Flickering Out

Outnumbered, outgunned, outgeneraled, and easily outfought, the rebels in Sumatra last week were pushed to the wall.

Government troops at dawn scrambled from transports into lifeboats and landing craft, surged onto the beaches north of Padang, the rebel nerve center. A spearhead of Indonesian marines had already pushed inland against light resistance. At the Padang airfield, eight miles north of town, government planes strafed gun positions while 200 paratroopers drifted down at the field's edge. Within twelve hours, the rebel defenders were in flight along the road to Bukittinggi, 58 miles away, and Padang was firmly in the control of Djakarta's Colonel Achmad Jani, who had learned his lessons well at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kans.

Some 10,000 government troops converged on the battered remnants of four rebel battalions defending their capital, Bukittinggi. The two-month-old rebellion, which aimed at the overthrow of President Sukarno and his Red-encouraged experiment in "guided" democracy, seemed at the point of extinction.

Miscalculations. In Red China the Peking People's Daily crowed that "the liberation of Padang is a victory of the Indonesian people in their fight against colonialism and for peace. The U.S. was directly behind the Sumatran rebellion and gave much aid to the rebels."

The rebels had hoped for the U.S. aid that Red China talked of, but had not got it. They had expected that Washington would cripple Djakarta by freezing all Indonesian funds in the U.S. until the fighting was over; they hoped for cooperation from the U.S.-owned oilfields in cutting off revenues to the central government; they thought that raising the standard of anti-Communist revolt would bring quick support from all anti-Communist nations and from other regions of Indonesia. None of their calculations worked out--only North Celebes joined them in their uprising against Sukarno. Their most serious mistake was a tactical one: they had been too confident that Sukarno's creaky government could not mount so competent and quick an offensive.

Moving Center. At week's end the rebel leaders--Sjafruddin, Husein, Simbolon--were alternately reported heading for the mountains or in flight to North Celebes, where the banner of rebellion still fluttered at Menado. The Celebes' rebels had managed to buy a few B-26s "somewhere in the Pacific" and had already made bombing raids on government airfields. At Menado, too, was Colonel Alex E. Kawilarang, the former military attache at the Indonesian embassy in Washington, who was named the rebel commander in chief. But if the rebellion could not flourish in rugged Sumatra, it was not apt to survive for long in less populous Celebes.

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