At the present moment, the head of the Indonesian military government, Suharto, is visiting Europe. The aim of his trip is to get more aid" from the Western Countries which are members of the Inter-governmental Group on Indonesia", the watch-dog of imperialist penetration in the Indonesian MILITARY COUP The present military regime seized power in 1965 and in the course of establishing its position slaughtered between 500,000 and 1 million people. In some areas the massacres reached almost unimaginable proportions. The U.S. magazine, Time, reported, "The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travellers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies. River transportation has at places been seriously impeded" (17th December, 1966), The military leaders successfully used the hostility between Muslims and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (P.K.I.) to carry out Suharto's dictum: "Better to kill 1.000 innocent people than to let one revolutionary escape.
Since 1966, the government has continued to rely mostly upon physical suppression of all opposition, in order to maintain itself in power. Indonesia now has at least 100,000 political prisoners - the largest number of political nrisoners in any country in the world. Since 1966, only 160 people have actually been tried in military courts. The remainder are detained without trial in prisons and concentration camps (the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva reported the existence of 350 such institutions. with 120,000-150,000 political prisoners). No definite charges need to be made against those arrested and imprisoned, and no evidence is required for internment.
The conditions for prisoners are horrific: since 1969, 10,000 have been transported to the malaria-infested island of Buru, a 'settlement with grossly inadequate health facilities, constant food shortages and rigorous forced labour. Yet this is no isolated example; even the Djakarta paper, Berita Yudha reported (13th January 197l) that the detainees of the Glodok jail (Djakarta) received eight mouthfulls of rice spread with salt and a slice of salted fish as their daily ration. PIOUS HOPE To this situation, the inevitable reply of capitalist governments and their media has been to point to the elections of July 1971 as the usual "proof" of the existence of a democratic Indonesian society: but even this false index of democracy remains a pious hope. The government's claims to be on 'the threshold of democracy (Government publication) are utterly negated by the conditions under which these elections were held. The voting ban on past or present sympathisers of the P.K.I. automatically disenfranchised up to 15 million people; all candidates were screened by the "Institute for General Elections", which also banned "radical or left wing" parties, intervened were prepared to take the struggle beyond the stage of Civil Rights, to an armed national struggle against the British Army and in defence of the ghettoes. The Provisionals had the answers which corresponded to the needs of the minority after July 1970. If they are less politically sophisticated than some elements who were rejected the fact is that these other tendencies did not have the necessary answers to develop the struggle.
Given that this is the case, it is by no means pre-determined that the Provisionals will always exercise their present influence. Indeed it is the fact that they are unable to take the struggle beyond its present phase which has (in freezing the situation) been partly responsible for their continued Tole.
But will a breakthrough come about by developments within the Provisionals, or ership? It is clear that without a new During the slaughter directly in the elections of opposition parties, and forcibly induced people to vote for the government-sponsored, military dominated Sekber-Golkar. Finally, one-third of the membership of the government assemblies was directly appointed by Suharto himself, one-third representatives of "functional groups' set up and controlled by the military. Even then he and his cabinet are not constitutionally responsible to the Assembly. Clearly such 'elections' present no challenge to the government's control of the state apparaius.
There is, of course, nothing novel in the fact that capitalist governments should give considerable political, military and financial support to S.E.Asian military dictatorships. What is notable, however, is the speed with which they rushed to Suharto's assistance in early 1966 (the British government was one of the first to push aid into his hands). The general answer is hardly complex; as a world bank official stated after the 1965 coup, * Indonesia is the best thing that's happened to Uncle Sam since the War" With its rich raw material sector (petroleum, timber, bauxite, nickel, tin, manganese, silver, copper, uranium, etc.) and its extremely low cost labour force, Indonesia has become an imperialist eldorado - unlike the previous Sukarno regime which tried to place restrictions on imperialist penetration. One of Suharto's first acts was to restore foreign companies nationalised under Sukarno to their original owners. Hence, the flow of aid.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT The government, basing its strategy for planning on the utilisation of this aid and the returns from foreign investment (which are often pathetically low - 39% in the petroleum sector) bends over backwards to attract the latter. The Law on Foreign Capital Investment (January 1967) enables companies to invest in any sector of the economy (except defence), where profits are tax-free for periods of from 2-5 years, and then taxed at a very low rate for the next 5 years, following which they may be repatriated without further delay. A more specifie example is the assistance given by the government to the Goodyear Tyre Co.; in addition to providing it with prison labour on its plantations in 1967, it oblgingly placed severe restrictions on imported and home-produced tyres when programmatic basis the Provisionals cannot achieve final victory, and it is unlikely that they can simply evolve such a programme through empirical experience. History shows that for a radical nationalist movement to become a socialist movement there must be a deep process of political struggle within it, which will be accompanied by re-groupments, rejection of layers of leadership, splits and re-unifications, Such a process, happening in Ireland, would create a new movement. quite different from the present Provisionals.
It is precisely the relationship between the Provisionals and revolutionary Marxists which is key for the way in which such a process will take place. This is why the reformist pseudo-Marxists, and the fake internationalists, who insist that the Irish revolutionary movement must follow their own dead-end road, play such a negative role. It is only asked to do so by the firm in 1968. The financial bourgeoisie and those people directly tied to foreign capitalist concerns (the comprador bourgeoisie, as they are called) make fortunes out of the govern ment's economic policies. So do the landowners producing crops for export, and, of course, the military through widespread corruption. But the policies have done nothing to improve the terrible living conditions of the working class and the peasantry. The latter, unable to compete with the big plantations, are often heavily indebted to middlemen. Inreasingly they are forced to sell their labour-power to a large landowner or to migrate to the cities. But there unemployment remains high since government policy favours foreign investment which employs little labour. The 1969 Indonesian Development Plan was itself drafted by a group of economists trained by the U.S. government at M.I.T., Berkeley, Cornell, and then in Djakarta. As John Howard, director of Ford's International Training and Research Programme explained, "Ford felt it was training the guys who would be leading the country when Sukarno got out". TERRIBLE WARNING The military control exercised by the government, with its vital support from numerous capitalist states, particularly the U.S.A., is capable of rapidly destroying any organised opposition, armed or unarmed. Opposition groups do exist, but they are generally small, isolated, and limited to specific reformist demands. All co-ordinated activity by student, intellectual and proletarian groups has been ruthlessly suppressed by the military The P.K.I., before 1965, had an actual membership of over 2 million, and at least seven times as many potential supp oiters, utterly destroyed by the carnage of 1965-6, it is now split into two major factions. There is a group in the Soviet Union, supporting what may be broadly termed a "parliamentary-road" strategy. and a group in Indonesia with contacts with exile groups in Peking, Tirana and Europe which, having carried out a self-criticism of its previous strategy, has attempted to analyse the Indonesian social formation, and specified the necessity of an armed struggle under a united front against the military government. However, unless all the lessons of the Indonesian counter-revolution of 1965 are fully understood and digested the revolutionary movement in Indonesia and elsewhere will be unable to move forward. Nixon termed Suharto's rule as an "Adventure in Progress'. There are similar "adventures" taking place in Ceylon, India, Thailand, etc. That is why the Indonesian experience is a tertible warning to the entire revolutionary movement.
J.T British Indonesia Committee The British Indonesia Committee has as its objectives, to disseminate information, to provide aid to victims of the Indonesian government, and to oppose all political and economic support to that government. For further information, please write to The Secretary, 48 Macaulay Court, Macaulay Road, London S W.4.
those tendencies like the Peoples Democracy and the Revolutionary Marxist Group in Ireland who, while maintaining their political independence and a critical stance, nevertheless attempt to fight alongside the Provisionals in the current struggle and solidarise with their positive actions, who will be able to make a contribution.
Irish Republicanism has been the most consistent and radical strand of democratic nationalism It has a long history of struggle and has inspired great acts of revolutionary heroism. The Provisionals exemplify the positive aspects of that tradition, but also its limitations. It Is those who are able to surpass and absorb that tradition, while giving a more adequate political leadership, who will supercede the Provisionals, not the majority of those who criticise them. And that new movement will draw heavily on the present Republican militants for its best cadres.