‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ in Indonesia Was Nothing Like the Film

A month after the abortive communist coup that killed six Indonesian generals in September 1965, I got to Jakarta as a free-lance correspondent. General Suharto had quickly suppressed the coup, but the Indonesian president, Sukarno, who was a powerful orator with a common touch and who had allied with the communists, was still drawing tens of thousands onto Merdeka (Freedom) Square in the heart of the Indonesian capital. Sukarno loved to fling out slogans castigating “Nekolim, ” his acronym for “neocolonialism, colonialism and imperialism, ” while glorifying the “Jakarta-Phnompenh-Pyongyang-Beijing axis.” Amid anti-American harangues, he spouted fashionably leftist propaganda as one of the largest slaughters in Asian history was erupting across the country.General Suharto had his own ideas. Doing nothing to stop the killing, he gradually restrained Sukarno while the Muslim majority rampaged against the godless communists. Nobody had been aware of the mass hatred for the Partai Komunis Indonesia, which had sought to consolidate its power with the full support of Sukarno. The drama of “Gestapu,” the acronym for the Indonesian words for “September 30 movement.” lives on today in attempts to understand the depths of Muslim animosity and the extent of the killing. I heard 300,000 had died by the time the Indonesian authorities refused to renew my visa after the New York Times Magazine ran a 4,000 word piece by me headlined, “Suharto Is the Name, not Sukarno.” In the years since I’ve heard maybe 500,000 or even a million perished at the hands of Muslim vigilantes with the support of the army. One would not know, however, of this great division in Indonesian life from the film “The Year of Living Dangerously,” a breakthrough work for the Australian director Peter Weir. I first saw “The Year of Living Dangerously” when it came out in 1983 and recently saw it again while it’s being screened in London as part of a season of the films of Mr. Weir. The film will also be screened in Warsaw later this month. No question, the film endures as a classic tale of a love affair between a young Australian journalist, played by Mel Gibson, and a British embassy staffer played by Sigourney Weaver. Then there’s the journalist’s all-purpose fixer, a male dwarf played by the female Linda Hunt, who won an Academy Award for an incredible performance offering words of wisdom, wit, and warnings from “his” vantage as a suspected intelligence agent. Gripping stuff, but too bad the acclaimed film fails to capture the essence of that year, which began well before Gestapu and did not end until a year later. One couldn’t tell from dialogue purporting to reflect what was happening that the PKI represented anything other than ideologues battling to undo the iniquities and inequities of a power elite, and you might think that the lives of journalists had been in danger from PKI operatives. When I got there, Sukarno loved to blame the few foreign reporters on the scene for “exaggerated” reports of Gestapu and its aftermath. He made a show of kicking out all the “American” journalists, a motley crew of one AP and one UPI guy and me. Admitted back a few weeks later by the Suharto people, while Sukarno was still nominally in power, I encountered my worst problem, censorship by young soldiers scrutinizing files, scratching out anything negative or, as they said, misleading and inaccurate.The way to get around this obstacle, though, was to entrust our precious prose to ”pigeons,” meaning airline passengers who agreed to get dispatches to the cable office in Singapore. Jakarta, in any event, was a grim place in those days. There were no great diplomatic parties as in the film, just background briefings by diplomats who often knew less than I did.There were occasional outbursts. One night, gun shots went off outside Wisma Warta, the press house, where I was staying with my then-wife, Susie, in a non-airconditioned room where the enemies were mosquitoes and cockroaches. In the morning, we heard that two people had been killed. Then there was rising sentiment against the Chinese, said to have been supporting the communist party’s PKI. One day the Chinese embassy was pillaged. I got there to find a Chinese diplomat screaming at the Indonesian foreign minister, the soft-spoken, ever-polite Adam Malik, who had made the transition to the Suharto era from the Sukarno era. Working on another Times Magazine piece in Medan, on the large northern island of Sumatra, I faced crowds of Chinese waving fists and shouting when I raised my camera. The piece ran under the head, “Indonesia’s Chinese Are People Without a Country.”Traveling through Java with Susie and a cameraman, Anwar, we got a sense of what we’d heard about in Jakarta. Everywhere villagers told us, through Anwar, of the killing they had witnessed. Mostly they were proud to have wiped out the communists, for whom they had shown little mercy. In Yogyakarta, the fabled city in south central Java, I saw an encampment surrounded by barbed wire where prisoners from the Sukarno regime were being held. At a restaurant you picked your chicken from a bunch flapping around in a cage. Half an hour later, it came back ready to eat.Flying with Susie to Bali, an enclave of Hinduism, I heard that 80,000 people, accused of anti-Muslim, pro-communist ties, had been killed. Otherwise, Bali was unblemished by the hordes of tourists who now descend on the island. Women walked around bare to the waist, clad only in sarongs. A local artist sold me a painting of a few of them for $20. “The Year of Living Dangerously” glosses over the specter of Muslim unrest. The film hints at seething sentiments but portrays communists as revolutionaries, not Maoist activists dreaming of taking over with Chinese weapons. On stories, I did run into the Australian TV journalist Phil Koch, brother of Chris Koch, who wrote the novel on which the film is purportedly based. Chris has said at least 50 percent of the film was beyond what he had written. None of which means it’s not a fine film. This is just a reflection of that “year of living dangerously” as I lived it, scrounging for stories from wary sources, covering demos, exploring empty streets in the blazing sun and drenching rain, inside cyclos peddled by wizened drivers, often the only way to get around. Prowling for contacts who were unwilling or reluctant to talk, I eventually broke through to some steady sources before the Suharto people got rid of me by an old ruse, not renewing my visa.

‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ in Indonesia Was Nothing Like the Film

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