Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (4 page)

When I asked why, people invariably gave one or more of the following reasons. One: the Dutch only took things, they didn’t give anything back, while the British built up the institutions of state. (What about all those great engineering works, I would ask? The irrigation systems, the ports? Those were only so that the Dutch could take things from us more efficiently, Indonesians would reply.) Two: the Dutch deliberately kept the local population stupid, while the Brits educated people. Three: the Dutch had a sliding scale of justice administered by political appointees which was always stacked against the little person, while the Brits had an independent judiciary and everyone was equal in the sight of the law.

These opinions came not from historians or academics but from people I met on boats and at coffee stalls, from truck drivers, farmers and midwives. I found it interesting that though Indonesians love to blame the Dutch for many things, they’ve done little over the last seven decades to change them. I suspect that’s because all the Dutch did was to exploit patterns of behaviour that already existed in these islands when they first arrived.

The Europeans changed the rules of the trading game, it’s true, and they made plantations and extractive industries more efficient. But the islands’ many kings and sultans had been squeezing the peasantry for taxes and labour to finance their endless wars with one another long before the Europeans arrived. Education in pre-colonial times was essentially confined to itinerant scholars from India and the Middle East, and the gossamer-thin layer of courtiers they interacted with. And justice was dribbled out at the whim of the ruler. In the Javanese heartland, the new colony could consolidate power simply by buying off squabbling aristocrats and turning them into bureaucrats. Java’s grandees were allowed, still, to strut their stuff in front of their people, to go out in great processions under twirling golden umbrellas, to stamp their feet, play boss and collect taxes as they had always done. But when they got back to their palaces they had to turn those taxes over to the King of Holland, taking a salary in return.

As the Dutch bosses got more demanding the grandees grew more oppressive. From the 1830s, farmers who had always grown whatever they wanted – mostly food for their families – now had to reserve part of their land to grow cash crops which the government bought at fixed prices. They also had to spend a certain number of days working on commercial plantations, pumping profits into the coffers of the motherland. At one stage, half of the Netherlands’ national income was being siphoned in from Indonesia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, left-leaning politicians in the Netherlands forced through the ‘Ethical Policy’. This recognized that the government of the Netherlands East Indies bore some responsibility for the welfare of the 34 million people who then lived nominally under Dutch rule. The colonists were obliged to start setting up schools for the children of the more privileged ‘natives’. The new ethics did not, however, stop the government in the colony’s capital Batavia (now Jakarta) from waging war on other natives.

In Java and some of the plantation areas of other islands there had been rebellions against the Dutch over time, while countless acts of civil disobedience poked holes in the hated system of compulsory labour. The colonists always replied with force. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, they also became less tolerant of the quasi-autonomous fiefdoms that survived in other islands. Batavia launched campaigns to impose its will more completely across the whole island chain, and local rulers fought back. In Bali, just a canoe-paddle away from decidedly Dutch Java, local rulers resisted the yoke of Queen Wilhelmina until 1908. Aceh, at the western extremity of the island chain, fought off the Dutch until 1903. At the other extreme, in the jungles and swamps of ‘Dutch West Papua’, the colonial presence was even more notional. Papua was so far out of the fold that it was not even part of the nation that was handed over to Indonesian rule at independence. And in the eastern half of the island of Timor, the Dutch never set foot at all. The Portuguese had settled in East Timor after being ousted by the people of Ternate in the sixteenth century. It remained a Portuguese enclave until 1975, when Lisbon abandoned it following a socialist revolution at home. Indonesia quickly sent in troops and ‘integrated’ East Timor as the nation’s twenty-seventh province.

Ironically, it was the well-meaning ethical policy that sowed the seeds of a true anti-colonial movement. For the first time, young ‘natives’ were allowed an education, and in a European language that gave them access to books and newspapers full of new ideas about sovereignty and social justice. For the first time, young men from across the archipelago came together in the major cities of Java, finding common cause against a common enemy. It was in the minds of these young men that the notion of Indonesia was conceived. It was made flesh in 1928, when a congress of youth groups from around the archipelago pledged, in the name of the ‘sons and daughters of Indonesia’, that they would fight for ‘One Homeland: Indonesia. One Nation: Indonesia. One Language: Indonesian.’

It was to become the rallying cry for nationalists in their battle to throw over the Dutch. Those who shouted it too loudly were exiled by the Dutch to forgotten corners of the land where they could do no harm.

Banda, once so central to Dutch interests, was by the 1930s just such a backwater. Down a quiet side street I found a monument to the political troublemakers who had been exiled in Banda over the years. The two most prominent were both leading lights of Indonesian nationalism: Sutan Sjahrir, Indonesia’s first Prime Minister and Mohammad Hatta, its first Vice President, who signed the declaration of independence alongside the nation’s first President, Sukarno.

Every Indonesian has the date of that independence, 17 August 1945, engraved on their memory: 17 August is a national holiday. Villagers make triumphal archways out of bamboo and paint them with the anniversary: CONGRATULATIONS, INDONESIA AT 67! Even in Jakarta’s slums people paint discarded plastic cups in red and white and string them along the side of the fetid canal; do-it-yourself 3D bunting.

In Banda, though, I stumbled over a monument that suggested a different creation myth: ‘Raised by the people of Banda to commemorate the independence and sovereignty of the United Republic of Indonesia: 27/12/1949’, it read.

Thinking I might learn more about this unorthodox view of Indonesian independence, I went to visit the house where Mohammad Hatta lived while in exile, which is now a museum. It is a typical Banda-style bungalow: three wooden doors with louvered shutters open out onto a long veranda. There was no one around, but the door was open so I wandered in. In one corner of the main room was an ornately carved love seat, the velvet upholstery of the genre replaced with cool wicker. It sat behind a wooden coffee table flanked by two other wicker chairs. On the table a wooden sign read: table and chair set. A couple of empty soft drink bottles blew around on the floor underneath. A glass corner cabinet housed a suit, a shirt, a pair of glasses, a pair of shoes. There was a desk with a typewriter on it. That was it. No information about why Hatta was exiled to Banda, let alone about the conflicting dates of independence.

The time lag between those two dates, the iconic 1945 and the rarely mentioned 1949, was in fact the time it took the Dutch to admit that they had lost their colony.

Throughout the 1930s, with the encouragement of leftist parties in Holland, the Indonesian nationalist movement had grown. But it had also diverged. One group thought that the hammers and sickles of workers and peasants would drive the colonists away. The other believed that the Koran was the strongest weapon with which to confront the Dutch. They probably would have gone on squabbling indefinitely had the Second World War not intervened.

It was the Japanese occupation that really catalysed Indonesian independence. By dispatching the Dutch so swiftly, the Japanese shattered the myth of European superiority. Espousing ‘Asia for the Asians’, they encouraged Sukarno and other nationalists to prepare for self-rule within an Asian commonwealth. And because they anticipated an Allied invasion, they set about militarizing the Indonesians, training many young men in the use of arms and guerrilla warfare.

Then came Hiroshima, the Japanese surrender and the hasty declaration of independence. The first item on Indonesia’s long list of Etcs was simply to make sure that the former colonial power didn’t settle back in. The Australian, British and American troops who moved in to reclaim Indonesia from the defeated Japanese were not enthusiastic about handing the territory back to the Dutch. But in the absence of any transfer of sovereignty, the Allies all still recognized the Netherlands as the legitimate authority in the archipelago. And the Dutch wanted their colony back.

The nationalists disagreed about how to stop that happening. Many leaders favoured negotiating their way to independence. But Sukarno, outstandingly the most charismatic of the young leaders, was for fighting. He set about trying to make the islands ungovernable through insurrection. There followed four years of intermittent warfare and bad-tempered diplomacy.

Very like the founding fathers of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Indonesia’s young leaders disagreed about the best political format for the new country: should it be federal, or a unitary state with a strong central government? Hatta and Sjahrir, who were to become Vice President and Prime Minister respectively, were both from West Sumatra. They feared that in a centralized state, Javanese colonizers would simply replace the Dutch, imposing their will on other islands and cultures. Sukarno, later President, believed the nation’s disparate elements could be held together only by a strong centre. He invoked a mythical past in which the Sriwijaya and Majapahit empires ruled the whole area coloured Dutch on the imperial map. In fact, the pre-colonial empires were much more limited than Sukarno claimed, their sphere of influence established largely through a loose system of tribute. But by retrofitting history, Sukarno was able to justify reclaiming the empire from the colonizers, recasting it as a republic, and ruling it from a central court in Java.

Sukarno did not immediately get his way; he was denied a place at the table at which the formal transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands was negotiated because he was considered to have collaborated with the Japanese. When the Dutch offered self-rule for seven individual federated states within the United Republic of Indonesia, a commonwealth headed by the Dutch crown, Hatta and Sjahrir signed up. Within a year, however, support for a federation had imploded and Sukarno was firmly back on track towards a unitary state ruled from Jakarta.

Sukarno was a demagogue whose political recipe was one part populism and three parts theatre, seasoned with mischief and served with a large glass of charisma. He was also astute, and knew how fragile the idea of Indonesia was. Had he been in any doubt, rebellions in Maluku, West Sumatra, West Java and Sulawesi in the early 1950s underlined the fact that not all ‘Indonesians’ shared his centralized vision.

Sukarno came up with a political philosophy that was supposed to create room in his unitary state for everyone. It’s known as Pancasila, the Five Principles, and it typifies the Indonesian talent for fuzzy philosophies that can be turned to any purpose. It encompasses:

1) ‘Belief in the one and only God’ – by not specifying which God, Sukarno intended this to enshrine the principle of freedom of religion. For Suharto, Sukarno’s successor as President and his polar opposite politically, it was seen as a bulwark against communism.

2) ‘Just and civilized humanity’ – a vague concept coloured by the Javanese idea of the enlightened and munificent ruler and espoused by many rulers who were neither.

3) ‘The unity of Indonesia’ – in Sukarno’s reading, this guarded against federalism; in Suharto’s, it justified weaving the military into every aspect of national life.

4) ‘Democracy guided by the inner wisdom of unanimity arising out of deliberations among representatives’ – intended by Sukarno as a safeguard against Western-style confrontational democracy, and used by Suharto to guard against any democracy at all.

5) ‘Social justice for all Indonesian people’ – for socialist Sukarno, this endorsed state intervention in the economy, while to capitalist Suharto, it suggested support for allowing free-market policies to trickle down to all people.

Every Indonesian can trot out the Pancasila in the way that even the most lapsed Christian can trot out the Lord’s Prayer, but it has never unleashed great currents of nationalism. So Sukarno turned to gunboats and grandstanding. To entrench national unity, he needed a common enemy to replace the Dutch. He set about picking fights.

In fact, it was unfinished business with the Dutch that provided the first battleground. The Netherlands had retrospectively excluded mineral-rich West Papua from the territory it handed over to the nationalists. It’s ours, said Sukarno, and went to the United Nations – a bold move for a newborn nation. Most countries at the UN sided with the flamboyant polyglot, though not enough to force UN action. That allowed Sukarno to keep up his nationalist belligerence. In 1961 he sent the paratroopers into Papua to begin the process of grabbing back what belonged, in the eyes of most Indonesians but few Papuans, to the republic.
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