Surviving Indonesia's Gulag: A Western Woman Tells Her Story.

• Author: Terrall, Ben

by Carmel Budiardjo Cassell. 213 pages. $17.95.

Thanks to the Lippo/Riady campaign donations to the Democratic Party and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Bishop Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor, Indonesia finally made it into the mainstream news this past fall. Readers who want to learn more about the ongoing scandal that is U.S. policy toward Indonesia would do well to buy Carmel Budiardjo's Surviving Indonesia's Gulag and Constancio Pinto's and Matthew Jardine's East Timor's Unfinished Struggle. Both memoirs show that U.S. support for the Indonesian dictatorship has been a consistently bipartisan affair for three decades.

Carmel Budiardjo is an English woman who became politically active while studying at the London School of Economics in the 1940s. In 1947 she helped launch the International Union of Students in Prague. There she met her future husband, an Indonesian, and moved to his homeland in the early fifties. Though she was barely able to speak the language, Budiardjo obtained a job translating for a news agency shortly after her arrival in Java. Within four years, she received a degree in economics at the University of Indonesia. She then wrote economic analyses for both the Sukarno government and the PKI, the Indonesian communist party.

After General Suharto took power in the phenomenally bloody 1965 coup, tolerance of the Indonesian communists, and anyone associated with them ended. By 1970, Suharto's forces had killed as many as a million Indonesians, all leftwing organizations were banned, and the prisons were crammed to capacity. Budiardjo herself spent three years in jail without charge or trial because of her PKI connections.

In understated, graceful prose, she describes the daily travails of surviving in jails where few prisoners had even mattresses. Though occasionally a bit disjointed in its chronology, her book effectively interweaves autobiography, political history (including a chapter on the 1965 coup that is a useful addition to the literature on this poorly documented period), and narratives of the people she befriended during her three years as a "tapol," or political prisoner. Not all were leftists. Suharto also cracked down on "aberrant" Muslim sects and, as Budiardjo notes, "for this regime, people in the middle are also extremists if they happen to be liberals or advocates of human rights."

Suharto's campaign of terror combined mass killings in the countryside with brutal repression in...