The Communists Try a Comeback

Indonesia's Communist party was all but wiped out in the wave of anti-Communist slaughter that followed the party's abortive coup in 1965. Since the pogrom, Indonesia's leadership has warned time and again that the Com munists were plotting a comeback. So often was the message repeated that most Indonesians came to pay it scant attention. This month the government produced evidence that even the most hard-nosed skeptics could not ignore: the army announced that it had broken up an incipient guerrilla movement in East Java led by surviving Central Com mittee members of the outlawed Partai Komunis Indonesia, or P.K.I.

East Java authorities first received reports early this year of a series of kidnapings, robberies and murders in South Blitar, a barren and isolated region distinguished only by its long tradition of rebellion. The troubles were not linked to political activity until a Communist group staged an arms raid on an air-force installation in Surabaja, East Java's largest city.

Rebuilding the Party. The Communists had been active in South Blitar since mid-1966. They had evolved a program to revive their party, begin armed struggle, and establish a revolutionary united front, presumably with the left wing of the Indonesian Nationalist Party, which is particularly strong in East Java. Encouraged by Peking propaganda calling for armed uprising, they set up schools for guerrilla training, and political indoctrination and established cells in such East Java cities as Surabaja and Malang. By early 1968, they controlled two regional guerrilla groups and 17 village detachments and began to look for bigger action.

Djakarta was alerted by the Sura-baja arms raid and reacted quickly. The army launched "territorial operations," occupying suspect villages and replacing village chiefs with military officers. But stronger measures were needed, and in June five battalions moved to launch sweeping search operations throughout South Blitar and its sandstone caves. In two months, they brought in 850 suspects, among them twelve members of the P.K.I.'s old Central Committee. They captured an arsenal of old bolt-action rifles, a few submachine guns and some homemade weapons. The army claimed that Oloan Hutapea, who took over the party's leadership after the death of D. N. Aidit in 1965, had been killed.

Why did the Communists rise up so prematurely--long before they were ready for a real test of armed strength with the government? Puzzled Djakarta officials put it down to the Indonesian Communists' notoriously bad sense of timing and planning. After all, an ill-prepared Communist uprising flopped in 1948, and the 1965 coup attempt was a model of mismanaged conspiracy.

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