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A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia, more commonly known as the " Cornell Paper", is an academic publication detailing the events of an abortive coup d'état attempt"The assassination of generals on the morning of 1 October was not really a coup attempt against the government, but the event has been almost universally described as an 'abortive coup attempt,' so I have continued to use the term." by the self-proclaimed September 30 Movement, produced on January 10, 1966. The study was written by Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, with the help of Frederick Bunnell, using information from various news sources. At the time of writing, the three were members of Cornell University's network of graduate students and scholars on Southeast Asia.
In their work, Anderson and McVey theorized that neither the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) nor President Sukarno took part in organizing the operation; instead, they became the victims. On the basis of the material available, they proposed that the coup was indeed an "internal army affair" as was claimed by the September 30 Movement to remove members of the Indonesian Army General Staff who allegedly worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. By the end of the following week, the movement had been crushed by forces of Major General Suharto, who was charged with the sole responsibility of restoring order. Several alternatives to their theory were also presented and disputed, including the official government account that the PKI had masterminded the coup attempt.
Although the paper was intended to be kept confidential, information on its existence was eventually leaked in a March 5, 1966, article by The Washington Post journalist Joseph Kraft. Cornell turned down requests to access the paper, and its contents became subject to misinterpretation and forgery before publication. Requests made to the Indonesian government to supplement the study with additional documents pertaining to the incident were not fulfilled, and the paper was finally published in 1971 without any additional material. Since its publication, the "Cornell Paper" has been subject to further analysis and revision.
George McTurnan Kahin, a leading expert on Southeast Asia and director of Cornell University's Modern Indonesia Project, recounted how he learned of the announcement:
When Kahin returned to Cornell, graduate students and Indonesia specialists Benedict Anderson and Frederick Bunnell had begun working with Ruth McVey, a 1961 graduate and research fellow at the university's Center for International Studies, to gather information on the coup. Using Cornell's collection of national and provincial Indonesian newspapers and by listening to radio broadcasts from the country, Anderson and McVey began writing their findings and analysis. A "very tentative" 162-page summary and analysis of the events was completed on January 10, 1966, and was titled A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia.
Kahin "found himself in disagreement with some of the views presented in this paper";"Preface" by George McTurnan Kahin. however, he called the work a " " for providing an "impressive analysis" of the events despite the limited amount of access to information. In his view, Anderson's and McVey's work "contains a number of important insights and a considerable amount of significant data which other writers have not taken into account".
In the opening paragraph of the synopsis of the study's results, Anderson and McVey outlined their tentative conclusions:
The officers understood that "the one occasion in the year when Diponegoro troops could legitimately be in Djakarta was the annual parade and demonstration put on by paratroop, cavalry, armor and other units for Armed Forces Day October 5". After securing a number of supporters in the Indonesian Air Force, the officers decided to utilize Halim Perdanakusuma Air Force Base as the location to which Sukarno would be evacuated. Additionally, they enlisted the help of Communist radical youths in order to secure military installations across the city. Anderson and McVey theorized that the night of Thursday, September 30, was chosen for the operation because it is a time of the week when, "in universal Javanese belief, magical forces are abroad, and spiritual strength and support most readily obtained". They further discovered evidence that at least two "prominent leaders" other than Sukarno were evacuated to Halim Perdanakusuma: Air Force Commander Omar Dani and PKI Chairman Dipa Nusantara Aidit. Anderson and McVey suggested that Aidit's presence would "prove to the President that the PKI was inextricably compromised in the affair, and therefore that if he wished to preserve his 'leftward course', ... he had no alternative but to come out" against the Council of Generals. Anderson and McVey emphasized that in the announcement made on the morning of October 1, "Untung repeatedly stressed that the September 30th Movement was purely and simply an internal Army affair". As such, the movement did not find it necessary to "impose any form of press control, nor indeed any particular mobilization of the press". In the announcement, Untung asserted that all "political parties, mass organizations, newspapers, and periodicals may continue functioning" until it became necessary for them to "declare their loyalty to the Indonesian Revolution Council".
Seeking to seize the political initiative, Sukarno refused to make any decision until he was allowed contact with political friends and advisors. With no reason to doubt Sukarno or their control of Jakarta, Untung and his men allowed the President to communicate via couriers. One such courier delivered a message read over Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI) at 1:15 p.m. that Sukarno was not a prisoner of Untung's movement, which "carried far more weight than anything that Untung himself could say" because the statement was issued with the signature of the President's security chief. Couriers were also sent to Major Generals Pranoto Reksosamudra and Umar Wirahadikusumah summoning them to Halim Perdanakusuma for discussions on a new Army leadership. One courier found his way to Major General Suharto, who had assumed command of the Army and whom Sukarno wanted to avoid because of his "independent-mindedness and powerful personality". He refused to allow either Umar or Pranoto leave for Halim Perdanakusuma, and, Anderson and McVey believed, Sukarno then realized "Suharto would probably suspect him of having engineered the whole thing". After seizing control of the RRI station and securing the capital, Suharto issued an ultimatum to Untung's group at Halim Perdanakusuma. Refusing to follow Untung for a final stand at the Diponegoro Division headquarters in Central Java, Sukarno retreated to Bogor Palace where he was placed in the custody of the Army. Although Sukarno was not allowed to make any personal broadcasts, Suharto announced that the Army remained loyal to the President. He eventually agreed to give Major General Suharto "sole responsibility for restoring security and order". By October 5, the Army had ended all resistance movements in Central Java.
On October 2, the PKI newspaper Harian Rakjat published an editorial that would eventually be used as evidence that the Communists had organized the coup attempt by Untung and his group. Anderson and McVey noted that the Harian Rakjat "prided itself on well written and cogently argued editorials", but the editorial in question "is no gem of style or clarity". They believed that the "foolish hesitant editorial" provided the Army an opportunity to place the blame of the coup on the PKI. Since the coup, Anderson and McVey noted that the Army's success in blaming the PKI was "both because of actual PKI involvement, however confused, and because all groups now in power wish to believe it, since for years they lived in growing fear of a possible PKI takeover"."Synopsis of the Coup Analysis" by Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey. To conclude their observations of the events of and following the coup, Anderson and McVey asserted, "It is not the place here to go into the details of the anti-Communist campaign which developed in the wake of the Army coup of October 1." However, they believed that the coup itself and subsequent events formed "quite separate political phenomena" despite being "intimately related". Anderson and McVey believed this to be the case because of a three-week absence of violence that ended on October 21, when Communist youth elements clashed with the Army Para-Commando Regiment (, abbreviated as RPKAD) in Boyolali Regency.
The second alternative to Anderson's and McVey's interpretation was that, instead of masterminding the operation, "the played a role at one remove—by persuading the President, directly or indirectly, to attempt the removal en masse of his and their military enemies". The primary planning of the operation would then be conducted by Sukarno, motivated to remove Army General Staff members who opposed his idea of a "Nasakom" (; ) state. Anderson and McVey disputed this theory through analyzing the threat to Sukarno's leadership prior to the coup attempt, believing that "its major assumption—the failure of Sukarno to affect the political leadership of the military in the past few years—is doubtful". They further questioned as to why, instead of removing the generals as quickly as possible, the President chose to conduct the kidnappings "so crudely ... from a political viewpoint". From Anderson's and McVey's perspective, "Sukarno placed himself compromisingly at Halim and spent all day there, floundering".
In ruling out the possibilities that Sukarno and/or the PKI organized the events of October 1, 1965, Anderson and McVey considered two additional alternatives. The first was an independent move by Untung and his movement to seize control and remove members of the Army General Staff for their "Western orientation", "Menteng mentality", and "obstruction of Sukarno's endeavors" without the desire for popular support. If Untung and his men did not want to involve the civilian movement to prevent its coup attempt from being thwarted by the Army, Anderson and McVey then believed Sukarno must have been a key figure. This was the final alternative, in which the President acted spontaneously after being spurred by Untung and his men to act against the Army General Staff without his knowing that rumors of an impending coup were false. Again, Anderson and McVey disputed this theory because in the case that Sukarno wanted to remove his opposition, "surely more generals would have been taken care of, particularly Suharto and [Umar Wirahadikusumah]".
The existence of the paper became public after The Washington Post's Joseph Kraft published an article on March 5, 1966, reporting the contents of "a study of recent Indonesian events by a group of scholars at Cornell University". Several days later, the Post published a letter from Kahin criticizing Kraft for going "considerably beyond a discussion of the events of early October to speculate on more recent developments". He explained that the paper was a "tentative attempt ... to reconstruct the confusing events surrounding the coup" and "neither discussed nor hazarded judgment on any subsequent events". According to Kahin, the paper was frequently "misquoted, Forgery, and misrepresented". Scholars and journalists who requested copies of the study from Cornell were turned down, but several received a four-page document titled Hypothesis on the Origin of the Coup Analysis and mistook it for the actual paper. Alternative versions of the paper's thesis were also published by Cornell graduate Daniel Lev in the February 1966 issue of the Asian Survey and by Lucien Rey in the British journal New Left Review the following month. In his 1969 book The Communist Collapse in Indonesia, author Arnold Brackman identified Lucien Rey as "a Pseudonym for someone who, on the basis of the article's content, must have had access to at least one version of the 'Cornell Paper'."
In order to clear any misconception of the findings and to allow readers to assess the paper independently, it was finally published in its entirety by the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project in 1971. In observing the unstable political climate of Indonesia since the events of 1965, Kahin wrote in the preface to the publication, "It will probably be some time yet before a reasonably comprehensive and sound analysis can be written.""Preface" by George McTurnan Kahin.
When Kahin visited Indonesia in June 1967, he met with the intelligence officer responsible for coordinating the interrogation of political prisoners and formulating an official government account of the October 1, 1965, incident. Kahin requested "much more pertinent documentation" on the event in order to create a "fuller and more scholarly" report and analysis of the coup. He made a similar request to judge advocate general Kabul Arifin, and both men promised to provide the necessary materials for a more complete documentation. However, the documents were never provided by the government, and, despite a final request made by Kahin in 1971, the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project released Anderson's and McVey's report without the accompanying government account. Kahin believed that the promises made by the officials who conversed with him were "overruled by a higher authority". The Indonesian government also attempted to persuade Anderson to revise the findings of the study to match official accounts released by Suharto and his officers during visits to the country in 1967 and 1968. However, he questioned their accuracy and credibility.
In October 1975, ten years after the incident and after Suharto had become President, the Indonesian government sent a delegation of "military men and government intellectuals", led by intelligence officers Ali Murtopo and Benny Moerdani, to present a complete briefing of the coup and the events leading up to it. In a private meeting with Kahin, Anderson, McVey, and Bunnell, the delegation promised that it would promptly deliver documents requested for the past eight years after returning to Jakarta. On November 27, 1976, a delegation of Moerdani's men arrived with over 200 pounds of trial records of alleged conspirators of the coup but did not provide the requested documents. In response to Kahin's persistent requests and Anderson's resistance, the government subsequently placed the two on its blacklist and denied them entry into the country. Although Kahin's travel ban was lifted in 1991, Anderson was not able to enter Indonesia until 1999 following Suharto's resignation from office.
In his 1978 book, National University of Malaysia scholar Harold Crouch found that "the testimony of PKI leaders at the Mahkamah (Special Military Court) trials as well as the opinions expressed by PKI émigré groups in Europe and elsewhere made the 'Cornell' thesis very difficult to defend in its original form". In reviewing these testimonies, Crouch asserted that the PKI undoubtedly took part in the events of 1965, but "the circumstances and extent of its involvement are still unclear".
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