by Tim Hannigan
As the independence movement got underway, however, all that changed, and New Guinea became a significant bone of contention. Once it became clear that Indonesian independence was inevitable, the Dutch unilaterally hived New Guinea off from the Dutch East Indies and declared it an entirely separate colony. For the first time they began to invest in the place, proposing, amongst other things, that it might make a suitable homeland for the thousands of Indo-Europeans likely to be disenfranchised in an independent Indonesia. The more strident Indonesian nationalists were understandably furious, but Hatta and the other pragmatists agreed to allow the Netherlands to hold West New Guinea temporarily, on the understanding that a later transfer would be arranged. No one, of course, asked the local inhabitants what they wanted.
Sukarno and Hatta had always represented the two sides of the nationalist movement. The calm, intellectual Minangkabau Hatta belonged to the sector that was prepared to be pragmatic, to negotiate, and to make concessions. Sukarno, meanwhile, tended to side with those who called for ‘100 percent merdeka’ at any cost. In the 1950s he felt that the Indonesian parliament, whether through inclination or ineptitude, belonged to the concessionary group. In speech after speech he expanded on the need to make West New Guinea part of Indonesia, and to sever the Dutch tentacles that still extended deep into the Indonesian economy. In the aftermath of the 1955 election, Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo unilaterally repudiated 85 percent of the debt Indonesia supposedly owed to the Netherlands, but this was not enough for Sukarno.
Sukarno also worried that the government was sliding into very obvious corruption, and as it did so the potential for discontent in the outlying regions of Indonesia increased. There were rumblings of unease with Jakarta rule from Sumatra and Maluku. Even much closer to home, the hills of West Java were host to a low-level rebellion by the staunch Muslims of the Darul Islam movement. This movement had emerged the previous decade, at the height of the revolution, amongst orthodox Muslims who wanted to turn Indonesia into an Islamic state, and who were dismayed by the secularism of the mainstream nationalists. They had support in Aceh and South Sulawesi as well as West Java, and though they were never a serious threat to the government, they were a permanent irritant.
By early 1957, Sukarno had decided that Indonesia was ‘afflicted by the disease of parties, which, alas, alas, forever makes us work against one another’. What the country needed, he felt, was ‘Guided Democracy’. Parliamentary democracy, he believed, was a Western concept, ill-suited to the culture of Southeast Asia, and as 1955 had proved, a popular vote did nothing to achieve stability. A more appropriate system, he declared, would be based on the Indonesian concepts of discussion and consensus. Since time immemorial, Sukarno argued, wise village elders had gathered in the shade of banyan trees and calmly chewed over the various options until they had decided on the best course of action for their community. He envisaged this model scaled up to take in the whole country. There would be a ‘national council’ made up not of career politicians, but of representatives of the ‘functional groups’—the workers, the artists, the soldiers, the housewives, and so on. This council would, through discussion and consensus, set the direction of policy for a cabinet made up of representatives of every political shade. And the guide in this ‘guided democracy’ would, of course, be the national village chief, the president himself.
Many later critics would assume that Sukarno’s guided democracy was simply the power-grab of a dictator, but this is unfair. His vast ego may well have craved a more decisive role in the running of the country, but his 1957 proposal was a genuine attempt to bring some direction to a floundering nation. What was more, the rejection of parliamentary democracy was nothing new: Sukarno had been arguing since the very start of his career that Western political concepts and systems could rarely be imported wholesale to Indonesia. He had also recognised from the outset that no one of the competing ideologies—socialism, Islam and nationalism—could ever succeed in dominating in Indonesia. The country might have a large Muslim majority, but the orthodoxy of the Islamic parties was anathema not only to the non-Muslims of Bali and the Christian-dominated regions: it was also utterly alien to the millions of rural Javanese whose own adherence to Islam was nominal at best. Socialism and communism, meanwhile, had limits in a society that was in many ways pre-industrial, and there was only so much that nationalism could achieve when it came to social justice. It was necessary, Sukarno had argued publically, even as a young man, to splice these three threads together.
Socialism, Islam and nationalism had, of course, all been well-represented in the parliaments of the 1950s. But the democratic system meant that they pulled against one another, creating an unproductive stalemate. In Sukarno’s vision of guided democracy the ideological stalemate would remain—as it needed to, with no single worldview dominating. However, without the crude distraction of ballots and shows of hands, everyone would work together; there would be progress. On paper, at least, it was a very clever idea.
Guided democracy crept into being over the final years of the 1950s. Hatta had resigned as vice-president in July 1956, frustrated by his own inability to guide the nation and by Sukarno’s increasingly strident behaviour. In March 1957, Ali Sastroamidjojo’s democratically elected cabinet collapsed in the face of rebellions by regional military commanders in Sumatra and eastern Indonesia, and on 14 March 1957 Sukarno declared martial law.
The president’s crucial collaborator in the establishment of guided democracy was the army chief, Abdul Haris Nasution. A Batak from northern Sumatra, Nasution had been working as a teacher in Bengkulu in the 1930s when he first met the exiled Sukarno. During the revolution he had become a commander in the new army of the Republic. He had always had political interests, and he believed in a so-called third way in which the military would play an advisory role in government, reserving the right to nudge the country back on track if the civilians went astray.
By the end of 1957 there was a Sukarno-appointed ‘business cabinet’, supposedly organised without recourse to party lines, and the ‘national council’ was in place, complete with its ‘functional groups’. At the same time a constituent assembly was attempting to put together a new constitution. Outside of the meeting rooms and presidential palaces, meanwhile, Sukarno had encouraged PKI- and PNI-affiliated unions to start seizing Dutch assets ahead of nationalisation, and the remaining 46,000 Dutch citizens were ordered to leave Indonesia.
The eviction of the Dutch citizens and the seizure of Dutch assets was the first move in what would soon be a programme of wilful confrontation with the outside world. International relations worsened in 1958 when the United States, alarmed by what looked like a leftwards tilt in Indonesia, backed an unsuccessful rebellion by an alliance of Masyumi leaders and conservative nationalists in Sumatra. Nasution’s army crushed the rebellion with minimal fuss. Following the precedent of the eviction of the Dutch, the army also began forcing ethnic Chinese traders out of the countryside, in line with a ban on foreign citizens participating in the rural economy. Most moved into the cities where they tried to start afresh, but over a hundred thousand Chinese were actually repatriated to China. Many of them were from families that had been in Indonesia for generations.
In July 1959, Sukarno dissolved parliament and dismissed the constituent assembly before it had managed to create a new constitution. He brought back the old 1945 constitution, hastily drafted during the Japanese occupation. It made him what he had always wanted to be: a strong president with executive powers. Just for good measure, he decided to make himself prime minister, too. Guided Democracy was now firmly in place, and its leader was spoiling for a fight with the world.
By the 1960s Sukarno was showing his age. He was a little over-weight; there were dark bags beneath his eyes and a puffiness to his face. Beneath the ever-present peci cap his hair had thinned, and he was beginning to have trouble with his kidneys. He was showing no signs of slowing down, however.
Guided democracy had given Sukar
no the chance for yet more demagoguery, more opportunities to conjure new phrases and concepts from the air. And he did have a genuine talent for capturing the imagination of the nation. He had survived a number of assassination attempts over the years, and there were rumours that he possessed the mystic Javanese power of invulnerability—a property that had been attached to many a great leader of the past, not least Diponegoro. His sexual appetites had not waned either, and he had availed himself of several more wives, including a nineteen-year-old Japanese girl he had met in a hostess bar in Tokyo in 1959. He also had innumerable mistresses secreted in villas all over Jakarta. Members of the educated elite, the women’s movement and some of his former revolutionary fellows might have rolled their eyes at his endless romantic dalliances, but they only increased his potent prestige with the masses. In 1963 he had himself declared ‘Leader for Life’, and there was no outcry from the streets. His charisma could work its magic on foreigners, too: he had recruited a glamorous New York gossip columnist to help him write his autobiography.
Sukarno’s Independence Day speeches, which were delivered on 17 August each year, grew more flamboyant. Each had an overwrought title: in 1962 it was ‘The Year of Victory’, while 1963 was ‘The Ringing Out of the Sound of Revolution’. And when it became time to make the 1964 speech, he declared that the coming twelve months would be ‘The year of Vivere Pericoloso’. This was one of his more obscure dashes of foreign idiom, and even the international reporters were left scratching their heads. When they looked up the phrase, they discovered that he had borrowed it from Mussolini, of all people, and that he had used it to proclaim ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’.
Sukarno had ratcheted up the rhetoric against the Netherlands over New Guinea with fiery threats of military action. The president’s theatrics might have been viewed with distaste and growing alarm by many Western politicians, but on this issue he actually had the United Nations on his side. In 1962, the Netherlands bowed to international pressure and handed West New Guinea to the United Nations, which then passed it on to Indonesian control in 1963, on the understanding that there would be an ‘act of free choice’ by the inhabitants, a plebiscite to decide its future, within five years. The place was renamed ‘Irian’.
It was a triumph for Sukarno, but with no more Dutchmen to fight he was in danger of being without an enemy. Nothing, he understood, could unite a decidedly ramshackle nation like an external conflict, so he swung next for the new federation of Malaysia, which Britain had forged from its former territories and protectorates in the Malay Peninsula, Singapore and northern Borneo. The federation, Sukarno believed, would be nothing more than the puppet of the dastardly forces of NEKOLIM, his pet acronym for ‘neo-colonialist-imperialists’. Indonesia, he announced in 1963, would ‘crush Malaysia’. He began a process known as Konfrontasi, ‘the Confrontation’, whipping up angry street protests in Jakarta, and sending soldiers to the jungle borders of Kalimantan, as the Indonesian portion of Borneo was now known (where they struggled against professional Commonwealth troops).
Sukarno also swung for other Western targets. In 1964 it was the turn of the United States, which had only recently backed Indonesia’s claims over New Guinea. During the ‘Year of Living Dangerously’ speech on 17 August, Sukarno condemned the USA as the biggest of all NEKOLIM forces. Soon semi-sanctioned mobs were attacking American-owned businesses and Hollywood movies were banned from cinemas. At one point the innocuous East Java pop group Koes Plus, Indonesia’s answer to the Bee Gees, were arrested for playing American rock and roll. In Jakarta, meanwhile, Sukarno was commissioning ostentatious and expensive symbols of national pride, even with Indonesian debt topping US$2 billion. Most notable was the ‘National Monument’, popularly abbreviated to Monas, a stark 433-foot (132-metre) tower rising from the middle of Lapangan Merdeka.
Politically, Sukarno was still attempting to strike a balance, keeping the opposing political forces within the country in play as ideological counterpoints. The problem, however, was that his own grip on the situation was slipping, and the most powerful of those opposing forces were heading for a confrontation of their own.
Guided democracy had not been good for the traditional parties. Some, including Masyumi, had actually been banned. But one political organisation had flourished, and that was the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. By the early 1960s, under the leadership of chairman Dipa Nusantara Aidit—a veteran of the revolution from the island of Belitung off the southeast coast of Sumatra—it had become the largest national communist party in the world outside of China and the Eastern Bloc. It claimed 3.5 million members, and some 20 million affiliates through its connected labour organisations and unions. The sheer scale of the PKI made other political forces nervous. The religious groups were particularly concerned; when the PKI attempted to enforce government land reforms in East Java, redistributing farmland from traditional landlords to peasant farmers, there were violent clashes with the youth wing of the Nahdlatul Ulama, which was always eager to portray the PKI as a religion-hating mob.
The other major force in 1960s Indonesia that was becoming nervous of the rise of the PKI was not a political party or religious organisation: it was the TNI, the Indonesian National Army. The army had, initially, done very well out of guided democracy. One third of the cabinet was made up of army officers and Nasution’s concept of the military’s ‘third way’ role seemed to have been formalised. But the top brass was mostly drawn from the old Javanese and Sumatran elites, conservative men who disliked socialism and were increasingly averse to the president’s antics. Sukarno was aware that the military was a potentially volatile weight in his increasingly precarious balancing act, and from 1963 he had moved to curb its power, ending martial law and reducing the army role in government.
Both military and religious leaders were worried that Sukarno was not just tolerating the rise of the PKI; he seemed to be actually encouraging it, even if only as a balance against their own influence. Internationally, too, the president was displaying distinctly left-wing sympathies. Sukarno had told the United States to ‘go to hell with your aid’ after it cut financial assistance in the wake of the anti-American actions of 1964. He initially approached Moscow in search of more cash, but then turned in the direction of communist China, and began to talk of a ‘Beijing–Jakarta axis’. The Cold War was getting decidedly hot at this point, with American boots on the ground in Vietnam, and the apparently credible threat of Indonesia turning communist terrified many Western observers.
By the time Sukarno’s ‘Year of Living Dangerously’ drew to a close with a new Independence Day speech on 17 August 1965, the political atmosphere in Indonesia was toxic. There had been clashes between PKI activists and Muslim youth organisations not only in East Java but also in Aceh in Sumatra, prompting an American observer in the US consulate in Surabaya to predict that ‘a civil war between the two groups will eventually be fought’. In Jakarta, meanwhile, there were persistent rumours that a cabal of senior right-wing generals were being sponsored by the CIA to launch a coup against Sukarno. It was, in the circumstances, an eminently believable rumour. It does not, however, appear to have been true, and this may be why, when September came and the generals in question heard a report that in fact it was the forces of the left who were plotting a coup against them, they dismissed it as nothing more than gossip and propaganda…
At 3 am on 1 October 1965, General Abdul Haris Nasution was in bed at his home on Jalan Teuku Umar, a quiet street south of Lapangan Merdeka in Jakarta. The house was an old-fashioned colonial bungalow, a place of tiled floors, high ceilings and long corridors.
Jakarta nights in the 1960s were dark and silent. There were none of the towering skyscrapers or howling traffic that mark the city in the twenty-first century; by day the potholed streets were plied by a few battered buses and a tiny handful of private cars, but little moved after dark. But despite the heavy, blanketing silence, the general, who was now serving as defence minister, despite Sukarno’s efforts
to curb military influence in government, was not asleep. The monsoon would begin within weeks and the night was humid and thick with insects. The mosquitoes had kept Nasution and his wife Johanna awake, and they were both quick to rise from their bed when they heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the hall outside. When they opened the bedroom door they spotted a uniformed man with a machine gun. Quickly they slammed the door and slid the bolt, and as they did so a shot rang out. Nasution, dressed only in a sarong, slipped out of a side door and made for the garden. As he crossed the grass a volley of shots exploded behind him and lights came on all over the house. He scrambled over the high brick wall at the back of the property and tumbled into the garden of his neighbour, the Iraqi ambassador, shattering his ankle as he fell. With the sound of shooting and shouting still echoing in the night, he crawled across the lawn and hid under a bush.
Back in the house, soldiers dressed in the uniform of the elite presidential guard were demanding of Johanna to know where her husband was. In the confusion an ill-fated young aide who had been sleeping in the guest quarters had been seized in the mistaken belief that he was the general; a policeman from a neighbouring house had been gunned down; and a trigger-happy trooper had accidentally shot and fatally wounded Nasution’s five-year-old daughter. Leaving Johanna and the other women of the house sobbing in the hallway, the men bundled the unfortunate aide into a waiting truck and rumbled away southwards, just as the first stain of daylight was starting to show on the eastern edge of the night.