The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra

Preface to the Second Edition

xvii Preface to the Second Edition This study was first published more than thirty years ago, and some of the interviews on which it was based took place forty years ago. I am delighted to find that these labours of my youth should still be thought of sufficient interest to reprint for a new generation today. Much has changed in the intervening period. Most obviously, most of the key actors in the dramatic events of the 1940s, including the informants who helped me to understand them, were still alive in 1979. I did not presume to write for them; but for outsiders like myself struggling to understand the extraordinary changes Indonesian society underwent in those times. But I was intensely aware that some of these informants would read the book and judge it on the basis of intense personal knowledge. Because of this I may have worried over details which are less relevant to a later generation. Now the generation politically active in the 1940s has almost all passed from the scene. The “social revolution” has retreated to a slice of history, remembered if at all as a mythologized morality lesson, homicidal criminality to some and the purest essence of revolution to others. The long regime of President Soeharto (1966‒98) did much to wrap the divisive controversies of the revolutionary period in a cocoon of bland national myth. During the latter part of his period the targets of the “social revolution” made a significant comeback in East Sumatra, their palaces restored as cultural and tourism assets. Still more remarkable is the democratic era since 1998, putting to the test both the primordial ethnic conflicts of East Sumatra and the sense of distinctiveness in Aceh. In both regions the success of the democratic transition in surviving ethnic and religious tensions has surprised observers. The tendency of electoral politics to push candidates towards the centre appears to be working. I first visited northern Sumatra from Malaysia as konfontasi was being dismantled in February 1967, and the violent destruction of Sumatra’s left wing in 1965‒66 was still a heavy presence. Before that disaster Sumatra had experienced rebellion first in Aceh (1953) and then much of the rest of the island through the PRRI (1958). When I wrote the conclusion to 00 BP fm.indd 17 2/28/14 9:44:13 AM xviii Preface to the Second Edition the 1979 book, it required an effort to craft a final sentence that was more positive than negative about the outcome of these events. Although Sumatrans themselves were reluctant to criticize the increasingly sanctified birth-pangs of independence, an observer from Malaysia could not ignore the brutal state violence, the lawlessness, and the impoverishment that had followed the high ideals of the revolution. When this book first appeared Acehnese had renewed their tradition of resistance to outside rule (1976), and thousands more died on both sides of that conflict over the next thirty years. But as I noted in 1979, what appears gain or loss to one generation may appear the opposite for the next. The cost of imposing the ideal of “an independent, united Indonesia, master of its own destiny” was very high, in term of both violence and the postponing of development. The latest round of violence was in the period of transition to a more democratic, open and decentralized politics in 1998‒2004. Since then, the Aceh rebels and Jakarta agreed a remarkable peace with unprecedented autonomy, and peaceful and orderly elections have been held at provincial, district and national levels. The ideal of a single new revolutionary identity was hugely costly in lives, cultural diversities, and development foregone, but it is now delivering a benefit through an Indonesian identity that no longer has to be forced. For this generation, that new identity is at last proving compatible with the freedom it was meant to deliver long ago. In addition to the acknowledgements of 1979, I want to honour here some of the Indonesian kawan se-perjuangan who shared my attempts in the 1970s to document and understand these events of the 1940s. Two of them passed away only this year (2011)—M. Nur El Ibrahimy, some of whose corrections of my text have benefitted the present version, and Tengku Lukman Sinar, who wrote and preserved much historically, while surviving politically to end his life with the title Sultan of Serdang. H. Mohammad Said(t) and Nip Karim, reliable Medan friends who chronicled the divisive events with admirable honesty...