The Duel

An undeclared and mostly bloodless duel is being fought for the control of Indonesia's 3,000 islands and its 85.5 million people. The well-matched opponents are the only two organizations in the nation that are European in structure, efficiency and administration: 1) the army, under Lieut. General Abdul Haris Nasution, 40. 2) the Communist Party, under the leadership of Secretary-General Dipa Nusantara Aidit, 36. These days the Communists are taking a silent licking.

Broken Strike. At the Soviet's 21st Party Congress in Moscow last January, slim, supple Red Boss Aidit could boast the best vote-getting Communist Party outside the Iron Curtain, and he promised Nikita Khrushchev that Indonesian Reds would deliver 8,000,000 ballots if elections "were held tomorrow" (in the 1957 regional election the Reds became Indonesia's top party with 6,940,000 votes). All this had been done in a scant ten years, for Communist prestige in Indonesia was at zero after the Reds tried to pull a coup in 1948, which was easily crushed and its leaders executed. But Aidit had problems too. He lingered in. Moscow long after the Congress was over, presumably to explain his difficulties.

Aidit's strength, outside a disciplined party of up to 1,500,000 members, rests on half a dozen well-infiltrated Indonesian mass organizations that loyally support Communism's interests. They include: the labor confederation SOBSI (2,750,000), the Pemuda Rakjut youth organization (800,000), the Perbepsi veterans group (200,000), the peasant B.T.I. (250,000) and the Gerwani women's movement (75,000). Western intelligence officers also believe that there are 300 secret party members in "sensitive and unsuspected" government positions.

Only the army has successfully resisted Red penetration, and gone over to the attack. Last April General Nasution, who is not so much pro-Western as pro his country's independence, banned the biggest Red weapon—mass demonstrations— and followed it with an order prohibiting strikes. When SOBSI recklessly decided on a test of strength and called a plantation strike in Sumatra, the army swiftly broke it, arrested eight union officers. In central Java last month, police jailed eleven known Communists, seized caches of small arms and munitions.

Kiss for the Girls. The Reds turned for help to President Sukarno, whom they had strongly supported—and tried to make their captive—when the Sumatra colonels began their 1958 right-wing revolt in the Outer Islands. Two years ago, dissatisfied with the role of Indonesia's three leading non-Communist parties, Sukarno had called for Communist participation in the government because "a horse can't stand on three legs." Now an officer boasts that the army "will provide the fourth leg."

As Red Boss Aidit slowly journeyed home from Moscow, with stops at the Soviet Asian city of Tashkent, where his wife is studying medicine, and at Peking in Red China, he got word that President Sukarno had decided to go back to the old constitution of 1945, to include 35 army officers in his government, and to exclude the Reds from the Cabinet and from major governmental posts.