U.S. Sees New Opportunity

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30879, 12 October 1965, Page 21

U.S. Sees New Opportunity

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) WASHINGTON, Oct. 11. The Johnson Administration believes that a dramatic new opportunity has developed in Indonesia for the United States following the September 30 uprising, the “New York Times’* correspondent, Max Frankel, reports. Frankel says that though still confused and publicly silent about the 10 days of turmoil in Indonesia, the Administration believes that a new opportunity has suddenly developed for both antiCommunist Indonesians and United States policies. He reports: There is stil considerable disagreement among Ameriican specialists—as there is among Indonesians —about the role of powerful Communist leaders there in the plot that led to the assassination and mutilation of leading antiCommunist Army generals and some members of their families. There is general agreement here, however, that:— Indonesian politics will never be the same again. The Communists have misplayed and lost an important round and perhaps much more than that. The surviving military leaders, riding a wave of popular revulsion, will now seriously limit if not wholly destroy President Sukarno’s personal and erratic pattern of rule. There is new hope here that Indonesia can now be saved from what had come to appear as an inevitable drift toward a peaceful Communist take-over from within. There is hope that Indonesia’s increasingly intimate associations with China can be disrupted without necessarily making her proWestern. And there is hope that a new receptivity will develop in Djakarta for Western financial aid geared to difficult but necessary economic development programmes. There is, in short, hope

where only two weeks ago there was despair, about the fifth most populous nation on earth, whose 103 million inhabitants on 4000 islands possess vast but untapped resources and occupy one of the most strategic positions in South-east Asia. Before the September 30 plot, neither threat nor blandishment by Washington had been able to persuade Sukarno to arrest the growth and influence of the three-million-member Communist Party. He played it off against the senior Army commande"s under a programme of national unity combining nationalism, the Moslem religion and his concept of socialism, but yielded the Communists a growing voice in his Cabinet and adjusted his foreign policy line to their own proChinese tendencies. Washington tried, until a year ago, to retain some influence, through economic aid, propaganda and association with the military comm nders. Even these slender bonds were ruptured in recent months, however, and the Administration had braced itself for the worst.

In one horrible but momentous day, officials believe, they have now won a great new chance. For the moment, they suspect, Sukarno is the political if not the physical captive of the anti-Communist forces. And with popular passions aroused over the Army murders, they believe the Army will cripple and perhaps destroy the Communists as a significant political force. Mr Howard Jones, the former United States Ambassador to Indonesia, now Chancellor of the East-West centre in Honolulu, has been telling officials here that only the complicity of the top Communists, including their leader, D. N. Aidit, could have designed a coup of such proportions. His guess is that the party leaders, rightly or wrongly believing Sukarno to be critically ill, as rumoured, chose to neutralise the Army in one stroke in preparation for a bid for total power. Like other analysts who hold this view, he cites the circumstantial evidence that lower-ranking Communists were among the assassins, that Communists and their sympathisers were prominent

among those named to a shortlived revolutionary council—though probably without their permission—and that the Communist newspaper, “Harian Rakjat,” made the costly error of supporting the plot in an edition published two hours after it had been defeated. Mr Marshall Green, the new Ambassador, has been more cautious in his assessments and a large number of analysts here are still awaiting events. They point out that President Sukarno has refused, even in this period of Army ascendancy, to blame the Communist Party, and that two of its leaders attended the Cabinet meeting that urged punishment for those responsible for the plot without identifying them. The Army alone now controls the nation’s communications. It is believed to be in firm control of the major cities and probably of Sukarno himself in his palace at Bogor, 30 miles from Djakarta. If Sukarno is still well and capable of leadership, some officials believe that he will ride out the turmoil and still command the loyalty of the Army. But the military’s price, it is thought, will almost certainly be the elimination of Communist influences at all levels of Indonesian society.