Quest to Transform Southeast Asia } 223
disinformation cooked up by Moscow to spoil US-Indonesian relations, but
this did not become apparent until many years later.^76 At the time, Sukarno’s
group and the PKI credited them. Thus on October 1, 1965, PKI death squads
abducted and murdered six top military commanders. Several top officers
escaped, however, and organized a counterstrike against the PKI and its
allies. The recently delivered Chinese arms were distributed by radical air
force officers to form a hastily organized militia, but that scratch force was
no match for the Indonesian army. Communists and communist sympathiz-
ers were arrested and many summarily executed. Popular anger, much of it
Islamic and/or anti-Chinese in nature, began to boil over. The close iden-
tity of the PKI with Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority produced popular
anti-Chinese pogroms that raged for several months. Between 100,000 and
500,000 people, mostly suspected communists and Chinese, were massacred.
By late 1965, the PKI was destroyed and its few surviving leaders, including
Aidit, in exile in Beijing.
Indonesian-China relations collapsed amid popular demonstrations and
army raids of PRC offices in Indonesia.^77 When Indonesian security forces
raided the Chinese embassy in 1966, they found materials outlining a net-
work of contacts between the PKI and Chinese intelligence agencies. The net-
work was operated by Indonesians holding Chinese citizenship and eschewed
all electronic communications.^78 Not until 1985 would Sino-Indonesian rela-
tions begin improving. Even then, Indonesian memory of China’s deep in-
volvement in the PKI’s attempted seizure of power remained strong.
North Kalimantan
The three British protectorates of Sarawak, Sabah, and Brunei occupied the
northern portion of the island of Borneo, also known as Kalimantan. The
first two were integrated into the new state of Malaysia in 1963.^79 As noted
previously, Indonesia’s Sukarno felt that all of Borneo should be integrated
into Indonesia. Prior to his ouster in September 1965, Sukarno supported the
establishment of an independent North Kalimantan state as prelude to unifi-
cation of that region into Indonesia. Moreover, about one-third of the popu-
lation of Sarawak was ethnic Chinese, with a strong identity (in the 1950s and
1960s) with China rather than with their local host states.^80
In 1954, the Communist Party of Malaya established an anti-British united
front in Sarawak, the Sarawak Liberation League. That front, or more likely
the disciplined Leninist core within it, led to the declaration in August 1964 of
a North Kalimantan Liberation League (NKLL) seeking North Kalimantan
independence via armed struggle. This was during the confrontation between
Indonesia and Malaysia, and the NKLL was part of a Sukarno-China effort to
abort Malaysia. Representatives of Indonesia’s foreign ministry attended the