A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  The Indonesian government had previously declared that, whatever the result of the referendum, its rule in East Timor would end no earlier than 1 January 2000. But by the end of September it was clear that the place was imploding. It was obvious that no one, least of all the president, could do anything to stop it. And so, on 12 September, Habibie agreed to allow a force of UN peacekeepers into East Timor under an Australian command. They arrived eight days later, and on 20 October the Indonesian parliament formally gave up all responsibility for the ruined East Timor.

  As a new millennium dawned the Indonesian nation had shrunk. A small fragment of the Archipelago had broken away after twenty-four unhappy years. Many observers suspected that the destruction of East Timor had been not just an act of spite on the part of a military fearful of losing its potency in a post-New Order nation, but also a stark warning to any other corner of the country that might harbour its own secessionist dreams. But whether such a warning would be heeded was anyone’s guess.

  Indonesia had been independent of the Netherlands for half a century. It had been free from Suharto’s grip for a little over a year and a half. It had had a democratically elected government for six months, and a new president for ten weeks. But its future as a nation had never looked so uncertain.

  Epilogue

  Indonesia, Rising

  At a minute before eight o’clock in the morning on 26 December 2004, the Indo-Australian Plate suddenly slipped at the point where it drives under the Eurasian Plate off the west coast of Sumatra.

  All the while that the history of the Archipelago had been unfolding the ancient collision between these two huge slabs of the earth’s surface had continued, one plate bending ceaselessly beneath the other. The subduction zone was a submarine trench, shadowing the entire southern arc of the Archipelago, 23,000 feet (7,000 metres) deep and 186 miles (300 kilometres) offshore. Throughout history it had caused earthquakes, toppling the uppermost blocks from the Hindu-Buddhist temples and cracking the roofs of the mosques. And throughout history the material forced down into the bowels of the earth had fuelled the volcanoes that defined the landscape of the Archipelago. Ancient chroniclers had written of them; they had taken them as portents.

  But this earthquake of 26 December 2004 was entirely out of the ordinary. For a start it was quite simply enormous, measuring somewhere in the region of 9.0 on the Richter scale, one of the most powerful quakes ever recorded. It also went on for an inordinately long time—almost ten minutes. The epicentre was somewhere off the northern tip of Simeulue, a small island off the coast of Aceh in the north of Sumatra. But all across the region people felt the earth move. In the regional capital of Banda Aceh, the morning bustle came to a halt as people crouched or lay in the shifting streets, waiting for the moment to pass. An earthquake is not usually a sudden jolt, or a high-frequency tremor like the passing of a freight train; instead it is a deep rocking to and fro, as if a giant has taken hold of the edge of the land and is trying to work it free of its foundations. In Banda Aceh the palm trees swayed back and forth to the beat of the earth.

  When the shaking finally stopped people got carefully to their feet. The damage was actually not as bad as it could have been after such a long and powerful quake. But the real impact had yet to come. Offshore, some 18 miles (30 kilometres) below the surface, a vast gash had been torn into the crust of the earth. The wound had opened at the epicentre of the quake, then ripped its way northwards at 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometres) an hour, all the way to the Andaman Islands. Above this rupture huge submarine ridges had collapsed under the strain, and great blocks of the ocean floor had been shoved suddenly upwards, forcing a huge bulge of water towards the surface. As this liquid mountain reared up it sucked the water from the coastal shallows out to join it, leaving mudflats and beaches dry in a sudden and ill-omened spring tide. And then, with devastating speed, the water surged back, powered by an energy equal to 1,500 atomic bombs.

  This tsunami fanned out across the Indian Ocean. It tore through beach resorts in Thailand and levelled fishing villages in Sri Lanka. It smashed the seafronts of southern India and overwhelmed low-lying atolls in the Maldives. Its energy refracted around continents and between islands and out into other oceans, and by the time it had finally spent itself, some sixteen hours after the quake, it was lapping ashore as ripples on the west coast of North America.

  But nowhere was hit as badly as Aceh. There, the tsunami surged across the coast, a wall of water and debris rising a hundred feet (thirty metres) in places. Banda Aceh itself was devastated, and all down the west coast the narrow strip of land between the shore and the steep green hills of the interior was left flayed and blackened. Well over a hundred thousand people were killed.

  By the time of the 2004 Tsunami, Indonesia was on to its sixth president. At the start of the twenty-first century the country had been in a truly parlous state. It was riven by any number of violent conflicts; it had just lost its twenty-seventh province, and there were prophesies of doom aplenty, from both outsiders and from many Indonesians. But somehow, none of the grimmest predictions had come to pass. East Timor had gone—finally declaring its own sovereignty in 2002 after two years under United Nations administration—but its departure had not presaged the disintegration of Indonesia. The ethnic and religious violence that had erupted with the end of the New Order seemed to be burning itself out, too. Peace accords in 2002 had brought the worst of the Muslim-Christian fighting in Maluku and central Sulawesi to an end, and the patchy violence that had occurred all over the country had gradually dissipated. There was still an anchor of unrest at each end of the Archipelago—in Aceh and West New Guinea, where entrenched resistance to Indonesian rule continued. But the foreign journalists who had predicted civil war after the fall of Suharto had been proved wrong.

  Not that there weren’t problems. The presidency of the bumbling, near-blind Gus Dur was a political shambles. He might have been lauded by liberals at home and abroad for his avowed nonsectarianism, but his erratic style alienated even his closest allies in government. His visits to Israel and sympathy for other faiths outraged Islamist hardliners on the one hand, and his successful effort to change the official name of West New Guinea from ‘Irian’ to ‘Papua’, in line with local preferences, angered the nationalists on the other. As for his suggestion that Indonesia’s ban on Marxism-Leninism should be lifted and some sort of reconciliation process over the pogroms of 1965 attempted, it horrified just about everyone. Once he had been forced from power in 2001, under a vague cloud of suggested impropriety that seemed to have more to do with incompetence than actual corruption, he returned to the more effective role of gentle elder statesman. By the time he died at the end of 2009 he was one of very few Indonesians who could claim the status of ‘national treasure’.

  His replacement, Megawati, was unlikely to ever achieve such a position, but the students and the poor farmers cheered her on, and she proved more effective as president than some cynics had predicted. She did not do enough to win re-election, however, when the country went back to the polls in 2004. This was the first time that Indonesians were allowed to elect individual candidates, instead of simply casting a vote for a party. The result was the predictable mish-mash of minorities, with Golkar and the PDI-P taking the biggest chunks of the parliament. But voters were now also allowed to choose their own president. The constitution had been amended to allow for US-style presidential elections. Candidates had to get at least a 50 percent share of the national vote, and they were limited to two terms in office. In 2004, after a run-off, the winner was a fifty-five-year-old former general named Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who would be known forever more in the interests of brevity as ‘SBY’.

  He might have been a one-time soldier in the New Order army, but SBY came to power with convincing reformist credentials, promising to tackle corruption, improve education and healthcare, and deal with any number of Indonesia’s other woes. One of his biggest headaches on entering office in October 2004 was Aceh, w
here the army was still locked in a vicious fight with GAM, the Acehnese rebel group. But then, before SBY even had a chance to take stock of the situation, came the tsunami. As the waters receded, the Aceh conflict came to an abrupt halt. International aid agencies descended to help rebuild the province and a peace agreement followed. GAM, which had been fighting the Indonesian government for three decades, signed up for democracy. It had taken plate tectonics to bring one of Indonesia’s most intractable conflicts to a close.

  Even before the tsunami, Aceh had been given a special degree of autonomy in an effort to appease the separatists. After the peace agreement that autonomy was extended, and in this staunchly orthodox corner of the country, sharia, the Muslim legal code, underpinned many local bylaws.

  By the time SBY came to power, a good number of international pundits and journalists were claiming that Indonesia was edging towards some sort of Islamist rule, either through the ballot box or through violence. On an October night in 2002 a suicide bomber had blown himself up in a crowded bar in Kuta, the biggest tourist resort on Bali. Moments later, a huge car bomb exploded outside a night club on the other side of the road; 202 people were killed, most of them from Australia. Other bombings followed, in a luxury hotel in Jakarta the following year, and again in Bali in 2005. Meanwhile, during the 2004 election the Muslim parties dramatically increased their showing, collectively taking 38 percent of the vote, while in society at large the shift towards a more orthodox sort of Islam continued. On university campuses and on city streets there were thousands of candy-coloured Muslim headscarves where there had been almost none a generation earlier, and new concrete mosques were rising in neighbourhoods across the country.

  With the global ‘war on terror’ in full swing following the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, some foreign observers tried to conflate these three phenomena—terrorism, electoral success for Muslim parties, and an increasing Islamic influence on society. But they were, as it turned out, quite separate. The violence was the preserve of a tiny minority, and one of Indonesia’s most notable New Order inheritances was a powerful security apparatus with absolutely no fear of a fight. The men behind the bombs in Bali were tracked down, arrested, tried, and executed, without prompting a hint of the popular backlash that some pundits had predicted. As for the Muslim political parties, their Islamism was of a moderate sort, and after the successes of 2004 their share of the vote fell away to well below 30 percent in the subsequent election. Many young Indonesian Muslims might well be becoming inclined to sign up for a more formal personal interpretation of their faith, but they seemed to have little appetite for electing an Islamic government.

  Ultimately, the major challenges of SBY’s presidency were not terrorism or the breakup of the nation, but the old issues of corruption, inefficiency and infrastructure. Efforts to get to grips with corruption rarely seemed to be effective, and a regional autonomy package that had been brought in at the start of the decade had, if anything, made matters worse. In an effort to tackle grumblings in the outer islands about the neglect and arrogance of the central government, more power had been devolved to the regencies, the administrative units below the level of the provinces. It had appeased many of the original complainants, but before long others were claiming that it had simply created new opportunities for corruption amongst local politicians, and hampered effective provincial government.

  Regional autonomy also made it harder for the central government to deal with Indonesia’s appalling environmental problems, to tackle the large-scale illegal logging operations in Kalimantan, or to take any sensible steps to slow the pace of deforestation there or in Sumatra, where vast swathes of what was once jungle were being turned over to the sterile monoculture of palm oil plantations.

  One of the fundamental problems was that, for all the high drama that had surrounded the fall of Suharto, there had never really been a clean break with the New Order. Suharto himself had died in a Jakarta hospital on 27 January 2008 at the age of eighty-seven. He had passed his forced retirement quietly at home on Jalan Cendana, and he had never been brought to book for the corruption or the excesses of his long rule. Whenever there were moves towards a trial, his failing health was cited as an excuse not to proceed. But there had never been a serious appetite for pursuing him amongst the new political elite anyway, for the fact of the matter was that many of Indonesia’s post-reform politicians were simply veterans of the regime that had gone before. And even where there was no direct New Order link there were sometimes queasy continuities. SBY was married to the daughter of the great communist killer of 1965, Sarwo Edhie Wibowo.

  By the start of SBY’s second term in 2009, a fair degree of voter cynicism had crept in, and little more than a decade after the wave of popular protest that had toppled Suharto, some Indonesians, both poor and middle class, were starting to make nostalgic comments about the days of the New Order, when, they seemed to recall, things had been somehow less chaotic.

  But one thing was certain: Indonesia had thoroughly recovered from the economic meltdown of the late 1990s. The country had crept back into very modest growth under Gus Dur’s presidency, and then picked up speed under Megawati. During his first term, SBY had put competent officials in charge of the economy, tightening up the banking system, reducing public debt and cleaning up the notoriously corrupt tax office, in the face of considerable hostility from the old-style oligarchs and surviving New Order cronies. As a result, Indonesia rode relatively smoothly through the turbulence that crippled Western economies in 2008.

  In 2014 Indonesia went to the polls once again to choose SBY’s successor. This was the first time that power had passed from one directly democratically elected president to another, and the choice was a dramatic one. The frontrunner during most of the campaign was a whippet-thin former furniture salesman from Surakarta named Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi. He had served as governor of Jakarta, but unlike every serious presidential candidate who had gone before, he was not a member of the established political elite. What was more, he had seriously impressive reformist and anti-corruption credentials from his time in charge of the capital and a previous stint as mayor of his home-town, Surakarta.

  On the other side of the contest, meanwhile, was a man whose ties with the ancien régime could hardly have been more obvious. Prabowo Subianto was not just a retired officer of the New Order era army, one-time head of the Strategic Reserve Command and implicated in some of the military’s most heavy-handed efforts to crush the student democracy movement during the late 1990s; he was also the former son-in-law of Suharto.

  During the 2014 campaign, Prabowo did everything he could to tap into any latent nostalgia in the Indonesian electorate, dressing and speechifying like Sukarno, while at the same time channelling Suharto’s ideas about strong leaders with iron fists. Backed by funds from his billionaire businessman brother, Prabowo’s nostalgia-fuelled campaign soon built up a considerable momentum, and by the day of the vote only a hair’s breadth separated the two candidates in the polls.

  In the end Jokowi won, with a modest but incontestable majority. Few serious observers really supposed that he would be able to instantly change the traditional style of Indonesian politics, with its cynical horse-trading and its entrenched culture of patronage. But Jokowi’s election as Indonesia’s seventh president was nonetheless a powerful symbolic moment. It had been a close-run thing, but in the end the country had chosen the new man, rather than the figure who harked back, quite literally, to the past.

  By the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, many admiring observers were proclaiming Indonesia a rising economic superpower, all set to take to the podium alongside India and China. Across Jakarta and Surabaya and Medan and Bandung, the malls and multiplexes and apartment blocks and luxury housing complexes were rising once more, and foreign cash was pouring in. Whether the hyperbolic proclamations of coming glory would ultimately prove as ill-founded as the prophecies of doom and gloom a decade earlier was not entirely
clear, for Indonesia certainly still had its problems.

  Corruption still stretched down through the deep layers of government, and healthcare and education, though universal, were frequently of woeful standards. The old violence could still flare up at unexpected moments in odd corners of the Archipelago—an attack on a church here, a riot against a transmigrant community there; unseemly blemishes on the glittering developmental façade. In the east of the country in West New Guinea, or Papua as it was now called, there was still much resentment of Indonesian rule. There was active resistance, too, and this was the one part of the country where the army could still show its teeth, just as it had done in East Timor and Aceh in the decades past.

  But one thing was clear: Indonesia existed. If only through sheer dogged perseverance and shared traumatic experience, it was more than a disparate collection of islands inside an old colonial border. It was a nation.

  History is everywhere in Indonesia. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, the national motto of this, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, is a fragment of a fourteenth-century poem celebrating the unity of Shiva and Buddha. There is not a city in the country that does not have a street named for Diponegoro, the rebel prince who fought the Dutch in nineteenth-century Java, and a street named for Gajah Mada, the Majapahit prime minister who wanted to conquer all of Nusantara. These same cities also all have streets named for Ahmad Yani, the senior general thrown down the Crocodile Hole at Halim Airbase in the early hours of 1 October 1965. The bank notes, too, are adorned with a motley array of soldiers from the revolution, and recalcitrant royals and rebel chiefs from the more distant past co-opted as ‘national heroes’, although they lived and died long before the idea of Indonesia was ever invented. Every year on 17 August the whole country is swamped in a mass of waving red-and-white flags in commemoration of Sukarno’s ad hoc proclamation of independence in 1945. On 10 November, meanwhile, children across the nation line up to pay homage to the memory of the heroes who fought the British in the Battle of Surabaya. And 20 May is ‘National Awakening Day’ in honour of the founding of Budi Utomo in 1908.