Ngadiredjo: Sugar in East Java's Brantas valley

The sugar factory at the centre of events described by Pipit was Ngadiredjo, in the southern sector of the Brantas valley area of Kediri Residency. The massacres here in 1965 represented the culmination of two parallel histories: that of the growth of powerful ‘communist’ peasant and worker movements (Cold War labels should be treated with some caution), and that of the post-nationalisation role in the sugar industry of the Tenteral Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Army, TNI). Both histories related to the large-scale sugar production in the area that dated back to the late nineteenth century, when this part of the Brantas valley had been ‘opened up’ by government irrigation works and by Western capitalist enterprises — and the labour that they drew into the area from other parts of the island.Footnote ⁴

Sugar was first cultivated around Ngadiredjo in the 1880s, mainly in the Brantas valley and on the lower slopes of the Kelud volcano to its east; ‘factory’ cane took over the more densely populated parts of Kediri, which, in turn, was dominated from the early twentieth century onward by the Handelsvereeniging ‘Amsterdam’ (HVA; Amsterdam Trading Association).Footnote ⁵ The company, which became by the 1920s the biggest plantation operator in the colony, produced sugar in some dozen or so factories dotted around the countryside. It also grew cassava to make tapioca and sisal for hemp manufacture.Footnote ⁶ The settlers drawn into the area to work came from the north coast of Central Java and the Vorstenlanden (principalities) of its interior. As we shall see, evolving cultural differences between these groups were an important factor in determining the unusual ferocity of what happened in 1965–66.

War, revolution and the early years of independence

HVA's Ngadiredjo sugar factory itself was one of the very few in Java to remain almost continually in production throughout the tumultuous times which began with the Japanese invasion in 1942. During the previous decade, the factory had closed temporarily (like all the other HVA sugar enterprises in Java) at the height of the Great Depression. It was back in production by 1936, however, and still making sugar — though on a very limited scale — in 1945 when the Japanese surrendered to the Allies and the Dutch sought to reinstall themselves as masters of the Indies. After a brief hiatus, production resumed c.1946, when Kediri formed part of Republican territory, and with Indonesian personnel in charge. Production was disrupted again when Dutch troops overran this part of the Brantas valley at the end of 1949 — and restored the factory to its Dutch owners — but it had resumed again by 1951 despite the ‘unsettled’ conditions in the surrounding countryside.

The factory's subsequent history reflected the evident poverty of the local population. In 1951 and 1952, the HVA recorded that Ngadiredjo was suffering very badly from cane theft, with a reference (almost unique for this company) to the fact that ‘the motivation for this continual theft [of cane] is not only a taste for plunder but also the wretched conditions in which the population finds itself’.Footnote ⁷ Economic conditions in the Brantas valley had been deteriorating since the 1940s: war and revolution had resulted in the degradation of the elaborate irrigation system on which rice — and cane — agriculture depended; deforestation continued apace; and the big eruption of the Kelud volcano in 1951 had caused widespread siltation in the irrigation and drainage channels.Footnote ⁸

Against this background of pressure on resources, pushing ahead with plans to bring more land under cane was bound to run into resistance — which indeed it did, in the form of continued clashes with ‘squatters’ on what was deemed to be company land. In particular, the HVA found itself in a long-drawn-out conflict with the PKI-affiliated Barisan Tani Indonesia (BTI; Indonesian Farmers’ Front). Somewhat unusually for lowland Java — the phenomenon was much more common on upland estates and in the Outer Islands — the ‘land question’ in Kediri came to be dominated in the 1950s by the issue of squatting, or what the HVA referred to as the ‘illegal occupation’ of land that was ‘rightfully’ the company's. The HVA's position in Kediri was a historically peculiar one. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the company had purchased long leases on so-called ‘waste land’ of around 17,000 hectares, mostly on the western slopes of Mt. Kelud, to the east of the Brantas. Most of this land was exploited for crops other than sugar. After the war, however, and faced with the evident reluctance of many peasant landholders to rent their rice fields for the rotational cultivation of cane, the company turned its attention to the possibilities of growing cane on its long-leasehold ‘estates’ — what it referred to as its ‘perceelen’. This quickly brought it into conflict with squatters — farmers who had moved onto the land during the 1940s, whose cause was quickly taken up by the BTI.

The second full year of independence, 1952, had seen a surge of farmers’ organisation agitation in Kediri, during the course of which an extensive area of the HVA's newly planted sisal crop was torn out of the ground. A police ‘mobile brigade’ — the successor of the field police or veldpolitie (see below) of the inter-war years — had been called in. The leaders of the ‘actie’, which involved as many as 100 squatters, were arrested. Nonetheless, the issue remained unresolved, and in the following year made an impact on ‘sugar’ land as well as that which the HVA hoped to plant with other commercial crops. Armed police units were again called in, and, under their protection, tractors were used to remove squatters’ crops.Footnote ⁹ Some months later, in January 1954, the Minister for Agrarian Affairs, Mohammad Hanafiah, and a large entourage visited Kediri to gain first-hand knowledge of events that had been widely reported in the Jakarta newspapers. Presumably, the visit was also designed to impress local activists with the authority of the central government. The Minister, though apparently sympathetic to the company's situation, nonetheless told HVA executives, who had travelled from Surabaya for the occasion, that there was no chance of getting a law against squatting through the national parliament.Footnote ¹⁰

In the event, tensions between the company and the BTI proved resistant to such interventions. Clashes between the HVA and squatters continued. Indeed, later in the same year, land already planted with cane — about 500 hectares — was taken over by squatters: ‘the acties [actions],’ the HVA board was informed, ‘were combined with the destruction of the [sugar] crop and intimidation of the workforce … the police presence was weak and vacillating.’Footnote ¹¹ Red and white — the Indonesian national colours — and the red flags of the PKI were everywhere. In a new development that the company found particularly disturbing [bijzonder ernstig] some of the ‘acties’ involved the pulling out of ‘recently planted cane, even though the land itself was not then taken over by peasant farmers’, indicating, presumably, a more general objection on the part of some elements among the peasantry — or within the BTI leadership — to the presence of the ex-colonial sugar industry per se.Footnote ¹² In mid-1954, some sort of truce appears to have been brokered by the authorities (the Governor of East Java had promised action), but this involved the HVA giving up its claim to about 25 per cent of the nearly 5,000 hectares currently contested.Footnote ¹³ When nationalisation of the industry began late in 1957, however, the issue remained unresolved.

Indeed, as Pipit tells it, the squatter issue took an even more serious turn early in the 1960s. Under HVA management, production had suffered badly from inadequate supplies of raw material. The new, post-nationalisation regime at Ngadiredjo — state-controlled and backed by the Indonesian army — aimed to remedy this by planting cane on land that had belonged to the HVA's former Jengkol ‘estate’, some 20 kilometres away. Jengkol, operating on land that the company had taken on long-term leases in the early twentieth century, had been run as a sisal and tapioca plantation. Although damaged during the revolution, it had still been functioning as late as 1956.Footnote ¹⁴ Plans in 1962 to bring it under sugar, however, ran into fierce resistance from the BTI and squatters who had moved onto the estate during the preceding two decades; a bulldozer driver attempting to clear squatters and their crops was said to have been buried alive. In the wondrous jargon of Sukarno's Guided Democracy, there were also urgent calls by the BTI for ‘re-tooling’ [ousting or crushing] Kartawidjaja — Ngadiredjo's manager and Pipit's father. Indeed, the standoff between Kartawidjaja and the PKI and its affiliates continued unabated into 1965. As we shall see shortly, clashes over land of this kind reflected an altogether broader — and deeply ominous — history of gathering communal antagonisms that, in the rural areas of the Brantas valley at least, focused on the area's few remaining sugar factories.

Merdeka: Sugar workers and trade unions

As far as the ‘politics’ of sugar production in the early years of the Republic was concerned, however, land was not the only issue at stake. Equally crucial was the evolution of a ‘restive’ workforce, led largely but not exclusively by Sarekat Buruh Gula (SBG; Union of Sugar Workers), a Java-wide organisation affiliated to the PKI. Hard-bitten expatriate Dutch executives claimed at the end of the 1940s that the celebrated nationalist slogan of Merdeka! best translated as ‘more pay for less work’.Footnote ¹⁵ On a more mundane level it also meant better wages and better working conditions — in the case of the sugar industry such things as eight-hour shifts, showers and toilets in the factories and other requirements that plainly scandalised the general run of (ex-)colonial employers. Particularly revealing of pre-war arrangements in the factories was the new demand for an end to nightshift work for women. Not only was ‘cheap labour’ per se under attack — at Ngadiredjo the HVA had reopened for business in 1950 claiming that wages were 10 times higher than they had been a decade earlier — but the highly exploitative gendering of the workforce also came under the spotlight of Merdeka. Before the war, women workers had played a key role in operating the centrifugal machinery used to ‘spin’ the sugar crystals free of impurities in the final stages of processing; this meant working day and night during the campaign (the five- to six-month harvesting and manufacturing season). This demanding job had always been considered ‘men's work’ in the beet sugar factories of northern Europe — and as such remunerated accordingly — but hitherto performed in Java by low-paid females.Footnote ¹⁶

Hence, Merdeka brought in its wake a level of industrial disputes unknown since the 1920s, when a wave of strikes had been followed by rigorous repression. Indeed, it was totally unprecedented. Strikes abounded, often led by the SBG.Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps, even more disturbingly from the viewpoint of the industry's expatriate management, strikes were accompanied by a more general refusal of workers to accept the pre-war norms of labour discipline. What had taken their place, complained one factory manager (one can almost smell the cigar smoke), was ‘the generally occurring post-war phenomenon of a total lack of interest in work and the absence of any feeling of obligation [plichtsgevoel]’.Footnote ¹⁸ More specifically, as the directors of one big ex-colonial company complained, the implementation of a 40-hour week and the 8-hour day had the most ‘disastrous’ [funeste] effect on the running of the campaign, especially because of the implications for factory overtime payments.Footnote ¹⁹

Not all sugar factories were hotbeds of ‘red’ activism. At one big ex-colonial factory in East Java, for example, within a few years of independence, the unions, including even the SBG, appear to have been ‘domesticated’. By 1955, the factory's Dutch general manager was able to report that there had been no disputes (geschillen) with the workers’ organisations, and that the campaign had run smoothly. Moreover, the fact that the SBG had by 1955 been joined by other workers’ organisations, notably the Sarekat Buruh Islam Indonesia (Union of Islamic Indonesian Workers) may well have given management more room to manoeuvre since they can be presumed to have had an antipathy to the ‘irreligious’ PKI.Footnote ²⁰ Nonetheless, it would be unwise to extrapolate too much from developments at one particular factory. At another big factory in Central Java (owned by the same firm who owned the East Java operation just mentioned) there is little indication of ‘domestication’. In 1955, what management referred to (using the English term) as a ‘club’ of SBG activists, all but one of whom it identified as members of the PKI, raised labour grievances by the score. Indeed, management felt it almost impossible to negotiate with them, ‘since the doctrines which they have imbibed leave no room for reason’.Footnote ²¹

The HVA — or at least its boardroom in distant Amsterdam — was similarly convinced that they faced a well-nigh implacable opponent in the Brantas valley. At its Ngadiredjo factory, disputes with ‘left-wing’, ‘communist’ workers’ unions over both pay and conditions were ongoing throughout the 1950s. Even before it resumed control of the factory (and of its other holdings in Kediri) early in 1949, the HVA had received ‘reports about the political situation in Kediri that were anything but promising. In particular parts [of the Residency] power was in the hands of crypto-communists [heerste een Communistische getint bewind]. At the factories … the strongly communist-oriented [Trade Unions are] … in control.’Footnote ²² Subsequently, the same company found itself confronted by unions, all of which were described as ‘Marxist orientated’, and which used slogans against ‘imperialism’, for the ‘class struggle’ and even — a sign of the times — ‘hands off Korea’. The unions were also reputedly linked with officials in the Republic's Ministry of Labour.Footnote ²³

The dynamics changed again with the nationalisation of the industry between 1957 and 1959. The impact of nationalisation was ‘conservative’ rather than ‘radical’: far from placing the workers in control, nationalisation led to the de facto takeover of the industry by the TNI. Along with the ex-colonial industry, their inheritance also included a legacy of militant unionism and an ongoing struggle between the sugar factories and ‘communist’-backed peasant activists over access to land. Both legacies, moreover, were being played out in the context of increasingly bitter communal tensions in which economic differentiation was greatly complicated by cultural cleavages between santri Muslims and those whom they regarded as irreligious or worse. We shall return later to this conflicted and convoluted situation. First, however, we will look at the broader pattern of developments relating to sugar production within the Republic in Ngadiredjo and elsewhere in the Brantas valley from the 1940s to the 1960s that provide a context for the 1960s killings. Put differently, how did an industry that was waning during the Depression and was virtually put out of commission during the decade of war and national revolution revive, thrive and become a focal point for rural massacre?

Modernity — and a new kind of sweetness

The first of the factors involved was the arrival in the erstwhile Netherlands Indies of a growing taste for a new kind of sweetness, and the degree to which this was bound up with ideas of modernity circulating among mid-century Indonesian political elites. During the middle decades of the twentieth century industrially manufactured white sugar came to be judged — at least by Indonesia's new leaders — as inseparable from the modernity that was one of the national project's key promises. Sugar was a commodity in which national self-sufficiency became just as important a national priority as was the case, say, with steel or cement. To this extent, sugar's espousal by national elites throughout the so-called ‘Third World’ reflected idolatry of ‘modernity’ and its attendant technology. This phenomenon was perhaps particularly characteristic of states that otherwise shared very unequally in the economic benefits of the world capitalism that such technology was developed to serve.

In a new state still otherwise largely devoid of major industrial plants, the sugar industry remained an exemplar of progress: for many of the key people in nationalist circles, all born in the early twentieth century, the succession of great ‘state-of-the-art’ sugar factories built in the colony in the 1910s and 1920s — vast buildings full of gleaming machinery — represented the apogee of the Dutch colonial achievement, in so far as it could be measured in technological terms. However, the industrial manufacture of sugar as a fit subject for nationalism's romance with technology was only part of the story. It also reflected a taste for a new kind of sweetness that was global in its embrace: the sweetness, that is to say, exemplified in sugar that was both white and ‘pure’ — and likewise emblematic of the New State's modernity. Brown sugar of the ‘traditional’ sort, widely manufactured by artisanal producers throughout Central and East Java, simply would not do.Footnote ²⁴

The result was that Java's sugar factories — or at least a significant number of them, gained a new lease of life after their colonial-era rationale largely expired. Java's industrial sugar factories had been designed to produce for export either a ‘raw’ brown sugar for refining overseas or a quasi-refined ‘white’ sugar — known as Factory White — that was available for direct consumption but which was likewise manufactured with the export market in view. In fact, by the 1920s the Java factories produced huge quantities of sugar of this kind, much of it for sale in the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ²⁵ When that and other markets largely failed during the 1930s Depression, it left an industry that was potentially quite exceptionally well-equipped to sell a cheap alternative to fully refined white sugar on the local market.

As there were no sugar refineries in Java at this time, this ability to turn out quantities of Factory White helped keep the industry in business in the post-war decades, when it would otherwise have largely failed. Local production costs were no longer low enough for the industry to be fully competitive internationally. However, the fact that government regulations, carried over from the colonial era, prohibited the importation of sugar, meant that the industry ran no danger of being swamped by the dumping of the commodity on the Indonesian market.Footnote ²⁶ At the time of the industry's nationalisation in 1957–59, there were more than 50 sugar factories operating in Java (a number that continued to hold until late in the century). This was well under one-third of the factories that had been operating on the island prior to the Depression in the 1930s, but compared respectably with the 80 or so prior to the Japanese invasion.Footnote ²⁷ Most of these factories had been decomissioned either during the Japanese Occupation or during the conflict between the Dutch and the nascent Indonesian Republic that lasted from 1945 to 1949. Initially they had been brought back into production at considerable expense to supply the export market, but it quickly became apparent to their owners that the domestic market provided a ready and more lucrative outlet.

This was a culmination of trends that began in the inter-war decades. Prior to that, Indonesian consumers had largely satisfied their taste for sweetness with a variety of locally manufactured brown sugars made from either cane-juice or palm sap. During the 1930s, however, the previously export-oriented colonial sugar factories began to turn their attention to the Indonesian market in an effort to compensate for the loss of the bulk of their overseas sales. Whereas c.1910, domestic sales amounted to no more than around 50,000 tons annually, by 1940 they amounted to some 370,000 tons,Footnote ²⁸ and, as was remarked by the executives of the biggest of the Dutch companies involved in the sugar business, domestic sales were ‘of great influence on the ultimate financial results’ of the industry.Footnote ²⁹ Significantly, by the late 1930s, white sugar, manufactured in Java, began to find a ready market in the so-called ‘Outer Islands’ — notably Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi — where cash-crop smallholders and traders were growing in prosperity.Footnote ³⁰ Exactly how this level of white sugar consumption stacked up against indigenous production of brown sugar is impossible to tell with any accuracy. A possible ‘guesstimate’, however, is that brown sugar accounted for a somewhat smaller market share, at around a quarter-of-a-million tons.Footnote ³¹ During the decade of war and revolution that followed, brown sugar of one kind or another dominated the market because little else was produced. A very different situation began to emerge in the 1950s, however. As the directors of one of the big ex-colonial sugar companies remarked early in the 1950s, domestic sugar consumption within Indonesia demonstrated a continually upward trend, and ‘demand on the domestic market is ever increasingly for white sugar’.Footnote ³²

Between 1950 and 1958 annual domestic consumption of factory-produced white sugar in Indonesia increased by almost 250 per cent, from around 277,000 tons to over 692,000 tons.Footnote ³³ This was virtually twice the domestic sales that had been achieved prior to the Second World War. To be sure, Indonesia's population had increased considerably during the intervening period, but the Dutch — who would have represented a considerable percentage of pre-war consumers — had by then disappeared or were fast disappearing. In short, though a ‘hard’ figure is impossible to come by, the 1950s had indeed witnessed a strong surge in the consumption of white sugar by Indonesians themselves. Brown sugar did not disappear from sale, however: estimates from the early 1960s were that somewhere around 40 per cent or more of the sugar consumed in Indonesia was indigenously manufactured brown sugar and that this percentage may well have been rising.Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless, the fact remains that from the inter-war decades onward, white sugar had attained a very much higher market-share within Indonesia — and that the continuing growth in demand for white sugar from the 1960s onward made Indonesia a major importer of a commodity which it had once supplied half the world.

A gathering constellation of interests: The state and the sugar industry

The national project's romance with technology and a global preference for a new kind of sweetness was only one dimension of the politics of sugar in newly independent Indonesia. Equally vital to the industry's survival was its close nexus with the state, something with deep roots in the colonial era, but which was significantly renewed during the 1930s with the establishment of the Nederlandsch-Indische Vereeniging voor de Afzet van Suiker (NIVAS, Netherlands Indies Association for the Sale of Sugar), the state-linked, single-seller organisation which also had the power to ordain how much land might be planted to cane in any given year.Footnote ³⁵ It was an early manifestation of a constellation of interests that included bankers, bureaucrats and politicians that gathered around the industry in the mid-twentieth century and played — for diverse reasons — a significant role in its survival.

Bureaucrats, and particularly local Indonesian civil servants, counted for a great deal, well before the departure of their Dutch mentors and superiors at the end of 1949. Indeed, their linkages to the sugar industry were almost as old as the industry itself. At one large and ultramodern sugar factory on the north coast of Central Java, for example, we can be reasonably sure that in the 1930s the regular visits to the factory's staff-club of the Wedana (district head) of Comal, the highest-ranking Javanese official in the district, reflected a long history of sociability that extended back to the factory's original establishment 100 years earlier.Footnote ³⁶ Such people were ever more useful during the 1940s and early 1950s, when ‘the state’ was (temporarily) in limbo: the co-operation of people with strong local networks of power and influence down to the villages was a critical factor in enabling the industry's survival. At one factory in the same general locality as Comal, for example, two sons of the local Bupati, the key figure in the Indonesian branch of the state bureaucracy in provincial Java, helped run the enterprise during the Second World War. In the immediate post-war period, this time in East Java, the Indonesian District Head took up residence in the compound of another large sugar factory, probably to improve his own security but also to lend his weight to the enterprise's operations.Footnote ³⁷

The local power brokers’ co-operation chimed in, moreover, with the overall stance of the politicians who, in the second half of the 1940s, ran the nascent Indonesian Republic. There was little unanimity among the very disparate groups working and fighting for the Republic on how the industry might best be revived or even whether it should be revived at all. The Republican government's policy toward the industry, on the other hand, was essentially supportive. Not least, this was because it feared that hostility toward the interests of overseas capital would jeopardise negotiations aimed at securing a transfer of power into Republican hands. Moreover, there emerged a hard-headed conviction that, whatever the industry's sins in the colonial era (the Indonesian ‘National Project’ had long had the sugar companies in its sights), much-needed cash — and handy foreign exchange — might yet be achieved from the industry's revival. Hence, Mohammad Hatta, Rotterdam economics graduate, devout Muslim and Vice-President of the Republic, in 1946 reminded his listeners at a conference in Central Java that sugar had once been the country's leading export product, and advised that it was necessary that sugar exports be restored to provide foreign exchange to buy machinery and textiles.Footnote ³⁸ Even more immediately, during the course of its four-year struggle with the Dutch, sugar smuggled from Republican territory could be a useful source of funds for its hard-pressed economy — and for buying weapons to continue the struggle against the Dutch. In response to these several motivations, the Republican Government set up a central board to coordinate the industryFootnote ³⁹ and as many as 20 factories were reopened in Republican-held territory. For example, when the Dutch seized Jatiroto, Java's biggest sugar factory in the far southeast of the island, from Republican control in July 1947, they found that part of the ‘estate’ had already been planted with cane in readiness for a forthcoming campaign.Footnote ⁴⁰

Once hostilities had terminated and the transfer of power had taken place at the end of 1949, the Indonesian government — inheriting the practice of its immediate Dutch predecessor — played a significant role in the rehabilitation of the industry's infrastructure through the agency of Bank Industri Negara (BIN; State Industrial Bank).Footnote ⁴¹ In pursuit of this aim, BIN — one-quarter of whose budget in the early 1950s was reserved for the reconstruction of sugar factoriesFootnote ⁴² — became the major stockholder in some four such enterprises. It also joined with Kian Gwan, the commercial arm of the old established Oei Tiong Ham Concern, one of the biggest Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia, in financing the reconstruction of a fifth.Footnote ⁴³

In a sense, of course, these varying degrees of state involvement, dating back to the 1930s, prefigured nationalisation. When it happened, however, nationalisation appears to have come as something of a surprise to virtually all concerned. As was the case with all similarly expropriated Dutch enterprises, nationalisation of sugar was the by-product of a crisis that had nothing directly to do with industry, and was emphatically not — at the national level at least — an assault on its position in the Javanese countryside. Instead, it was the by-product of a long-running dispute between the Netherlands and the Indonesian Republic over the future of the territory of West Irian — the only part of the Netherlands Indies not handed over to the Republic in 1949. The issue rankled in Indonesian political circles since it was widely felt that the new state, as the legitimate territorial successor of the Netherlands Indies, had been cheated of a significant part of its rightful inheritance. As such, nationalisation eventuated as the outcome of pig-headedness in The Hague (Foreign Minister Luns, it would seem, well to the fore) rather than any ardent desire in nationalist circles in Indonesia to possess themselves of the sugar industry.

The Army, nationalisation and the sugar industry

The nationalisation of the industry in the late 1950s and the key role played in it by the ArmyFootnote ⁴⁴ provided the third component in the trilogy of developments that ensured that Java sugar carried over from the final decades of Dutch rule through into the foundational years of the new Indonesian Republic. Predicated inter alia on a growing domestic taste for white sugar, the gathering constellation of political and bureaucratic interests that had bolstered the sugar industry in the early years of independence was now joined by the TNI, which added sugar to a portfolio of economic interests that it had been steadily accumulating since the late 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁵ Beginning in the closing weeks of 1957 and only totally finalised in mid-1959,Footnote ⁴⁶ nationalisation meant the expulsion of the industry's expatriate personnel, the expropriation of overseas capital, and the passing of the industry directly into the hands of the Indonesian Republic. Critically, it signalled the emergence of the TNI as the industry's major stakeholder (along with the latter's key associates in the Indonesian–Chinese business community).

To be sure, the sugar industry and the TNI — and its Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger or Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL) precursor — were scarcely strangers to each other. The KNIL and TNI had both proved a vital element in creating the conditions necessary in the countryside for the resumption of large-scale sugar production after the Second World War. During the first so-called Police Action by the Dutch against the Indonesian Republic in July 1947, for example, the timely arrival on the scene of KNIL units had been crucial in ensuring that the colony's two biggest sugar factories — the HVA's Jatiroto and the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM)'s Tersana Baru — survived largely undamaged the scorched-earth tactics with which Indonesian guerillas responded to the First Police Action. By September 1947 Jatiroto boasted a military ‘occupation’ [besetting] of around 80 men — subsequently increased to 200 — and a battalion command had been established on the factory site.Footnote ⁴⁷ The nexus thus established did not cease with independence. At the beginning of the 1950s, for instance, the TNI took over the guard-duty roles that the industry's own private security forces had played since the end of the war.Footnote ⁴⁸ During the years that followed, notably in the plantation areas of North and East Coast Sumatra, the TNI played a crucial role in curbing worker unrest and acting against squatters in plantation land.Footnote ⁴⁹ On Java itself, meanwhile, the strong and growing administrative presence in the countryside of the army during the 1950s and early 1960sFootnote ⁵⁰ points strongly toward a pre-nationalisation accord between the industry and military as a vital foundation for the latter's continued operations. In 1950s Kediri, for example, the ‘illegal occupation’ of HVA land by squatters had been brought to an end ‘in the context of orders proclaimed and put into effect by a military authority’.Footnote ⁵¹

With nationalisation, however, the TNI took on a radically changed and unprecedented role: whereas it had previously acted as a tool of the state in respect to the sugar industry, it now set about arrogating power to itself and, in effect ‘becoming’ the state. In tandem, it moved centre stage as the de facto owner of Java's 50 or so sugar factories. Taken over by the state, the factories effectively passed into the hands of the military. The TNI's new role in the industry dated from the early stages of the chain of events, beginning late in 1957, that led to nationalisation. Those developments began early in December of that year around the time that the Indonesian Government called for ‘reprisals’ when the United Nations vote on the future of West Irian went against the Republic.Footnote ⁵² The upshot, at sugar factories variously located throughout Java, was that formal control passed from Dutch managers into the hands of Indonesian ‘commissions’, comprised of local civilian officials, people from the trade unions — primarily the ‘communist’ SBG — and local TNI officers.Footnote ⁵³ Evidence is fragmentary in the extreme, but at some factories the TNI appears to have become involved in order to forestall any threat of a PKI takeover, as represented by the SBG presence on the factory ‘commissions’. One big factory on the north coast of Central Java (the NHM-owned Sumberharjo) reported that the local TNI command had been tipped off by the enterprise's leading Indonesian personnel that local PKI activists were planning a takeover — and responded by having the factory secured by troops. Some TNI officers evidently were directly involved in the running of enterprises. At the NHM's Tersana Baru in West Java — one of the two biggest operations in the country — this reportedly led to a tussle between the top Indonesian factory personnel and the local military. Generally speaking, however, as of the early months of 1958, it looks as if the Indonesian staff who had previously worked under the Dutch simply took over the key management positions from their former bosses.Footnote ⁵⁴ They did so, however, under the ‘protection’ of the TNI.

This was the period when astute commanders like (the then) Colonel Suharto, head of the TNI's Diponegoro Division, based in Semarang, seized their opportunity. Along with key civilian Indonesian–Chinese associates (including The Kian Seng, who, as Bob Hassan, became one of the New Order's most prominent kleptocrats), Suharto set up army ‘foundations’ that took over the ownership of a number of ex-Dutch businesses, including sugar factories. A large number of military officers simply ‘jumped the fence’ into the business world: indeed, at the beginning of 1960, as many as 450 of them took early retirement in order to take up jobs in the new state-owned firms set up to manage the former Dutch enterprises.Footnote ⁵⁵ In short, subsequent to — and consequent on — nationalisation, the army came to play a direct and unprecedented role in running the industry. It was no accident, for example, that when Pipit's father — who was by that time no longer the general manager of Ngadiredjo but an industry executive in charge of a group of factories — was dismissed on the grounds of ‘corruption’, he was replaced by a military man.

Guns, knives and sugar: The massacres of 1965–66

The TNI had been feeling its way toward controlling Indonesia since the early 1950s, and in an incremental coup in 1965–67 it succeeded in doing so, under the leadership of General Suharto, who supplanted Sukarno as head of state. The Suharto takeover and the large-scale massacres of PKI members and communist sympathisers that accompanied it (that began in October 1965 and continued late into the following year) marked a terminal point in the history of fraught relations between the sugar factories, their workforce and peasant landholders in the surrounding districts, which had characterised the industry since at least the beginning of the previous decade. Nationalisation effectively lined up the army with the interests of the sugar factories and — at the very least — incipiently pitted it against PKI-linked trade unions and peasant organisations. The anti-communist pogroms subsequently provided the occasion for a final reckoning with the people and organisations that had for so long been a thorn in the industry's side.

The essential background to what happened at Ngadiredjo and elsewhere in the Kediri section of the Brantas valley in 1965–66 was one of complex economic, social and cultural cleavages that had a long evolving history in the region. We can best concentrate on how these cleavages manifested themselves in and around the few sugar factories that remained in Kediri at the time of nationalisation. In all, there were three such factories — of which Ngadiredjo was the largest — left over from the nearly two score that had existed there prior to the inter-war Depression. As was the case throughout Java, these factories were characterised by the existence of workers’ quarters or residential clusters that housed a great many of the factory's semi-skilled and unskilled labourers, and — presumably — some of the casuals as well as the permanents. Described by one Indonesian scholar as ‘wild, frontier type communities’, in Kediri they reflected the complex cultural as well as economic cleavages of mid-century rural Java, where a self-consciously ‘devout’ or santri variant of Islam existed in varying degrees of harmony and tension with a more eclectic, Javanised version whose adherents came to be designated as abangan. Abangan or even ‘secular’ in orientation, and characterised inter alia by ‘gambling, prostitution and other distractions’, these workers’ quarters at the sugar factories had long been targeted by santri Muslims, who often set up pesantren or religious schools in their neighbourhood.Footnote ⁵⁶ In newly independent Indonesia, Muslims of this kind were predominantly drawn to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest of the ‘religious’ political parties in rural Java.

In turn, by the 1950s, the sugar workers’ quarters became centres of PKI activity in the countryside. Nonetheless, given the very high (one-third or more) vote for the ‘secular’ PKI in Kediri in the 1955 Indonesian general election, the factories were scarcely abangan islands in a predominantly santri countryside. In this sense rural Kediri was very mixed: santri and abangan villages — by the 1950s flying the colours of the NU and PKI, respectively — were interspersed across the countryside, and many villages had both santri and abangan clusters. Despite the religious and cultural divisions that separated peasants of the same ‘class’ in Kediri,Footnote ⁵⁷ it is also clear that there was a ‘class’ of ‘big’ peasants, relatively substantial landowners who rented out or sharecropped their fields, and whose affiliations was exclusively NU.Footnote ⁵⁸

Such people could — and did — stir up the animosity of their santri co-religionists among the small or landless peasantry in defence of their property against the PKI and its affiliates: in this sense their interests largely coincided with those of the sugar industry, in so far (at least) as they had a common enemy in the BTI. The latter's agitation against both the industry's land-rental practices and Kediri's ‘big’ peasantry, naming rural landlords (in terms reminiscent of Maoist China) as one of the ‘seven village devils’,Footnote ⁵⁹ made at least temporary allies of two groups whose interests had often conflicted. Historically, in much of rural Java the sugar factories and the ‘big’ peasantry had indeed sometimes worked together, but their interests had also clashed. In some places and at some times, ‘big’ peasants could do financially better by denying the sugar companies access to the land that they controlled, while the presence of the local sugar factory with its alternative employment could undermine the ‘big’ peasantry's control of its workforce. By the 1960s, however, it looks as if ‘big’ peasants and sugar factories were united by the presence of a common enemy. Probably the single most important factor here was the so-called Aksi Sepihak of 1964–65, when the PKI and its affiliates attempted the unilateral enforcement of land-reform programmes enacted in Jakarta, but generally left to languish by the local authorities. In Kediri, Aksi Sepihak precipitated a veritable maelstrom of incidents, murderous and otherwise, between the PKI and its NU opponents.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, although reports of the events in Jakarta on the night of 30 September–1 October 1965 were the immediate trigger for the violence that followed, the tensions generated by the Aksi Sepihak would appear to have established a very substantial prior foundation.

The precise role of the military in what happened in Kediri in the closing months of 1965 remains unclear. For example, it was still the case in 1965 that ‘… sometimes [TNI units] were pro-PKI, but more often pro-NU. The police were more inclined to be pro-PKI.’Footnote ⁶¹ Nonetheless there appears to be a fairly direct connection between the growing identification of the military with the interests of the now-nationalised sugar industry and a determination by local military commanders to use the anti-communist pogroms to break, once and for all, the opposition to the industry among the ranks of workers and peasants. Pipit — wisely perhaps since he was writing (albeit in West Germany) while Suharto's New Order regime, and the army, was still fully in control of his native Indonesia — ascribes a marginal role to the military. In his account, the killings were carried out largely by Muslim youths (ANSOR) from the NU.

The point, however, as Kenneth Young remarked some years ago, was that: ‘In 1965 the army was in a position to restrain popular violence … but once it chose to licence civilians in its drive against the communists, it set in motion dynamics of conflict which were deeply embedded in regional political processes, and which were expressed through local class and cultural affiliations.’Footnote ⁶²

Indeed, in Kediri itself, according to one well-informed account, the violence against the PKI began in earnest (around mid-October 1965) when ANSOR and NU leaders had ‘satisfied themselves that they had sufficient backing from within locally stationed army groups’. Across Java, moreover, the situation was unquestionably one in which the units of the TNI (at that time still by no means an homogeneous force) sided with the killers, in so far as they did not themselves organise or participate directly in what happened. At Ngadiredjo itself, the role of the TNI — however covertly or obliquely in this particular instance — was critical in determining what happened. The situation described by Pipit, fuelled as it undoubtedly was by local cultural–economic cleavages in the aftermath of events in the national capital, also represented the culmination of a process of military penetration of the industry and — crucially — of a history of antagonisms between the army and peasant and worker movements that dated back a decade or more at least. Characteristically, one of the TNI's first actions in its new patrimony in 1958 was to declare the sugar industry one of ‘national importance’ in which any form of industrial action was prohibited.Footnote ⁶³ Nonetheless, as we have already seen, the army's dominance continued to be contested by worker and peasant activists, with whom some elements in the local TNI were not necessarily out of sympathy.Footnote ⁶⁴

Hence the events of late 1965 took on a significance in Java that was considerably greater than that in other commodity-producing parts of the Republic. One scholar has described the effect of the massacres in Sumatra as ‘annihilating whatever was left of the labor movement’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Java (and certainly in Kediri), the elimination of SBG and BTI activists — and rank and file — appears to have brought about much more than that, and to have amounted to the destruction of a still potent worker–peasant movement. How many people were killed? Fragmentary evidence relating to what happened at the Meritjan sugar factory in north Kediri (information pertaining to Ngadiredjo itself appears not to have survived) has been uncovered by the Indonesian scholar Hermawan Sulistyo. It suggests that the actual number of people who ceased to be employed at the factory amounted — in the initial phase of the massacres at least — to something over 6 per cent of the permanent and ‘casual’ factory workforce (around 45 individuals of a total of around 691). As his findings show, around half of these people were certainly murdered in November 1965: the fate of the remainder is undocumented. Sulistyo's surmise is that the murdered individuals, named in factory records, ‘comprised the core power of the SBG’ and that ‘many rank and file members and other sympathisers’ fell victim in the subsequent months.Footnote ⁶⁶

Generally speaking, what happened in Kediri appeared to follow a pattern common throughout the industry. Further to the east, for example, in the Malang area of Pasuruan, where the BTI had been active in the early 1960s in successfully supporting peasant farmers against the sugar factories, ANSOR youths from the NU acted in cahoots with the local military in 1965 to murder (‘arrest and execute’) the local BTI leaders.Footnote ⁶⁷ Whatever the motive forces at play in the genesis of the massacres, the outcome — fortuitous in some places perhaps, carefully planned in others — represented a critical victory for the army and its ‘client’ factories over worker and peasant opponents — the majority of whom were involved in PKI-affiliated organisations — that had not been achieved hitherto. The importance of this victory and, more broadly, the crucial dynamics of the process that carried Java sugar across the mid-century decades, are the themes to which we can now return.

Postscript

It would, of course, be agreeable to report that eliminating the activists and installing a retired colonel would have restored the sugar industry in the Brantas valley to its former glory. Yet, things are never simple. Presumably, in effectively taking over the industry Java-wide, the army, its close associates in the Indonesian–Chinese business world, and the regime that they backed, intended thereby to assure the adequate supply to the Indonesian market of the factory-produced white sugar that was increasingly in vogue among the mass of domestic consumers. If so, they were frustrated. The agrarian basis of production, one that had fenced in the colonial industry even at the height of its pre-Depression heyday, continued to bedevil any such assumptions. In relation to other crops, the ‘opportunity cost’ of growing cane for sale to the sugar factories was simply too high, especially for a regime like that of Suharto's which aimed to accommodate as well as coerce significant rural elites.

In an important sense, agrarian factors in Java itself rendered the ‘victory’ of state and army in commandeering Java's sugar industry a pyrrhic one. The island's industrial manufacturers of white sugar proved incapable of matching supply to local demand, and Indonesia became one of the world's largest importers of the commodity. Attempts to expand the industrialised production of sugar beyond the confines of Java itself—for the first time in its long history—met with only limited success (at least in the short term). In Java, meanwhile, smallholder cane-growing was increasingly confined to unirrigated land that the colonial-era factories would never have given a second glance to. The upshot was that cane yields overall were around half those enjoyed in colonial times, with commensurate modest levels of sugar productivity. Meanwhile, consumption in Indonesia as a whole continued to far outstrip domestic output, and had to be fed by massive imports. By 1980, for example, imports of sugar were more than four times greater than they had been a decade earlier. Allowing for considerable variations over time, the trend continued for the remainder of the twentieth century — and into the twenty-first.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet, if the island of Java, with its old established industry, totally failed to match demand, the same could not be said of Indonesia as a whole. In 2008, although the Republic was importing around one million tons annually, it was also producing something just short of three million tons of sugar — hence nearly matching colonial-era peak output.Footnote ⁶⁹ The bulk of this production, however, came not from Java, but from estates on Sumatra and other Outer Islands, where industrial sugar manufacture had begun to develop in the 1970s.