Vincent Bevins describes the murderous US programs for the coup in Indonesia and Chile. The Federal Republic had co-responsibility.
"Yakarta viene" ("Jakarta viene") was one of the ominous slogans that appeared in Chile in the run-up to the military war 50 years ago. In the variants "Yakarta se acerca" or just "Yakarta" the message emblazoned "on the walls and house walls" at the top "on the hills" of Santiago, "where the wealthy people lived," writes Vincent Bevins in his book "The Jakarta Method". The cipher was not yet mediated everywhere, but in right-wing and paramilitary circles the reference to Indonesia was omnipresent in 1965/66: There, the USA had supported the Indonesian military in a coup and imminent mass executions in order to move the country away from an anti-colonial course to the pro-Western situation. With exemplary character for other countries: "In Argentina we do not need a million deaths as in Indonesia, the problem can be solved with ten thousand," José López Rega, founder of the death squad "Alianza Anticomunista Argentina" ("Triple A"), should say soon after the coup in Chile. The parallels between the events in Southeast Asia and Latin America are striking - up to the Federal German co-responsibility.
The coup under General Suharto needed only one small occasion in October 1965: an opaque uprising within the military, the background of which is still unclear today. The subsequent US-based military coup was all the more powerful: estimates range from 500,000 to three million civilians who were killed in 1965/66. As a result, Indonesia was deduced from an independent course. At the same time, the then largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China was switched off: According to the PKI as well as estimates of the USA, more than 25 percent of the population belonged to the party or party-affiliated organization such as women's, trade union or farmers' associations. As in Guatemala in 1954, the US embassy now also presented death lists in Indonesia. "Responsible in Washington," Bevins writes in the introduction, assumed that Indonesia was "a far more important prey than Vietnam could ever have been." There, the USA would have reached "in a few months" what they had failed in ten bloody years of war in Indochina. These findings are not completely new. But the "Jakarta method" is characterized in several respects: with a global perspective on the Cold War including the classification of the anti-colonial awakenings; with the emphasis on the exemplary character that Indonesia had for further US-supported coups; with a pleasantly readable journalistic style with at the same time extensive evaluation of new sources; and with the question of to what extent, according to the subtitle of the volume, "a murderous program of Washington still shapes our world today".
As a Southeast Asia correspondent for the Washington Post, Bevins quickly noticed in Indonesia: The silence about 1965 was an obstacle for more detailed reporting. It was only slowly that, especially as an American, he succeeded in gaining the trust of contemporary witnesses and relatives of victims; he was able to incorporate numerous conversations into the "Jakarta Method". So the one with Wayan Badra, son of a Hindu priest and in the village school shaped by two communist teachers who one day did not come back. On one of the beaches of Bali, the young Wayan specifically searched for the remains of the killed - in vain, there were too many. In Bali, at least five percent of the population was killed. Soon after, tourism came: The "luxurious beach club, which is just a few steps away from Wayan Badra's house, has a name that sounds a bit bizarre," writes Bevins. "It's called KU DE TA, i.e. 'Coup d'État' on Bahasa Indonesia." Bevins collected similar stories in Latin America, a continent that was familiar to him as a former Brazil correspondent of the Los Angeles Times. Especially in Brazil, Chile and Guatemala, he conducted interviews for the book - in countries that were also characterized by military dictatorships. At the same time, Bevins evaluated, partly with a team, documents from the CIA and other intelligence services that were released at the end of the 2010s. He traveled to twelve countries for his research, also to visit libraries and archives.
The volume shows the background of the "apocalyptic carnage in Indonesia" without going into the horrors in detail. Instead, he broadens his view and lets the book become a global history of the Cold War, as it were. With historians like Odd Arne Westad, Bevins is one of those who do not reduce the Cold War to a conflict between West and East; as an integral part of which he understands the anti-colonial struggles and the (para-)military encounters under Western guardianship. Under President Sukarno, Indonesia was the initiator of the non-aligned movement. This emerged from the Bandung Conference, named after the city on Java, where a first Asian-African meeting with 29 states took place in 1955; heads of state such as Nasser (Egypt) or Nehru (India) were present - later Cuba also shaped the movement. The USA saw itself challenged. Where people did not rely on open war, as against Vietnam, other registers were drawn. Bevins describes the US policy towards Indonesia as a kind of "try and error", from the attempt at cooperative containment under Kennedy to recipes of modernization theory and the excitation of the fight against the uprising to the support of the military putsch.
The findings include: Bevins accounts for more than 20 countries in which there was a direct operation in relation to the "Jakarta" cipher. And he collects, based on the historian John Roosa, overwhelming evidence that the method of "disappearing", which is mainly known from Latin America, was systematically tested in Indonesia for the first time. A frequent swing applies to Brazil, where the 1964 coup had an astonishing number of parallels to Indonesia beyond the temporal proximity. Particular attention is paid to Chile as a leading member of Operation Condor, a US-supported anti-insurrection alliance, which also included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Guided by narrative journalism, Bevins captures the mood of the Allende era (1970 to 1973) with two activists, Carmen and Carlos, who belonged to different currents of the left. The "Days after the 11th September 1973" would then have resembled "the Indonesia of the year 1965": Also in Chile, the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet directly waited with an explosion of violence.
What can also be shown for Chile - the Federal German support of the Junta - Glenn Jäger addresses in the case of Indonesia in an afterword to the German edition of the "Jakarta Method". The former NSDAP members Luitpold Werz and Kurt Luedde-Neurath, once employed in the Foreign Service, successively held the office of Ambassador to Indonesia for the Federal Republic in the 1960s. "We can say one thing with certainty about this cut in the state life of Indonesia," explained Luedde-Neurath, local Federal German representative from 1966: "He was not directed against us and not against the free world. The hundreds of thousands of killed communists offer a fairly great guarantee that today's government will do everything possible to prevent the state ship from getting back on a communist course." The "ideological openness to the West" is "great". The former SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Oebsger-Röder works for the BND in Jakarta, reported for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and served as an advisor and biographer to General Suharto. Not only were West German authorities aware of the events from the beginning; a research team of the news portal t-online.de brought to light in 2020 on the basis of long-hidden files: A few weeks after the coup, the Indonesian General Nasution turned to the BND in November 1965 with a request for financial support in order to be able to deepen and expand the successes against the communists. The Federal Foreign Office gave Rheinstahl Hanomag, Heckler & Koch and other armaments forge makers the green light for the delivery of infantry and infantry fighting vehicles, G3 rifles and other equipment.
And what happened to Luedde-Neurath? He was ambassador to Chile from 1973. "Shut up" was his recommendation on dealing with the Pinochet regime before he retired in 1975. In 1969 he had received the Federal Cross of Merit. From the point of view of Bonn, he also did justice to this in Chile.
Vincent Bevins: The Jakarta Method. How a murderous program of Washington shapes our world to this day, translated and provided with an afterword by Glenn Jäger, PapyRossa Verlag, 427 pages, 28,- Euro.