Demokrasi Read online

  It is not hard to see why the events of 1965–66 were seen as the virtually inevitable consequence of what had happened since independence, a result of the behavior of narrowly experienced politicians and their followers, all striving for survival and advantage in a system that constantly changed shape, wherever it had much shape at all. Nor is it hard to see why Indonesia’s new government and its Western and regional supporters would have largely accepted that notion of inevitability and avoided blame, immediately looking to the future.

  Later writings about the 1950s certainly have the note of failure and retreat, from Feith’s The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia, the definitive study of the country’s politics, to Twilight in Jakarta, a novel by the periodically detained newspaper editor Mochtar Lubis, which was published abroad in 1963.

  But it started out optimistically, with the 1945 generation of leaders and foreign volunteers, like Feith, who were out to show that an independent Indonesia could work. The 1945 constitution had been hastily proclaimed in emergency conditions, and it was replaced by a new provisional constitution that set out a government responsible to a parliament, the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR, People’s Representative Council), and a president whose role would be largely ceremonial, aside from inviting party leaders in the DPR to form governments. It resembled, perhaps unconsciously, the Dutch parliamentary system, with Sukarno reluctantly filling the role of Queen Juliana.

  Membership of the parliament was allocated on a notional estimate of relative popular support, with the largest blocks given to Masyumi, the Islamist party of the more devout, and the PNI, the perceived inheritor of the Sukarnoist nationalist tradition, which, with Sukarno now standing aloof from party politics, was being led by Javanese priyayi figures. The Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI, Socialist Party of Indonesia), led by Sutan Syahrir and supported by many intellectuals, and the PKI, which was reforming itself after the Madiun setback, had smaller blocks, and a large quota was shared among many smaller parties and prominent individuals.

  A rotation of governments followed, which formed around leaders from Masyumi or the PNI. Suspicious of the international economic order, they wrestled with attempts to put more substance into independence, given that big American and Anglo-Dutch companies ran the oilfields, Dutch enterprises owned and ran the banks, plantations, and factories, and ethnic Chinese dominated the middle strata of commerce. Schemes to promote indigenous entrepreneurship were subverted by “Ali Baba,” or dummy, partnerships, which had a pribumi (ethnic Indonesian) as a front man in order to hide a Chinese operation.

  It was a heady time and today is viewed with much nostalgia. The new elite moved into the large houses vacated by the Dutch, as protected tenants on rents that became low over time. The round of cocktail parties and dinners resumed, with foreign embassies competing for influence and cachet. The formation and disintegration of coalitions, the maneuverings of army factions, and the schemes and love life of Sukarno all provided endless material for gossip. The ruling coalitions packed the civil service with their clients, who worked alongside the newly educated and the demobilized freedom fighters. There was no money to pay adequate salaries, and petty corruption exploded. Jakarta financed itself by printing money.

  The armed forces remained barely under the control either of the civilian government, being chiefly loyal to Sukarno or to Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX during his spell as defense minister, or of their own commanders. In 1952 General Nasution pushed a scheme to halve the army’s numbers to 100,000 men and rashly mounted a show of force outside the presidential palace to press the argument. Sukarno suspended him for three years. In 1956 Nasution was back in command and forestalled a march on Jakarta by his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Zulkifli Lubis, the head of a column of the new Special Forces. In 1960 an air force officer, Evie Mauker, outraged by Sukarno’s advances to his sister during a lineup of beauties in regional costumes (known in Jakarta circles as the “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika routine,” suggesting that the president would choose “one from many”), took off in his MiG-17 jet and strafed the presidential palaces in Jakarta and Bogor.

  It was not entirely a lost era in terms of social progress. The numbers of children getting at least a few years of education grew, and by 1961 the literacy rate for the population over ten years of age had reached nearly 47 percent, in contrast to the 7.4 percent adult literacy rate last recorded by the Dutch. Newspaper circulations also grew strongly, some of which served as party or institutional mouthpieces, while others reflected broader political and social attitudes.

  In the background, though, was a population growing so rapidly that it threatened to overwhelm any gains. Rural poverty deepened in Java as villagers shared farming resources in what became known as “involution”: more and more minute subdivisions of land, as described by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Landlessness grew, and the landless moved into cities, living in squatter settlements and eking out a living as peddlers, coolies, pedicab drivers, domestic servants, touts, and prostitutes. Jakarta’s population grew from under 1 million at independence to 3 million in the early 1960s.

  The parliament eventually got around to holding Indonesia’s first elections in September 1955, and another vote for a new constituent assembly followed in November that year. The electorate was widely divided. The PNI gained the largest vote, but that still only amounted to 22.3 percent. Masyumi was next with 20.9 percent, while a second Muslim group, the Nahdatul Ulama (NU, Muslim Scholars’ League), a mass organization appealing to conservative Muslims in rural Java, gained 18.4 percent. Among the “modernizers,” the shock was the rise of the PKI, which gained 16.4 percent of the vote, and the small following, just 2 percent, of the Socialists, the party seen (outside Indonesia, at least) as being the most pragmatic and as having “realistic” economic thinkers. When provincial assembly elections were held in 1957, the PKI emerged as the biggest party in central and eastern Java, winning 34 percent of the vote.

  The inflation set off by Jakarta’s deficit financing, along with the reliance on an artificially high exchange rate to help imports keep flowing into the elite circles of Java, was increasing the economic stress on the more export-oriented outer island regions. Many military commanders and their local business circles traded commodities directly into Singapore and Manila. An attempt by General Nasution to crack down on such freelance business and to reassign suspect officers led in December 1956 to a rebellious colonel, Maludin Simbolon, seizing control of North Sumatra and its rich oilfields. In March 1957 the commander of the East Indonesia military region, Lieutenant Colonel H. N. V. Samual, declared martial law and proclaimed a “Universal Struggle Charter” (known as Permesta, its Indonesian acronym) to “complete” the Indonesian revolution.

  This defiance of Jakarta might have been subdued had Sukarno heeded the calls of Nasution, Masyumi, and other groups and installed the respected Hatta, who had recently resigned from the vice presidency in a sign of displeasure, to lead a new nonparty government and begin the reform process. Instead, the rebellion expanded, and in February 1958 its leaders proclaimed the PRRI, or Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia, with its headquarters in Bukkittinggi, West Sumatra.

  The Sulawesi rebels linked up, and noted figures from Masyumi, such as Mohammed Natsir, and the economics professor Sumitro Djojohadikusumo of the Socialists joined its cabinet. The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was tempted by the chance to divide an Indonesia it saw as drifting into communist hands and began covertly supporting the rebels, shipping in arms and trainers from the British base in Singapore and from its own bases in the Philippines, Guam, and Taiwan. An air wing with mercenary pilots flying B-26 strike bombers operated out of rebel-held Manado in the north of Sulawesi, although its cover was blown when an American pilot was shot down over Ambon in May 1958.

  The Indonesian military had reacted to the declaration of the PRRI with ferocity and efficiency and within a fe
w weeks had seized the Sumatran oilfields by means of parachute and marine landings. The rebellion simmered on until its commanders surrendered in 1961.

  Sukarno, meanwhile, had been voicing his dissatisfaction with the parliamentary system and floated his idea of a turn to Demokrasi Terpimpin (Guided Democracy), in order to restore what he saw as a more acceptable and culturally suitable process of consultation and mutual self-help. Indonesia’s failure to win a UN vote calling on the Netherlands to negotiate the “return” of New Guinea sparked a nationalist backlash. Indonesian workers seized Dutch enterprises and plantations, and thousands of Dutch citizens still working in Indonesia were ordered to leave.

  This provided a means for Sukarno and the army to move to the center of power. Nasution installed army officers to run the seized Dutch enterprises, creating an independent revenue base. He announced a new “middle way” doctrine for the military’s relationship with the state: it would be involved in political and administrative affairs but would not take over government, per se. Sukarno’s decision to take New Guinea by force led to the acceptance of a massive credit from the Soviet Union to buy tanks, warships, submarines, and advanced combat aircraft.

  Nasution had also urged Sukarno to cut through the muddled parliament and constituent assembly, which was still bogged down in arguments over Pancasila and the Jakarta Charter, and to do this by restoring the revolutionary constitution of August 1945. Sukarno was receptive and did this in June 1959 by proclamation, giving himself sweeping presidential powers that accorded well with his notion of Guided Democracy. The constituent assembly was dissolved. The parliament helped seal its own fate by agreeing to postpone elections due that year, and it, too, was wound up in 1960, replaced by a selected echo chamber. The two parties that had been most supportive of conventional mixed public-private economic policy, Masyumi and the PSI, were banned outright because of their involvement with the PRRI/Permesta revolt.

  Sukarno was again hammering the theme of his Bandung days in the 1920s: the synthesis of nationalism, religion, and communism that he called Nasakom (from nasionalisme, nationalism; agama, religion; and komunisme, communism). As we have seen, his leadership was understood to be harking back, whether consciously or not, to precolonial patterns of kingly rule. Energetic sculptures of protean figures grasping fire went up around Jakarta. The money from Japanese war reparation funds—which also resulted in a new Japanese wife for Sukarno as a deal sweetener—was spent on building luxury hotels in Jakarta and Bali.

  The American scholars who had studied the emerging nation since the 1940s were inclined to be forgiving. “Perhaps our basic error all along has been to examine Indonesia with Western eyes,” mused Harry J. Benda in 1964. Specialists had fallen into asking, “What’s wrong with Indonesia?” and were conducting an “agonising search” for the entrepreneurial middle classes in Southeast Asia and for “problem-solvers” in general. But “solidarity-makers” seemed to represent a specifically Javanese culture; their “Hindu-Javanese world” looked remarkably resilient. Instead of asking why democracy failed in Indonesia, the question should have been “Why should it have survived?”

  Another scholar, David Levine, wrote that, in fact, nothing had “gone wrong” in Indonesia: “Given the colonial legacy and the lack of a true social revolution, things could hardly have gone any other way.” Even Feith, the author of what seemed a lament for constitutional democracy, noted that American scholarship had tended to look with favor on figures like Hatta and Syahrir as pragmatic, realistic, and forward thinking, and more critically at Sukarno as nativist, demagogic, and a diversion from the country’s real problems.

  Less sympathetically, there were questions about the Indonesian leaders’ three years of tutelage under Japan. Had its version of fascism, nestled within the imperial cult, not encouraged the drafters of Indonesia’s constitution to think in terms of the national “family,” national “spirit,” and consensus formation, rather than paying attention to outright argument and to the checks and balances of power? Even so, and despite the banning of the more reform-minded parties and the jailing of individual critics, such as Mochtar Lubis, Sukarno’s Guided Democracy was seen as essentially pluralistic. And with the communists apparently headed for greater success at the polls, Washington’s support for electoral democracy was waning.

  But the elements supporting Nasakom and Sukarno were polarizing. The military had used its Soviet equipment to needle the Dutch forces in New Guinea. Strings of commandos had been dropped in the jungles, though many of them were rounded up by unsympathetic Papuans; the rest were struggling to survive. It appeared that Moscow and Beijing were winning the international competition for influence over a country that sat at the gateway of Southeast Asia.

  The new administration of John F. Kennedy jumped into the fray, telling the Dutch that they couldn’t win in the long run—a repeat of the US pressure in 1949. The Dutch agreed to leave in October 1962: after a face-saving UN interregnum of seven months, the territory would be turned over to Indonesia on May 1, 1963, with Jakarta promising to conduct an “act of free choice” among the Papuans by the end of 1969, in which they could decide whether to stay part of Indonesia or become independent.

  After the debacle of the CIA’s support for the PRRI/Permesta rebellion, the policy makers in Washington decided it was pointless to promote a division in the Indonesian army, which had anticommunists on both sides. Nasution’s new Dwifungsi (Dual Function) doctrine accorded with the evolving US Army scheme of “civic action,” whereby third-world armies would be encouraged and trained to carry out village-level development works, in order to counter the grassroots mobilization of the population by local communist cadres. Their senior officers would be encouraged to undertake broader nonmilitary education, in subjects such as economics and international relations, to prepare them for roles in government. The United States began a program that aimed to educate the Indonesian military in its way of thinking, bringing some 2,800 Indonesian army officers—more than a fifth of the officer corps—to Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth for long residential courses. One American-trained officer, Colonel Suwarto, took this indoctrination back to the Indonesian army’s senior staff college in Bandung, known as Seskoad, where it was integrated into the studies of middle-ranking officers headed for senior commands.

  But it was a hard game to play. In 1963 Sukarno’s government announced that the big foreign oil producers—Caltex, Stanvac, and Royal Dutch Shell—that had been left out of earlier localization policies would henceforth be contractors to one of three state oil companies. The existing fifty-fifty split of profits would change to sixty-forty in Indonesia’s favor, and restrictions would be placed on local product distribution. New concessions to small independent oil companies upped the ante, and the threat of outright appropriation was voiced. The squeeze was seen as a crisis of the relationship at the highest levels in Washington, but eventually strategic considerations outweighed the corporate pain. The oil companies signed up.

  Meanwhile, Sukarno had signed off, from Tokyo, on a package of fiscal austerity that was meant to prepare Indonesia to receive large amounts of aid from the International Monetary Fund, the United States, and whatever other allies it could bring into the arrangement. It was the conventional “structural adjustment”: reduction of price controls and subsidies, removal of export taxes, a realistic exchange rate, and budget cuts. The measures set off price increases that ranged from 200 to 500 percent in many staple items, resulting in protests from many quarters.

  Just as this painful preparation for the aid package set in, Sukarno embarked on a fresh campaign, his Konfrontasi (Confrontation) of the new Malaysian federation being formed by Britain out of its various protectorates and colonies in Southeast Asia. There had been the idea of a UN consultation in North Borneo about their peoples’ agreement with the idea, which might have placated Sukarno’s suspicions about a Nekolim (neocolonialist and imperialist) maneuver. But the Br
itish, anxious to reduce their military burden east of Suez, and the headstrong leaders of Malaya and Singapore (Tunku Abdul Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew, respectively) made it clear they were going ahead anyway. When Abdul Rahman declared the new federation on September 16, 1963, officially organized rioters in Jakarta promptly burned down the British embassy, while Sukarno banned all dealings with Malaysia (which then included Singapore, Indonesia’s main trade gateway). Kennedy’s aid initiative foundered, although limited programs of assistance to the Indonesian military continued.

  Sukarno’s Guided Democracy now careered around the international skies like a missile with its gyroscope disabled. Infiltration and raids into Malaysia stepped up, drawing countercampaigns from Britain and its commonwealth partners. Sukarno proclaimed a new power axis with China, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. He told the United States, in front of an audience that included the US ambassador, Howard Jones, to “go to hell with your aid.” After China exploded its first nuclear device in 1964, he suggested that Indonesia might soon do the same.

  The PKI’s leadership, under Dipa Nusantara Aidit, was stepping out from under the Nasakom umbrella. Its artistic organization, Lekra, hounded intellectuals of a liberal persuasion who were deemed insufficiently revolutionary. The PNI was persuaded to purge its conservative elements. In 1964 the PKI launched its aksi sepihak (unilateral action) campaign to implement a land reform law that had been passed in 1960. The law mandated the transfer of landholdings above a certain size to the landless and put a limit on the portion of crop payable to landlords.