Indonesian nationalism today and in the future

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 235, 1999, Pages 3-16

  Anderson, Benedict ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033471346     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Both General Nasution, creator of the post-revolutionary military, and General Suharto started their adult careers in the KNIL, the prewar colonial military, the great enemy of the nationalist movement. Suharto then went on to join the PETA auxiliary army created by the Japanese Occupation authorities in 1943.
2. The famously Muslim province of Aceh, situated at the north-western tip of Sumatra, marks Indonesia's westernmost extremity. Irian, the western half of New Guinea, marks its easternmost frontier.
3. When the returning Dutch colonial regime seized control of Batavia/Jakarta in January 1946, the revolutionary capital was moved to the old royal city of Jogjakarta in Central Java.
4. Daud Beureueh, a famous modernist ulama of the 1930s, was military governor of Aceh during the Revolution, and the key figure in the local popular movement for Indonesia's independence.
5. Titular founder of the Independent Aceh movement, he had the advantage of lineal descent from one of the main heroes of the long, bitter 1783-1908 struggle against the advancing Dutch imperial military.
6. General Ali Murtopo was the legendarily machiavellian head of Suharto's political intelligence apparatus in the early days of the New Order. It was this apparatus that in 1963 'fixed' the so-called Act of Free Choice in Irian to produce virtually unanimous support for union with Indonesia. During the final negotiations for the transfer of sovereignty in late 1949, the Dutch had refused to turn over Irian to the new state of independent Indonesia. By 1962, Indonesian military, and American diplomatic, pressure forced The Hague to put the region under temporary UN administration pending an expression of local opinion on its final status.
7. The PRRI (Pemerintah Revolusioner Republic Indonesia - Revolutionary Government of the Indonesian Republic) was a rebel government formed early in 1958 with heavy CIA backing. It drew its strength from parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi, aimed at toppling and replacing the government in Jakarta, and was defeated by 1960. The DI (Darul Islam) was an armed extremist Islamic movement that originated in Central and West Java in 1949, and later spread to parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi. It was not finally crushed until 1964.
8. From late 1945 to January 1948, the Republic's cabinets had been dominated by socialists and communists, who thus had to bear the onus of increasingly unfavourable 'agreements' with the Dutch colonial regime. In that month, a new cabinet, led by Vice-President Hatta, which excluded the Left, came to power. Political tensions between conservatives and the Left then rapidly increased in a deepening cold-war atmosphere. In September 1948 this resulted in bloody armed conflicts that began in the town of Madiun, and the subsequent smashing of the Left.
9. When the Allied armed forces, under Louis Mountbatten, took over from the Japanese in September 1945, Holland, only recently liberated from Nazi rule, had no military forces available. Hence The Hague was represented for more than a year by a Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA) under the British military protection.
10. Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia - Indonesian Women's Movement) was a left-wing women's organization that gradually became a part of the Communist Party's infrastructure.
11. NU - Nahdlatul Ulama, an organization of traditionalist ulama dating back to the middle 1920s. Abdulrahman Wahid, its long-standing leader, is a grandson of its founder. Ansor is the NU's much-feared youth arm, especially strong in rural East Java.
12. Megawati, a daughter of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, is currently head of the PDI-Perjuangan (Indonesia Democratic Party - Struggle [version]). In the early 1970s, Suharto forced all existing non-Islamic parties to merge into an internally-divided, quickly corrupted Indonesian Democratic Party. Its major component was a PNI (Indonesian National Party) - bloodily shorn of its large left wing - which, in the 1950s, had been regarded as closest to the political vision of her father.
13. General Benny Murdani, long-time intelligence czar, and the man most responsible for the savagery of Indonesian rule in East Timor. Frans Seda, minister of plantations in the last Sukarno cabinet, was a key early financier of the Suharto regime. Liem Bian-kie and Harry Tjan Silalahi, two prominent Indonesian Chinese operatives in Ali Murtopo's Special Operations intelligence network, played an inactive role in the anti-communist matanza of 1965-66.
14. PSI - Indonesian Socialist Party. A small party of Western-oriented intellectuals, which by the mid-1950s was socialist only in name. Influential in military and other circles, it was banned by Sukarno in the early 1960s.
15. General Joannes van Heutsz, one of the more successful Dutch commanders in the Aceh War, became Governor-General from 1904-1909, and oversaw the formation of the Netherlands Indies in its final territorial shape. Sultan Agung (r. 1613-1645) almost succeeded in putting the whole island of Java under his control, using the most ruthless methods. But he was ultimately defeated by the United East India Company.
16. The two endlessly repeated slogans of the late colonial regime were rust en orde (peace and order) and opbouw (development). Characteristically, the Suharto regime simply Indonesianized these slogans in the Orde Baru (New Order) and pembangunan (development).
17. Kopassus (Komando Pasukan Khusus - Special Forces Command), partly modelled on the Green Berets, were and are the Indonesian army's elite paratroop units, also legendary for their cruelty.
18. In 1983, thousands of so-called 'petty criminals' were spectacularly assassinated (sometimes with torture) by Kopassus men in mufti. These death-squads, popularly known as petrus (penembak misterieus - mysterious gunmen), were eventually acknowledged proudly by Suharto as his handiwork. Their operational head was the Catholic Eurasian General Murdani.
19. Amien Rais, an academic with a doctoral degree in religious studies from the University of Chicago, made his name first as a modernist Muslim intellectual known for vitriolic speeches on Christians, Israel and Jews, as well as local Chinese. He became head of the large modernist Muslim organization Muhammadiyah. At the end of the Suharto period, however, he earned wide acclaim as the first prominent person to call for Suharto's ouster, and bravely helped lead the student demonstrations of May 1998. Since then, he has formed an attractive non-confessional party, has invited in both Christians and Chinese, and has made the most serious proposals for fundamental political reform.
20. The Suharto regime's state party Golkar, which 'won' every election while Suharto lasted, used the sacred banyan-tree as its logo, relying on its Javanese connotations of magical power as an abode of protective tutelary spirits. But as anti-regime activists always noted, the thick rain of tendrils hanging down makes it impossible for anything to blossom under them - nothing but (political) lichens, mosses, toadstools and so forth.
21. This list includes communists, socialists, Muslims, middle-class secular nationalists, Chinese, women, poets and novelists, human-rights lawyers, and social reformers.
22. Iwan Fals is the stage name of a folk-rock singer popular with teenagers and students. His themes have been as left-political as the dictatorship tolerated.