A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  It was a moment that would fix Sukarno’s status as father of the nation forever. Even twenty-five years later, when his reputation was at its lowest ebb, he was still quietly celebrated as ‘the Proclamator’. No one could take that away from him.

  PRESIDENTIAL TOMB President Sukarno spent his final years under house arrest in Bogor, where he wanted to be buried. But The New Order regime was uncomfortable with the idea of a man that had had such charisma in his glory days lying so close to Jakarta. His tomb would surely have a powerful attraction, maybe becoming a symbol of passive resistance. So when he died in 1970, he was interred in the isolated East Java town of Blitar where his grandparents had lived, in an unmarked grave alongside his mother.

  In the 1980s the New Order felt that enough time had passed to allow for a partial rehabilitation of Indonesia’s founding father. The Blitar tomb got a lavish overhaul. People had already been making quiet pilgrimages there, but now the place became a tourist attraction. Today hundreds of thousands of people visit the tomb every year. The place has the atmosphere of a popular saint’s grave—busy, bustling, and with a party of pilgrims always in attendance.

  JOKOWI On 9 July 2014, Indonesians went to the polls to vote for the second directly elected president in the country’s seven-decade history. They chose fifty-three-year-old heavy-metal fan and former furniture salesman Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi.

  Jokowi had first appeared when he was elected mayor of his hometown, Surakarta, in 2005. He made a remarkable job of shaking up the city administration. There were whispers of presidential promise that turned into a noisy clamour once Jokowi took up the much more challenging role of governor of Jakarta in 2012. He and his gloriously forthright deputy Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama—himself a highly unusual figure as an ethnic Chinese Indonesian in a position of political power—made significant headway with the capital’s problems.

  No one was surprised when the nationalist party PDI-P made Jokowi their choice for the 2014 presidential race. What made all this remarkable was that Jokowi was a genuine outsider, the first serious presidential candidate in Indonesia’s decade-and-a-half of democracy who was not part of the old-established political elite.

  But first Jokowi had to head off a challenge from a man very much connected to the old elite: Prabowo Subianto, a former New Order–era military man and onetime son-in-law of Suharto. In the end Jokowi slipped through with a slim majority. His election was deeply symbolic: the outsider triumphing over the insider, the new man trumping the throwback. For many observers it was the moment when the ghost of the New Order was finally exorcised and Indonesia came of age as a democracy.

  THE BALI BOMBINGS On the night of 12 October 2002, Kuta was buzzing. The resort town on the west coast of Bali had grown beyond all expectations since the first Australian surfers and hippies turned up three decades earlier, and was packed with thousands of foreign tourists—which was precisely why a small cell of Islamist terrorists had chosen it as their target.

  Just after 11 pm that night a suicide bomber with an explosive-filled backpack blew himself up in a crowded bar on the eastern side of Jalan Legian, Kuta’s chronically congested main drag. Seconds later, a car bomb exploded across the street outside the Sari nightclub. A total of 202 people were killed, 88 of them Australians. Bali’s tourist industry was decimated.

  In the coming years there was a rash of other bombings—against a luxury hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and against the same hotel six years later, and against the Australian embassy in 2004. Just as the Balinese tourist industry was beginning to recover, a trio of synchronised suicide bombings struck the south Bali resort area again in 2005. Some predicted that this was the beginning of Indonesia’s slide into chronic terrorist violence.

  The Indonesian authorities, however, proved adept at tracking down the terrorists, who belonged to one small network. The men who orchestrated the attacks were arrested, tried, and executed. The Malaysian-born ringleaders, Noordin Mohammad Top and Azahari bin Husin were killed in police shootouts, and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the supposed spiritual leader of the terrorist movement, was jailed for supporting a jihadist training camp in Aceh.

  As for Bali, today a memorial stands close to the site of the 2002 bombings, and the bars and restaurants are busier than ever.

  CHAPTER 7

  BRAVE NEW WORLD:

  THE RISE OF

  NATIONALISM

  The hotel stood beside a broad, smooth road running through the heart of the colonial capital. To the south lay the Koningsplein, the King’s Square, a huge expanse of scorched grass at the heart of the city laid out by Daendels at the start of the nineteenth century. To the north, the original quarters of Batavia—as built by Jan Pieterszoon Coen—were still a tight-packed jumble of mildewed warehouses. Here, however, the buildings stood well apart from one another, each white mansion nestled in its own manicured jungle of bottle palms and traveller’s trees.

  There had been a hotel on this spot for the best part of a century, and it had long been the lodging of choice for wealthy passers-by to the city. A disorientated Alfred Russel Wallace, still finding his feet in crowded cityscapes after years in the wilderness, had stopped by on his way home in 1861. Sixty years had passed since Wallace’s visit, however, and the old core of the Hotel des Indes, with its pastel-red shutters and neoclassical colonnades, was now hidden under three stark storeys of angular modernism. It looked like the upper levels of a luxury liner, marooned three miles from the sea.

  On the hotel’s broad balcony a man was sitting, looking out on the scene below and scribbling in a notebook. Now and then a landau or a motorcar would rumble by, carrying a Dutchman in a starched white suit. But the man was more interested in what was happening in the canal on the other side of the road. Directly opposite the hotel a set of steps descended to the water, and the scene at the foot of these steps was in warm contrast to the stiff formality on dry land: local men, women and children had gathered there for their daily bath. The man on the balcony had already decided that ‘The Javanese cannot be said to be beautiful’, but he was particularly keen to watch when a pair of comely, sarong-clad sixteen-year-olds emerged from the water like ‘two dripping Venuses’—and he was a little disappointed when they deftly changed into dry clothes ‘in the bright light of this tropical sun without the least exposure of person’.

  The man had arrived in Batavia a few days earlier aboard a steamer from Australia. He had jug ears and floppy red hair, and his thin frame seemed a little lost in the folds of his suit. He was sixty-eight years old; he was an American citizen, and his name was Frank Carpenter.

  Carpenter was an inveterate globetrotter. He had started out as a journalist in Ohio, and he had funded his first world cruise in the 1880s by selling a series of pithy travel articles to a dozen different publications. He had gone on to author an endless series of potboiler travelogues under the brand of ‘Carpenter’s World Travels: familiar talks about countries and peoples with the author on the spot and the reader in his home’.

  Travellers of all sorts had been wending their way through the Archipelago for thousands of years, but Carpenter belonged to a new breed. Yijing had been a pilgrim; Ibn Battuta was an adventurer; Tomé Pires had been a born reporter and Alfred Wallace was an authentic explorer. But in 1923 Frank Carpenter—for all that he would hastily hack out yet another book about his brief visit to ‘Java and the East Indies’—was unmistakably a tourist.

  After his sojourn at the Hotel de Indes, and still having failed to spot a bathing teenager in total dishabille, he set out on a thoroughly touristic itinerary, ticking off all the must-see sights of Java in fine style. He wandered in the glorious botanical gardens at Buitenzorg, as his counterparts do today (though this country seat of the colonial government has now gone back to its old name of Bogor). He took a comfortable train to Bandung and enjoyed its cool mornings and mountain views, and he was a guest at the huge estate at Sinagar, where they still grow tea for export in the twenty-first century. He
visited Borobudur by moonlight—it was now fabulously restored and stripped of all the accumulated debris of a millennium. He took in the sights of Surakarta, enjoyed the luxuries of Surabaya—now surrounded by huge private sugarcane estates—and was left breathless by the infernal fumes of Gunung Bromo. Amongst his enormous luggage he carried a full suit of evening dress, for he had been reliably informed that the Dutch were great sticklers for formality, and that ‘It is impossible to travel comfortably and see anything of the country without dress suits’.

  Carpenter was by no means the only first-class tourist on the roads. Java had been an essential stopover for well-heeled globe-trotters for several decades, and in Bali, too, just a decade-and-a-half since the puputan bloodbaths at Badung and Klungkung, a nascent tourism industry was already emerging. The first images of the island had appeared in a tourist brochure in 1914 and the steamships of the Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij, the ‘Royal Packet Navigation Company’ or KPM, were already depositing a trickle of sightseers at Singaraja, the Buleleng harbour where explorers and spice traders had once disembarked. By the end of the 1920s there would be hotels, travel agencies and packaged dance performances for the visitors. Bali would also have become temporary home to a burgeoning international band of itinerant artists, bohemian anthropologists, aristocratic drop-outs and sexual adventurers who would do so much to forge its enduring reputation as an earthly paradise—and a place of irresistible titillation to boot. Frank Carpenter did not make it to Bali, but had he known the name it would shortly attain in travel circles he would perhaps have skipped across the channel in a jiffy: there would be no frustration for an admirer of local bathers there, and Bali would soon be known worldwide as ‘the island of bare breasts’.

  The early tourists were usually starry-eyed and admiring of the state of affairs in the Dutch East Indies, and Carpenter was no exception. He described the place as a beneficent Eden of well-mannered economic progress and gentle paternalism:

  The railways have already conquered … Java, and the schools of the west are to be found in the towns. New resources are being discovered, and new industries are developing … the bulk of our tin is from the islands of Banka and Billiton [Bangka and Belitung] … The petroleum of Borneo and Sumatra competes with ours in the markets of Asia…

  As for the indigenous population, in Carpenter’s eyes they were either ossified relics of oriental splendour at the courts—draped in batik, shaded beneath golden parasols and clinging to the arm of a beefy Hollander in a tropical suit—or smiling peasants ready to drop to their heels in a respectful squat the moment a white man hove into view. The land Carpenter described was a place of timeless tradition, for all the industrial activity, telephone cables and railways.

  He did not, of course, invent the scenes he described. He really had seen sultans and courtiers performing an ageless routine at the quiet command of the Dutch ‘elder brother’, and he really had ‘travelled for miles through the country where every man, woman, and child I met would squat down on the ground and fold his hands in an attitude of humility until I passed’. But tourists, and indeed travel writers, have always had a tendency to see only what they are shown and hear only what they are told. Had Frank Carpenter been a better journalist he would perhaps have noticed the tectonic rumblings that were beginning to trouble the rust and the orde of the colonial regime.

  The 1920s were a brave new world. By the time Frank Carpenter came trotting merrily through Java with rose-tinted spectacles wedged on the end of his bulbous nose the plates were shifting all over the globe. The Netherlands had remained officially neutral during World War I and Europe’s mud-splattered apocalypse had scarcely ruffled the palm fronds of the Dutch East Indies, but the world beyond had changed. In Russia the Bolsheviks had triumphed in the October Revolution of 1917, while in China the Qing Dynasty had collapsed and an ailing Sun Yat-sen was building a new republic. Elsewhere, Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’ had overturned the grandest of all old Muslim aristocracies—the Ottoman sultanate—and had forged the aggressively modernist Turkish Republic from the wreck. British India was already home to a sophisticated independence movement: Gandhi’s non-cooperation campaign against the colonial authorities was earning headlines around the world, and in just about every other tranche of European empire there were strange whisperings on the wind. There was no way that the Dutch East Indies could continue undisturbed.

  The first stirrings of what would one day become a revolution had come amongst ink, chalk dust and the declination of irregular Dutch verbs in the early years of the twentieth century.

  For the bulk of their time in Asia the Dutch had made little effort to dispense knowledge to their subjects. They did not encourage the locals to use the Dutch language; in some instances it was expressly forbidden, and Malay and Javanese had remained the main mediums of interaction. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, pidgin Portuguese would often prove more useful than Dutch on Archipelago docksides. This was all in striking contrast to the state of affairs in other areas of European empire in Asia at the turn of the twentieth century. Across the Bay of Bengal in India, for example, the British Raj was at its zenith with stiff-lipped pukka sahibs lording it over ‘a fifth of humanity’. Much of the lowly desk work there was being done by a vast native clerical class—an army of Anglophone ‘babus’ in possession of a cut-price Western education. It was from this new caste that the leading lights of the Indian independence movement would rise, speaking smoothly in the tongue of their oppressors.

  But in the East Indies, the Dutch were still governing through those old layers of batik-clad regents and princes, a stratum that was part-administrative apparatus, part-museum piece, and where a bowdlerised version of princely protocol was still the order of the day.

  At the end of the 1890s just 150,000 so-called inlanders, or ‘natives’, out of a total population of some 40 million had been enrolled in government primary schools, and even their instruction was mainly in Malay. When it came to a proper European education in the Dutch schools of the cities, a measly cabal of just 1,500 ultra-elite natives—the sons of the most senior of Europhile aristocrats—were studying alongside their European brethren. But under the auspices of the Ethical Policy this had all begun to change.

  First, the European lower schools in the cities were opened to any inlander with the ready cash to pay the fees. Then Dutch language, and even Dutch teachers, were brought into the higher class of native primary schools, and the entire school network was greatly expanded. Elsewhere, old institutions set up decades earlier to give young aristocrats a modicum of formal schooling were overhauled and reinvented as serious training colleges designed to turn out well-rounded, Dutch-speaking civil servants.

  By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first generation of graduates was emerging from the schoolrooms and lecture halls—earnest young men in possession of ideas that their fathers and grandfathers could never even have imagined. Most of them were still drawn from the ranks of the indigenous elite—and thanks to the simple facts of demographics, the vast majority of them were still Javanese. But many of their number came from a substratum below that of genuine aristocrats. They were the studious sons of schoolmasters, local doctors and junior magistrates: they were, in short, the rootstock of a modern middle class, and they would change the course of history.

  One of the earliest manifestations of a nascent native middle-class sensibility came rolling off the backstreet presses of Batavia, Surabaya and Semarang: journalism was coming into its own in the Indies, and for the most part the language was Malay and the type was Latin. Malay had been the major lingua franca of the Archipelago since the days of Srivijaya. But it was usually a spoken rather than a written language. It was what got you by in markets away from home; it was what you used to barter with a Melanesian trader from some lost eastern island, or to beseech the Chinese toll-keeper—and it was what you used when talking to the white men. In the western part of the Archipelago it did take a liter
ary form, but it was usually written in a modified Arabic script called Jawi—a script that wedded Malay literacy closely to Islamic scholarship. But over the course of the nineteenth century Romanisation had crept in, alif-baa-taa giving way to ABC, and a vernacular press soon appeared. By 1900, there were around thirty Malay-language newspapers printed in the Latin alphabet. Journalism became a legitimate trade for literate locals, and on smudged back pages the first buds of a new literary culture unbound by courtly convention was starting to show in the form of modernist poems and short stories.

  But journalism and literature were just the start of it. In no time at all the young men of the new educated class were ploughing headlong into politics.

  Today, in the received narrative of nationalist history, the founding of Budi Utomo, just two weeks after the mayhem of the Badung puputan in 1908, is proclaimed as Indonesia’s moment of ‘national awakening’. Hindsight is a fine thing, however, and if the scholarly young men who gathered in a Batavia medical school on 20 May had been told that they were, in fact, anti-colonial revolutionaries, they would doubtless have been utterly flabbergasted.

  The founding members of Budi Utomo, this so-called Beautiful Endeavour, were students of STOVIA, the School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen or ‘School for the Training of Native Physicians’. This was one of those old institutions, originally a training centre for local smallpox vaccinators, that had received an educational upgrade under the auspices of the Ethical Policy. Its alumni were amongst the first of the new elite. The man who had come up with the idea for the Budi Utomo was a doctor from Yogyakarta called Wahidin Soedirohoesodo (sometimes also spelt Sudirohusodo), and whatever later myth-makers might claim, he was certainly no radical anti-colonialist. He was an aficionado of the traditional arts who believed that Javanese culture could be returned to the heights of Majapahit-style glory through the medium of Western education.