Spooks, goons, ‘intellectuals’: The military–catholic network in the Cold War diplomacy of Suharto’s Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article foregrounds a case of informal diplomacy with far reaching consequences for the international politics of postcolonial Indonesia and capitalist Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The case is Suharto’s New Order Indonesia (1966–1998), where the Republic’s diplomacy was dominated not by the foreign ministry but by a small elite network (jaringan) of sectarian activists of Catholic faith allied with military officers of an intelligence background against Communism and Islam. Operating under the patronage of intelligence czar Ali Murtopo, this jaringan emerged as a powerful and conservative channel of influence on the early New Order and steered some of its major diplomatic initiatives: from the covert diplomacy that ended Konfrontasi, and the founding and elaboration of ASEAN’s diplomacy, to planning and justifying the annexation of East Timor in 1975. The article moves in three steps. One, it situates the New Order’s informal diplomats in the long arc of diplomacy in postcolonial Indonesia. Two, it atomizes this network in sociological terms and probes how the habitus of its members shaped the substance and style of their diplomatic practices. Three, it examines the main foreign policy initiatives of this network. This Indonesian case brings to the study of informal diplomacy an appreciation of how partisan networks embedded in domestic and international circuits – rather than standalone individuals – shore up a strongman. It also offers insight into the tortured fightback by actors of ‘formal’ diplomacy as they come under the assault of informal diplomats and their patrons.

KEYWORDS:

• Diplomacy
• New Order Indonesia
• Suharto
• ASEAN
• Cold War

Acknowledgements

This article began as a conference draft for the workshop on 'Strongman and Networks: The Rise of Informal Diplomats' held at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore in December 2018. My deepest thanks to Eng Seng Ho, Sana Jaffrey, Ameem Lufti, Sercan Yolaçan, and Nisha Mathews for reading earlier versions of this paper and for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To be sure, ‘informal diplomacy’ does not occur only under strongman auspices. As the Introduction to this Special Issue notes, this phenomenon predates the modern state and appears across a range of regime types. That said, there is a strong correlation between the use of informal diplomacy (with its accent on the backdoor, informality, and secrecy) with strongman regimes and their styles.

2 With the necessary caveat against a monolithic treatment of the New Order. Vickers (2001) argues there were three phases to the New Order: a ‘honeymoon phase' where the military was yet to dominate society, a Stalinist totalitarian phase (after the Malari incident in 1974), and a highly personalist phase following the late 1980s until Suharto's ouster in 1998.

3 Consider, for example, General Djatikusomo from an aristocratic background and Lieutenant-General Hartono Dharsono educated at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, among others (also see Jenkins 1984, 297–299). On Lt-Gen Dharsono’s disillusionment with the New Order regime and his famous trial on charges of subversion, see, Cribb (1986).

4 John Roosa, ‘Review: From the Dark Side’. Inside Indonesia, 5 May 2013, https://www.insideindonesia.org/review-from-the-dark-side

5 Especially, the more technocratic and intellectual figures and sensibilities associated with the Partai Socialis Indonesia (PSI) (Sidel 1998, 168).

6 Indeed, the Army’s rationales for ending Confrontation were cast in terms of the concern that troop deployments in Kalimantan and Sumatra were leaving Java vacant for the PKI’s growing activities, see Roosa (2006, 114).

7 Interview with Jusuf Wanandi, 18/07/2019. Also see Wanandi (2012, 67–68).

8 Interview with Jusuf Wanandi, 18/07/2019.

9 David Jenkins, ‘West Meets East’ Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1996.

10 Ibid.

11 Though it was part of Mohammad Yamin’s ethnic pan-Indonesian idea in 1945 which, however, faded after the Revolution (McDonald 1980, 191).

12 In an Australian cable reporting the meeting of the Special Committee to deal with Portuguese Timor including representatives of Hankam, Bakin, Interior and Foreign ministries (Wanandi 2012, 203).

13 To be sure, other arms of the Opsus (i.e. beyond CSIS) were also engaged in this project. McDonald (194) writes how by the end of August 1974 ‘an editorial in the Ali Murtopo group’s newspaper, Berita Yudha, warned that rights of self-determination could not be separated from ‘general world strategies.”’

14 Paul Monk “On Secret Intelligence and Realpolitik,” The Australian Financial Review, 29 December 2000.

15 In particular, on what each side understood by “self-determination,” see Wanandi (2012, 201–202) for an oddly self-incriminating admission.

16 Interview with Jusuf Wanadi, 18/07/2019.

17 The ministry (Deplu) took on an expressly left-wing complexion under Foreign Minister Subandrio with indoctrination classes for diplomats and swift diplomatic appointments for members of Deplu’s communist youth movement (Nabbs-Keller 2013, 75, ft. 7).

18 Interview with Jusuf Wanandi, 18/07/2019. By the 1980s, and following Murtopo’s demise in 1983, Murdani had emerged as the chief patron of CSIS, and he also emerged as the second most powerful individual in the New Order after Suharto.

19 The was a result of the Army’s staunch anti-PRC orientation coupled with longstanding sympathies for Vietnam’s (nationalist) revolutionary credentials.

20 I thank Sana Jaffrey for this point.

21 By the late 1980s, an ageing Suharto courted Islam as a constituency to counter his reliance on a new generation of Army officers with whom he enjoyed weak personal and professional links. As a result, the late New Order saw the rise of an alternative jaringan of modernist Islam under the patronage of B.J. Habibie that converged on the think tank CIDES and would go on to fully eclipse the military–catholic jaringan of the early New Order.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National University of Singapore [grant number WBS R-108-000-092-133].