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Australian journalist Frank Palmos cited in declassified US files on communism purge in Indonesia
Sydney Morning Herald - October 21, 2017
Australian journalist and historian Frank Palmos, who at the time was the Indonesia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and other newspapers, has no doubt the secret telegram is referring to him.
"Then US Ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green used to laugh I knew much more than he did," Dr Palmos, who is now in his 70s, told Fairfax Media.
Dr Palmos – one of the obvious inspirations for the novel The Year of Living Dangerously, later made into a movie starring Mel Gibson – was among the first foreigners in the world to witness the scale of the purge which killed up to 500,000 alleged communists.
This week the National Security Archive in the US published newly declassified documents from the US Embassy in Jakarta from 1964-1968 after activists, scholars, film-makers and a group of US Senators called for the files to be made public.
The revelation about the pivotal moment in Southeast Asian history comes as the spectre of mass violence re-emerges in the region today, in the Philippines gripped by a drug war, and Myanmar, where government troops set upon Rohingya villages in Rakhine State.
The National Security Archive says Telegram 1516 from the American Embassy in Jakarta was an "important cable" that reported on conversations between Western observers and activists from the Indonesian Communist Party, known as the PKI.
The telegram, dated November 20, 1965, says a "reliable Australian journalist", who spoke fluent Indonesian, was the first Western journalist to visit Central Java on October 10.
"He said he talked to PKI cadres in number of places in Central Java... and found them thoroughly confused and claiming lack of any foreknowledge of Sept 30 movement," the telegram says.
The September 30th Movement was an aborted coup, blamed on the PKI, during which six high-ranking army officers were kidnapped and killed. It triggered an Indonesian Army-led massacre of alleged communists and anyone with suspected leftist leanings.
"The cable suggests US officials were well aware that alleged PKI supporters and members being arrested or killed in an army-led campaign of repression and mass murder had no role in – or even knowledge of – the September 30th movement," the National Security Archive says.
Despite this, the National Security Archive says, "the United States began moving to offer substantial covert support for the campaign".
Dr Palmos said he and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Don North travelled to Western and Central Java 10 days after the abortive coup to gauge the scale of PKI involvement.
"I wanted to find out whether this was a Jakarta-headed operation or a wholesale, well-informed, thoroughly impregnated PKI movement," Dr Palmos said.
The landscape was eerily deserted, with rice farmers who had supported the PKI already apprehensive about a military crackdown.
"The red star communist flags were already coming down indicating they were taking refuge," Dr Palmos said. "I was fairly brave in those days but I was still scared stiff."
Dr Palmos was not surprised to learn that PKI cadres in Central Java had been unaware of the coup.
His earlier reporting on the so-called "Long March" from Surabaya to Jakarta in May 1965 to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the PKI – which fizzled out by the time it reached Bekasi – had convinced him the Communist Party had no substantive army in Central Java.
"The farmers seemed to sum up the situation: I will support the party (PKI) and vote for the party but I am not going to fight for the party," Dr Palmos said.
Dr Palmos documented the horror of the anti-communist purge – "beheading was the most common form of killing but for large scale executions shooting was normal," he wrote in The Sun News-Pictorial, then Melbourne's largest newspaper.
However he believes that had the PKI succeeded in staging a coup the bloodletting would have been worse.
"The only thing that buoys me when I go back over 65 is that had the PKI come in [to power], [Indonesia] could have gone the way of Cambodia, where Pol Pot massacred almost 40 per cent of his population."
The 1965-66 communist massacre remains highly sensitive in Indonesia. Last month, police were forced to fire tear gas and water cannons to disperse anti-communist protesters who falsely claimed an event at the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute Foundation was a meeting of communist supporters.
In 2015 the Ubud Writers Festival cancelled sessions discussing 1965 – the first act of censorship in the history of the popular international event.
Amnesty International issued a statement in August saying there had been at least 39 cases since 2015 where authorities disbanded events related to 1965.
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