Demokrasi Read online

  By the 1920s the name, “Indonesia” was coming into common use, and in 1928 young members of various cultural and political associations met in Batavia to declare the Sumpah Pemuda (Pledge of Youth): one fatherland, one nation, one language.

  Local radicals had taken over the most active socialist organization, and in the early 1920s shaped it into the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI, Communist Party of Indonesia). They then embarked on a feverish campaign of recruitment and mobilization around Java, battling with Sarekat Islam and the Dutch police. In November 1926 the PKI launched an uprising in Batavia and parts of West Java, with a follow-up revolt in Sumatra in January 1927. The insurrection was promptly smashed by the Dutch authorities, and mass arrests ensued. Some 4,500 radicals were given jail sentences, and 1,300 of them transported to a new prison settlement called Boven Digul in the farthest part of the Indies, inland from the town of Merauke in the far southeast of Dutch New Guinea.

  Into the suspicious political atmosphere following the PKI uprising stepped the emerging leaders of secular Indonesian nationalism. Sukarno, born in 1901, was the son of a Javanese schoolteacher and his Balinese wife. He had flourished in the new educational system, proceeding to an engineering degree in Bandung, although he undertook much eclectic reading and dabbled in journalism along the way. In 1927 he and some fellow intellectuals founded what became the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI, Indonesian National Party); his idea of synthesizing Islam, Marxism, and nationalism into a single cause was already starting to form.

  In the Netherlands, students from the Indies became more consciously Indonesian. In 1927 the Dutch arrested several on charges of inciting armed rebellion, among them a future vice president, Mohammed Hatta, a Minangkabau from West Sumatra. The resulting trial gave them a platform to speak against the abuses of Dutch rule—and, to the further embarrassment of The Hague, all were acquitted.

  Undeterred, Indies authorities arrested Sukarno in 1929 and put him on trial. He gave a flamboyant speech of defiance and criticism but could not avoid a sentence of four years in Bandung’s Sukamiskin jail. The PNI effectively collapsed in Sukarno’s absence, and although he was released in December 1931 by an act of clemency, further political organization by the parties was dangerous. With political activity seen as likely to run away beyond any control, and with the Great Depression limiting resources for any social or economic palliatives, the authorities turned their eyes away from schemes of political development, such as the steps toward internal self-government being taken or promised in British India or the American-administered Philippines.

  Sukarno was again arrested in 1933 and sent into exile without trial, first to the primitive island of Flores in the southeast and then to the isolated Sumatran town of Bengkulu. Hatta and another Minangkabau intellectual, Sutan Sjahrir, returned from the Netherlands and threw their efforts into forming a cadre of future leaders. But in 1934 they too were arrested and exiled, initially to Boven Digul and then to the more salubrious but also isolated spice island of Banda.

  The Netherlands East Indies refused offers of help from its people in resisting the mounting threat of Japan in return for political evolution. Hitler invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, forcing Queen Wilhelmina into exile in London, and took France the following month, allowing his Axis ally in the East to use Indochina as a springboard for its advance into Southeast Asia. Only then did belated efforts begin to expand the small Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (KNIL, Royal Netherlands Indies Army). But after Singapore surrendered in February 1942, it took only three weeks for the Indies government to do the same.

  Suddenly, most of the Europeans in the Indies had been marched out of their big houses and into grim internment camps. Japanese army officers took control in Java and Sumatra, while the Japanese Imperial Navy managed the eastern islands. The Japanese military’s intelligence services had built up considerable knowledge of Indonesian political figures and religious organizations, and set out to use them to win popular backing and cooperation for Tokyo’s war effort.

  Released from their internal exile, Sukarno and Hatta decided to take Japan’s message of Asian liberation at face value and use the occupation to advance their mobilization of the population toward independence. It was agreed that some nationalist elements, under the control of Sutan Sjahrir, would keep their distance from the Japanese and act as a second, semiunderground movement. The worldly and highly educated Hatta was more cynical about the collaboration: he knew the difference between democracy and fascism. This didn’t matter so much to the more ingenuous Sukarno. On the pair’s visit to Tokyo in November 1943 to be decorated by Emperor Hirohito, Sukarno’s first time outside the Indies, he was much more impressed.

  It was a relationship of mutual exploitation, though it became harder to disguise the one-way nature of the exploitation of Indonesia’s human and natural resources, with 200,000 young men drafted into forced labor elsewhere in Southeast Asia—most would never return—and oil, rubber, and other products diverted to Japan’s military-industrial machine. With the balance of the Pacific war already shifting against Japan in 1943, the occupiers promoted the organization of the population into security organizations. Tens of thousands of young men were recruited as soldiers in auxiliary forces, such as the Pembela Tanah Air (PETA, Defenders of the Homeland). Village loudspeakers relayed speeches and messages from Jakarta (as Batavia had now been renamed) and Bandung. A new mass movement in Java, the Jawa Hokokai (Java Service Association), was modeled on Japan’s own neighborhood control system. Sukarno was enlisted to extend its reach and used its propaganda tours to extend his own following.

  As Japan’s control of the Pacific receded, the efforts to create a hostile barrier to the European powers increased. They moved to put their promises of independence into practice. In March 1945, Sukarno and many of the more mature leaders of the prewar independence movement were drafted into a preparatory committee in the old Volksraad building. By July the committee had finished drafting a constitution for a unitary republic with a strong presidency.

  A major battle concerned the role of religion. Sukarno had finally talked Islamic leaders into accepting his Pancasila (Five Principles) as the philosophical basis of the new state: belief in God, nationalism, humanitarianism, social justice, and democracy. A further sop was the addendum of a “Jakarta Charter,” which declared that belief in God carried “the obligation for followers of Islam to carry out Islamic law”—though the difficult question of how this would be enforced, by state law or not, was left to be wrangled over. Sukarno and certain other figures, but not Hatta or the more pragmatic committee members, were drawn to make a wider ambit claim for the new Indonesia, throwing in Malaya and the British territories in North Borneo.

  With the atom bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sukarno and Hatta took their document up to Dalat, Vietnam, for perusal by the Japanese supreme commander for southern Asia on August 11. He approved the charter, except for the inclusion of the British colonies, and the Indonesians arrived back in Jakarta on August 14, the day before Emperor Hirohito’s surrender. The Japanese military was then ordered to hold the status quo until Allied forces could take over.

  Restive students kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta to pressure them into an immediate announcement of Indonesia’s formation. A supportive Japanese naval officer, Tadashi Maeda, also urged them to go ahead. On the morning of August 17, 1945, Sukarno walked outside his house and read a forty-word declaration of independence, signed by himself and Hatta.

  With the Allied forces not arriving until the second half of September, the Japanese took a tolerant approach to the formation of a republican Indonesian government later in August, with Sukarno as president and Hatta as vice president. They insisted, however, that the Jakarta Charter would cause trouble with the substantial Christian minorities, and so it was abandoned, along with a provision that the president had to be a Muslim. An appointed Komite Nasional Indonesia Pusat (KNIP, Cent
ral Indonesian National Committee) stood in as a parliament, pending elections, which, as it turned out, would not happen for a decade. Governors were appointed in parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi.

  It became a time of chaos. Japanese forces retreated into their cantonments. Some units assisted the Indonesian militias, while other isolated posts were overwhelmed and robbed of their weapons. It was sometimes hard to distinguish idealistic freedom fighters from opportunistic gangsters. Ethnic groups settled old scores. The more traditional and the more devout Islamic villagers redressed perceived imbalances.

  The Dutch military showed up first in the eastern islands, which were under the control of Australian forces. The British occupation force in Java and Sumatra consisted of only 6,000 soldiers, mostly Indians. Their theater commander, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, declined the impossible task of recapturing the empire for the Dutch. Instead, his men concentrated on supervising the surrender of the Japanese and on extricating the thousands of European civilians stuck in inland prison camps, which sometimes took fighting columns and air strikes to achieve. In November 1945, an operation to get internees out through Surabaya sparked a fanatical war against the foreigners, with Muslim leaders declaring it a jihad (holy war). A brigadier was torn to pieces by a mob, and the British punished the city with naval gunfire and Lancaster bombers.

  The Dutch sent out their new conscripts, youths scrawny from the years of German occupation. During their journey, they’d been jeered by Arabs, who bared their bottoms at them from the banks of the Suez Canal. The wartime experience had caused no reflection among Dutch politicians and officials about the foreign rule they wished to reimpose on another people or about the change in Asians’ perceptions of Europeans after their quick capitulation to Japan.

  For four years the Dutch tried every possible way of breaking the independence movement, having quickly gained control of Jakarta and other cities along the north coast of Java. Sukarno and the republican government withdrew to Yogyakarta, where the progressive sultan Hamengkubuwono IX threw open part of his kraton for university students who’d been pulled out of colleges in Jakarta and Bandung. Funds came from rubber, sugar, opium, and other goods smuggled through the Dutch blockade and into Singapore. Transport aircraft bought by the Acehnese dodged the Dutch air force’s Mustang fighters. While the republicans were pressed back in Java, the Dutch cultivated autonomous regional states in the outer islands, playing on fears of Islamic or Javanese domination.

  Holland’s diplomatic ploy was to offer recognition of the Indonesian republic in Java and Sumatra, but as part of a federated United States of Indonesia, with the Dutch queen as the symbolic head of a kind of commonwealth. This deal was encouraged by the British, who were desperate to withdraw, and it was signed by Indonesian delegates at the hill station of Linggajati in November 1946.

  The Indonesians agonized about ratifying it, and Sutan Syahrir, who as prime minister had negotiated it, lost public standing. But with Sukarno and Hatta threatening otherwise to resign, it was ratified.

  The Dutch soon lost patience with their own diplomacy and in July 1947 launched a “police action” designed to seize control of Java and Sumatra. Pressure in the United Nations from the United States, Britain, and Australia led to a ceasefire being called after two weeks and the dispatch of a “good offices” mission to supervise the truce. The Dutch reverted to setting up their federal states elsewhere, and the republicans struggled to feed the large numbers of troops and civilians who had retreated to Yogyakarta.

  Now the conflict had been internationalized, and the Sukarno-Hatta leadership won new American favor when their Indonesian forces suppressed an uprising by the reformed PKI in Madiun, East Java, in September 1948. A second Dutch police action, in December that year, was ostensibly successful, capturing Yogyakarta and the entire republican leadership, and leaving Aceh as the only part of Indonesia under republican control. But it was a disastrous misstep, arousing worldwide condemnation and leading to a halt in American postwar reconstruction aid for the Netherlands itself.

  In July 1949 the republican leadership were returned to Yogyakarta, and a gradual handover of military control to Indonesian regular units commenced. On December 27, 1949, the Netherlands transferred sovereignty over the entire Indies, minus western New Guinea, to a new Republic of the United States of Indonesia, with Sukarno and Hatta as president and vice president, respectively. Sukarno flew into Jakarta aboard a KLM Dakota that had been hastily rebadged as part of the new state airline, Garuda, and proceeded through ecstatic crowds to address the masses from the steps of the former governor-general’s palace. The federal structure was abruptly swept away the following August, and a provisional constitution for a unitary state declared.

  It’s no wonder, in retrospect, that the very short history of Indonesian nationalism before the fall of the Dutch empire led to an intense preoccupation with nation building by the first president, Sukarno, through his sixteen years in power (however “power” is defined). The story of his presidency is the triumph of this “solidarity-maker” over the attempts of the “administrators,” such as Hatta and Sjahrir, to apply sound economic and social development policies. (The terms come from Herbert Feith’s classic account of parliamentary politics and the shift to “Guided Democracy” in the 1950s, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia.) Yet Sukarno’s grand solidarity-making efforts prevented the sober administrative measures that might have prevented the rebellions that shook Indonesia from 1957 to 1960, when exasperated army colonels and development-minded politicians launched the Permesta revolt in Sulawesi and the Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (PRRI, Revolutionary Government of the Indonesian Republic) in Sumatra, drawing unwise American and British covert support.

  That is not to say Sukarno did not face other immediate, and entirely internal, challenges to the unity, the character, and, potentially, the territorial integrity of the Indonesian state. The Ambonese attempted to break away as the declared Republic of the South Moluccas in Indonesia’s first year. In 1953 the restive Acehnese ulema (Islamic scholar) Daud Beureu’eh turned his back on the Pancasila ideology and launched a jihad to create a Negara Islam Indonesia (Islamic Indonesian State). He linked up with similar Islamists in West Java and South Sulawesi in insurgencies known generally as the Darul Islam (Abode of Islam) movement, which the Indonesian military quelled only in 1965 and which periodically erupts again in small extremist cells.

  The Dutch, meanwhile, started preparing their New Guinean territory for a separate independence, which, however much it might have been justified by cultural incompatibility with Indonesia, was an objective totally suspect in Indonesian eyes, after the divisive Dutch behavior in 1945–49. But Sukarno had relatively few military resources; instead, he had to employ the symbolic demonstrations of power noted by Benedict Anderson: his ability to hold vast crowds spellbound with rhetoric and incantations (such as the TAVIP, from Tahun Vivere Pericoloso, the Year of Living Dangerously, which he declared in 1964 to explain his alignment against the Western powers and their economic prescriptions), his semipublic sexual life, his welding together of disparate political forces. His triumph was to drive the Dutch out of New Guinea in 1963 by a combination of rhetorical insistence, symbolic military sacrifice, and adroit balancing of strategic Cold War concerns.

  It was all very precarious. Half a century later, unrest still simmers and builds in Papua. The defeat of Daud Beureu’eh was not the end of rebellion in Aceh. The termination of the Konfrontasi with Malaysia was handled graciously by the British in the wider interests of the times, but the ignominious withdrawal from East Timor gave the Indonesian military and political establishment a humiliating rebuke. Solidarity-making remains a core preoccupation of the Indonesian state to this day.

  2

  The Crocodile Hole

  Not far from the cheeriness of Taman Mini is another memento of the Suharto era, quite different in tone. The name of
the place, Lubang Buaya (meaning “Crocodile Hole”), preceded the grim events that took place there on October 1, 1965, but no propagandist could have devised a more sinister one. It was here that three abducted army generals, the bodies of three others, and an aide mistaken for the army chief, General Abdul Haris Nasution, were taken by mutinous troops.

  Visitors to the Crocodile Hole peer through the windows of the hut at a life-size tableau of the living captives, bloodied and tied to chairs as frenzied interrogators in red scarves stand over them with raised rifle butts. They look at the well, where the seven bodies were dumped that day; fake blood drips down its rim. They walk across to a large monument: a vast bronze garuda—a mythical eagle, the national symbol—soaring over the defiant figures of the murdered officers.

  This is the defining story, the creation myth, of the New Order regime, which had its origins in steps taken after that day by Suharto and the military. The army leaders, the story goes, men defending the nation and following their president’s directives, were callously murdered during a coup instigated by the PKI, which was fortuitously foiled because the conspirators had failed to target the little-known General Suharto, who then stepped up to take control.

  To emphasize that this atrocity was not an aberration, an adjacent Museum of PKI Treachery has forty-two dioramas that depict various episodes, such as the Madiun uprising, in which communists tried to overturn the course of the Indonesian nation and its values. The PKI’s uprising against the Dutch in 1926 is not mentioned.

  The story has been picked apart by scholars outside Indonesia, as we shall see, along with the portrayal of the subsequent mass killings and arrests of the PKI membership, and its characterization as something like a natural disaster, a volcanic eruption or a tsunami that resulted in a kind of catharsis. The surprising thing is that—fifteen years after the repudiation of Suharto, the embrace of reformasi (reformation), and the return to electoral democracy—the myth survives largely uncontested within Indonesia. Busloads of children still arrive at Lubang Buaya for indoctrination, and every year on October 1, the president and senior officials still come here to hold a solemn commemoration.