The Indonesian Model

Achmed Sukarno was a populist leader and founder of modern Indonesia. He also founded the non-aligned movement of developing countries to create a ‘third way’ between the then two superpowers. In 1955 he convened the Asia-Africa Conference where the leaders of the developing world (the majority of mankind) met to forge their common interests. Alarms went off as his initiative demonstrated a powerful potential in opposition to the boundless aspirations of the proponents of a “free market economy.” The 1963 formation of the Malaysian Federation was criticised by Sukarno as a neo-colonial plot to further British commercial interest in the region. A declassified British Foreign Office report from 1964 called for the ‘defence’ of western interests in South-East Asia as “the region produced nearly 85% of the world’s natural rubber, over 45% of the tin, 65% of the copra and 23% of the chromium ore.” More stridently, from a CIA memorandum two years earlier, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and President John Kennedy had agreed to “liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities”.

Under Sukarno Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy and later was referred to as a guided democracy. He vigorously encouraged the establishment of trade unions as well as peasant, women’s and cultural movements. Sukarno was himself a committed nationalist and democratic leader, while characteristically autocratic in his performance. He promoted participation in political parties and by 1965 the largest was the PKI, a communist party. According to the historian Harold Crouch, “the PKI had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor within the existing system.” Its popularity as grass-roots resistance to the former colonial power’s corporate interests is what seriously alarmed the Americans and their friends. It could, they said, like Viet Nam “go communist.” Sukarno’s government was a broad coalition within which the PKI had a significant position, while there had never been evidence that he was himself a member of the Party.

In 1966, with the secret backing of the CIA, General Suharto seized power. While the ‘threat of communism’ was the provocation promoted to the Western World, copiously splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world, there was the de facto flash point that rushed America and Britain to act, culminating in their pre-arranged mandate that Suharto would be put in place. A recalcitrant Sukarno had committed a most mortal sin within the secular religion of liberal democracy that safeguards the sacred rites of corporate capitalism. He had thrown out the IMF and World Bank. We know, again from declassified memoranda, that the CIA provided lists of suspected or known communists or agitators. The lists were supplied to General Suharto and his army. Thousands, then tens of thousands of people were rounded up and killed. With the names checked off the lists were handed back to the CIA. Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador to Jakarta, reported back to the Foreign Office that “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. The Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, while visiting the White House said: “With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked-off I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place”.

In 1967 a meeting was held in Geneva, sponsored by Time-Life Corporation, to distribute the spoils from the great prize of Indonesia. David Rockefeller helped chair the meeting in which all the most powerful capitalists were assembled. The corporate titans of the Free World were represented: General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British Leyland, British-American Tobacco, American Express, Siemans, Goodyear, US Steel and the International Paper Corporation. On the other side of the table were Suharto’s men, whom Rockefeller referred to as “Indonesia’s top economic team”. The team was headed by the Sultan of Jogjakarta, who produced a plan for a free ‘market economy’ that had been supplied to him by the Ford Foundation which had worked it out with two CIA front organisations: The Center for International Studies and the Stanford Research Institute. The final draft was written by Harvard economist David Cole. In Geneva the team was jokingly referred to as the Berkeley Mafia, as many of the participants had enjoyed US government scholarships to study at the University of California in Berkeley. All of the vast natural resources, including that of the human resource of cheap labour, were handed over in exchange for General Suharto being placed in power, protected by the USA, Britain and Australia. The Geneva conference was called ‘To Aid in the Rebuilding of a Nation’. The prestigious conference was opened by the notable James Linen, president of Time Inc. and a man who has the appearance of someone who has just consumed a third of the worlds natural resources for lunch, who said, “we are trying to create a new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries work together…for the greater profit of the free world. This world of international enterprise is more than governments…It is a seamless web of enterprise, which has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary speed”. By the second day of the conference the region was all carved-up. Chase Manhattan set up the financial services; the Freeport Company got the mountains of copper, the giant US company Alcoa got most of the bauxite, and on and on. A tax-free haven was quickly set up by Suharto’s government for his new friends and to the raucous cheers of the conference participants the IMF and World Bank were back in business in Indonesia.

In an interview given in 2000 an air force pilot who had been loyal to Sukarno at the time of the coup, and while he had survived, had spent many years in prison under the Suharto/CIA regime, was quoted as saying: “In the early sixties the pressure on Indonesia to do what the Americans wanted was intense. Sukarno wanted good relations with them but did not want their economic system. With America that is never possible. So he became an enemy. They didn’t call it globalisation then, but it was the same thing. If you accepted it you were America’s friend. If you chose another way you were given [a] warning, and if you didn’t comply all hell was visited on you”. It must be clear that the Suharto Indonesian model worked. It worked for more than thirty-five years before anyone ventured to pull the plug on one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. The very same model was applied in Viet Nam.

In 1959, as the French were preparing their withdrawal from Viet Nam, the Americans started sending in their first ‘advisors’. A few years on the CIA, under the cover of innocuous NGO’s, brought explosives and arms into the country. By the mid 1960’s innocent villagers were being butchered and unprovoked explosions were going off in Saigon. The front pages of the western world’s newspapers reported the atrocities being committed by the communists. Ralph McGehee, a top CIA operations officer in the 1960’s declared that the Viet-cong did not kill villagers and burn villages; rather their modus operandi was to recruit people and set up supply lines to fuel the resistance [to foreign occupation]. McGehee went on to say of the Indonesian Model of 1965 (code named ‘Operation Phoenix’ when launched in Viet Nam where American-directed death squads assassinated over 50,000 people): “You can trace back all the major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that initial program meant that it would be repeated again and again.” Seven years after the Terror in Indonesia, the model was again used, according to McGehee, as a ‘model operation’ for the American run coup that disposed Chilean President Salvador Allende. Allende was a highly cultured Marxist intellectual who was elected by the people of Chile in indisputably free and fair democratic elections. President Richard Nixon was in the White House. How he arrived there is germane to our understanding of the events leading up to the present.

Kennedy had been highly instrumental in America’s continued involvement in Viet Nam, just as he had been complicit in the overthrow of Sukarno. Nixon was the man who the rapidly expanding military industrial complex had intended to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower, war hero president of WWII. Yet Nixon lost, and the wild-card candidate got in. Cuba and the ‘Bay of Pigs’ turned into a fiasco, and the military, together with the armaments industry, i.e. military industrial complex, lost a lucrative opportunity. Nevertheless, they were given Viet Nam, which was a golden compensation for having lost Cuba. The American Mafia, instrumental in getting Kennedy into the White House and who also lost out when the hay-days of Havana ended, were given Las Vegas in Nevada to operate legalised gambling. This was political payback for new friends who were old friends of his father Joe Kennedy. Kennedy’s presidency was cut short and LBJ stepped in and so deepened America’s involvement in Viet Nam that Johnson eventually buried himself. Then in 1969 Nixon took the place that had been usurped from him by the charismatic and popular Kennedy back in ‘61.

In 1972 US business interests and other trans-nationals were sucking dry the great natural wealth of Chile. The communications giant ITT was a major player and when its head, Geneen, an execrable Polish American, went to Nixon and handed him a large suit case crammed with $100 bills to activate the subversion of the Chilean economy with the desired intent that the matter culminate in a coup d’état, the exigent plan was rushed into motion. The danger of Allende was already well known, for in December 1972 he had delivered a most rousing address of immense historical importance to the General Assembly of the United Nations. In his address he outlined, in detail, the vast and rapacious expropriation of wealth from the developing states by huge international corporations. He told of the loss of autonomy and sovereignty of those states, not to other states but to entities and individuals who operated and moved freely beyond any national boundaries. Moreover, they were un-elected by any known franchise of the human population, bound by nothing but their own bottom lines. The ensuing poverty [that ravaged Latin America as well as Africa and Asia] was a direct result of those actions, and the weakened and indebted national governments were helpless to alleviate the suffering of their people. At the end of Allende’s speech the auditorium erupted in a roar of cheering and applause. Behind the roar, in muffled whispers, the acrimonious words not heard but too soon felt, “the communist son-of-a bitch has to go”.

Communism was a failed ideology within the flawed dialectic of left/right that dominated nearly all thinking in the last century. Allende and his government fell, not simply as the Berlin Wall fell, but because he had embraced a theism that failed to grasp the true nature of both capital and money itself. Nevertheless, there has always been an irrefutable critique of Capitalism that emerged from its opponents, irregardless of their inability to have any self analysis. Andre Malraux’s intellect and passion do not go wasted on an attentive listener concerned with the human condition. Yet what is to be taken from the brutal reality of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag requires yet another assessment. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not so different from the collapse of Enron, which together with their accountants Anderson, hid its enormous debt within an empty shell. The irony here is that the Soviet Union collapsed not ostensibly because of a lack of efficacy but lack of efficiency. The Presidential Building was surrounded by General Pinochet’s brutal army. The in-back CIA operation moved forward. Facing inevitable defeat, Allende committed suicide. The mass slaughter began and the football stadiums started filling up with corpses. Among the thousands dead, who remain to this day unaccounted for, were a number of naively idealistic Americans opposed to US sponsored fascism in South America, who needed to be identified by their parents who had flown down to retrieve their children’s bodies. They had been lured by the seductive lies of communist propaganda, the parents were told. We had all been warned of the dangers and now, said the State Department official: “This terrible tragedy.”

What happened in Chile was a new nadir in the transformation from inter-state wars to the now omnipresent hostile takeovers that are occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Elections have just been held to choose Haiti’s first elected president since the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Prior to these elections (2006) and continuing on, Haiti, a small island state, rages on in chaos and violence. These events are all part of the active ‘Nation-Building Policy’ of the Bush administration. Aristide was openly supported by the US, as he had originally been their pick for the presidency. While they stated that he “…was deeply flawed,” its policy was always to work with him as Haiti’s democratically elected leader. Brian Dean Curran, American Ambassador to Haiti had this mandate and conscientiously worked to uphold it. Nevertheless, he continually found his efforts being thwarted. He had come to help this fledgling democracy and now found himself recalled, having to leave in anger and foreboding. Government documents show that while Curran was told to speak with the US voice of cooperation and support for the President, the putative State Department position, a much more powerful voice was running a rip-tide undermining his every effort. That voice came from the publicly funded democracy building group close to the White House, the International Republican Institute, I.R.I. Their man in Haiti was the invidious Stanley Lucas, who actively encouraged and provided support for the war-lord generals to overthrow Aristide. Lucas assured them that this was Washington’s true policy and that “Curran was of no importance, [and] that he did not fit in the bigger picture.” Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell assured the world that America’s policy was precisely what Curran had been promoting, and that “the United States stood by Mr. Aristide”. Then Lucus flew hundreds of opposition rebels to a hotel in the Dominican Republic, situated on the other half of this small island. There the active plan was laid out to oust Aristide by the US backed war-lords. The enactment of the Terror begins. It is the very heart of the operating system. Lucas has since moved on and is currently working hard for the I.R.I. building democracy in Afghanistan.

Then democracy is really tyranny.

“No. It’s really democracy.”