Moorings

In the eastern end of the Indian Ocean, the hardening of racial boundaries from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards occurred under the aegis of a globalized imperial system. According to Dutch classification, every non-white person in the Netherlands Indies was part of a European empire. The vast majority of Indies population were of course Dutch subjects, but there were people relegated to the category of ‘Foreign Orientals.’ For example, Malays were often labeled ‘Britisch-Maleiers,’ even if in Dutch territory simply because the Malay peninsula, identified as place of origin for all Malays, had fallen under British influence in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, Chinese subjects who originated from Taiwan were recognized as Japanese because the territory was colonised by Japan in 1895. South Asian populations in the Dutch colony on the other hand were alternatingly labelled ‘Britisch-Indiers,’ ‘Klingaleezen’ and ‘Bengaleezen.’ Because Dutch colonial censuses were not diligently undertaken, we do not know the proportion of the South Asian population throughout the colonial period; the only systematic colonial census published in 1930 put the population at 1-3% depending on their location in the vast archipelago. Evidently, urban areas in Padang, Medan and Surabaya had enough South Asians for them to have their own quarters with their own community heads.
    Yet the much older category of ‘mooren’ predated these categories, appearing in both VOC (Dutch East India Company) records and Dutch colonial government records before 1850 especially. Who were these ‘mooren’ exactly? A clue is provided by the fact that the term ‘klingaleezen’ was sometimes substituted for ‘mooren.’ By using the term ‘mooren,’ Dutch authorities linked South Indian Muslims with other Muslims much further away in Spain (who once ruled them) a few centuries before. But this link excluded non-Muslims from Malabar and parts of southern India. The ‘Hindoe-Klingaleezen’ were a “neglected” people the Dutch should pay more attention to, a Dutch newspaper lamented in 1918, which suggest that on its own, the term only referred to Muslims. Also, why did “Bengaleezen,” a label that applied to all Indians from northern India regardless of origin, remain a distinct but undifferentiated category too? Although nearly all references to ‘mooren’ after 1800 refer only to the Indian subcontinent, the term emerged out of Dutch experience in Sri Lanka from 1640 to 1796 referring to Muslims of Tamil descent who were living in Dutch Ceylon who were of mixed ethnicity. “But more likely, if not certain, is that they are descended from the 'Mooren,' or so-called Klingaleezen of the Malabar coast,” the reporter of Sumatra Courant noted in September 1871. They came mainly for trade, another reporter wrote in De Locomotief in 1873. The term, in other words had many layers some of which were shed by the Dutch colonial government who took over from the defunct VOC in 1800. By subsequently connecting the ‘mooren’ classification with the subcontinent only, the Dutch government got round the awkwardness of taking over corporate VOC rule by dint of forgetting their association with Dutch Ceylon by implying that those earlier ‘mooren’ are an artefact of an era that had recently ended. 'Mooren' in Netherlands Indies on the other hand were supposedly from the subcontinent instead. The question remains as to how the klingaleezen identified themselves since their voices are rarely found in the archives but in September 1927, a group classified as klingaleezen wrote to the colonial government requested that they not be referred as such anymore since the term is humiliating. The term “kling” had evolved into a racial slur by then in parts of Southeast Asia.
    The category of ‘Britisch-Indiers’ was taken literally. In 1886, the British government in India requested that the Dutch government accept the appointment of a ‘British-Indian Protector’ from the Straits Settlement of Penang to oversee south Indian immigrants (referred to as klingaleezen) in Deli in northeast Sumatra, the site of many tobacco plantations. The south Indian coolies who traveled to work in these plantations were not only claimed by British as subjects but made to sail from southern India to British Penang first before looping back to Deli across the Straits of Malacca although their passage was paid by plantation owners in Sumatra. Dutch authorities were aghast that their authority did not suffice, but British capital buoyed the Dutch tobacco industry and the advantage of having an interpreter in the form of the Protector enticed them to accept the appointment. This arrangement aligned with their imperialistic view of governance.
    Slightly up north, Siam challenged this conception of a world organized according to empires in the late nineteenth century as an independent nation not colonized by Europeans who nonetheless increasingly determined its borders. Through copious inter-imperial correspondence between Bangkok, Singapore and Batavia, the Dutch took it upon themselves to police the presence of Chinese, Malays and South Asians in Siam. The obsession led to the proliferation of “reispas” (travel pass) and travel certificates issued by Dutch consulates, both of which functioned as some kind of proto passport and visa, instruments that first emerged in the colonial world as the late Adam McKeown pointed out in his vast oeuvre. 
    Generally, it was impossible for most people to move freely in the Asia-Pacific region. Ultimately, colonial classification was an inscription practice obsessed with legibility and smoothness although normative confusion between categories persisted by design. Everything was coded and was capable of being endlessly recoded. While much of mobility research is preoccupied with the association between origins and destinations, we know we can move while staying still because one mechanism for mobility is paradoxically dispossession.
 

--Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Time for Dutch Courage in Indonesian

Paul Doolan looks at the continuing controversy over Dutch 'police operations' post-1945 in Indonesia.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Last year marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Dutchman, Cornelis de Houtman, on the island of Enganno, off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. Now, over four centuries later and nearly fifty years after the ending of their rule in Indonesia, the Dutch are engaged in a soul-searching debate concerning their colonial past.

Between 1946 and 1949 two military campaigns, euphemistically called 'police actions', resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Indonesians and, according to one Financial Times Service report, 6,000 Dutch soldiers. However, the colonial power found itself politically isolated as well as economically near bankruptcy, and independence was reluctantly conceded in December 1949; a fact that even today causes controversy.

Criticism of Dutch colonial policy dates back at least to the appearance of Edward Dakker, the Dutch master known as Multatuli's Max Havelaar . At the time of its publication, in 1860, this 'J'accuse' was considered a biting attack against the exploitation and abuse of the poor majority of Javanese by their European and local masters. Today, the novel is generally regarded as a classic work of nineteenth-century Dutch literature, its criticisms been neutralised and made safe due to the passing of time.

The period 1945-49 in Dutch colonial history, however, is still highly sensitive. Indeed, this chapter is conspicuous among colonial studies by its absence. Unlike Vietnam, which Hollywood has transformed into an icon of contemporary culture, post-Second World War Indonesia constitutes something of a collective blind-spot in the Dutch psyche. The case of one of the Netherlands' leading historians, the late Jan Romein, is enlightening. His wife, Annie Romein-Verschoor, had grown up in colonial Dutch East Indies. They were both self-confessed Communists, progressive idealists and committed to Indonesian independence. Yet when Jan Romein published his major study of decolonisation, De Eeuw van Azie (The Asian Century) in 1956, Indonesia earned only a superficial mention. Of the 300 pages, twenty-five were on Indonesia, while the bibliography of 267 titles contained only ten relating to it.

In 1980 a leading Indonesian historian, Taufik Abdullah, referring to the loud Dutch silence, remarked that international historiography was the monopoly of the conquerors. After all, far more works have appeared analysing German and Japanese brutality during the Second World War than the Dutch police actions – actions which took place while Nazi leaders were standing trial for crimes against humanity in Nuremburg. If the Dutch historians were not prepared to do it, announced a historian from Singapore, Yong Mung Cheong, then he would attempt his own analysis of the complex events of 1946-49.

A significant breakthrough in terms of Dutch historiography occurred in 1988 when a new volume of L.de Jong's The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War appeared in Dutch bookstores. Each volume of de Jong's massive work had been awaited with anticipation, not only by professional historians, but also by the Dutch reading public. Bestseller status was assured. Of the eleven volumes the arrival of each invariably led to praise, criticism and open discussion in the national press. When the 1988 addition appeared, however, the outcry from some veterans of the colonial army and the conservative press was bitter and the ensuing debate more heated than usual. De Jong, who is considered a figure of national importance, had dared to criticise the atrocities that the Dutch had inflicted during their police actions.

Another writer, Ewald Vanvught, published Legal Opium in 1983 in which he argues that the control and expansion of the opium trade was a prime motor in Dutch colonial policy. Vanvught says that his work has been inspired by the inertia of the professional historians – he himself is a freelance author. More recently he has claimed that the record of the Dutch presence in Indonesia is one of systematic and continual atrocity, while he accuses Dutch historians of disguising this fact under a cloak of silence. He has cited certain established historians as presenting misinformation as a science, and of forming a tradition in which painful features of the past have been deliberately suppressed.

A number of incidents in recent years have further highlighted how painful this whole issue really is. Ponke Princen was a young Dutch man drafted into the army in 1946 and sent to Indonesia. There he deserted and switched sides, fighting for Indonesian independence. For Indonesians he became a hero but to the Dutch he was a traitor. As the decades slipped by many progressive Dutch citizens began to see Ponke Princen as a principled individual who had been sickened by the immoral acts he was ordered to carry out. But when he applied in Jakarta for a visa to revisit his former homeland for the first time in nearly fifty years, all the old cries of 'traitor' were heard again. Despite having the support of the Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs Princen was initially refused entry into the Netherlands. In 1992 Gra Boomsma published the novel The Last Typhoon . It was the first fictionalised account of the police actions to have appeared in Dutch. In a newspaper interview the young writer made the mistake of saying that Dutch soldiers, while certainly not the same as the SS, could be compared to the SS in some ways. Both he and the interviewer attracted the wrath of the colonial veterans and were charged in court with slander. In June 1994 they were acquitted.

January 1995 saw the appearance of a book of photographs of the Indonesian campaign taken by the late Dutch photographer, Hugo Wilmar. These included shots that had been banned by the military censors at the time. A leading national weekly carried excerpts from the book and the Dutch Photo Institute in Rotterdam held a five-week exhibition. These pictures are in some ways reminiscent of images that we are familiar with from Vietnam; wounded and dead lie on the jungle floor, guerrilla suspects are being interrogated and manhandled by Western troops. For a country that has enfolded a significant part of its past in silence, these are disturbing reminders.

This was followed in July 1995 by the publication of Verboden voor honden en inlanders (No Dogs or Natives), a collection of interviews in which Indonesians who had experienced Dutch colonial rule were given the opportunity to tell their stories. The following month, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands arrived in Jakarta for a ten-day official visit. At home, her visit had been preceded by a bitter debate over whether she should apologise to the Indonesian people for 350 years of colonial rule. Her main speech stopped short of an outright apology. Instead she spoke of feeling 'very sad' at the deaths that had been caused by colonialism.

Ironically, the majority of the Indonesian population are barely aware of their historical link with the Netherlands. The Dutch left little cultural heritage behind and many Indonesians are more interested in the future, rather than in any study of the past. However, for the Dutch, the integration of their recent past with the image of their country as a bastion of tolerance and human rights is a dilemma not yet resolved.

The well-known Dutch cultural critic Ian Buruma recently published his The Wages of Guilt , an excellent analysis of how the Germans and the Japanese have reacted and coped with the horrors of their not-too-distant past. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before his countrymen feel able to turn the lens to their own past too.

Paul Doolan is the Head of History at the International School of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo.

Independence For Indonesian

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the Japanese had promised them. Neither Communism nor Islam much appealed to the nationalists, who were led by Achmed Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta. Sukarno, the son of a school-teacher and Theosophist, had little time for religion or ideology and believed himself a man of destiny. He had been imprisoned and exiled by the Dutch. So had Hatta, a Sumatran with a Rotterdam University degree in economics. Both had collaborated with the Japanese and helped to organise a Japanese-backed Indonesian army.
 

Equipped with Japanese weapons, the nationalists waged an armed struggle against the Dutch, who had powerful economic reasons for recovering the East Indies and believed that most Indonesians wanted them to return. Dutch forces made substantial headway in Java and Sumatra, but there was fierce criticism in the United Nations, and the United States pressed for a negotiated solution. Eventually a conference of 120 delegates assembled at The Hague in August 1949 under the chairmanship of the Dutch prime minister, Willem Drees. 

 

The nationalist delegates were skilfully led by Hatta. On November 2nd, after ten weeks of haggling, the conference reached an agreement which transferred Dutch sovereignty to the United States of Indonesia, with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands as titular head of a new Netherlands-Indonesian Union, Sukarno as Indonesian president and Hatta as prime minister. The thorny question of Dutch New Guinea (Irian Jaya) was put aside for later. The Dutch released thousands of political prisoners before independence was formally celebrated on December 27th. The new Indonesia, with a population of 78 million on an archipelago approaching 2 million square kilometres of land, immediately became an important factor in the Southwest Pacific.

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.

The Future Of Indonesian

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - There is much speculation, and not a little worry, about the future of Indonesia – the giant of Southeast Asia, the most populous Muslim-majority nation in the world, the world’s third-most-populous democracy, a nation which sits astride some highly strategic sea-lanes, and a place sometimes identified in the rhetoric of ‘war against terrorism’ as a potential source of al-Qaeda-linked, or al-Qaeda-type, terrorist movements. The most pressing question seems to be how – or whether – the nation can be held together. It seems that the government of Megawati Sukarnoputri (from July 2001 to the present), and certainly the Indonesian military, believe that the use of force to that end is justified and necessary, at least in the case of Aceh. Some military leaders see the broader American-led ‘war against terrorism’ as an opportunity to re-establish the military as the predominant political force in the nation.

Indonesia consists of the world’s largest archipelago. Running it as a centralised administrative unit would be an immense challenge for any government, let alone one with as many problems as that of President Megawati. So what might the future hold? Will Indonesia fall apart?

Concern about Indonesian unity commonly rests upon a view of its history which is too short-term. Most observers have in mind the Soeharto years (1966-98). All are aware of the extravagant corruption of President Soeharto, his family and his cronies. The regime’s human rights abuses earned it an international reputation for brutality and for an inability to recognise its own long-term self-interests. This was a regime which was often stupid, brutal and corrupt. Yet it also achieved remarkable economic development and, until the crash of 1997, most of Indonesia’s citizens benefited as did many foreign investors. In the context of the Cold War and in the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979, Indonesia seemed to the United States to be a nation which, while remaining non-aligned, was nevertheless non-aligned in ways the West found helpful. The regime was anti-Communist, seemed to have domesticated Islamic political forces, was open to capitalist investment, and was achieving high levels of growth.

The most promising period of the Soeharto regime was the late 1980s. By that time economic development was achieving impressive results. Health, education and welfare standards were rising significantly. Corruption was bad but perhaps not dysfunctional. There was a rapidly growing urban middle class and signs of political openness from time to time. The country was not yet seriously challenged by separatist sentiments, religious radicalism or inter-ethnic conflict. There was plenty that was wrong by the standards of universal human rights, transparency and honesty, but it would not have been unreasonable to think that there was a real chance that things could get better. Indonesia might evolve into a middle-income, ‘soft authoritarian’ or maybe even nascently democratic state, unified, stable, and friendly to the West and to its economic and strategic interests. It may well be this idea, or something like it, that President Megawati has in mind today.

But the centralising model of the Soeharto regime has been discredited in the eyes of a large proportion of Indonesians. Too much freedom was lost, too many corruption became obvious, too much of its forests fell to regime cronies, too much blood was shed, too much brutality was suffered. Above all, the administrative capacity of the bureaucracy, the resources of the military and the general capacity of the government to govern are all far too limited to run Indonesia as an administratively unified state.

It is probable that there is no going back to the late 1980s. However, a longer-term look at Indonesia’s history suggests a different sort of future might be possible.

Looking at the archipelago in the period 1400 to 1800 reveals some distinctive factors. These give the area a distinct identity and continuity which enables us to speak meaningfully of the history of the Malay-Indonesian region as an entity. It used to be said that colonial regimes created the modern states of Indonesia and Malaysia, and there is some truth in that. But the Dutch and British colonial empires broke continuities, too.

The boundaries of this cultural, political and economic continuity were different from modern national ones. The Malay peninsula and Borneo were part of it, and the southern Philippines was at its outer fringes. Papua was not in this world, except for peripheral trading contacts.

This was a maritime world. Seas were not, as in modern states, where lines were drawn to divide polities, but highways that connected polities with each other. Trading towns of east Sumatra had more to do with the other side of the Malacca Straits (in modern Malaysia) than with the remote interior of Sumatra. North Java coastal states were linked to places across the Java Sea in south Kalimantan and resisted attempts to control them on the part of the interior empires of Java itself. Much of the commerce of the great Malay trading state of Malacca, which prospered during the fifteenth century, depended on the seaborne import of the spices of Maluku, the rice of Java and the slaves of the eastern archipelago.

Trade was thus important in linking these places. The astute Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, who was in Malacca in 1512-15, shortly after its conquest by the Portuguese in 1511, visited Sumatra and Java and recorded information from across the archipelago. His Suma Oriental described a vast seaborne trade system which handled bulk items like rice, textiles and slaves, but also high-value, low-bulk products such as spices, gold, benzoin, honey, rosewater, wax, rattan, sandalwood and diamonds. These products circulated around the archipelago on the basis of natural comparative advantages. This Malay-Indonesian network was connected, principally at Malacca, to wider international networks which traded Indian textiles, Chinese goods, and much else from as far afield as Europe.

Cultural continuities also connected the archipelago’s population centres. Islam provided a shared reference, networks of books, teachers, laws and ideas; and the powerful experience for some of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The mystical Sufis were important in spreading ideas and commitment to Islam. Some major Sufi works written in early seventeenth-century Aceh spread across the archipelago, in Malay and in local translations. This was, at least until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not a puritanical or reformist faith. But there were certainly people for whom Islam was a moral imperative and banner of political action: Sultan Alauddin who Islamised South Sulawesi by force of arms in 1608-11; Shaikh Yusuf Makasar who resisted the Dutch East India Company’s intervention in West Java in the 1680s; Trunajaya of Madura who toppled a king of Java in 1677; Kyai Tapa who inspired a Bantenese rebellion in 1750 and prince Dipanagara who led the last great Javanese resistance against Dutch rule in 1825-30, known as the Java War.

Although Hindu Bali did not convert to Islam, it was part of this archipelagic continuity because of its intimate connections with Java and Javanese culture. Until the late eighteenth century, Balinese were involved in the turbulent politics and complex cultural transitions of the easternmost extremity of Java. And Balinese products, not least slaves, were an important element of the trading system.

When Malay-Indonesian kingdoms went to war or made peace, they did it with their fellows within this vast archipelagic community. The sultans of what is now Malaysia rarely battled the rulers of Siam or Burma; their alliances and conflicts were with peoples from Aceh to east Indonesia. The Bugis and Makasarese of Sulawesi traded widely, but their political and trade heartland was the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. When a Javanese king had imperial pretensions, it was to other states in the archipelago that he turned for tokens of obeisance – which they, under most circumstances, refused to give.

In all of these states, the forms of government were pre-modern, with low levels of institutionalisation. The state whose form of governance is best known is the Mataram empire of central and east Java, which was founded in the late sixteenth century and whose descendants still occupy the courts of central Java today. Here we see irregular processes for collecting taxes and levying manpower for public works or war. Such low levels of institutionalisation were in part necessitated by the difficult facts of geography. Java now has a population of over 100 million, but its population around 1800 was probably no more than 3-4 million. Vast tracts were unpopulated, roads were extensive, but easy for brigands or local overlords to cut or tax, and often impassable in the wet season. Smart Javanese kings recognised that they needed alliances with local lords (which meant making sure they shared in the rewards of loyalty), a cultural position which made the monarchy appear to be supported by supernatural powers, military success whenever challenged, and, of course, lots of spies and poisoners. What was true of Java was true of the entire archipelago. It was not run like a modern state.

Thus, there was continuity in the area before the high colonial period of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, but it did not rest upon administrative unity. Rather, it rested upon a shared sense of cultural community, shared histories of interaction, and above all on shared trade links. This trade provided the solid ties of mutual benefit that knitted the archipelago together. The Malay-Indonesian archipelago was not a nation, but it had something that looked like a nascent national economy, with comparative advantage and mutual benefit making it sensible for the region to work together. It was not unlike the European Union: it even had its parallel to the Euro the Spanish (Mexican) Real , the silver ‘piece of eight’, which was the common unit of exchange throughout the region. The coming of the northern Europeans in the seventeenth century soon changed that.

What the Dutch and British colonial powers did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to break the continuity of the region even as they worked for administrative centralisation of their colonial territories. They did this firstly by separating the two sides of the Straits of Malacca into different spheres of interest in the Treaty of London of 1824. Then, the Dutch sought to make the archipelago an administrative unit by conquest. Finally, they broke up the economic continuities of their new colonial state by redirecting its economies towards export destinations outside of Indonesia. At independence in 1949, Indonesia was an administrative unit, but no longer an economic one.

The administrative and political unification of what is now Indonesia began under the Napoleonic governor-general H.W. Daendels (1808-11), who sought to make Java a real colonial territory, governed from Batavia. The interim British administration that followed (1811-16) intervened in the affairs of the Javanese courts in the name of bringing to heel what it regarded as a corrupt ancien régime . This newly interventionist approach precipitated the Java War (1825-30) which, in the end and not without difficulty, the colonial forces won. Thereafter Java became truly a Dutch colony, with its resources developed for the benefit of the mother country. Java’s sugar, coffee, tea and other products helped to make Amsterdam one of the world’s great markets for colonial produce, paid off the Netherlands’ national debt, kept Dutch domestic taxes down, built the Dutch state railway system and did much to stimulate the industrialisation of the Netherlands in the course of the nineteenth century. Java’s trade, once a part of networks involving Sumatra, southern Malaya, south Kalimantan, Bali and east Indonesia, was now to a great extent focused on Amsterdam.

The Dutch had initial misgivings about expansion into the outer islands (except for Sumatra) but, in the more intensive imperial scramble for territory of the later nineteenth century, felt that they had to move to prevent other European powers or Americans from becoming established there. This meant a series of costly wars: in south Sumatra (1819-1907), west Sumatra (1821-38), Bali (1840s, 1906-8), Lombok (1894), south Sulawesi (1858-60, 1905-6), Kalimantan (1859-63) and elsewhere. This process of conquest culminated in the Aceh War, which began with the defeat of the first Dutch expeditionary force in 1873. The war went on for four decades, with significant resistance continuing until 1910-12 – the longest colonial war in history.

As the Netherlands colonial state was being brought together by force, it was being unified by the KPM shipping line. The KPM brought people, products and mail from one part of the archipelago to another, with everything in the end centralised around Batavia (modern Jakarta).

The products which now developed most dramatically were those needed by an industrialising and modernising world, such as petroleum and rubber, tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea, copra, tin and quinine. The new products of the archipelago were mainly directed to international, not Indonesian, markets. By 1914, the ratio of inter-island trade to foreign trade was only 5.5 per cent, 10 per cent in 1921, 17 per cent in 1939. The outer islands now became more important than Java as sources of exports to international markets.

With the Netherlands East Indies fully established by the 1910s – except for remote areas like Papua, barely controlled even by the time of the Second World War – there occurred a degree of administrative unity never before witnessed in the history of the archipelago. It is this which justifies the claim that the modern state of Indonesia was created by the Dutch. But the economic continuities that had once knitted the archipelago together had been broken.

After five years of revolution beginning in 1945, Indonesia’s independence was conceded by the Dutch in 1949. Now Indonesia’s political elite had to decide how they were going to run their new country. Not surprisingly, they shared the assumptions of the Dutch regime under which they had lived, the conventional political orthodoxies of Europe and America, and a commitment to democracy as an abstract idea (although their social and educational backgrounds made them elitists at heart). During the revolution, the Dutch, crucially, had sought to counter the unitary Republic of Indonesia by setting up sham independent states in territories they still controlled so as to create a federal Indonesia in which Dutch influence would remain strong. In December 1949 a federal Republic of the United States of Indonesia was indeed created by the Round Table Conference which brought the Indonesian Revolution to an end, but this Dutch attempt at continuing influence had the effect of discrediting federalism in the eyes of nationalists. Within eight months the federal states were all gone, collapsed into the unitary Republic.

Through the 1950s, governments came and went with alarming rapidity. Administratively they proved inadequate. The bureaucracy was highly politicised and became for the most part a bloated, incompetent and corrupt cancer on the nation. The military was involved in various political ploys, rather poorly, in the earlier 1950s, resulting in it being under-funded, under-trained, ill-equipped and divided. An Islamic rebellion, the Darul Islam movement, had begun in West Java in 1948, even before independence, and even here, in the hinterlands of Jakarta, the army had difficulty in re-establishing control. By late 1956 military commands in the islands outside of Java themselves were setting up regional councils (i.e. carrying out regional coups) – financed in part by the proceeds from smuggling local products to markets outside of the country. Political parties hardly had national electoral bases at all. There were no national elections until 1955 and most parties concentrated on the only game in town: dividing up the spoils in Jakarta.

Cultural unification was a greater success. President Sukarno (1945-66) hammered the theme of national unity incessantly, and struck responsive chords. The national Indonesian language was a powerful tool in this respect. It was adopted throughout the national educational system and in the media. Nevertheless, it remained a minority language; as late as 1971 only 40.8 per cent of Indonesians were literate in the national language. However, the idea that Indonesians were members of a single nation nevertheless was beginning to take root.

The forces of disunity were still powerful. Among the regionally based rebellions the most important was the Sumatra-based PRRI (Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia , Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia) rebellion of 1958, which was crushed quickly, and rather surprisingly, by Indonesian military combined operations. Yet this was not a Sumatran breakaway movement, but an attempt to change the government in Jakarta. Even these regional rebellions took place in a context which assumed that Indonesia was a single state.

Sukarno sought to enhance this national unity and to crush his political opponents by building a sense of ongoing revolution. Both the military and the Communist Party saw advantages in this and played along. Thus was ushered in the chaos of Sukarno’s Guided Democracy government, a teetering house of cards which finally collapsed in the failed coup of 1965 and the bloody anti-Communist violence that followed, in which between 300,000 and 2 million people were murdered and over 100,000 taken political prisoner without trial.

From this bloodshed came Soeharto’s so-called New Order government. Now the national unity project was pursued by putting trusted military men in crucial governmental positions and trusted military units in places which were, or might become, troublesome. Already by 1968 seventeen of Indonesia’s twenty-five provincial governors and over half of itsbupatis (regency heads) and town mayors were military men. If it was necessary to apply violence, there was no hesitation in doing so. The new presidency was born in violence and remained, at heart, a military regime, working with a depoliticised national bureaucracy. And so the politics of the New Order became largely the politics of Soeharto himself and of the military.

If Soeharto could be seen to follow the agenda of his colonial predecessors in maintaining the unity of the archipelago by force, his regime departed from the past in its economic programme. Its first task was to stabilise and rehabilitate the economy. Having achieved this within the first five years, the regime’s technocrats turned their efforts towards development.

The revolution in oil prices of the 1970s not only gave Indonesia vital resources for development, but also made possible a degree of economic nationalism. From the mid-1970s real local industrial and business growth occurred. Java now experienced what Howard Dick calls ‘a belated industrial revolution based on the resource of cheap labour’.

By the time the Soeharto regime fell in 1998 real progress had been made towards creating a national economy, for the first time in nearly two centuries. Various parts of Indonesia were again being tied to each other, rather than to overseas markets, principally because of the development of manufacturing industry in West Java. Now raw materials for that industry were being drawn from the outer islands and the products of that industry were being sold throughout the archipelago (as well as in overseas markets). Indonesia was again becoming an area tied together by economic advantages and self-interest.

The history of the past two centuries suggests that unifying the archipelago administratively can only be done by the use of force. Despite all the developments in communications and other technologies over this period, only compulsion has produced administrative unity. Once the capacity of the Soeharto regime to enforce unity collapsed, anti-Jakarta sentiments bubbled up in many places. In East Timor these have ended in the independence of the area. In Papua there are demands for independence. Throughout the country there is an insistence on greater autonomy from Jakarta. In strife-torn, tragic Aceh a historical sense of déjà vu may be prompted by the thought that the Indonesian military has been fighting to crush the local independence movement for well over a decade already.

Indonesia is now tenuously unified in administrative terms. From 2002, a policy of regional autonomy has been implemented. No one dares call it federalism, but that is what it looks like. The problem for Indonesian policy circles is that the Dutch having discredited federalism and Soeharto having discredited centralisation, there are few middle options to choose. The critics of Megawati Sukarnoputri suspect that she wishes to roll back regional autonomy, being inspired by her father Sukarno’s calls for national unity but far more inclined to embrace Soeharto’s use of force to achieve it than her father’s style of revolution.

Comparison with the colonial and earlier independence periods suggests that administrative unity is unlikely without force, while present social and political realities suggest that force is unlikely to be acceptable to most Indonesians. Therefore any government recourse to force might tear the country apart. Indeed, military force has already done much to destroy Acehnese allegiance to the nation.

In the pre-colonial period, however, Indonesian continuities were products of cultural and economic connections, and of political interaction between autonomous polities, and these continuities are now stronger than they have ever been. Indonesia is now a much more uniformly Islamic country than it was even forty years ago. Ongoing Islamisation has dramatically reduced opposition to Islamic values and norms. Throughout the country are thousands of Islamic schools, many – but certainly not all – of which support the tolerant pluralism which Indonesian religious elites have generally embraced. Notably, there is a widespread network of the State Islamic University in Jakarta and the State Islamic Religious Institutes, university-level establishments which form a powerful institutional base for the liberal, tolerant Islam for which Indonesia is well known. The two largest Islamic organisations, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, have vast educational networks, a dominant philosophy of liberalism and openness, and something like 60 million followers between them.

The sense of Indonesianness is strong. By 1980 61.4 per cent of Indonesians were literate in the national language and the 1990 census reported the figure to be over 80 per cent for Indonesians above the age of five. Three generations of Indonesians have got used to the idea that their nation is something to be proud of. Although Soeharto did much to discredit major symbols such as the national (Sukarnoist) philosophy of Pancasila (Five Principles), nevertheless in most of the country the sense of being Indonesian seems still to matter.

It now makes sense for the various parts of Indonesia to work together as an economic entity, employing comparative advantages to mutual benefit. Reverting to the European comparison, Indonesia not only has the foundations for economic co-operation and a common currency, but things the European Union still lacks: common laws, a common foreign and defence policy, and a common language.

This review of the archipelago’s history suggests that those with an interest in Indonesia’s future might do well to consider how the archipelago functioned in the 1480s. They might then do everything possible to encourage economic interdependence and order the military to limit its role to the defence of the archipelago from external threats. That is, sell Aceh’s energy resources to Java, sell Java’s manufactures to Aceh, and send the military back to the barracks. This policy might marginally enhance the prospects of a peaceful settlement in Aceh. And it may point the way to a new kind of state in Indonesia.

For Further Reading:  

 

M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (3rd ed.; Palgrave; Stanford UP, 2001); Howard Dick, Vincent J.H. Houben, J. Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie, The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 (Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Allen & Unwin and University of Hawai’i Press, 2002); Armando Cortesão (ed. & transl.), The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues (2 vols. Hakluyt Society, 1944); Anne Booth, The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities (Macmillan in association with the Australian National University, Canberra, 1998).