Workers World in 1966

Editor’s note: Workers World is in its 50th year of publication. Throughout the year, we intend to share with our readers some of the paper’s content over the past half century. Below are excerpts from an article that first appeared in the issue dated Nov. 17, 1966, one year after a pro-U.S. military coup in Indonesia.

Save Subandrio!

Free the 52,000 Indonesian political prisoners!
Stop CIA-made massacres!

Dr. Subandrio, the former Foreign Minister of Indonesia, has been sentenced to death by the CIA-inspired military junta that illegally rules in Jakarta. The main charge against Subandrio is that he conspired to block the takeover of Indonesia by the “Council of Generals.” But it is this butchers’ “Council” that should be on trial. Their hands are dripping with the blood of a million people whom they slaughtered in the four months following the Oct. 30, 1965, right-wing putsch.

The world working class, all the oppressed and friends of the oppressed must protest this criminal death sentence handed down at the instigation of Wall Street and demand its immediate reversal!

Prior to Oct. 30, 1965, Indonesia appeared to have wrenched itself free from the orbit of imperialism and had moved toward a strong diplomatic and political alliance with People’s China and its revolutionary allies in Asia. Foreign corporate property was confiscated or threatened daily by the militant Indonesian working class and peasantry as well as by the government. Sukarno had begun to arm the masses against the pro-U.S. army.

Now, just one year after the coup d’etat by the pro-U.S. clique of Indonesian generals, Sukarno, the legal President, is a captive in his own country; former Foreign Minister Subandrio has been sentenced to death by a kangaroo court of military usurpers; 52,000 political prisoners are rotting in Suharto’s concentration camps; and one million Indonesian workers, peasants and intellectuals have been slaughtered in a bloody massacre unprecedented in modern history for its swiftness and ferocity.

Communist leaders have been butchered or imprisoned and the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party), which had a membership of 5 million and whose allied organizations represented 20 million more, has been dismembered and crushed. The trade unions and peasants’ organizations were also among the victims.

The dollar is back!

Imperialist property is once more guaranteed in Indonesia. Jakarta has turned its back on the world liberation struggle, moved savagely against People’s China and her allies and has begun a diplomatic rapprochement with the capitals of world imperialism under the tutelage of Washington.

Thus, it is little wonder that on March 13 of this year, after the generals and their Washington masterminds had temporarily satiated their blood-lust, Max Frankel of the New York Times wrote from Washington that:

“The Johnson Administration found it difficult ... to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia, pointing to the political demise of President Sukarno and the Communists. After a long period of patient diplomacy, designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, officials were elated to find their expectations being realized.”

The New York Times, whose corporate owners are in the inner circles of the U.S. ruling class, wrote a threatening prophecy eight months before the coup which provided a perfect outline for coming events.

“When President Sukarno threatened the Federation of Malaysia” wrote the Times on Feb. 12, 1965, “he placed himself firmly in the path of U.S. and British efforts to contain Communist China. Washington has left active defense of Malaysia to the British ... and seeks to retain some influence in Indonesia, primarily in the hope (!) of some day helping her army against the expected Communist bid for power.”

Thus the Times outlined long in advance that Washington was plotting an offensive with the Indonesian Army and that it would be carried out under the cover of preventing a coup by the PKI–this, eight months ahead of time!

The CIA has brought to power General Suharto, who is the ringleader of the U.S.-trained Indonesian high command (200 Indonesian generals and hundreds of lower officers were trained in the U.S.).

The Minister of Economics is the Sultan of Jogjakarta, one of the richest feudal lords in Indonesia and the second highest figure in the 1958 CIA plot to overthrow Sukarno. (The CIA involvement in the plot was documented in “The Invisible Government” by David Wise and Thomas Ross).

Within less than one year, the CIA-backed clique has accomplished the following:

They have launched a savage attack on China; quietly re-entered the U.S.-controlled U.N.; called off Sukarno’s war against Malaysia; offered their services as a broker for the U.S. in its attempt to get a Vietnamese surrender; gone begging for debt aid to the Tokyo Club, a banking consortium dominated by the U.S.; opened the flood gates for a torrent of the Johnson administration’s foreign “aid” and agents; issued new guarantees to foreign corporations in Indonesia and received U.S. billionaire ambassador Averill Harriman and Eugene Black, the chairman of the U.S.-controlled World Bank (former director of Chase Manhattan), both of whom recently traveled to Jakarta to advise (i.e., supervise) in the “reconstruction” of Indonesia’s economy for the benefit of the U.S. monopolies.