Indonesia Today: Challenges of History

5 BRIEF REFLECTIONS ON INDONESIAN POLITICAL HISTORY

Indonesian politics has been poorly served by historians. Most of the seminal books were contemporary of their time – one thinks of Anderson’s Java in a Time of Revolution, Feith’s Decline of Constitutional Democracy, Crouch’s Army and Politics in Indonesia or even Robison’s Indonesia: The Rise of Capital – and written by scholars whose primary intellectual affiliation was not the study of history. One struggles to think of more than a handful of major works on the history of Indonesian politics. There are numerous reasons why this is so. The practice of the discipline of history is generally very weak in Indonesia,1 which means that there has been – apart from odd sensationalist newspaper and magazine exchanges about such things as who really found the generals’ bodies at Lubang Buaya or the whereabouts of the missing Supersemar letter – little sign of intellectual excitement or historical debate about the country’s politics. More importantly , perhaps, Indonesia has never been a place that made historical research on modern themes easy, especially for foreigners. With a few exceptions, government archives on the post-1945 period remain closed to domestic and foreign researchers; continuous runs of Indonesian newspapers are difficult to find; and obtaining interviews requires stamina, patience and even courage, as well as well-placed local go-betweens – and that before the interview has even begun. There is, finally, the supreme difficulty of the subject matter itself; the political history of modern Indonesia is a cascade of related and unrelated themes and plots, a whirling kaleidoscope of people, emotion, interests , skulduggery, nobility and violence not lending itself readily to interpretation . This, then, is precisely why the application of the specific skills of the historian is so vital today. While Indonesians are not professionally adept at history , they are deeply historically minded, by which I mean that a large portion of the identity they create for themselves depends on some deeply held sense 5 BRIEF REFLECTIONS ON INDONESIAN POLITICAL HISTORY R.E. Elson 69 AA/Part2 23/3/01 6:25 PM Page 69 of the past and its meaning. The problem, for the most part, has been that historians ’ (both Indonesian and foreign) deprecation of the modern in Indonesian history has allowed sparse, distorted, simplistic and misleading understandings to emerge and dominate consciousness, discourse and even policy making. There are familiar and obvious examples of this phenomenon, such as the myth that Indonesia always existed (‘waking up’ only in 1908), that the Indonesian National Army was the defender of the nation in the period of the revolution (the TNI was, in fact, a hopeless shambles; what saved the republic were its pejuang, or fighters, not the TNI), that Sukarno was a great leader, that 1950s democracy was bound to fail because of its inappropriate application to Indonesia’s ‘culture’ and historical circumstances, and, more recently, that Soeharto was no more than a corrupt thug. Such myths contain wisps of truth, but parading them as though they encompass more than that does everyone a disservice, especially Indonesians themselves. Indonesian politics requires the disinterested yet passionate work of serious historians. They have two major tasks. The first is to begin the process of deep research. Apart from a few notable examples – in particular the revolutionary and early independence periods, where scholars like Benedict Anderson , Anthony Reid, Robert Cribb, Anton Lucas, and George and Audrey Kahin have dug deeply, with fertile results – much of the modern period remains seriously understudied. The outstanding work of Herbert Feith and Daniel Lev on the 1950s and early 1960s excepted, few have bothered to dip into the exceptional riches of the newspapers of the 1950s or to test the memories of those few participants of the period who still survive. Similarly, much of the work of the New Order period has centred on the army; it is work of a high standard, but mostly written by political scientists who have little detailed knowledge of the earlier phases of the army’s development . Beyond that, the New Order has been the terrain of political scientists or journalists who have taught us much, but focused on a particular political or journalistic slant. The first task of historians of modern Indonesia is to take their sources – in all their variety – seriously, and to explore them seriously. The second, and more difficult, task is to make sense of it all. Notwithstanding the high-quality labours of numerous scholars, we have no clear sense of the meaning – or meanings – of modern Indonesia. There...