Officials believed that both President Sukarno and the. once= powerful Communist party had taken sharp setbacks." con
Writing from Washington, Times correspondent Max Frankel stressed the "delight". of the Johnson administration and indicated . that the. situation in Indonesia was the result of intervention in the | internal affairs of that country:
"After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence while Mr. Sukarno. appeared to be slipping, officials were elated to find their expectations being realized. a
There ‘appeared to be hope in “Washington that General Nasution would yet emerge as the new "strongman" in Indonesia.
"The United States retained excellent contacts with the military leaders," Frankel revealed, "even after Mr. Sukarno had renounced American aid and had begun to move against American information libraries, the Peace Corps and news correspondents."
Frankel added: "The Central Intelligence Agency was known to have participated .in some plots against him [Sukarno]. An American flier was captured by the Indonesians while flying for a rebel group.."
Of all the lessons to be drawn from the success of the counterrevolution in Indonesia, one of the most: obvious is Sukarno's role. -.. In 1961 he was reported to have told _nonneay "I am the best bulwark in Indonesia against Communism. ue mo
This was completely true. Sukarno! s greatest Single success as a bourgeois politician was to attract and to hold the support of © the Indonesian Vommunist party. Instead of mobilizing the workers and peasants to take power in Indonesia and open up the road to socialism, the Indonesian Communist party under D.N.Aidit placed political confidence in Sukarno and depended on him both to safeguard its own standing and to lead the struggle against imperialism and indigenous reaction.
The result was a debacle. for the Communist party on the scale of the one experienced in Germany with the rise of Hitler.
The Kremlin, of course, shares responsibility for the immense defeat in Indonesia, for Aidit was only practicing the line of "peaceful coexistence". developed by the Soviet bureaucracy.
Peking, too, helped pave the way for the counterrevolutionary _ victory in Indonesia. Despite the radical language and the many references to Lenin, Mao and his circle covered up Aidit's opportunist policies if they did not actively encourage them out of their own eagerness to please Sukarno as a diplomatic ally.
The ‘end result was to weaken the world position of both the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, not to mention the | os
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Democratic Republic of Vietnam and all the other workers states. This was one of the big reasons for the "delight" in Washington over the turn of events. ©
The main victims of the defeat in Vietnam are, of course, the workers arid poor peasants who placed their confidence in the capacity of the Communist party to lead them in a struggle for power.. They. had to pay with one of the most monstrous slaughters of modern times for the illusions sowed by Stalin’ s heirs in Indonesia. —_ ‘How> long. will it take them to rebuild from the ground up, this time constructing a leadership. genuinely shaped in accordance with the principles of Leninism? A precise answer cannot be given to this question. But that the Indonesian workers and poor peasants will do it, is absolutely certain.
JAPANESE CP