To Nation by Revolution: Indonesia in the 20th Century

Chapter 1. Indonesia: Revolution without Socialism

Indonesia: Revolution without Socialism 1 1 CHAPTER 1 Indonesia: Revolution without Socialism Proclaiming Independence We the people of Indonesia hereby declare Indonesia’s independence. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be executed in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time. These simple words were read by Sukarno to a few hundred people gathered outside his house in Jakarta on the morning of 17 August 1945. They have been celebrated every year since by a grateful people. Two days earlier, the proclamation had been the subject of an angry exchange between two generations of nationalists. The Japanese had surrendered to the Allies on 14 August, just too soon to allow the implementation of their last-minute preparations to grant “independence” to Indonesia. Sukarno and his then colleague Hatta were anxiously seeking a way to proceed on the agreed path to independence in a manner which would not provoke the intervention of the still-powerful Japanese occupying army. A delegation of young revolutionaries, including the future communist leader D.N. Aidit, came to Sukarno’s house to deliver an ultimatum. Sukarno must, they insisted, “for the last time, proclaim independence at once and break all ties and connections with the promise of ‘a gift of independence’ from the Japanese.” They demanded a revolutionary proclamation by Sukarno in the name of the people. The older leaders, knowing they could not fight the Japanese, replied that this was impossible “until we hear what the attitude of the Gunseikan and the Somubucho [the senior military administration officials] is to the independence which has been promised.” The young men taunted Sukarno 2 To Nation by Revolution with cowardice, and threatened that they would not be answerable for the violence if independence was not proclaimed that very night. Sukarno leapt out of his chair in a fury, shouting, “Here is my neck … go on, cut my head off … Don’t wait until tomorrow.” Aidit replied bitterly, “You have crushed the hopes of our generation,” and the youths had to return emptyhanded , “overwhelmed with mixed feelings of anger and dejection.”1 The proclamation of 17 August represented a characteristic compromise between the two positions, though not before the angry youth leaders had kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta to try to force them into a bolder stance. The conflict between a romantic vision of revolutionary struggle and the desire to obtain the maximum pragmatic advantage from the objective situation was at the heart of Indonesian nationalism throughout the century. The difference between the two parties was one of age and of closeness to power. They shared the same revolutionary rhetoric and the same goals. They could and did frequently change sides. The Peoples of Indonesia “Indonesia” is a new word for a nation which took clear shape only in the 20th century. Coined by European ethnologists in the late 19th century, the word was adopted by nationalism in the 1920s in an extraordinarily rapid discovery of national unity. It was scarcely two decades earlier that Dutch conquest or control had forced into a centralised polity the varied array of peoples and cultures that made up the archipelago. The enormous linguistic and cultural complexity of Indonesia can be crudely categorised into three broad types of historical experience, each of which had its own relationship with Dutch colonialism and with independent Indonesia. In addition to the immigrant Chinese and European cultures, these were the Javanese, the coastal-Islamic, and the non-Islamic (see Map 1.1, p. 3). The Javanese are by far the largest single ethno-linguistic group, comprising over 40 per cent of the Indonesian population. Inhabiting the most densely-cultivated eastern two-thirds of the island of Java, the Javanese had supported for more than a millennium a succession of diverse kingdoms , whose 20th-century relics remained in baroque but ineffective splendour at the four courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. Despite poverty and the low literacy level of the Javanese as a whole, the non-Javanese were ready to concede that they possessed an exceptionally high culture Indonesia: Revolution without Socialism 3 Map 1.1 Ethno-religious Indonesia, before the modern migrations. 4 To Nation by Revolution based on dance, the gamelan orchestra, theatre and especially the wayang kulit shadow puppets which carried the ideology of the courts into the lowliest villages. Java had accepted Islam in the 16th century, but without surrendering the Hindu epics or the cultivation...