The Journal of Peasant Studies

ISSN: 0306-6150 (Print) 1743-9361 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20

Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front and

Plantation Workers’ Union (1945–1966)

Ben White

To cite this article: Ben White (2015): Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front
and Plantation Workers’ Union (1945–1966), The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2015.1101069

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2015.1101069

Published online: 04 Dec 2015.

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 The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2015.1101069

Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front and Plantation Workers’

Union (1945–1966)
Ben White

The absence of a strong national peasant and agricultural workers’ movement in

Indonesia can be traced back to the violent destruction of the Indonesian Peasants’
Front (BTI) and Plantation Workers’ Union (SARBUPRI) in 1965–1966. This
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contribution reflects on their role in building a progressive movement of peasants and

workers in the face of continual attempts to squash them by the Indonesian state and
military. How did the cadres learn about the situation and problems in rural areas,
and what were their priorities in working with the peasants? Unpublished reports
from the last round of the BTI’s local-level ‘participatory action research’ conducted
in 1965 provide some answers to these questions.
Keywords: Indonesia; peasants; plantation workers; communism; 1965–1966

Introduction
Unlike their counterparts in neighbouring countries like Thailand and the Philippines,
Indonesia’s tens of millions of peasants and agricultural workers – the country’s
largest single occupational group – have no strong national movement, organisation
or political party representing their interests. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the revolution-
ary Indonesian Peasants’ Front (BTI) and Plantation Workers’ Union (SARBUPRI)
together claimed almost 8 million members. But in 1965–1966, after a bungled leftist
attempt to kidnap right-wing generals in Jakarta and the countercoup led by Major
General Suharto, the Indonesian military unleashed and orchestrated one of the largest
massacres of the twentieth century. Members and sympathisers of BTI, SARBUPRI
and other leftist organisations were slaughtered and they and their families imprisoned
without trial, and for decades suffered persecution and discrimination in education
and employment. The bulk of the killings occurred in rural areas, and particularly in
the provinces of Central and East Java and Bali. Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-
winning films The act of killing (2012) and The look of silence (2014) have brought
this episode of Indonesian history to the attention of hundreds of thousands of
viewers who might otherwise have been completely unaware of the events of 1965–
1966, and many others (especially young Indonesians) who for decades have been fed
a distorted version of those events.
From the earliest years after the massacres, there have been two competing versions
of events and their causes. A stream of well-researched publications, from Griswold
(1970) to Kammen and McGregor (2012) and Kasenda (2015), has shown with accumu-
lating evidence that the kidnapping of the generals was used as a ‘pretext for mass

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 Ben White

murder’ (Roosa 2006), carried out largely under military auspices, with the full knowl-
edge and encouragement of Indonesia’s new leaders and of various Western powers. The
official version, echoed in many western publications such as the US Government Print-
ing Office’s Area handbook for Indonesia (Henderson et al. 1970), suggests first that the
entire Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and all its affiliated organisations were
somehow implicated in the ‘30th September Movement’, justifying their abolition, and
that where killings of communists took place they were done by enraged civilians
taking their revenge on the PKI, with the military having no part in the killings
except in some cases to stop them. This is the version taught in schools:

In the history books of the Suharto regime, the killings of half a million members and sympathi-
zers of the Communist Party and other leftist organizations in 1965–66 were non-events. The
only significant killing that occurred at that time was supposedly the killing of six army gen-
erals and a lieutenant in Lubang Buaya on 1 October 1965.
(Hilmar Farid 2005, 4)
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In the years since the collapse of the Suharto regime (1998), there has been ‘no serious
weakening of this official explanation of the killings’ (Hilmar Farid 2005, 4); a new
attempt at critical accounting is underway, as detailed at the end of this paper.
This contribution reflects on the role of BTI and SARBUPRI in building a progressive
movement of peasants and rural workers. The next section outlines the national and inter-
national context in which the PKI and its affiliated organisations BTI and SARBUPRI
attained widespread popularity, operating within the rules of parliamentary democracy
and (after 1959) Sukarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’. The following section summarises the
events of 1 October 1965, Major General Suharto’s accession to power and the subsequent
reign of terror in which hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers and sympathisers of
leftist organisations were slaughtered and detained, mainly under direction of the military.
The remainder of the paper asks: what was the BTI and who were its cadres, members and
sympathisers, who were hunted down and persecuted on grounds of having been involved
in the ‘30 September Movement’? How did the cadres learn about the situation and pro-
blems in rural areas, and what were their priorities in working with the peasants? This
part is based on some unpublished reports from the BTI’s local-level ‘action research’ con-
ducted in 1965.

Indonesia, the Cold War, and agrarian reform 1950–1965

Indonesia emerged from the 1930s world depression, the Japanese occupation (1942–1945)
and the Independence war (1945–1949) a poor nation, with huge problems of collapsed
infrastructure. From all accounts the Sukarno period was a time of lively, widespread and
at times confusing political activity, in which people paid close attention to both local pol-
itical affairs and developments at national and international levels. At the local level, there
emerged a proliferation of institutions and organisations through which villagers could voice
their views, interests and grievances; these developed alongside, but did not replace, the old
ties of patronage, dependence and deference to local elites. Gender and landholding status
were no longer a basis for formal exclusion from the local political process. Old local clea-
vages of religion and politics merged with new political traditions with the emergence of a
full-fledged multi-party system in the run-up to the elections of 1955 and 1957.
The Western powers (especially, but not only, the United States), and some elements in
the Indonesian military, were alarmed to see the emergence of the PKI as a powerful force.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 3

In national elections in the mid-1950s the PKI emerged as the second largest party, and by
1965 claimed 3.5 million members, making it the biggest Communist Party in the world
outside the communist bloc (Mortimer 1974, 366).
It is important to remember that the PKI was a legitimate party which since the early
1950s had opted for the parliamentary rather than the revolutionary road, and performed
successfully within the rules of parliamentary democracy and (after the cancellation of
the elections in 1959, when it was widely expected the PKI would have emerged as the
strongest party) the so-called ‘Guided Democracy’ introduced by President Sukarno,
taking place alongside the other parties in decision-making bodies at all levels, from the
national (cabinet and parliament) to the village (village councils).
The PKI like all major political parties had affiliated occupation-based mass organis-
ations: workers, women, youth, farmers, artists, students/intellectuals, etc. Some of these
were ‘affiliated’, others formally separated but ‘aligned’ to the party. The most important
were SOBSI (labour) and its sectoral branches (e.g. SARBUPRI for plantation workers),
GERWANI (the Indonesian Women’s Movement), BTI (the Indonesian Peasant’s Front),
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LEKRA (the People’s Cultural Institute, for writers and artists), HSI (Indonesian Gradu-
ates’ Association, for scholars and intellectuals) and Pemuda Rakyat (Youth). Altogether
these organisations claimed about 27 million members (Mortimer 1974, 366, who notes
that even allowing for overlapping memberships this would amount to ‘a following
approaching 20 million’). By 1963 the BTI claimed 7.1 million members, and SARBUPRI
700,000 (Mortimer 1974, 294).
These affiliate organisations were also legitimate organisations that did their work
largely within the law and within the rules of the game. But they were vocal in cam-
paigning for the realisation of the unfulfilled promises of the Indonesian revolution,
in particular for economic and social justice on both the global and the national
scale. Besides political campaigning, they undertook many social and practical activi-
ties. LEKRA brought cultural performances to villages and urban kampungs;
GERWANI provided health clinics and courses for women; Pemuda Rakyat were
active in rural areas, trying to help small farmers with their problems; the BTI provided
agricultural extension, access to inputs, promoted mass campaigns to exterminate
plagues of rats, and also undertook three rounds of pioneering ‘participatory action
research’, which will be discussed further below. After some initial years of euphoria
in which they operated with relatively free rein, from the mid-1950s onwards they
encountered continual opposition from the Indonesian state, private companies and
Western powers.
Indonesia was an important Cold War ‘domino’, as the US and her allies struggled to
contain the spread of communism all over the world and especially Asia, having ‘lost’
Eastern Europe and China in the early 1950s, and becoming increasingly entangled in
Southeast Asia. John D. Rockefeller III was a frequent visitor to Indonesia and other
Asian countries in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, after visiting various Indonesian poli-
ticians, academics and some farmers, he wrote in his private notebook:

A tremendously interesting and important question is the relationships of the Communist Party
to the present government … . The great concern … is that the government … may not be
able to control the situation as far as the Communists are concerned (RAC n.d.).

After another visit in 1958, he wrote in a private letter to the US Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles:
 4 Ben White

The deterioration in Indonesia is not irreversible but may be reversed by timely and effective
action … .The United States should undertake a well interpreted program of various kinds:
political, military and economic … to construct a stable, democratic and unified nation and
in doing so to prevent a Communist political victory or Communist control of parts or all of
the country.
(RAC n.d.)

Indonesia’s relations with the West neared collapse in early 1965 when President Sukarno
withdrew Indonesia from the United Nations. Meanwhile, at home, Sukarno engaged in a
political juggling act, invoking the concept of ‘Nasakom’ trying to combine the three forces
of nationalism (Sukarnoism/marhaenism), religion (especially orthodox Islam) and com-
munism, in uneasy tension.

The BTI, SARBUPRI and agrarian reform

Access to land was one of the burning political issues of the early post-independence years.
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In North Sumatra, the occupying Japanese had encouraged those starving plantation
workers who were not taken away as romusha (forced labour) to occupy plantation land
to grow food crops, delivering a part of their produce to the Japanese; more than one
third of the total plantation area was taken over in this way. After independence, the ex-
estate workers remained on this land and the BTI supported further expansion of the squat-
ter movement, now augmented by land-poor locals, refugees and ex-soldiers occupying
under-utilised plantation land to establish smallholder farms (Stoler 1985, 153–57; Fauzi
2012, 53). Meanwhile SARBUPRI, the union of plantation workers, mounted successful
campaigns, including many strikes, for maintenance of living standards of plantation
workers, particularly by the inclusion or retention of in-kind provision of basic needs
(rice, cooking oil, cloth, sugar, etc.) as part of the pay package.
But the early, relatively euphoric atmosphere and successes of BTI and SARPUPRI in
plantation regions were short lived. Plantation owners responded to the growing strength of
SARBUPRI and other labour unions by the classic manoeuvre of importing temporary
workers, and other Taylorist measures (Stoler 1985, 136–41). In the late 1950s and early
1960s, the nationalisation of hundreds of former Dutch plantations (in the context of the
Dutch–Indonesian struggle for West Papua/Irian) and in 1961 of Belgian plantations (in
response to the murder of Patrice Lumumba) brought with it an influx of military personnel
into the plantations’ administration (Stoler 1985, 148), putting plantation workers and
squatters in confrontation not with foreign companies but with the state and military who
made persistent attempts to quash them.
For smallholder peasants, share tenants and landless workers in Java, Bali and other
densely populated rice-bowl regions, the passing of the Basic Share-Tenancy Law
(UUPBH) in 1959 and the Basic Agrarian Law (UUPA) in 1960 had immediate importance;
as the economy declined and inflation accelerated in the early 1960s, ‘land became virtually
the only guarantee of livelihood’ (Robinson 1995, 251). The UUPBH and UUPA basically
reproduced the typical ‘anti-communist’ model of land reform – based on private owner-
ship, maximum and minimum holdings limits, and conversion of tenancy into ownership
rights – as had been applied successfully with US backing in Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan, and unsuccessfully in South Vietnam. The draft laws were originally opposed
by the PKI and BTI since they were based on private ownership and did not embody the
‘land to the tiller’ principle. Once they had been passed, however, the PKI and BTI immedi-
ately campaigned at national and local levels for the implementation of these (‘anti-commu-
nist’) reforms – and from 1963 onwards, when it became clear that implementation was
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 5

being impeded by landlords and bureaucrats, supported some forceful seizures of land (aksi
sepihak) by peasants. The aksi sepihak in some areas and the threat of such actions in others
made enemies among the landed rural elites, and that was one main reason why they
became the victims of outbursts of anti-communist violence, particularly by the Nahdatul
Ulama (NU) in East Java, which had formed their own Banser militias for this purpose
(Mortimer 1974, 309–28; Kammen and McGregor 2012, 14). In fact, being caught off
guard by these violent clashes with anti-land reform groups, the PKI urged an easing-off
of aksi sepihak, and in late 1964 it looked as if some measure of calm was returning in
the countryside (Hefner 1990, 202). But as we will see later from the accounts of the
BTI researchers Sujati and Sulasto, the BTI were not only or mainly busy with aksi
sepihak. They were concerned to learn about the economic, social and political problems
facing peasants and landless workers, and to help them find practical ways to solve them.
In February 1965, SARBUPRI plantation workers tried to occupy plantations owned by
the US Rubber Company in North Sumatra. Sukarno and his ministers informed US Rubber
and Goodyear that the government would take temporary ‘administrative control’ of
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foreign-owned rubber plantations, and that this policy would later be extended to other
foreign-owned companies. This was highly alarming to the three big oil companies drilling
in Indonesia (Caltex, Stanvac and Shell). George Ball, in a phone call to National Security
Advisor McGeorge Bundy in Washington, said ‘In the long run … this may be more
important than South Vietnam’ (Simpson 2012, 55).

The events of 1 October 1965 and the subsequent reign of terror

From mid-1965 onwards there were widespread rumours in Jakarta that a group of right-
wing generals, with the support of the US, were planning to organise a coup and take
over power from Sukarno. We will never know whether there really was such a conspiracy,
but given the context we have summarised above, it is not at all unlikely that something like
this was among the options being discussed in anti-Sukarno and anti-communist circles.
Early on the morning of 1 October 1965 six senior members of the military high
command and one adjutant to the Minister of Defence were abducted from their homes
(a seventh general, Nasution, escaped). They were taken to a village on the outskirts of
Jakarta called Lubang Buaya, at the Halim Perdanakusumah air force base, where
various leftist organisations were present at training camps. A few hours later Lieutenant
Colonel Untung (commander of a battalion of the elite palace guard, the Tjakrabirawa)
announced on national radio the formation of a ‘Revolutionary Council’, which he
claimed had been established to save President Sukarno and the nation from a military
coup planned by a right-wing, CIA-backed ‘Council of Generals’ led by the six kidnapped
generals and general Nasution.
When it became known that Nasution had escaped and that Untung’s troops had failed
to take control, the kidnapped officers were executed by gunshot and their bodies thrown
into a well. It is clear from many accounts that the Untung group had originally planned
not to kill the officers but to hand them over to the Revolutionary Council with a report
on their plans for a coup d’etat.
It remains a mystery why the Untung group did not also kidnap or otherwise sideline
Major General Suharto (Jenkins and Kammen 2012, 77). Anyway, Suharto seized his
chance, and took the first in the series of artful steps by which he skillfully wormed his
way, a year and a half later, into the Presidency. With nearly all his military rivals con-
veniently out of the way – something that has prompted endless speculation about
whether and how much he may have known in advance of the events – he took control
 6 Ben White

of the army on the morning of 1 October and launched a counter-attack on the rebels that
evening. By the morning of the following day, all the rebel troops had either been captured
or had fled. The ‘September 30 movement’ (G-30-S in the discourse of the Suharto regime)
or the ‘1st October Movement’ (Gestok as Sukarno more accurately called it) thus collapsed
the day after it had started, ‘before most Indonesians knew it existed’. The movement’s
leaders did not even have the chance to hold a press conference, or to explain their
actions (Roosa 2006, 2–3). A total of 12 people were killed in this badly planned escapade,
and most of the Indonesian population, both in Jakarta and in the regions, including the
members and sympathisers of the PKI and its affiliates, had no idea what had happened.
President Sukarno argued (not unreasonably) that the right course of action was to arrest
those responsible for the kidnapping and murders, and bring them to trial, following the rule
of law. He called the event ‘a ripple in the wide ocean of the revolution’, a minor crisis that
could be easily resolved. But as early as 2 October, the US National Security Adviser
George Bundy and his staff began planning for resumption of aid to Indonesia (which
had been suspended since early 1964), and making plans for covert assistance to the Indo-
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nesian Armed Forces. The US and the UK, supported by other nations in the region, con-
ducted secret operations aimed at supporting the army-led slaughter of alleged PKI
supporters and the removal of President Sukarno. The CIA were worried that the army
might follow Sukarno’s proposal, to ‘settle for action against those directly involved in
the murder of the generals and permit Sukarno to get much of his power back’, and
warned that the army ‘will not be successful unless it is willing to attack communism as
such’ (Simpson 2012, 57) – which is exactly what they did.
Within a few days, Suharto and his allies promoted the image of the PKI and its affili-
ates as wild beasts capable of the most inhuman actions. Stories were fabricated of sadistic
violence and torture committed on the kidnapped generals, including genital mutilation, by
Gerwani women while dancing naked. This story, which we know to be completely false,1
became part of New Order political culture, symbolising and underlining the danger of pol-
itically strong and sexual women (as many right-wing and fascist governments have done,
in various ways, in other countries):2 ‘the communists were dehumanized so that the public
would not see the communists as fellow citizens, but only as demons bent on spreading
atheism and sadism’ (Hilmar Farid 2005, 7).
Suharto had himself appointed commander of the army on 16 October. He accused the
entire Communist Party and its affiliates, improbably, of masterminding the ‘30 September
Movement’, – hence the acronym ‘G30S-PKI’ that became the official term for the move-
ment. On 17 October, having declared the PKI to be ‘treacherous’, he ordered units of the
elite Army Para-Commando Regiment Resimen Pasukan Komando Angkatan Darat
(RPKAD) paratroopers, under the command of Colonel Sarwo Edhie, to crush the ‘30 Sep-
tember Movement’, starting in Central Java. The chronology of mass killings followed the
eastward progress of Sarwo Edhie’s troops from Central to East Java and then to Bali. Being
relatively short of manpower, Sarwo Edhie requested, and was given, permission ‘to arm
and train youth from nationalist and religious organisations’ (quoted in Jenkins and
Kammen 2012 , 88). RPKAD units led the militia squads into the villages to identify,
capture and kill their leftist opponents. In Sarwo Edhie’s own words, ‘we gave them two

1
The official autopsy on the generals’ bodies, by a team appointed by Suharto, states clearly that no
other wounds or evidence of mutilation were found on the general’s bodies except the gunshot
wounds which had killed them (Anderson 1987).
2
See especially Wieringa (2002, and various other publications).
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 7

or three days’ training, then sent them out to kill the communists’ (quoted in Jenkins and
Kammen 2012, 88). A similar wave of killings swept through the plantation regions of
Sumatra, targeting officials and members of SARBUPRI, between October 1965 and
March 1966, with plantation companies providing the vehicles to transport prisoners to
places of execution (Fauzi 2012, 49–78). The Western embassies received a steady
stream of reports about the massacres, and made no move to prevent them. The US
embassy informed Washington on 20 October that Suharto was a suitable leader to
replace Sukarno: ‘he has a good reputation as incorruptible and lives modestly’
(Simpson 2012, 60). In January 1966, on his return from this three-month-long orgy of
slaughter, culminating in Bali where some 5 percent of the population – thus, close to
one-tenth of the adult population – were ‘shot, knifed, hacked or clubbed to death’ (Robin-
son 1995, 273), Sarwo Edhie was welcomed as a hero in Jakarta.
As the extent of violence and killing against Communist Party members and sympathi-
sers became clear, President Sukarno again protested. In March 1966, however, after six
months of political manoeuvring, he was forced – according to an eyewitness, at gunpoint
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(Heryanto 2013) – to sign a document known as the Supersemar3 that gave Suharto com-
plete authority ‘to take any measures necessary to ensure security, calm and the stability of
the path of government and the path of revolution, and to ensure the personal safety and
authority of the President’. The original document, according to another eyewitness,
included on its second page the instruction that after carrying out his instructions
Suharto should return the reins of power to President Sukarno; this part is missing in the
one-page document that was made public (Kasenda 2015, 142–43). The day after the
signing of Supersemar, Suharto issued an instruction banning the Communist Party and
all its affiliated organisations. In August 1966, an army seminar for the first time used
the term ‘New Order’ (Orde Baru) for the regime which they were busy building,
echoing the names which fascist parties and regimes had used in Portugal, Italy and Nazi
Germany (Kammen and McGregor 2012, 12). Sukarno continued to use the slogan of
Nasakom in various speeches, even in the face of jeers and insults from students in the audi-
ence (Kasenda 2015, 157–58).
The one-sided power struggle between Suharto and Sukarno was not over, however,
until March 1967 when the MPRS (Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly), now
purged of all its leftist members, banned Sukarno from further participation in politics
and appointed Suharto as acting president. By this time, certainly half a million Indonesians
had been massacred, and more killings were to follow; ‘many more … were detained,
some temporarily but others caught in the brutal tropical gulag. Shattered families were
ostracised in their communities and faced institutional stigmatisation from the state’
(Kammen and McGregor 2012, 4). In the first half of 1966, thousands of those who had
been taken prisoner (and were officially awaiting trial) were killed, rather than being
handed over to the judiciary for processing.
Most killings happened in rural areas (or small rural towns). The great majority were
carried out under the direction of the army; there is no doubt about this. The anti-communist
mass organisations mobilised by the army to carry out the killings included Ansor (the
youth wing of the Nahdatul Ulama) in Central and East Java (Jenkins and Kammen
2012; Fealy and McGregor 2012; Hammer 2013), the PNI’s Tameng Marhaen in Bali
(where hardly anyone was killed until the RPKAD arrived in December 1965: Robinson
1995; Bagus 2012) and Catholic Youth organisations in Flores and Timor (Kolimon and

3
Abbreviation for Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret (‘Instruction of 11 March’).
 8 Ben White

Wetangterah 2012; Van Klinken 2013). These organisations were indeed long-standing
political rivals of the PKI, and the patrons and leaders of these groups – wealthy Muslim
landowners in Java, PNI elite landowning aristocracy in Bali, and religious landowning
elites in Eastern Indonesia – were all threatened by land reforms. Plantation workers in
Asahan told Stoler that the nearby rivers had been clogged with the bodies of their co-
workers, and that sons of SARBUPRI officials were forced to watch their fathers’ execution
(1985, 164). Remember that many plantations (those previously owned by Dutch and
Belgian companies) had been nationalised and placed under military management,
placing plantation workers and their unions directly in confrontation with the military.
In upland Pasuruan (East Java), the PKI had adopted moderate tactics, not calling for
seizures of private land but only supporting squatters on former European plantation
lands and protesting against local PNI elites’ corruption in seizing these lands for them-
selves. When the anti-communist purges spread from the lowlands (where victims included
many plantation workers) to the uplands:
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none of the violence against the PKI … was initiated by the local population … . Outsiders
had to be brought in to get the roundup going, and threats of violence were used to secure
cooperation from a population that was often unwilling. … . [The violence] was thoroughly
regulated by agents of the state.
(Hefner 1990, 211–12)

Prisoners who had been taken for interrogation were moved away, blindfolded, in trucks
and never seen again. An eyewitness reported seeing the men unloaded and forced to dig
a large pit. ‘Then, one by one, they were beaten with bamboo clubs, their throats slit,
and they were pushed into the mass grave’ (Hefner 1990, 214–15).
Most of those killed were first rounded up and detained in prisons, military bases and
borrowed buildings, and later taken in trucks, usually at night, for execution and burial in
mass graves. Unlike Nazi Germany and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, where meticulous
records were kept of those killed, there was no detailed record-keeping in Indonesia. Esti-
mates of those killed vary widely, with many falling between 500,000 and 1,000,000. Sarwo
Edhie, however, not long before he died, confided to his friend Permadi: ‘three million were
killed. Most of them on my orders’ (Kammen and McGregor 2012, 9). Countless family
members of those who disappeared have no idea, to this day, where the bodies lie.
What kind of movement was the Indonesian Peasants’ Front, and what kinds of activi-
ties were they involved in at the local level? What were their priorities in working with the
peasants, and how did they learn about the situation and problems in rural areas? On the last
question, it is clear that the PKI and BTI were pioneers in what is now called ‘participatory
action research’, as may be seen in the following section.

The BTI and ‘participatory action research’

Since 1954, the PKI had claimed that ‘the Indonesian revolution is above all an agrarian
revolution’, but it was not until 1959 that systematic efforts were made to mobilise the pea-
santry, culminating five years later in the campaign of unilateral actions (aksi sepihak) to
enforce the Law on Share Tenancy and the Basic Agrarian Law which had been passed
in 1959 and 1960.
The PKI and BTI carried out three rounds of path-breaking rural research in 1959, 1964
and 1965. These studies (which all received government support) explicitly abandoned the
conventional questionnaire-survey approach (angket, borrowed via Dutch from the French
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 9

enquête) which had characterised previous research on agrarian problems (Aidit 1964,
chapter 1). Engaged academics trained the PKI/BTI cadres on how to practice the ‘three
togethers’, the ‘four don’ts’ and the ‘four musts’. The ‘three togethers’ (tiga sama) were:
work together, eat together and sleep together with the poor peasants and landless
workers; the ‘four don’ts’ (empat jangan) were: don’t sleep in houses of village elites,
don’t lecture the peasants, don’t be the cause of material losses to your host families or
the peasants, and don’t take notes in front of the peasants; and the ‘four musts’ (empat
harus) were: practice the ‘three togethers’; be modest, polite and ready to learn from the
peasants; know and respect the local language and customs, and help to solve the problems
of the host family, the peasants and the local Party (Aidit 1964, 18). These were a remark-
able forerunner of the bottom-up, ‘participatory action research’ and ‘participatory rural
appraisal’ strategies, inspired by Paulo Freire and popularised by Robert Chambers and
others in the early 1980s, and now still popular within the NGO community and in main-
stream development organisations such as the UK’s Department for International Develop-
ment and the World Bank (Chambers 1983, 1994).
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The first study (1959) covered 15 villages in Java and documented considerable
inequalities in land control. The results were widely publicised at the 1959 National
Farmers’ Conference and in the press, and included the identification of the tujuh setan
desa, the ‘seven village devils who suck the blood of the peasants’: landlords, usurers,
advance purchasers of crops, middlemen, bureaucratic capitalists (those who use govern-
ment resources to pressure peasants to sell their products to state enterprises at low
prices), village bandits (local strongmen who commit crimes to defend the interests of
exploiting classes) and evil village officials.4 The PKI reports confirmed the picture
already emerging from the few available university-based studies carried out in these
years (Van der Kroef 1960, 12).
The third and last study was carried out in villages of West, Central and East Java, Bali
and Lampung (Sumatra) in February and March 1965, under the sponsorship of the Aliarc-
ham Academy of Social Sciences and the Ministry of Science and Research. The aim of this
research was to study the conditions and problems of food production, an urgent problem
given Indonesia’s position as a chronic importer of rice and other staples, and the low har-
vests of the early 1960s due to problems of drought and pest attacks. It involved periods of
about two weeks of village-level participatory fieldwork. The results were quickly written
up in a preliminary series of stenciled village monographs but never published, being over-
taken by the cataclysmic events of October 1965. Stress was placed on objective reporting,
and this is indirectly confirmed by the enormous variety of conditions reported from the
various villages in West, Central and East Java, indicating that the cadres were not press-
ured into following a standard line. The importance of women’s participation in research
was stressed, and several of the researchers were women, reflecting also the gender-
mixed membership of the BTI (Slamet 1988, 40). While the PKI and BTI based their
initial thinking on a ‘classical’ agrarian class categorisation (landlords, rich peasants,
middle peasants, poor peasants, agricultural labourers), they made important modifications
to this framework based on the realities observed in the field, combining land- and income-
based indicators to arrive at a classification of social-economic groups in rural society. Both
the published and unpublished studies of 1964 and 1965 show clearly that the PKI were
quite willing to adapt received theories and concepts to Indonesian realities as revealed

4
‘Tuan-tanah jahat, lintahdarat, tukang-ijon, kapitalis birokrat, tengkulak jahat, bandit desa dan
penguasa jahat’ (Aidit 1964, chapter 2).
 10 Ben White

in field research; the ‘seven village devils’ discourse was precisely an attempt to underline
that Indonesia’s rural poor were exploited in complex ways and that ‘concentration of
surplus’ was based not only on land rent and extraction of surplus value from wage
labour, but on a much richer combination of economic, political and ideological mechan-
isms which dffered from one village to another (Slamet 1988, 31).
What do these studies tell us about village conditions, about the peasants who were
interviewed and the BTI and PKI cadres who carried out the research? Let us take the
example of the reports by two young researcher–activists, Sujati and Sulasto, trainees
from the Aliarcham Academy, who studied two villages in the extremely poor upland
region of Purwodadi district, Central Java. The following information is taken from their
unpublished reports (Sujati 1965; Sulasto 1965).5 One village (G) had a communist
lurah, and more than 90 percent had voted for PKI in the 1959 elections; the other
village (T) had a PNI village head and largely PNI administration, but still 75 percent of
the peasants had joined the BTI, the Pemuda Rakyat and/or the PKI, ‘so actually, we
ought to have the hegemony (berhegemoni) … we are losers in the village power structure,
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but winners in people’s power’. In the next pages I provide some details which may seem
trivial, but later the reason for doing so will be clear.
The first point to note is how seriously the young researchers took the principles of the
‘three togethers’, the ‘four dont’s’ and the ‘four musts’. Sujati had left her city clothes at
home and went to the village wearing an old kain and kebaya, tying her hair in a
sanggul in the way that peasant women do. She stayed in the house of an extremely
poor peasant woman, where she swept the house and yard and looked after her host’s
young child while she went to market. Every day she helped with pounding maize for
the next day’s meal, picking vegetables, fetching water from the neighbour’s well and
sometimes weeding the maize fields. Sulasto went to the sawah with his host (another
poor peasant) in the morning and helped with weeding; in the afternoon he collected fire-
wood and helped hoe the home-garden, using the host’s second ‘rather broken’ hoe. They
both ate with their host families: two meals a day of steamed maize with whatever leafy
vegetables could be found in the tiny house-gardens, and plain water from the neighbour’s
well to drink. They listed their host families’ meagre possessions. Suyati’s hosts in village T
had ‘three plates, four cups, one glass, two sickles, a hoe, a borrowed plough, three chick-
ens, one cow’ (which they did not own, and which was kept inside the house as there was no
stable). Sulasto in village G noted:

the house is fairly large, but there’s nothing in it. … They have only two plates and one bowl;
they have no cups and all the time I stayed there I never drank coffee or tea … . They own only
the one set of clothes which they wear every day. (He told me that he had pawned his good
clothes to buy food.)

5
The stencilled monographs on village conditions followed a standard format, starting with a day-by-
day account of the researcher–activists’ movements and discussions, and a personal account of their
experience of the ‘three togethers’. The main report introduced the village (location, history, sources
of livelihood, population, health and disease, education, religion, and art/culture) and went on to
describe food production and agricultural practices and problems, the rural class structure, agrarian
labour relations and wage levels, and detailed illustrations of household budgets of rich farmers,
middle peasants and landless worker households. These descriptive data were the basis for analysis
of the forms of exploitation (penghisapan) to which food producers were subject, the balance of pol-
itical power in the village, the state of organization and development of the ‘revolutionary peasant
movement’, and the peasants’ ‘subjective consciousness’. The final sections then drew conclusions
on the constraints to increasing food production, and the appropriate steps needed to overcome them.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 11

There was no toilet or closed place to bathe. The house of Suyati’s host, a poor widow, had
a leaky roof, and holes in the bamboo walls, making it constantly wet and chilly in the rainy
season. She looked after a few chickens which did not belong to her, and kept their dung
and other kitchen waste in a corner of the house near the bamboo sleeping platform, where it
attracted mosquitoes. Sulasti listened to her host talking about problems of indebtedness
(with merchants charging about 40 percent interest on three-month loans of maize), and
was surprised that she did not see this as an exploitative relation; ‘at first I just said
“yes”, but after getting to know her better I questioned her opinion, so she became more
aware of exploitation’. She noted how hard everyone worked: ‘in this village [T] I rarely
saw anyone resting, they are always busy working from morning to sunset’.
Yields of the major crops in both villages were low at the best of times: in good years
less than one ton of paddy or soya per hectare, and 1.5 tons of maize (nowadays, on rain-fed
fields one would expect about five times these amounts). With farm sizes around one third
of a hectare, this meant that peasants could only eat rice for 1–2 months of the year. In 1962
and 1963, there had been serious problems of drought and rat infestation, with some pea-
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sants losing their entire harvest and others getting only 10–20 percent of the normal yield.
In neither of the villages were there landowners with holdings above the maximum per-
mitted under the Basic Agrarian Law. There were, however, owners who share-cropped out
their land with agreements which contravened the Basic Law on Share Tenancy. In village
G, Suyati reported that there were no landlords or rich farmers; there were eight better-off
farmers who owned between 1.4 and 2.1 hectares of (rainfed) sawah, ‘but they worked on
their own farms like the middle and poor peasants’. There was, however, one absentee land-
lord, a civil servant resident in the sub-district town, who had bought 41 plots of land
(altogether about 14 hectares) at very low prices in 1962 and 1963 when crop failures
led to many distress sales of land. The land was then parcelled out to local farmers in
share tenancies, but under conditions contravening the Tenancy Law. There was also a
Chinese merchant in the same town who made loans of maize to peasants, to be paid
back in cash after harvest at 30–40 percent above the market rate.
In village T there was only one rich farmer, who employed wage workers and was also a
trader and moneylender. There were five Chinese merchants who made loans of maize at
high interest rates, seven relatively well-to-do peasants, 18 middle peasants, 142 poor pea-
sants and 105 landless worker households; these last three categories survived on a combi-
nation of farm and non-farm work, including seasonal out-migration. Labour relations in
this village were more ‘feudal’ than in village G; labourers were hired by the year and
given only food and tobacco, plus one calf (men) or young goat (women) at the end of
the year. Children hired to graze livestock would be paid with one calf at the end of two
or three years’ work.
In both villages, child marriages (of girls under 15 years of age) were frequent, and
Sujati gave a thoughtful account of the combination of economic, social and cultural
factors behind this. As under-15 marriage was illegal, corrupt village religious officials
charged 10 times the official fee to perform the marriage.
In considering how to confront these problems, both Sujati and Sulasto underlined the
urgent need for village democratisation (which already existed on paper) to be
implemented. The Bamudes (Badan Musyawarah Desa, Village Consultative Boards)
had been appointed on the Gotong-Royong principles to represent all major parties and
mass organisations including BTI and PKI, but neither the communist lurah of G nor the
PNI lurah of T had called a Bamudes meeting. Although membership of BTI, Gerwani
and Pemuda Rakyat was high in both villages, the leaders were largely ineffective (in G,
they were apparently scared of the communist lurah). Despite these organisational
 12 Ben White

weaknesses, they found the peasants’ political consciousness and their awareness of exploi-
tation to be quite high. They were also conscious of improved agricultural practices and
‘fertilizer minded’, but could not afford modern chemical fertilisers, while many had no
livestock and therefore no manure.
Besides the need to implement democratisation, to establish the Agrarian Reform Com-
mittees to deal with problems of tenancy and absentee ownership and to ‘re-tool’ corrupt
village heads and officials, they underlined the urgency of addressing the peasants’ practical
problems: improvement of irrigation, Germet (Gerakan Membasmi Tikus, mass rat extermi-
nation campaigns) and the Mutual Help Teams (Regu Saling Bantu) which had been ident-
ified as key pillars of the BTI’s local efforts, based on the principle that problems can best
be solved by working together rather than individually.
Sujati’s report includes a reflective ‘self-criticism’: she had found it difficult to adjust to
bathing and going to the toilet in the open under the bamboo tree, and drinking unboiled
water, and sleeping with the cow and chickens in the house, and because Gerwani was
not yet well organised in the villages, she had found it difficult to learn enough about pro-
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blems facing women. And on what she was able to give back to her hosts, she regretted that:

I did not succeed in making a toilet for my hosts, since I did not have the materials and also
could not have done the work of digging and carpentry;
I did not bring enough medicines [quinine and aspirin, BW] for those who needed them;
I grew too close to my hosts’s little children, so that they cried when I left to go home … .

Readers may have found these details boring. But this is just the point: the activists and
members of the Peasant’s Front were not concerned with plots to kidnap generals or set
up revolutionary councils in Jakarta; they were concerned to understand the mundane
causes of rural poverty and underproductivity, poor diets, poor health, child marriage,
corrupt officials and so on, and to work together with peasant men and women to find
practical ways to overcome them. They were aware, as we are today, that these problems
had technical, social and political causes. And these are the kinds of people who were
hunted down, rounded up and massacred in late 1965 and 1966, in Purwodadi and
other regions, on grounds of their supposed involvement in the ‘30 September
Movement’.

Consequences
After 1965, agrarian reform implementation was abandoned and became a taboo subject for
many years; the Agrarian Reform Courts and Committees were formally dissolved in 1970.
All surviving SARBUPRI members lost their jobs, and many of those detained were used as
forced labour on plantations; this continued until 1971 (Fauzi 2012, 74–75). Tens of
thousands of squatters on plantation land were expelled, and many of them became the
plantations’ new flexible, temporary workforce (Stoler 1985, chapter 6). In Java and
other rice-bowl regions, the popular ‘mass guidance’ programmes of the BTI and university
students which had tried to help peasants increase production were replaced with the dis-
astrous Bimas Gotong Royong6 programme, in which the new regime contracted with mul-
tinational corporations for provision of the new ‘Green Revolution’ inputs including
fertilisers, insecticides, extension and management, and the new ‘IR’ paddy varieties

6
Bimas = mass guidance; gotong royong = ‘helping each other’.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 13

which had become available from the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos.7
Peasants were expected to repay these inputs by delivering one sixth of their crop to a
national collecting agency. Mismanagement and corruption made a near disaster of this pro-
gramme, which was abruptly terminated in 1970 when the state took direct control of the
Bimas and Inmas programmes, recognising the crucial importance of food production
and stable food prices for political stability (Hüsken and White 1989, 251–52).
At the same time, the BTI and all other peasant organisations (including those linked to
NU and PNI) were dissolved and replaced with a single, state-sponsored monolith organ-
isation, the ‘Indonesia Farmers’ Harmony Association’ (Himpunan Kerukunan Tani Indo-
nesia, HKTI), officially mandated to promote the interests of small farmers and farm
workers. The HKTI has not been active in support of small farmers; in recent years, for
example, it has been completely silent in the face of the massive forced expulsion of
local peasants from millions of hectares of land for corporate agriculture (especially oil
palm). The HKTI has for some years been locked in a leadership struggle between Suhar-
to’s former son-in-law Prabowo Subianto and business magnate Oesman Sapta Odang
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(both of them owners of plantations, among their many business interests).8 The two
rival HKTIs continue to claim legitimacy, and as can be seen from their two competing
websites, neither has any vision of agrarian renewal.9 The losers are the millions of peasants
and farm workers whose interests the HKTI is formally mandated to defend. The indepen-
dent Indonesian Peasants’ Union (SPI; formerly the Federation of Indonesian Peasant
Unions, FSPI), set up immediately after the fall of Suharto and an active member (and
Southeast Asia coordinator) of La Via Campesina, has adopted the slogan ‘land to the
tiller!’ and has mounted various local campaigns, but has not achieved any broad national
following remotely approaching the BTI’s more than seven million members.
Finally, we should note the continuing problems in confronting the history of 1965–
1966 (Zurburchen 2005). Thousands of accounts have been collected from victims and
eyewitnesses, including some by former perpetrators of the killings (Tempo 2013), and
Indonesian historians and others have now published literally dozens of books and count-
less shorter articles on what happened.10 In Eastern Indonesia, researchers interviewing
surviving women victims discovered that the programmes of the PKI and its affiliates
prior to October 1965 – as we have seen for the BTI in our illustrations from Java –
were no less than ‘a far-sighted forerunner of their own progressive social work’, turning
the state propaganda version of the PKI upside down (Van Klinken 2013; Kolimon and
Wetangterah 2012). Since the fall of Suharto in 1998, various national leaders have
stated that the history of this period will be revised, but nothing has been done. There is
more than enough evidence to demolish the government version, but more than 15 years
after the fall of Suharto, books that challenge the official story of the coup and countercoup
are banned; history textbooks continue to be doctored, and those involved in exhumations
of mass graves are attacked by thugs and goons (McGregor 2012). Only a few official
figures have dared publicly to recognise the crimes committed against the PKI and its affili-
ates and sympathisers. In 1999, Indonesian President Abdurrachman Wahid (former head
of NU) personally apologised to NU’s countless victims, but the NU itself (with the

7
The corporations were allocated huge areas of rice fields (often around 50,000 hectares) and were
paid around USD 50 per hectare for providing the inputs and management.
8
Tempo (2010).
9
hkti.or.id and hkti.org.
10
Accessible English-language books on the subject include Cribb (1990), Zurburchen (2005), Roosa
(2006), and Kammen and McGregor (2012).
 14 Ben White

exception of its Jogjakarta branch) has not (McGregor 2012, 237–39). In Palu (Central
Sulawesi), the site of one of the concentration camps where detainees were subjected to
forced labour, Mayor Rusdi Mastura (who was 16 years old in 1966) has publicly apolo-
gised to the more than 1000 victims, and has promised free medical care and scholarships
for their families and children, and a monument to their memory (Tempo 2013, 6–7).
Although the UN Human Rights Committee reminded the Indonesian government in
2013 of its obligations as signatory of the International Convenant on Civil and Political
Rights to investigate and prosecute past cases of grave human rights violations, no
action has been taken. In 2012, the National Commission on Human Rights report on
the 1965 Crimes against Humanity recommended follow-up investigations by the Office
of the Attorney General, establishment of an ad hoc human rights court and a non-judicial
truth and reconciliation commission as stipulated in Law number 26/2000 on Human Rights
Courts. But their report was rejected by the Indonesian State and the Office of the Attorney
General. Meanwhile, each year on 1 October, ‘Sacred Pancasila Day’ (Hari Kesaktian Pan-
casila), Indonesia’s successive post-Suharto presidents have led the ceremony at the
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Lubang Buaya memorial to the six murdered generals, and visited the museum which per-
petuates the government version; there is no national monument to the victims of ‘this
ghastly massacre, visited alike upon Communist leaders and hundreds of thousands of fol-
lowers whose only crime was that they found in the PKI sustenance for their needs and
aspirations’ (Mortimer 1974, 9). A half century later these victims, their families and des-
cendants, and also new generations of Indonesians growing up with a distorted version of
their own society’s past, deserve a better history than this; the ‘battle for history after
Suharto’ (Van Klinken 2005) continues.
Faced with the state’s failure to live up to its international obligations to investigate past
crimes against humanity, a new International People’s Tribunal has been launched, assem-
bling documentation and drafting an indictment which will hold the Indonesian State
responsible for genocide and for nine forms of ‘crime against humanity’: murder, extermi-
nation, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecution and ‘other inhu-
mane acts’ as these are defined in international law. As a people’s initiative, the Tribunal
has no legal power to enforce its judgments, but hopes to carry the moral authority to
promote their wide acceptance by the international community. Supported by prosecutors
from Indonesia and volunteer judges from various other international tribunals, the Tribunal
will be held on 10–13 November 2015 in The Hague; details are available at www.
1965tribunal.org.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ina Slamet for access to unpublished BTI reports, and to Ann Stoler for helpful comments,
particularly on North Sumatra.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Ben White is Emeritus Professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies, The
Hague. His research has focused mainly on processes of agrarian change and the anthropology and
history of childhood, youth and gender, especially in Indonesia. He is a founding member of the
Land Deal Politics Initiative. Email: white@iss.nl