[Dunia Book Club] Review of Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method

By Haeryun Kang (Freelance Journalist)

Last autumn, I traveled to Indonesia for the first time. I attended a work-related workshop at a beachfront resort in Denpasar, Bali, sipping cocktails by the sea. It was a beautiful, blissful time.

Then I encountered that very coastline in Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method. Beginning in 1965, the US-backed anti-communist campaign in Indonesia led to the massacre of one million people over several years under Suharto’s regime. In Bali alone, more than 80,000 people were killed after being accused of communism. The resort where I stayed was, without question, part of a “Balinese smile” built over a history of extermination. Unaware that such a wall of forgetting even existed, I behaved exactly as a foreign tourist would: swimming, strolling, and taking photographs. Wow, what a beautiful place!

Most South Koreans, myself included, probably think of the Cold War as a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, liberal democracy prevailed, and South Korea, as an ally of the United States, stood on the side of the “good countries.” Although the communist regime in North Korea remains, and although South Korea endured decades of oppression under dictatorships shaped by the Cold War, the Cold War itself is generally treated as a relic of the past. In a world where the United States emerged victorious, twenty-first-century society seems to offer a clear answer as to which system was right and which was wrong.

The Jakarta Method cracks that seemingly definitive answer open. It is not a defense of communism. Rather, with Indonesia as its central case, it examines how political diversity was sacrificed in the name of anti-communism.

After the Second World War, Indonesia won its freedom from the Netherlands through a brutal struggle. Throughout the 1950s, Sukarno’s government championed anti-imperialist policies and sought to unite a country of more than 1,300 ethnic groups and over 700 languages under the banner of “diversity.” It brought together nations of the “Third World” and imagined a new global order. At the time, the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI) was a legal political party and a formidable political force. Nearly a quarter of Indonesia’s population of roughly 100 million was connected to the PKI in some way. Outside the Soviet Union and China, it was the largest communist party in the world.

Western countries did not welcome this anti-imperialist movement. The United States, in particular, regarded the PKI as a major threat. Beginning in the 1950s, it pursued a range of policies against Sukarno’s government, including diplomatic and economic pressure and covert operations. Then, in 1965, following an attempted coup whose causes and circumstances remain contested, General Suharto seized control of the military. The United States provided diplomatic and intelligence support to the new anti-communist military leadership. The massacres began, and the PKI was annihilated. Countless innocent civilians were disappeared and brutally murdered.

Unlike Sukarno’s government, which had vigorously pursued the nationalization of Indonesia’s oil and other key natural resources, Suharto’s regime adopted US-friendly economic policies. After the 1965 massacres, “the United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The extreme economic pressure eased, and American companies began searching for opportunities to make a profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives of the US mining company Freeport entered the jungles of West New Guinea and located a mountain rich in minerals. The mine, now known as Ertsberg, is part of the largest gold-mining complex in the world.”

This was how the “Jakarta Method” was born. The United States had intervened in many other countries before Indonesia, but Bevins argues that the US government regarded Indonesia’s anti-communist massacres as a success and went on to apply similar methods around the world. He pays particular attention to Latin America. Salvador Allende’s social-democratic government in Chile collapsed in 1973 amid US intervention and attacks by domestic anti-communist forces, and Bevins suggests that the Indonesian model may have significantly influenced both the process and its outcome. At the time, graffiti reading “Operación Jakarta”—Operation Jakarta—reportedly appeared on walls across Buenos Aires, left there by anti-communist forces.

Prominent American news outlets described these events as victories for democracy and freedom. In a 1966 column, The New York Times called Suharto’s rise to power “a gleam of light in Asia.” This was how the massacres were erased.

Since 2014, I have worked as a freelance journalist covering the Korean Peninsula for Western news outlets. I have long maintained a fairly critical view of the idea of “journalistic objectivity,” and I have understood that even the publications everyone aspires to work for have incomplete perspectives. I had taken some pride in considering myself relatively aware, but this book forced me into a great deal of self-reflection. It made me reconsider when, how, and by whom the narrative we call “history” is written, as well as what gets erased or overlooked. I realized that my ignorance of the Cold War ran as deep as my ignorance of Indonesia.

The Jakarta Method devotes little attention to Korea. This may be because the connections between the anti-communist movements in Latin America and the Indonesian massacres are more explicit. Or perhaps the author found the continent-wide pattern in Latin America more compelling than the geographically contained case of South Korea. Whatever his reasoning, Korea occupies a major place in the global history of anti-communism. A glance at the book’s appendix map, “Anticommunist Extermination Programs, 1945–2000,” places Korea among the countries with the highest death tolls: Indonesia ranks first with one million victims, followed by East Timor with 300,000, Guatemala with 200,000, and Korea with between 100,000 and 200,000.

Even without ranking the victims, the patterns of extermination seen in Indonesia and Latin America are painfully familiar from Korean history: the Jeju April 3 Massacre, which began in 1947; the 518 Gwangju Democratization Movement of 1980; and countless other atrocities. Communism was successfully demonized, becoming the most convenient justification for suppressing political opposition. Nor is this only a pattern of the past. On December 3, 2024, the Yoon Suk-yeol government invoked the same anti-communist logic when it declared martial law.

Today, a communist party is virtually unimaginable as a legitimate political party, not only in Indonesia but also in South Korea. Bevins argues that US intervention around the world erased political diversity in many countries. In the years immediately following the Second World War, many “Third World” nations embarked on anti-imperialist experiments and imagined themselves becoming a new constellation of global power. At the forefront of that movement stood Indonesian President Sukarno. What might the world look like today had they succeeded? Bevins argues that they were never truly given the freedom to try.

The banner of “freedom” and “democracy” that the United States flies today is stained with the suffering and blood of countless people. From Syngman Rhee through Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, South Korea’s dictatorships sustained anti-communist campaigns for decades in line with US expectations. Whether to secure American favor, retain power, or eliminate the existential threat posed by North Korea, violence persisted throughout South Korean history. Meanwhile, South Korea received enormous economic, diplomatic, and military support from the United States. It achieved the economic transformation known as the “Miracle on the Han River” and joined the ranks of the world’s developed countries.

This does not mean that South Korea’s twenty-first-century standing can be attributed entirely to the anti-communist policies of US-friendly dictatorships. That would be far too simplistic. But what relationship might exist between the democratic freedoms and economic benefits I enjoy today as a Korean and this history of violence? In the capitalist society shaped by an American victory, how free are the many things I love from histories of sacrifice and death?

To be honest, reading this book left me depressed and anxious. It is an excellent book, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Yet the questions I could not resolve concerned violence, brutality, and the sacrifice of innocent people. As an individual, I do not believe that violence is necessary for survival. But the world Bevins reveals is a cruel one that continually unsettles my personal convictions. Is violence inevitable in such a world? To put it another way, could the PKI in Indonesia have survived if it had been armed? What if it had fought back? If Allende in Chile had suppressed his opponents more ruthlessly, could he have carried out the social-democratic experiments he envisioned?

Bevins appears to have wrestled with these questions as well. “The biggest losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the liberal international order, those who believed too much in democracy, those who trusted what the United States said it supported rather than what it actually supported—those who believed the words of wealthy nations rather than their actions. They were annihilated.”

What sense of responsibility should I, as an individual, carry toward this bloodstained history? I am undeniably part of it. Unintentionally, and without having committed these acts myself, I have benefited from this history of violence. I am not suggesting that I should see myself as a perpetrator. But because I have benefited from it, I should study it seriously.

Living in the twenty-first century as a citizen of South Korea, I need to look beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula. I need to study Indonesian and Latin American history as part of our own story. And I need to learn how to live with greater humanity and conscience in a world this complex, ugly, and strange. Perhaps Vincent Bevins wrote The Jakarta Method as part of that same effort.

Haeryun Kang is a Seoul-based documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist. Host and writer of Mission K-pop, an eight-part podcast produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning USG Audio, and director of the forthcoming feature documentary Naro’s Space Adventure. www.haeryunkang.com