Shrinking Perimeter

Padang's rebellion floundered, seemed perilously near collapse. The rebel communiques continued to report bloody battles all along the shrinking perimeter of rebel territory in Central Sumatra, but newsmen searching for these savage conflicts were finding little but bad roads, torrential rains and, occasionally, friendly government troops. "It's an accident when they fight--like two people bumping into each other in the dark," said one Western observer.

Colonel Simbolon, who marched off with one battalion to take command of the rebel forces in North Sumatra, last week was back in Bukittinggi without 1) his troops, 2) report of victory. In the eastern foothills of the Sumatra mountains, government troops from the oil center of Pakanbaru had pushed the rebels back within 70 miles of Bukittinggi. To the south, the government's hard-working paratroopers were inching through the jungle to cut the last rebel artery to the outside--the potholed road that leads to Palembang in South Sumatra.

Cut off by sea by the government's blockade, deprived of its revenues by government seizures of its oilfields, Padang had few resources left. The rebel capital of Bukittinggi was preparing for the defeat. Its population of some 120,000 has been halved as residents moved out to the hills.

What had gone wrong with the rebel cause? It was not a lack of arms. Their Premier, Sjafruddin, boasted last week that there was ammunition enough for a ten years' war. Over the weekend, two more airdrops of arms occurred at Bukittinggi, parachuted down from planes of "unknown" nationality, reputedly Nationalist Chinese.

Truth was that the rebels' only chance of success was the expectation that other areas all over Indonesia would unite with them in massive opposition to President Sukarno. The other areas held back. Even Sumatra itself proved no more united as an island than Indonesia is as a country.

In Djakarta, President Sukarno made the most of the rebels' failure to rally others to their cause. The government invasion of Sumatra was not a "military" effort, he said, but a "police action against a group of political and military adventurers" who "want to drag us into one of the world blocs." From combat accounts, a police action is what it appeared to be.

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