A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  On 27 December 1949, the Netherlands finally ceded sovereignty to a Republic of the United States of Indonesia. It was a gimcrack federation that no one really wanted, but it consisted of all former colonial territories—all, that is, except for the western half of the great green island of New Guinea, which the Dutch retained.

  As the second half of the twentieth century began, the federation threatened to fall apart before it had even begun to function. Raymond ‘Turk’ Westerling, now acting as a freelance guerrilla, launched his own terrorist campaign against the Republic from the Priangan highlands near Bandung. He called his eight-hundred-man militia the ‘Legion of the Ratu Adil’, using the ubiquitous Joyoboyo prophecies to proclaim himself the divine saviour of Java.

  In the federal state of East Indonesia, meanwhile, pro-Dutch Ambonese troops were stirring up trouble of their own, culminating in the proclamation of an independent Republic of South Maluku, with Ambon as its capital. Ultimately, however, the Republican army crushed these and other nascent rebellions. Westerling snuck out of Indonesia and ended his days running a bookstore in Amsterdam.

  Finally, on 17 August 1950, five years to the day after Sukarno and Hatta had stood outside a modest Jakarta bungalow and read their declaration of independence, the federation ceased to exist and the unitary Republic of Indonesia came into being, with Sukarno as its president and Jakarta as its capital. It was a vast nation, stretching from the northernmost tip of Sumatra, down across the crowded countryside of Java and the deep forests of Borneo, beyond the beaches of Bali and Lombok, and out into the scattered landfalls of Maluku and Nusa Tenggara. It was home to around 80 million people speaking myriad languages and practicing manifold cultures, and there were many who guessed that it would never survive.

  CHAPTER 9

  YEARS OF LIVING

  DANGEROUSLY:

  THE SUKARNO ERA

  It was hot in the crowded hall. The silence was broken here and there by a stifled cough and by the whirring of the cine cameras on the press balcony. Delegates fanned themselves with their conference papers. At the head of the room, backed by a rank of flags, Sukarno rose to the podium. He was dressed in a pristine white suit and a black velvet peci, the fez-like cap that had become part of the essential uniform of Indonesian nationalism. He shuffled his papers and began to speak.

  The room was filled with delegates of twenty-five countries, including thirteen serving prime ministers. On the dais behind Sukarno, Nehru of India slouched in his seat with the casual confidence of a born statesman. Next to Nehru, U Nu of Burma was grinning enthusiastically. Indonesia’s vice-president Mohammad Hatta was sitting at U Nu’s left, upright, utterly immobile and unblinking behind thick spectacles, the eternal counterpoint to Sukarno’s florid charisma. Also there were Zhou Enlai of China, and the Indonesian prime minister of the day, Ali Sastroamidjojo.

  ‘As I survey this hall and the distinguished guests gathered here, my heart is filled with emotion’, Sukarno declared. ‘This is the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples—so-called coloured peoples—in the history of mankind!’

  And so, indeed, it was. It was 18 April 1955, and the Bandung Afro–Asian Conference was underway. Over the previous days, dozens of chauffeur-driven cars had made their way to Bandung, travelling up from Jakarta through the mountains where the over-lords of the Cultivation System had worked their labourers to death a century earlier. The passengers were the prime ministers, foreign ministers and sundry hangers-on from new and old nations across Asia and Africa. Soon they were all rubbing shoulders in the city where Dutch prisoners of war had been interred ten years before. Foreign reporters had arrived in their droves; the hotels did a roaring trade, and the Indonesian hospitality committee laid on a call-girl service to meet the nocturnal needs of the delegates.

  The conference had, in fact, been the brainchild of Prime Minister Sastroamidjojo. But this was unmistakably Sukarno’s moment, and as he got into his stride he was making the most of it.

  ‘Our nations and countries are colonies no more’, he told the onlookers. ‘Now we are free, sovereign and independent. We are again masters in our own house.

  ‘Yes, there has indeed been a sturm über Asien—and over Africa too’. This was a standard Sukarno affectation—a random foreign phrase dropped into a speech as a flag of his own masterful internationalism. Out in the hall the reporters scribbled and the assorted Arab princes mopped their brows.

  ‘Yes, there is diversity among us. Who denies it?’ Sukarno said, pausing for dramatic effect before filling his voice with passion. ‘But, again, what harm is in diversity, when there is unity in desire?’

  It was a truly proud moment. Here, just a few years removed from the revolution, was Indonesia on the world stage—even if the Bandung Conference would ultimately achieve little beyond a mild declaration of brotherhood in anti-colonialism and a certain amount of backroom politicking. For Sukarno, too, it ought to have been a great achievement, his confirmation as a world leader. But in 1955 he was a man straining at the limits of a constitutional presidency, the figurehead of a country struggling to come to terms with its newfound independence. He was also watching over a political system sliding into chronic ineptitude. Indonesia’s first national election was due just a few months after the Bandung Conference, but Sukarno was already beginning to wonder if democracy was a good idea. Before the decade was out he would have broken his constitutional bounds, appointed himself uncontested and unelected Indonesian supremo, and created a political atmosphere so tense that it would eventually produce the most horrific violence imaginable.

  The independent unitary Republic of Indonesia that finally came into being in August 1950 was faced with some monumental challenges. For a start, as some of the more radical nationalists pointed out, the independence struggle wasn’t entirely over. As part of the final treaty with the Netherlands, Indonesia had been forced to take on the huge debts accrued by the Dutch East Indies administration in its final decades. The new Indonesian nation was faced with the bizarre situation of owing 4.3 billion guilders to the Dutch government, a sum that included the cost of military operations intended to prevent its own existence. Many major industries and institutions—including the bank responsible for issuing and guaranteeing the national currency, the rupiah—were also still in Dutch hands, and many of the biggest plantations of Java and Sumatra were still owned and run by Europeans.

  But despite that, Indonesia had the recognisable features of a functioning nation. The vast territories had been organised into provinces—some as big as middle-sized European countries in their own right. Each province broke down into smaller administrative units known as regencies—based on the old colonial system of government through local aristocrats. The 282 royal domains recognising ultimate Dutch suzerainty had been dissolved, and their sultans and rajas had either been turned into government employees or left jobless. Only one royal house had kept its official status in the new republican nation: the firm support that the Yogyakarta court had given to the revolution meant that it endured as a special territory. Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX was made governor for life.

  Sukarno and Hatta were president and vice-president, as they had been since the declaration of independence. But the constitution made them mere figureheads, always on the stage but without sanctioned political power. Both men still bore the revolutionary title Bung, or ‘Brother’, but they remained nothing like brothers in character and political attitude, as one young Englishman noticed when he met them in the early 1950s. Harold Forster and his wife Coral were teachers, seconded in 1952 to Indonesia’s first university, newly opened and using the borrowed pavilions of the Yogyakarta kraton as makeshift lecture halls. The institution had been named after the legendary Majapahit prime minister, Gajah Mada. In the early days the national leaders would often come calling at the university, and Forster quickly recognised Sukarno for a formidable demagogue: he had ‘that dramatic quality which makes a great actor and also a great politician’ and when he
was on campus ‘there was excitement in the air’. Hatta, meanwhile, could not have been more different. He was singularly undramatic: ‘short, chubby and bespectacled, in a neat lounge suit’. If you didn’t know better, Forster wrote, you would have ‘guessed him to be a professor or senior civil servant rather than a fiery revolutionary leader’.

  While these two contrasting men stood in the limelight, the actual running of the country was the task of a mishmash of contesting political parties. The original constitution, penned in 1945, had called for an upper house, the People’s Consultative Assembly, or MPR, which would meet only once every five years to appoint the president; and a lower house, the People’s Representative Council, or DPR, which would have the right to legislate but which would, in practice, often bow to a strong executive president. During the tinkering required to get the Republic through the revolution this had all changed, and by 1950 the DPR was the powerhouse of the government. It had 236 members from 16 different parties divided into three broad groupings: Muslim, socialist (including the communists), and nationalist.

  At the outset the largest party was the Muslim Masyumi, which had evolved from the umbrella group established for Muslim organisations under Japanese rule. Despite being the biggest party, Masyumi was a very long way from controlling a majority of the parliament, with less than a quarter of the total seats. Its near equal was the Indonesian National Party, or PNI. Like Masyumi, this party had roots in a wartime organisation, and it claimed the heritage of Sukarno’s 1920s party of the same name. Further down the ranks there were myriad small socialist and nationalist parties, a clutch of special interest Protestant and Catholic groups, and the ever-resilient PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, which had managed a partial rehabilitation since its involvement in the Madiun rebellion in 1948.

  At a glance, the wild diversity of ideologies without any single party coming anywhere near holding an absolute majority might have seemed unworkable. And when, in 1952, the Nahdlatul Ulama, the influential organisation of traditionalist Javanese Muslims founded in the 1920s, split from Masyumi and struck out on its own, the prospects of any one party achieving dominance became slimmer still. But in practice, ideological commitments were rarely absolute: nationalism, Islam and socialism often overlapped in Indonesia, and there was usually room for enough compromise to form a coalition, elect a prime minister and attempt some legislation. The situation was hardly conducive to stability, however, and the average life expectancy for an Indonesian cabinet in the 1950s was twelve months. The only hope for real progress, as far as many were concerned, was a national election.

  On 29 September 1955, Indonesia went to the polls for the first time. In Yogyakarta the English teacher Harold Forster woke that morning feeling decidedly uneasy. Foreign reporters, and more than a few Indonesians, had been prophesying doom for days. There would be carnage, they said; the elections would unleash anarchy on a par with the violence of the early revolution. But when he peered out of his modest bungalow at the bright morning street, Forster was greeted by a scene of the utmost tranquillity: far from seething with unrest, Yogyakarta seemed to be deserted. Baffled, he dressed and went for a walk. It was only when Forster reached the first polling station that he realised why things were so quiet elsewhere: ‘The people were not visible on the streets because they were packed in the school yards in enormous sinuous queues, patiently waiting for their turn to vote’.

  There were all sorts, from toothless old hags to young girl students, from smart westernised office workers to peasants from the kampongs, dressed in their best and complete with kris, as befitted a great occasion. Hundreds of babies, slung on their mothers’ hips, suffered for democracy. Despite a staggering proportion of illiteracy Indonesia had universal suffrage over the age of eighteen, and here were the people, quiet, orderly but firmly determined to exercise their right to choose their own government at last.

  It was the same all over the country. From hill towns in the Bukit Barisan mountains of Sumatra to tiny islands in Maluku, they had turned out: some 39 million people, more than 91 percent of the registered electorate. Nothing served so well to show that Indonesia, for all its faults, was now a nation.

  A staggering eighty-three separate parties and independent candidates contested the elections, and every village square and every bus depot was festooned with multi-coloured party flags. The election was run on the principle of proportional representation, so voters had only to choose a party, rather than an individual. And with such high levels of illiteracy, symbols counted for everything. Everyone entering the polling booths was presented with an enormous ballot card, speckled with dozens of cartoon-like party signs. They had to puncture their preferred picture, fold the sheet into a chunky wad, and cram it into the ballot box. The whole process went off in an air of almost surreal calm. As far as the watching Harold Forster was concerned, ‘It was the quietest election I have ever seen, but there was no doubt of its fairness and freedom. If this was not democracy, nothing was’.

  And then it was time to wait for the results. The outcome of this unprecedented act of communal decision-making turned out to be rather underwhelming. The biggest losers were the Muslims of Masyumi, who slipped into second place behind the PNI, but neither party had managed to accrue even a quarter of the vote. The Nahdlatul Ulama, meanwhile, had come storming out of leftfield to take 18.4 percent, worth forty-five seats in parliament. And the rehabilitated communists of the PKI had garnered 16.4 percent and thirteen seats. Nobody else managed to get more than 3 percent of the vote.

  Ultimately, the election only made it clear that it would be virtually impossible for any of the four biggest parties ever to win a majority. Far from doing away with the permanent coalition-based stalemate that had defined the first five years of the Indonesian parliament, the election had confirmed it. And now the president was getting twitchy…

  At the time of Indonesia’s first election Sukarno was a man in his mid-fifties. But he was not, by any means, ready for the quiet role of the elder statesman. He was still full of vigour, and as if to prove it he had just taken a new wife. At the height of the post-war struggle against the Dutch, he had finally convinced his aging second wife Inggit to grant him a divorce, and had flown the fragrant Fatmawati from Bengkulu to Java to become his new bride. The couple had several children—including a little girl called Megawati, born in Yogyakarta at the height of the revolution. But by the 1950s, the president’s irrepressible roving instinct was in play once more, and he was pursuing the glamorous Hartini, a sophisticated Central Java woman he had met, legend has it, at the Prambanan temple complex. Sukarno decided to marry her, and this time he would take advantage of his Muslim right to a second wife. The decision earned him the ire of modernist politicians, who felt that multiple marriages were for anachronistic aristocrats rather than the leaders of modern nations. It also caused considerable outrage amongst women’s groups, and Fatmawati herself was none too pleased—though she did manage to retain her official status as Ibu Negara, ‘Mother of the Nation’, Indonesia’s First Lady.

  Sukarno remained Indonesia’s undisputed figurehead. He lived in the hulking neoclassical palace in Jakarta that had once been the residence of the governor-general, and which was now known as Istana Merdeka, ‘Freedom Palace’. It looked out over the grassy expanse of the Koningsplein—now similarly rechristened Lapangan Merdeka, ‘Freedom Square’—and it was here, each year on 17 August, that Sukarno addressed the crowds celebrating the anniversary of the declaration of Independence.

  Sukarno was a formidable orator, and he could have a crowd a quarter of a million strong laughing at his jokes, cheering at his exhortations, and then dropping abruptly to respectful silence when he proclaimed profundity. He called these speeches ‘a two-way conversation between myself and the People, between my Ego and my Alter-Ego’. In the mid-1950s, the topic of these great orations was often the areas of the revolution that he felt were unfinished. Foremost amongst them was the question of New Guinea.

  Ne
w Guinea sits at the eastern end of the Archipelago. Thickly forested and skewed along the edge of the Pacific Ocean at a forty-five-degree angle, it is the second largest island on earth after Greenland. In 1623 a Dutch explorer named Jan Carstenszoon had reached the south coast and thought that he could see distant snows on the high summits inland. He was roundly mocked when he reported the vision back home, for New Guinea lay just beneath the equator. But Carstenszoon’s eyes had not deceived him. There really was snow on the heights of New Guinea’s central mountains.

  After Carstenszoon’s visit, Europeans had for the most part left the place alone. Merchants from within the Archipelago, as well as wandering Arab and Chinese sea captains, traded along the coast, but as far as most outsiders were concerned the island was essentially empty. It wasn’t, of course, and though they were scattered very thinly, there were indigenous Papuan people living all over the island—often as nomadic hunter-gathers, but in some places as settled villagers practicing well-developed agriculture.

  The Sultanate of Ternate in Maluku had traditionally claimed sovereignty over an ill-defined western chunk of New Guinea, and when the Dutch established suzerainty over Ternate they inherited the claim. But it was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that they made any significant effort to settle in West New Guinea, largely in response to British and German activity in the east of the island. They established the 141st meridian—a clean line running through the middle of the island—as the eastern frontier of the Dutch East Indies, and created a few coastal settlements. Even so, when the invading Japanese troops arrived in 1942, West New Guinea was the single least developed part of the entire colony.