Malik," the article informs us, "...since the founding of the 'Murba' Party in 1948...has been one of its leaders. The 'Murba' is a political party which embraces Trotskyism and therefore it shows the same characteristics as any Trotskyite party: it raises the banner of 'Marxism,' 'revolutionary,' '‘leftist' and the like, but in practice it implements the political program of the rightwing forces."
The charge is then made that "It has been an open secret that ever since the founding of the 'Murba' Party, its leaders, like Adam Malik, have always participated in all the counterrevolutionary activities of the right-wing forces...
"The cooperation between the Trotskyites, the bourgeoisie and the fascist generals...is also clearly visible in the field of foreign affairs followed by the fascist military regime with Adam Malik as its progenitor."
What is the truth about these charges?
The Partai Murba was founded in October of 1948 by Tan Malakka, one of the founding leaders of the Indonesian Communist party in 1920, and a hero in Indonesia's struggle for freedom. To understand the Partai Murba and its promising beginnings it is necessary to know at least a little about Tan Malakka, something which the authors of "Who is Adam Malik?" do not provide.
In 1925 Tan Malakka became the representative of the Communist International for all of Southeast Asia. In 1926, against the advice of Tan Malakka, the Indonesian CP launched a disastrous uprising. This led to the suppression of the party and Tan Malakka's break with the now Stalinized Comintern.
For 18 years he worked to build a revolutionary underground throughout Southeast Asia, retu~uing in 1945 to Indonesia, which was then occupied by the Japanese.
He tried to persuade Sukarno to fight for independence. Sukarno had collaborated with the Japanese during the war, and was afraid to oppose his capitalist masters, although he was still a popular figure among the Indonesian masses.
Time was running out. The Allies were about to land, which would mean restoration of Dutch rule, so Tan Malakka kidnapped Sukarno and forced him to sign a declaration of independence.
in the years that followed, various partisan armies fought the Dutch; but where Sukarno made treacherous concessions to the Dutch in a series of "negotiated" agreements, Tan Malakka and the forces he led remained intransigent for complete independence.
In October of 1948, Tan Malakka. founded the Partai Murba, or Proletarian-party, which numbered at the outset some 80,000 members. He was Sukarno's chief contender for leadership of the Indonesian revolution. A few months later, in June of 1949, Sukarno had Tan Malakka murdered. :
Tan Malakka had never formally been a member of any Trotskyist organization, although certainly he was an outstanding revolutionary whose politics were "Trotskyist," i.e., revolutionary socialist, in the broad sense. But the party he founded never had a chance to develop.
Adam Malik was a young follower of Tan Malakka during World War II and the struggle for independence. On Tan Malakka's death, he and a few others who found thenselves: in the leadership of the new party became demoralized, and defected to the bourgeoisie, taking the remains of the Partai Murba with them.
From the beginning of the 1950s, Adam Malik and his party have been bitter enemies of Trotskyism and of the revolutionary working-class program it represents. This fact must be well known to the "Indonesian students" and their Maoist mentors, who are now issuing statements on the "“Trotskyism" of Adam Malik.
Why do they now choose to attack Trotskyism? There are two reasons. The most important is the catastrophe which their own policies prepared in Indonesia. In the Stalinist tradition, they are seeking for a scapegoat.
More specifically, Adam Malik is singled out for the epithet “Trotskyite," as a way of attacking the Kremlin bureaucrats for their red-carpet treatment of Malik last October 17-22. (See World Outlook, December 16, 1966. )
Preparing for Malik's visit to Moscow, M.D. Sytenko, Soviet ambassador in Djakarta, made a special point of praising the counterrevolutionary Indonesian government. A September 18 dispatch by Antara, the Indonesian press agency, quotes Sytenko as saying that Indonesia was "continuing her anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist policy" and that "the attitude of the Soviet government towards Indonesia remains unchanged."
As a goodwill offering to the reactionary Indonesian generals, shortly before Malik's arrival in Moscow, the Kremlin expelled Answar Dharmar, correspondent of Harian Rakjat, the official organ of the Indonesian Communist party, from the Soviet Union.
This cynical act was consistent with the Kremlin's policies of “peaceful coexistence" with imperialism and its agents. But for the Indonesian Communists to aint the reactionary Malik as a Trotskyist discredits their case against the Kremlin. The charges are implausible on their face, if for no other reason than that genuine Trotskyists are the last people in the world the Soviet bureaucrats would have anything to’ do with.)
The slightest examination of the accusations raised in the Indonesian article make it plain that the whole “exposé" has nothing in common with the actual history of the Trotskyist movement in Indonesia.
The only authentic Trotskyist organization in Indonesia has no relationship with the Partai Murba, or Adam Malik. It was begun in June of 1946 as the Communist Youth Army, which was organized into a political party, the Partai Acoma, in1952. -
Founded on August 8, 1952, the Partai Acoma (Indonesian Communist Group of Struggle) has a long history of persecution at the hands of the bourgeois Sukarno government. (As late as December of 1965, after the counterrevolution was in full swing, Second Secretary of the PKI, Njoto said of Sukarno that, "The PKI recognizes only one head of the state, one supreme commander, one great leader of the revolution -- President Sukarno." Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, Dec. 2, 1965.)
In 1959 the Partai Acoma was recognized as the Indonesian section of the Fourth International -- the world party of the socialist revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. It was the only Indonesian party ever so recognized.
In February of the same year, Ibnu Parna, the leader of the Partai Acoma and a member of parliament, was jailed for eleven months, despite his parliamentary immunity, for publishing a pamphlet denouncing the suppression of workers' rights by General Nasution.
Thus, six years before the military coup, a Trotskyist leader was imprisoned
for warning the Indonesian workers against the man who was to become the butcher of the Indonesian Communist movement.
In 1964 Sukarno declared the Partai Acoma illegal, at_the request of the Communist Party of Indonesia!
The Indonesian Trotskyists struggled against overwhelming odds to create a mass revolutionary party in time. They were met in that attempt with persecution and harassment not only by the ruling class, but by the party that dominated the workingclass movement, the PKI.
For Communist youth who bear a “responsibility to analyze the terrible defeat for which their party is responsible, it is a shabby deception to concoct fantasies about "Trotskyites" in high places and to falsify the real role of Trotskyism in the Indonesian revolution.
In reality it is only the Trotskyists who have been able to cogently explain and denounce the class-collaborationist policies that led to the Indonesian disaster.
THE