Indonesia Peoples and Histories by Jelman Gelman Taylor

INTRODUCTION
Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. It is important as exporter
of petroleum, natural gas, and manufactured goods, as consumer
of Western and Japanese aid and investment funds, and as the world’s
largest Muslim nation. It is an archipelago country, made up of 17,506 islands,
populated by 230 million people speaking more than three hundred languages.
It has been an independent republic for more than fifty years, before
that a colony of the Dutch and a zone of Islamic monarchies. The world’s
largest Buddhist temple survives from the ninth century in the heart of Java,
and a form of Hinduism lives on in Bali. A fringe of Christian communities
encircles Java.
Indonesia is a modern idea, conceived first in the minds of the Dutch military
around 1850, adopted by Dutch civilian politicians in the 1890s, and realized
by 1914. Indonesian youth who lived in the principal cities of the Dutch
colonial state and studied in Dutch-language schools conceived the goal of
making the colonial state the chief focus for everyone’s identity but under selfrule.
When they took up this ambitious project peoples’ minds were already
informed with the identity of Islam. This self-understanding had evolved in
stages from identity as subjects of a Muslim king, to a conception of self as
Muslims in a land ruled by an aristocracy of Muslims united in alliance with
Christian Europeans. Promoters of Indonesian identity competed with other
youths who wanted to arouse in Muslims an objection to rule by Christians.
Some also wanted to wrest Islam from its local roots, to shed the distinctive
features of Indonesian cultures celebrated by nationalists, and align Islam with
Arabness.
This book is a social history more than a political one. It narrates journeys
of peoples of the archipelago into today’s republic. It aims to set the lives of
men, women, and children in huts, workshops, and palaces, to present parallel
histories, influenced and influencing, submerged but not obliterated by the
big picture. The subtitle of the book is Peoples and Histories because many pasts
have fused into the nation of Indonesia.
I believe that the past consists of facts about people and processes that are
knowable and verifiable and that interpretations select and suppress facts according
to the personality and moral judgments of each historian. Every writer
has an agenda that emphasizes one class or one gender or one region. Individual
authors may have an aptitude for economic or technological history, or a
fascination with individuals in their settings. My approach to Indonesian histories
grew out of an early interest in the meeting of Indonesian and Dutch in
Asian settings. That interest led into other pasts and times before and since
those encounters.
Modern Indonesia’s presidents have ruled a state that has existed longer
than the Dutch colony did in its final form. They have drawn on technologies
available to the modern world to generate a profound identity of Indonesian
through the state ideology of Panca Sila, whose ideal followers believe in one
God, in one Indonesian identity, in a place in the world for Indonesia, in a
homegrown solution to political organization, and in a just and prosperous society.
This state philosophy competes with Islam and its commitment to Allah,
Muhammad, Islamic law, and a place for Indonesia within the world Islamic
community.
Sukarno, who was Indonesia’s first president (in office 1945–1967), perceived
Indonesia as a land of village republics with traditions of mutual aid,
discussion, and consensus that could be applied to the national level. Maria
Ulfah Santoso, Indonesia’s first woman law graduate, viewed the same landscape
and saw women wanting monogamy and the vote. In 1945 she advocated
protection for all Indonesians through a bill of rights. Pakubuwono X,
ruler of the princedom of Surakarta from 1893 to 1939, wanted to be acknowledged
king of Java. The visionary Kartosuwiryo (1905–1962) accepted
the title of imam from his followers, preached withdrawal, and launched his
militias on campaigns to usher in an Islamic state. The communist activist Tan
INTRODUCTION
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Malaka (1897–1949) thought that ordinary Indonesians would never have
lives worth living until hereditary kings, aristocrats, and colonial governors
were swept aside.
The idea of an independent Indonesia has caused uprisings and wars. In
1926 and 1927 branches of the Indonesian Communist Party attempted to
throw off Dutch rule. In 1943 members of paramilitary forces rebelled against
Japanese occupation of the archipelago. In 1945 armed bands began the fight
to prevent Holland from reimposing colonial rule following the collapse of Japan’s
wartime empire. In 1948 the Army of (the Muslim) God and Indonesian
Communist troops attacked Republican troops in separate attempts to realize
their own visions of Indonesia. So did rebels and separatists in Ambon, Sulawesi,
Sumatra, and west Java in the 1950s. In 1965, in the cause of preserving
the Republic of Indonesia from communism, General Suharto unleashed
regular army units, local militias, and individuals against left-wing Indonesians.
Armed and civilian opposition in East Timor challenged the idea of Indonesia
from 1974 to 1999. Politicians and militias today challenge the idea of
Indonesia in Aceh and Papua.
Indonesians today debate how they should be governed, which rights
should be limited for the benefit of the whole, what direction the country
should move in, and whether a nation of Muslims can create lasting democratic
forms. The openness and vigor of these debates are attributable to the end of
President Suharto’s thirty-two-year rule in 1998. While groups campaign for
human rights, an independent judiciary, and an accountable government, the
Western press depicts Indonesia as a place hostile to a secular West, a land of Islamic
militias intent on extinguishing the rights of those proclaiming difference.
Until recently Indonesia presented itself to the West not as a Muslim
country but through Bali, a land of smiling faces, exotic dancers, paradisical
landscapes. Western scholars once wrote about the stillness of Javanese interior
life, the sophisticated tolerance of its philosophy. Now authors focus on violence
in its many forms of state terror directed against dissenters and the public
at large. Once Indonesia was presented as the world’s crossroads because it
straddles the great water highway that connects China to the West and because
its peoples follow the world’s religions: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and
Christianity. Now that crossroads is more often discussed as the province of
people smugglers.
Within its home region Indonesia is a formidable presence. It is far more
populous and exports its excess laborers to neighboring countries. Dissenters
flee into the region to escape and to publicize ethnic, religious, and political
conflicts. Indonesia’s visionaries attract young men from the region to join
INTRODUCTION
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religious causes; its popular culture beams to the region’s Malay youth messages
of modernity and “cool.” Its timber, minerals, and cheap labor attract
multinational companies, while Indonesia’s wealthy invest in safer regional
economies. Indonesia at times appears menacing to its neighbors, Timor Loro
Sa’e, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and
Australia.
Indonesia’s history is not widely known even in its own region. Magazine
articles and documentaries present fragments: environmental disasters of fire
and flood, the installation of a woman as the Republic of Indonesia’s fifth president
in 2001, the demands in 2002 to expel non-Muslim foreigners and establish
Indonesia as a country ruled by Islamic law.
Many Indonesian intellectuals, politicians, and journalists believe that
foreigners (principally the West) do not understand Indonesia, have no grasp
of the complex problems it faces, no sympathy for the struggles to find political
forms that will suit the aspirations of Indonesians and bring ordinary people
prosperity, peace, and justice. Many Indonesians believe that Western governments
and international human rights’ organizations seek the breakup of
Indonesia by aiding opposition movements in the eastern and western ends of
the archipelago. They point to the contradiction: the West lectures Indonesians
on human rights and economic management while supporting and cooperating
with the country’s corrupt nexus of political, military, and business
elites and overlooking the plight of internal refugees fleeing ethnic conflicts
and natural disasters.
The context in which I write is the collapse of President Suharto’s long rule
and the rapid succession of three new presidents. Under Suharto’s leadership
an official policy of order, security, and economic development replaced fervor
for Moscow or Mecca. Indonesia resumed its leadership position among nonaligned
countries through its economic achievements: continuing expansion
of schools and medical services for male and female, programs for attaining
self-sufficiency in rice and for industrialization. In 1990, for the first time the
value of manufactured goods exceeded raw materials in exports, and millions
of Indonesians began to see their standard of living improve. The Asian monetary
crisis abruptly reversed these gains in 1997 when banks and businesses
collapsed, and more than half of all Indonesians fell into their government’s
definition of impoverishment. Suharto’s presidency dissolved in a chaos of ethnically
targeted killings, breakaway movements, and an army seemingly out of
control. A new struggle for power and a contest of visions now mark Indonesia
as pregnant with possibilities.