.

• The G30S was a Meeting Point between American and British Interests

The interests of Britain which wanted Sukarno's confrontation against Malaysia to end with him losing power and the USA's interest of ridding the world of communism sparked the G30S.

• Sukarno was the Mastermind of the G30S

One of the most controversial theories of the G30S, Sukarno wanted to make the top army officials 'vanish' because they threatened his power. The PKI was also pulled into the mess because of its closeness with Sukarno.

• The Chaos Theory

Nobody actually did the G30S. There was no grand scenario and it was ultimately affected by field operations.The G30S was a mix of Western nations, the doings of the PKI's leaders and the army's corrupt cliques.

Further muddling matters are recriminations of coup plots by both the left-wing and right-wing. As mentioned before, the PKI had in fact launched a coup effort in 1948; lesser known is that the right-wing military faction had already made several attempts on Sukarno's life.

The Anderson theory

The allegations by the G30S assassins, that they acted to stop a coup by the right-wing Council of Generals and to take power, have always been dismissed by Suharto supporters as absurd. These Suharto supporters state that there was no such Council of Generals and that the G30S was merely a communist coup for whom the assassination of the generals was a prelude to the overthrow of Sukarno.

Recent historical revisionism by a leading American expert on Indonesia, Professor emeritus Benedict Anderson of Cornell University, refutes this quick dismissal. Anderson has put forward a theory that the Civil War was almost totally an internal matter of a divided military with the PKI playing only a peripheral role; that the right-wing generals assassinated on 1 October 1965 were, in fact, the Council of Generals coup planning to assassinate Sukarno and install themselves as a military junta; and that G30S was in fact a movement of officers loyal to Sukarno who carried out their plan believing it would preserve, not overthrow, Sukarno's rule. The boldest claim in the Anderson theory, however, is that Suharto was in fact privy to the G30S assassination plot.

Central to the Anderson theory is an examination of a little-known figure in the Indonesian army, Colonel Abdul Latief. Latief had spent a career in the Army, and according to Anderson had been both a staunch Sukarno loyalist and a friend with Suharto. In the civil war, however, he was jailed and named a conspirator in G30S, and given a military trial in the 1970s. At his trial, Latief made the accusation that Suharto himself had been a co-conspirator in the G30S plot, and had betrayed the group for his own purposes.

Anderson points out that Suharto himself has twice admitted to meeting Latief in a hospital on 30 September 1965, the namesake of G30S, and that his two narratives of the meeting are contradictory. In an interview with American journalist Arnold Brackman, Suharto stated that Latief had been there merely "to check" on him, as his son was receiving care for a burn. In a later interview with Der Spiegel, Suharto stated that Latief had gone to the hospital in an attempt on his life, but had lost his nerve. Anderson believes that in the first account, Suharto was simply being disingenuous; in the second, that he had lied.

Further backing his claim, Anderson cites circumstantial evidence that Suharto was indeed in on the plot. Among these are:

• That almost all the key military participants named a part of G30S were, either at the time of the assassinations or just previously, close subordinates of Suharto: Lieutenant-Colonel Untung, Colonel Latief, and Brigadier-General Supardjo in Jakarta, and Colonel Suherman, Major Usman, and their associates at the Diponegoro Division’s HQ in Semarang.
• That in the case of Untung and Latief, their association with Suharto was so close that attended each others' family events and celebrated their sons' rites of passage together.
• That the two generals who had direct command of all troops in Jakarta (save for the Presidential Guard, who carried out the assassinations) were Suharto and Jakarta Military Territory Commander Umar. Neither of these figures were assassinated, and (if Anderson's theory that Suharto lied about an attempt on his life by Latief) no attempt even made.
• That during the time period that the assassination plot had been made, Suharto (as commander of the Kostrad) had made a habit of acting in a duplicitous manner: while Suharto was privy to command decisions in Confrontation, the intelligence chief of his unit Ali Murtopo had been making connections and providing information to the hostile governments of Malaysia, Singapore, United Kingdom, and the United States through an espionage operation run by Benny Murdani in Thailand. Murdani later became a spy chief in Suharto's government.

Anderson's theory, for all the exhaustive research it has entailed, still leaves open a number of questions of interpretation. If, as Anderson believes, Suharto did have inside knowledge of the G30S plot, this still leaves open several possibilities: that Suharto had truly taken part in the plot and defected; that he had been acting as a spy for the Council of Generals; or that he was disinterested completely in the factional struggle of G30S and Council of Generals. Given that Suharto is infirm, reclusive, and judged as senile by the Indonesian judicial system, the questions raised by the Anderson speculation may never receive an answer from the man himself.

British psyops

The role of the United Kingdom's Foreign Office and MI6 intelligence service has also come to light, in a series of exposés by Paul Lashmar and Oliver James in The Independent newspaper beginning in 1997. These revelations have also come to light in journals on military and intelligence history.

The revelations included an anonymous Foreign Office source stating that the decision to unseat Pres. Sukarno was made by Prime Minister Harold MacMillan then executed under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. According to the exposés, the United Kingdom had already become alarmed with the announcement of the Konfrontasi policy. It has been claimed that a CIA memorandum of 1962 indicated that Prime Minister Macmillan and President John F. Kennedy were increasingly alarmed by the possibility of the Confrontation with Malaysia spreading, and agreed to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities." However, the documentary evidence does not support this claim.

To weaken the regime, the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) coordinated psychological operations in concert with the British military, to spread black propaganda casting the PKI, Indonesian Chinese, and Sukarno in a bad light. These efforts were to duplicate the successes of British Psyop campaign in the Malayan Emergency.

Of note, these efforts were coordinated from a British embassy in Singapore where the British Broadcasting Service (BBC), Associated Press (AP), and New York Times filed their reports on the Indonesian Civil War. According to Roland Challis, the BBC correspondent who was in Singapore at the time, journalists were open to manipulation by IRD due to Sukarno's stubborn refusal to allow them into the country: "In a curious way, by keeping correspondents out of the country Sukarno made them the victims of official channels, because almost the only information you could get was from the British ambassador in Jakarta."

These manipulations included the BBC reporting that Communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta. The accusation was based solely on a forgery planted by Norman Reddaway, a propaganda expert with the IRD. He later who bragged in a letter to the British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist that it "went all over the world and back again," and was "put almost instantly back into Indonesia via the BBC." Sir Andrew Gilchrist himself informed the Foreign Office on 5 October 1965: "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change."

In the April 16, 2000 Independent, Sir Denis Healey, Secretary of State for Defence at the time of the war, confirmed that the IRD was active during this time. He officially denied any role by MI6, and denied "personal knowledge" of the British arming the right-wing faction of the Army, though he did comment that if there were such a plan, he "would certainly have supported it."

Although the British MI6 is strongly implicated in this scheme by the use of the Information Research Department (seen as an MI6 office), any role by MI6 itself is officially denied by the UK government, and papers relating to it have yet to be declassified by the Cabinet Office. (The Independent, December 6, 2000)

American assistance to Suharto

Often cited by the left as evidence of a broader, international plot to topple Sukarno, a number of revelations were made by former employees of U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency regarding American actions during the Indonesian Civil War.

Beginning in 1990, American diplomats divulged to the Washington Post and other media outlets that they had compiled lists of Indonesian "communist operatives" had turned over as many as 5,000 names to military and intelligence loyal to Suharto. American journalist Kathy Kadane revealed the extent of the secret American support of some of the massacres of 1965-66 that allowed Suharto to seize the Presidency. She interviewed many former US officials and CIA members, who spoke of compiled lists of PKI operatives, which the Americans ticked off as the victims were killed or captured. They worked closely with the British who were keen to protect their interests in Malaysia. Sir Andrew Gilchrist cabled the Foreign Office in London saying: "…a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change". The PKI had won some popular support from the poor, it was this popularity, rather than any armed insurgency that alarmed the American government. Like Vietnam in the North, Indonesia might 'go communist'.(San Francisco Examiner May 20, 1990)

In 2001, the National Security Archive at George Washington University obtained several internal documents of the U.S. Department of State, bolstering the ambassadors' claims of American collaboration with Suharto. However, the National Security Archive claims that communications between Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency have been heavily redacted.

References

• Anderson, Benedict. "Petrus Dadi Ratu" New Left Review. May-June 2000
• "Army in Jakarta Imposes a Ban on Communists." New York Times. 19 October 1965
• Blum, William. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Black Rose, 1998, pp. 193-198 ISBN 1-56751-052-3
• "CIA Stalling State Department Histories". The National Security Archive. Retrieved May 23. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Easter, David. '"Keep the Indonesian pot boiling': western covert intervention in Indonesia, October 1965-March 1966', Cold War History, Vol 5, No 1, February 2005.
• "Jakarta Cabinet Faces Challenge." New York Times 16 December 1965
• "Jakarta Leftist Out As Army Chief." New York Times 15 October 1965
• Lashmar, Paul and Oliver, James. "MI6 Spread Lies To Put Killer In Power" The Independent. (16 April 2000)
• Lashmar, Paul and Oliver, James. "How we destroyed Sukarno" The Independent. (6 December 2000)
• Lashmar, Paul; Oliver, James (1999). Britain's Secret Propaganda War. Sutton Pub Ltd. ISBN 0-7509-1668-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Sukarno Removes His Defense Chief" New York Times. 22 February, 1966
• "Sukarno Seen Behind Coup" New York Times. 6 October 1965
• "Tapol Troubles: When Will They End?". Inside Indonesia. April–June 1999.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Toer, Pramoedya Ananta (2000). The Mute's Soliloquy : A Memoir. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-028904-6.

External links

• Shadow Play - Website accompanying a 2002 PBS documentary on Indonesia, with emphasis on the Suharto-era and the transition from New Order to Reformation.
• Tiger Tales: Indonesia - Website accompanying a 2002 BBC World Service radio documentary on Indonesia, focusing on early Suharto era. Features interviews with Indonesian generals and victims of the regime. Program is available in streaming RealAudio format.