Oloan Hutapea

Bismarck Oloan Hutapea, also known as B. O. Hutapea (born 1920s?, died in the Blitar area in 1968), was a high-ranking member of the Indonesian Communist Party and one of its major theoreticians during the height of its power, and was leader of a clandestine wing of the party in 1967-8 during the Transition to the New Order.

Biography Early life Bismarck Oloan Hutapea, shortened to B.O. Hutapea as his pen name later in life. Little has been published about his early life aside from the fact that he had been a cadet in the Dutch Navy at Surabaya.

T.B. Simatupang, chief of staff of the Indonesian Armed Forces from 1950 to 1953, knew Hutapea while studying in Batavia during 1937-40 and again later during the Japanese occupation. He was also from a Batak background and noted in his memoir that most Bataks in Batavia knew each other at that time. Among his friends in the Batak youth in Batavia, Simatupang listed Hutapea, as well as Josef Simanjutak, another future communist party propagandist, and Lintong Mulia Sitorus, future Indonesian Socialist Party secretary general. In February 1950 Hutapea and Peris Pardede were sent by the party to Sumatra to exclude people disloyal to Aidit. Hutapea was also the commissioner of the PKI in East Java during this time. In 1951 police made several raids of houses of Communists and other leftists in East Java, which Hutapea had called a "politics of demoralization" being waged against them by the government.

Then, in August 1951 there were mass arrests of leftists of various parties in the region, Hutapea was among them, along with editors of Trompet Masjarakat, Republik, and editors of several Chinese Indonesian papers. Aidit and other leaders went into hiding, where many of them stayed until 1952. The Dutch communist party newspaper De Waarheid claimed that Hutapea himself was instrumental in organizing the prisoners into various sports and education committees, and to campaign for better treatment.

In his writings, Hutapea showed himself to be among the most hard-line members of the party leadership. In a 1960 article in Bintang Merah, the party's magazine of theory, he condemned revisionists in the Second International who had proposed a non-revolutionary road to power.

After 1965 After the 30 September Movement events, many of the party leadership were arrested or killed. Aliarcham Academy, which Hutapea was director of, was closed by order of Suharto. Hutapea managed to escape capture for several years. In early 1967 a number of the surviving party notables made a plan to rebuild the party in the South Blitar area of East Java, which they judged to be suitable. Among those who left from Jakarta to South Blitar were Hutapea, Rewang, Tjugito, Iskandar Subekti, Marjoko, and Katno. This committee stockpiled weapons and attempted to build an independent communist zone in opposition to the new Suharto government. Some of their members had trained with the Viet Cong and recently returned to Indonesia, and so they imitated the tactics used in Vietnam. The Indonesian Army made aggressive raids into the region in early 1968, with five thousand soldiers and three thousand militiamen,