In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Leading the Government, 1950‒51 63 4 Leading the Government, 1950–51 From Federated to Unitary State On January 16, 1950, the Dutch transferred sovereignty, not to the Indonesian Republic that had been its adversary for the previous five years, but to the Federated States of Indonesia (RIS, Republik Indonesia Serikat) made up of both the Republic and the BFO (Bijeenkomst voor Federaal Overleg, Federal Consultative Assembly), a federation of states, mostly outside Java and Sumatra, which had been sponsored by the Dutch during the Revolution in an effort to curb the power of the Indonesian Republic. In the new RIS, the Republic, although its population of perhaps 31 million made it by far the largest entity, was merely one of sixteen component states, the smallest of which had a population of only about 100,000.1 Indonesia was now faced with an even more difficult task than freeing itself from colonial governance — bringing together such a disparate set of societies and cultures to create a viable country. Because of his opposition to some of the concessions made in the Round Table agreements that had led to the transfer of sovereignty, Natsir had refused to join the new RIS government headed by Mohammad Hatta. Several other Masjumi members did, however, hold cabinet posts.2 Meanwhile, Natsir 1 See George McT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951), pp. 446‒7. 2 Sjafruddin Prawiranegara was minister of finance, Abu Hanifah, minister of education and culture, K.H. Wahid Hasjim headed the religious affairs ministry, and Mohamad Roem was initially a minister of state. 63 64 Islam, Nationalism and Democracy remained as head of the Masjumi party, sat in Parliament, and at times acted as Hatta’s emissary in efforts to calm unrest in West Java. Almost as soon as the federal order was established, public pressure arose for it to be replaced by a unitary state. Many of the Republicans who had been fighting the Dutch since 1945 saw the Federated States largely as a colonial construct that betrayed many of the ideals for which they had fought. This pressure sparked a “unitarian movement” that grew up during the first six months of 1950, spearheading Republican demands for the federal structure to be dissolved. The dissatisfaction expressed by this movement intensified after Indonesian and Dutch members of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL) mounted a series of uprisings and attempted coups and assassinations against Hatta’s government. The first and most minatory of these attempts was a military attack launched in Bandung on January 23, 1950, with immediate follow-up actions in Jakarta, where the plotters planned to kidnap members of the cabinet and assassinate three of them, including the defense minister, Sultan Hamengku Buwono. In both Jakarta and Bandung a disaffected Dutch officer, Captain R.P.P. “Turk” Westerling, notorious for the massacres he had conducted in South Sulawesi during the Revolution, headed the anti-government actions.3 It was soon discovered that Sultan Hamid II, head of the federal state of West Kalimantan and a minister in the RIS cabinet, also supported and even perhaps had instigated the coup attempts.4 Although the rebel forces were driven out of both Bandung and Jakarta before they could pose any real danger, the Westerling plot exacerbated Indonesian mistrust of the Dutch,5 and increased antagonism toward the federal states. Anti-Dutch sentiment within these states themselves led to requests from most of them to be incorporated into the Republic, as a first step toward complete unification of the country. But at the same time the Republican-supported “unitarian movement” raised fears, especially in eastern Indonesia, about becoming subject to a central government on Java, along with doubts as to whether the oldest and strongest of 3 For his own account of the campaign in South Sulawesi, see Raymond “Turk” Westerling, Challenge to Terror (London: William Kimber, 1952), pp. 88‒123; see also Ulf Sundhausen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics 1945‒1967 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 55; George Kahin, “Indonesian Politics and Nationalism,” in Asian Nationalism and the West, ed. William L. Holland (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 121‒2. 4 See Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 62‒3; Sundhaussen, Road to Power, p. 57; Taufik Abdullah, Indonesia towards Democracy (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), pp. 195‒6. 5 Westerling himself was smuggled out of Indonesia in a Dutch military plane. Feith...

Share