BIBLIOTHEEK KITLV

0052 6895
 41/' I k k -//^

CONTEMPORARY INDONESIA:

POLITICAL DIMENSIONS

Jamie Mackie
Herb Feith
Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin
Humish McDonald

Papers given at the annual set of public lectures on Indonesia,

organised jointly by the Australia—Indonesia Association and
the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, prior to Indonesian
Independence Day, August 1978.

*ss»* "«sjs
wot £l
' &
 MONASH UNIVERSITY 1979

Copyright © ; No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form without permission

National Library of Australia card number and ISBN

ISBN 0 86746 005 9
 CONTENTS

PREFACE

INDONESIA SINCE 1945 —

PROBLEMS OF INTERPRETATION
Jamie Mackie

FROM SUKARNO TO SUHARTO:

A REPLY TO JAMIE MACKIE
Herb Feith

REGIONALISM AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION IN INDONESIA:

THE ACEHNESE EXPERIENCE
Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin

THE LAST PHASE OF THE 1945 GENERATION:

CRITICAL PROBLEMS OF THE YEARS AHEAD
Hamish McDonald
 PREFACE

The lectures, offered jointly by the Australian-Indonesian Association and the Monash Centre
of Southeast Asian Studies, have established themselves as an annual event. The first group of lec-
tures was sponsored in the early sixties by the AIA alone, with the Monash Centre joining as a co-
sponsor after its formation in 1964. The lectures have been held in a variety of places — the
University of Melbourne, Doncaster Shoppingtown and Monash — and have covered a diversity of
matters including aspects of Indonesian History, contemporary politics, education, religion and
social order. On occasion they have been used to provide a forum for the discussion of questions at
issue between Australia and Indonesia.
In 1978 the lectures covered an unusually wide range of topics. In the central lecture of the series
Jamie Mackie, perhaps as a valedictory summing up of his eleven years as Research Director of the
Monash Centre, examined the state of the debate between competing interpretations of modern
Indonesian politics. This was a nettle-grasping exercise, for it meant coming to grips with questions
that have been hotly argued amongst students of Indonesia over the last ten years. What is the nature
of Indonesia's "underdevelopment"? Can it be remedied by the kind of policies pursued by the
Suharto regime? Have those policies been based on a misleading "Western" model of development
and have they brought Indonesia into a dependent relationship with neo-imperialist capitalism? After
arguing that some radical criticisms of the New Order are often oversimplified, too neat and
mechanistic, and that they do not take account of the "multi-layered" character of many of In-
donesia's economic problems and attribute blame too simplistically to the policies of governments,
Mackie emphasises the subtleties and complexities of the Indonesian scene and attempts to identify
continuity in the post-revolutionary history of the Republic.
In keeping with Mackie's frontal consideration of these issues of interpretation is Herbert
Feith's Reply which defends the radical perspective from some of the criticisms levelled at it. He
places more emphasis on the external causes of Indonesian poverty — in particular, the destruction
of the demographic and ecological balances of Indonesian society by the impact of Western
capitalism — and on the way in which independent Indonesia has been integrated into the global
capitalist system, with the Suharto regime serving, in recent years, as a bridgehead for a new form of
colonial domination.
And so the argument continues — as of course it should. The fruitful debates are those that are
not easily resolved.
These general essays in interpretation provide the backdrop for Nazaruddin's case study of
regionalism in Aceh and for a stocktaking of the Jakarta political balance by Hamish McDonald.
Each of these, in its own way, presents detail relevant to the broad issues canvassed in the essays by
Mackie and Feith. Neither, however, confines itself to the presentation of detail. Nazaruddin sees the
Acehnese rebellion as part of the broader problem of national integration and considers alternative
theoretical approaches to that problem. McDonald focusses attention on the army's political position
and on the way in which members of an older military generation consider the problem of providing
for their successors.
Together, the four essays provide a sample of the way in which Indonesia was viewed from
Australia in 1978.

J.D. Legge

i
 INDONESIA SINCE 1945 —
PROBLEMS OF INTERPRETATION

Jamie Mackie

This paper had its origins in two sets of arguments about contemporary Indonesian politics. One
of these, to which I will be returning in due course, is a debate that Herb Feith and I have been con-
ducting for several years (or perhaps something less grandiose and structured than that, a low-level
skirmishing engagement) over the relative merits or otherwise of various radical critiques of the
Suharto regime as against the views commonly advanced in defence of it. The other was a discussion I
had recently with two colleagues who are also involved in teaching undergraduates what present-day
Indonesia is all about, in the course of which we talked about the difficulties that arise when we try to
incorporate the whole story of Indonesian politics since 1945 within a single analytical framework.
For we then have to embrace under one overarching explanatory theory such sharply contrasting
political systems as President Suharto's "New Order" and President Sukarno's "Old Order", not to
mention the very different political dynamics of the "liberal democracy" period (1950—59) and of
the 1945—49 "revolution" or struggle for independence. As soon as one begins to think about this
problem, one has to assess the relative significance of the radical discontinuities in Indonesian
political and social life to which these labels draw attention, as well as the underlying continuities in
Indonesian society, culture and history which equally deserve attention.
I am not proposing that we should attempt to formulate some kind of new generalised theory
along these lines, but I would emphasise that it is important to see the changes that have taken place
in Indonesia since 1965—66 within a broader historical perspective, which also takes into account
other long-term processes that have been working themselves out there ever since 1945 — and, in-
deed, much longer. In that context, the policies pursued by the Suharto government since 1966 are, I
believe, more explicable and more defensible than they appear if presented, as they often are, solely
in the light of recently fashionable theories of "dependencia" or neo-colonialism, or the view that an
all-powerful Army-backed government should be capable of remedying many of the ills that still
afflict the country, if it really wanted to do so. I would argue that in most respects it probably does
want to do so, but simply has not always been able to: first, because it is often not sure how to go
about it,' and second, because while the government and the Army are, indeed, vastly more powerful
than either was before 1965, they can only accomplish their will with the means available to them —
and the means are still very limited in the Indonesian situation, for various reasons which are rooted
deeply in the nation's culture and history. In this respect, continuity is still a powerful and pervasive
fact of life there. So many features of the political system have not changed very greatly, even though
others have.
I do not mean here simply to offer excuses for the many shortcomings of which the Suharto
government can be accused; on the contrary, I believe it would and should have pursued very dif-
ferent policies in numerous respects, from the treatment of ex-communists and political prisoners to
corruption, extravagence and social inequalities.2 But in making judgements on these matters, we
must avoid excessively mechanistic or deterministic theories — as well as extraneously moralistic or

1
 Utopian ones - about why governments or officials behave as they do and try to take into account
the particular historical reasons why they have responded to the situations confronting them as they
did, why they have given priority to some sets of considerations and objectives over others for
reasons which we may not readily comprehend. Essentially I am arguing for a more pluralistic and
historically grounded approach to the task of explaining recent events in Indonesia and interpreting
their significance, not the superimposing of externally derived explanatory models or irrelevant
ethical standards.
One of the major shortcomings of some of the currently popular theories which seem prima facie
to account for Indonesia's "underdevelopment" is that while they may seem to fit the most salient
facts of the New Order period, they do not serve nearly as well if we try to apply them to the earlier
years of Indonesia's independence. Interpretations in terms of neocolonialist dominance of the In-
donesian economy by foreign investors since 1967 do not fit comfortably against the facts that Dutch
business interests there (and British and American) found themselves forced increasingly on to the
defensive during the 1950s and early '60s, or that there was only a negligible flow of foreign capital
into Southeast Asia from any of the advanced capitalist countries at that time - for reasons which
had little to do with the Asian countries themselves. Hobsonian or Leninist theories of imperialism
just did not match the facts of that period at all well.3 So if one is going to try to apply them to the
New Order period, one must be able to show (within the terms of such theories themselves) why they
did not work for the earlier years.
I do not want to say much here about the debate over the strengths and weaknesses of the
various radical critiques, which would need more extensive treatment than I can spare them here. But
although I reject many of the more mechanistic theories on which these critiques are based and am
trying to offer here an alternative approach to the problem of characterising and explaining
Suharto's "New Order" in Indonesia, two things should be said about them at the outset. First these
theories, although often crudely formulated and overstated, in my opionion, do pose a challenge
even to those of us who are reluctant to espouse them, just because they come uncomfortably close to
the truth in many respects and because they direct attention to shortcomings of the Indonesian
government and its policies which cannot be disregarded, however little we may like to face them in
plain terms. There is simply too much corroborating evidence that they are at least partially right
though we may argue at length about how far. Second, one must admit that there are some elements
of these theories which, if formulated with due care and precision, do seem to provide a plausible ex-
planation of key characteristics of the present regime - e.g. its repressiveness, the elite-orientation of
many of its policies and its lack of effective action on behalf of the poorest segments of the rural and
urban population/ (There is nothing unique about Indonesia in that last respect, of course') I do not
advocate, therefore, that these theories should be altogether thrown out and disregarded; but neither
do I find them wholly satisfactory or acceptable.
My objections to these interpretations of the present regime in Indonesia centre mainly around
their underlying logic rather than the empirical evidence on which they rest.5 First, they are frequent-
ly oversimplified, excessively deterministic or mechanistic in establishing causal connections and
sometimes intrinsically unverifiable (i.e. of a kind that cannot be shown to be false by the production
of contrary evidence). One of the strongest reasons why these theories have had such a widespread
appeal has been the fact that they seem prima fade to offer such a rounded watertight explanation of
so many striking features of the current regime and to have an exact "fit" with the salient political
events and data about socio-economic trends they purport to deal, describe and explain, although the

2
situation is almost always more tangled than they allow for and the causal factors more complex. But
complex explanations are rarely as appealing as simple ones. Moreover, the latter kind frequently im-
ply a ringing condemnation of the regime, on impeccably high-minded grounds, pointing towards the
conclusion that only through a root-and-branch "revolutionary" transformation of the socio-
political order can the country's present ills be remedied. No good can come of piecemeal
technocratic reforms or administrative tinkering at the fringes of the problems, according to this line
of argument. They need to be tackled at a more fundamental level — whatever that means in
Indonesia's circumstances.
My second objection is that these views generally fail to take account of the multilayered, or
overlapping, character of so many of Indonesia's most crucial socio-economic problems, which are
simply not susceptible to easy solutions at one level of any kind, radical or conservative. While
radical theories may highlight much that is true about the seamier side of Indonesian political and
economic life, they do not present the whole truth. Above all, they tend to neglect the historical
dimensions that must be taken into account in explaining the main socio-economic changes taking
place there in recent decades, especially overpopulation, poverty and social stagnation. The root of
these problems must be sought several generations back in the past in most cases, not just in what has
been happening since 1965—66, critically important though the latter changes have certainly been. It
is not only that problems like the inexorable, long-term pressure of overpopulation and deteriorating
man-land ratios also have to be taken into account in any analysis of poverty, for example, but also
the development over the last 80 years or more of societal values, both of rulers and the ruled, as well
as traditional attitudes towards government, authority, fate (nasib) and free will, and the ideas of
"progress' (kemajuan) and modernisation or "development" (e.g. what Indonesians envisage by
pembangunan), all of which must be taken into account as objective givens in the situation confron-
ting any government attempting to change the social order.
A third objection is related to that. Many of these critical theories attribute too much of the
blame for the country's ills solely to the current policies of the government, whereas most of the pro-
blems have been defying attempts to solve them since 1900. These theories assume that governments
have a far greater degree of capacity to control or direct social processes in Indonesia than has been,
in my experience, the case since 1945. Yet by 1965—66, the country's tax revenues amounted to a
mere 4% of GDP and the atrophy of the various instruments of control available to the government
had utterly wrecked its capacity for effective planning and administration.6 Since then, the govern-
ment has restored these mechanisms quite remarkably (e.g. that 4% is now 21%) and greatly enhanc-
ed its administrative potentialities, but anyone who knows Indonesia (or any other developing coun-
try) will be familiar with the tremendous limitations upon what her bureaucratic machinery can ac-
complish by way of social engineering. It can exert some influence where the granting of resources
can be made conditional on the adoption of desired policies or where repression can have a preventive
effect. It has become administratively more effective mainly because foreign aid, initially, and oil
revenues, later, have provided it with far more resources to dispose in this way. But it has had a feeble
record in matters like the levying of personal income or land taxes, or preventing illegal occupation of
forest lands, or reducing the size of an overbloated bureaucracy, to mention only the most obvious.
And it has not only been unable to prevent widespread corruption, but unable even to prevent it
becoming worse over the last decade, for reasons which have to do with both the socio-political struc-
ture of the regime and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes. Yet anyone who has looked at all closely at
the profession of accountancy in Indonesia, its virtual collapse during the years of inflation, the

3
 feeble traditions of financial accountability or the sanctions behind the concept, and even the paucity
of trained accountants, would hardly find that surprising. In circumstances like that any government
would be critically handicapped, no matter whether communist or capitalist, colonial or indepen-
dent, made up of saints and sinners, or of Jacobinical root-and-branch revolutionaries rather than
hard-nosed technocratic incrementalists. Even with the record of China's transformation after 1949
in mind, I am sceptical that Indonesia's problems are susceptible to drastic political surgery or sweep-
ing solutions of the Chinese variety.7 Her problems are not just the outcome of the policies pursued
since 1966 (e.g. high foreign investment levels, IMF-World Bank monetary policies, adoption of ad-
vanced technology etc), although it could not be denied that in some respects these policies have
created or reinforced structural tendencies in the political system which make solutions harder to
achieve. The roots of her problems go much further back into the past, as Geertz showed well in
Agricultural Involution, and their solutions will require measures which are bound to be slow and
piecemeal. Likewise, their analysis will have to be both piecemeal, intricate, and above all precise.
When one takes these kinds of considerations into account, one is less inclined to jump to sweep-
ing judgements about the shortcomings of the country's present leaders or the policies they have been
trying to follow than if one measures them against some abstract standard that is simply inap-
propriate to the country's situation. Conversely, criticisms of the regime by Indonesians such as the
poet Rendra or the legal aid activist, Bujung Nasution, or Islamic leaders, all of whom invoke an
idiom and standards of behaviour which are meaningful to other Indonesians, carry far more convic-
tion than cliches which depict the ruling generals as mere puppets of neocolonialist masters. This
point is so obvious that it should hardly need to be mentioned were it not for the fact that many of the
more superficial critics seem to find the generals so distasteful that they are not interested in learning
what makes them tick in the way they do.
But I do not want to pursue these points further here. My primary purpose is to argue the case
for using a broader frame of reference, which will enable us to formulate a more coherent analysis of
Indonesian social and political developments over the last 30—40 years, so that our picture is not un-
duly dominated by the pattern of events that has been emerging since 1966. I want more stress on the
continuities over that broader period, since these will undoubtedly stretch forward into the future
also, as well as on the striking discontinuities of 1965—66 and 1959.
At the same time, we must remember that our interpretations of earlier events are inevitably col-
oured by our awareness of what has happened subsequently and the significance we attribute to them
is bound to be affected by that. Earlier writers on Indonesia saw events in a very different light, part-
ly because what they then took to be the end-point of the story they were telling, the culmination of
the course of events they were describing, seemed to them to give their story quite a different
character and significance from that which they would attribute to it today. A classic example of this
effect can be seen in George Kahin's admirable pioneering study of Nationalism and Revolution in
Indonesia, published in 1952; this told the story of post-independence politics largely in terms of a
power struggle between political parties within a quasi-parliamentary system of government, for
these seemed then to be the key features of the political structure in the 1945—50 period. Yet later we
discovered that political parties and the parliamentary system had put down only shallow roots in In-
donesian soil. When they came under challenge in 1957-58, very few prominent political leaders
were prepared to defend them. (One exception was Mohammed Hatta, but in a very qualified vein.)
So liberal democracy collapsed, largely through sheer lack of supporters, as Herb Feith showed so
well.8
Feith himself wrote another account of Indonesian society and politics in 1958—59, which
4
seemed at the time to give an entirely satisfactory, illuminating characterisation of a puzzling, un-
familiar process. Yet twenty years later, nearly all the key features of that society and the changes
taking place in it seem utterly irrelevant to the Indonesia we see today:
No single adjective better characterises present-day Indonesia than
'postrevolutionary'. Indonesian society today is vastly different from Indonesian socie-
ty twenty years ago, because of independence and the way in which it was achieved and
because of the tumultuous political and social changes of the Japanese occupation and
particularly of the revolution.'

He went on to elaborate this picture of tumultuous changes in terms of the collapse of the old col-
onial caste structure and the emergence during the revolutionary struggle for independence of new
groups of leaders with new types of qualifications; new mass organisations had arisen, "undermining
local loyalties and replacing them with loyalties to the nation and to political ideologies", while
thousands of Indonesians experienced the profound disruption of being uprooted from their villages
during the war and revolution, when they were mobilised for forced labour or military service. It was
a picture of a society in ferment, undergoing intense political and ideological mobilisation. No one
could seriously question the accuracy of his account. But one must wonder how it can possibly be
that Indonesian society twenty years later seems so utterly different, depoliticised to a quite depress-
ing degree. One of the best characterisations of that society in the 1970s was given by Lance Castles in
a paper which put the emphasis at quite the other end of the spectrum, on the stifling dominance of
the bureaucracy and the almost complete lack of alternative channels for political activity. One might
almost ask if they were talking about the same country.

****************

As is so often the case, we find in the writings of Clifford Geertz a revealing clue to the problem
of sorting out these contradictions and imposing some kind of order upon our interpretations of re-
cent events in Indonesia. How can we decide what meaning or significance to attribute to particular
events or phenomena in such a richly variegated socio-cultural landscape as Indonesia's, in which In-
donesians themselves attach such diverse metaphysical meanings to all that goes on around them? We
are confronted, says Geertz, with a veritable "garden of metaphors" which they use to describe the
complexities of the world around them in an attempt to bring it into some sort of comprehensible
order and coherence.10 All of these need to be taken seriously just because they carry meaning for
those who use them, but the consequence is that we face a formidable task of deciding which to ac-
cept or reject as we construct our own conceptual models. Because of the Byzantine complexities,
ambiguities and subtleties of Indonesian (especially Javanese) social and political phenomena, it is,
says Geertz, "really impossible to frame an argument relating political events . . . which is totally
lacking in plausibility"." But if no hypothesis is unequivocally ruled out, none can be exclusively and
unchallengably right, either. "Many are the roads", as theprijaj'i Javanese would put it, with their
tolerant and relativistic approach to both morality and epistemology.
Geertz was primarily concerned, in the article cited, with the question of what significance or
meaning we should attribute to the "vast internal trauma" of 1965—66 in Indonesia and the terrible
killings that accompanied the destruction of the Communist Party. How do we — either outsiders or
Indonesians — fit that into our patterns of explanation of events before and since? Geertz, writing
before 1970, saw the upheaval as a demonstration of the depth of "dissensus, ambivalence, and

5
 disorientation" among Indonesians, asserting that whether or not this conclusion was acceptable to
Indonesians, it was "the central question of Indonesian politics".'2 I doubt if many Indonesians
would like to have the problem discussed in quite those terms by a foreigner; on the other hand, most
are probably reluctant to engage in serious discussion of the problem at all. Yet Geertz is surely right
in stressing the singular difficulty Indonesians face in either interpreting and explaining the great
upheaval of 1965—66 or in attributing broader meaning to it as a major landmark in the life of their
nation. Few Indonesians have addressed themselves deliberately to the task of assessing its origins
and significance, except in terms of the conventional wisdom that it was a crucial episode in the life-
and-death struggle for survival against the communist threat.13 Like the people of many other coun-
tries who have terrible memories they would rather expunge, most Indonesian intellectuals tend to
shy away from the awkward questions the episode poses — and who are we to blame them? But the
unfortunate consequence is that most of the writings yet undertaken about the coup attempt and its
consequences and significance have been the work of foreigners, with their very different viewpoints
and moral values. (How would we react to an account of the drama couched in terms of the moral
dilemmas and values conveyed in the Bratayudha?) One is reminded, incidentally, of Mao Tse-tung's
complaint, related by Simon Leys, that none of China's creative writers has yet dared to tackle the
mighty theme of the Cultural Revolution — presumably because it would have been perilous, as well
as psychologically painful, for them to do so.14
The coup and the killings that followed must, undoubtedly, be regarded as one of the great land-
marks of Indonesia's history, but one which has left a terrible psychic scar; hence one of the greatest
of the discontinuities of the last half-century, one which will be much harder to incorporate into an
acceptable nationalist mythology than August 1945 or July 1959. It has had a pervasive effect on the
character of the Suharto government, which has found the effort to create a new institutional basis
for its power and a new source of legitimacy extremely difficult, since the PKI's former constituency
has had to be relegated to the sidelines and treated as almost without continuing rights. And because
we are all naturally inclined towards the view that great events must have great causes, it is not easy to
square the far-reaching consequences and significance of that episode with the theory that the coup
attempt itself had its origins in a rather amateurish, blundering and hastily contrived conspiracy by a
handful of officers, in which the PKI itself was only peripherally involved, although all the evidence
seems to point towards that conclusion." How could it happen that an event so limited in itself (and
shaped by so many accidental twists of fate) could spark off such a conflagration? One can only
answer that question by looking deeply into the character of the Indonesian polity and society before
1965, above all at the social tensions which then burst out into such violence.
I do not pretend to have a very satisfactory explanation of that puzzle, except in terms of the
santri-abangan rifts in Javanese rural society which had been exacerbated by the "unilateral actions"
of the communists over land reform in 1964-65. '6 But if we put too much emphasis on that factor in
the explanation, we have a problem later in explaining why and how rural social tensions have been
damped down so easily since 1965. Clearly an explanation must be related to the ways in which those
local tensions were intermeshed with the struggle for power between the PKI and anti-communist
forces in Jakarta, which brings us to questions about the character of the Indonesian state itself.
Geertz linked his interpretation to a set of generalisations about the nature of the polity, but his im-
pressions (based on the situation in the late 1960s, apparently) look curiously outdated today, thus
serving to warn us yet again that all explanations are rooted in a particular time and circumstances;

6
 "if Indonesia gives any overall impression, it is of a state manque, a country which,
unable to find a political form appropriate to the temper of its people, stumbles on ap-
prehensively from one institutional contrivance to the next . . . The country (is) . . . as
incapable of totalitarianism as it is of constitutionalism".17

One could hardly have anticipated from that description either che powerful centralising tendencies
of 1970—75 or the duration of Suharto's presidency. My own inclination would be to say that while I
broadly agree with Geertz's last sentence, I find the term "a state manque" more appropriate to the
late Sukarno era than Suharto's. The process of nation-building has advanced remarkably over the
last decade, in my judgement, although national integration cannot yet be simply taken for granted,
either in regional or social terms. It is true also that the institutional basis of power (even in the Arm-
ed Forces) in Indonesia is still very far from satisfactory. The structure of government is extremely
brittle — a term I find less misleading than "unstable", which Indonesia currently is not — and one
cannot predict confidently that it would survive a severe economic or political crisis or shock. But in
1978 the lineaments of the state and nation seem to me to be a great deal stronger than they were
when Geertz wrote those words, even though the "institutional contrivances" from which the state
derives its legitimacy have not changed very much.

Earlier I suggested that we need a more historical frame of reference for explaining the key
trends in recent Indonesian history, one which sheds light on both the continuities and discontinuities
of the last forty years. Any search for explanations here must be able to account for the dramatic
swings of the political pendulum that have occurred three or four times (at least — some might argue
for more) since the collapse of Dutch rule in 1941—42. The events of 1965—66 constitute the most
far-reaching of these, but the transition from "liberal" parliamentary democracy to "guided
democracy" in 1959 was also a major watershed, as also the 1945 proclamation of independence and,
in a lesser degree, the swing in 1948 from a leftward political trend towards the right. One can easily
imagine something of a similar kind occurring at the end of the Suharto era, probably to a much
lesser degree, whenever or however that might come about. Yet these dramatic changes have
significance mainly at the apex of national political life, in determining the character of legitimacy
and authority. At lower levels of society their effects are usually felt indirectly, in a rather muted
fashion; for in most respects life goes on there much as it did before, the continuities outweighting
the discontinuities.
I will conclude by listing some of the factors we need to consider if we want to get a broader
perspective on the major developments since 1945 along these lines. Much more would have to be
said to bring out their significance to the full, but I hope these comments will at least be sufficient to
suggest some fruitful lines of approach.
One of the most remarkable continuities of post-independence Indonesian politics, to my mind,
has been the general persistence of the patterns of socio-political alignment that have underlain most
of the struggles for power taking place there. Basically the natural mass constituencies of the major
political parties have not changed much, apart from alterations of name, or adjustments as one party
or another has been eliminated by government decree. Nowhere else in Southeast Asia do we find
anything like this almost "natural" basis for party politics (with the exception, perhaps, of Malaysia,
although the pattern is rather different there). When we compare the election results of 1971 or 1977
7
 with those of 1955 and 1957, the continuities are most striking, due allowance being made for the
elimination of the PKI and the emergence of Golkar as a candidate for the support of the abangan
constituency in Central and East Java which previously voted for PNI and PKI.18 It is noteworthy
that the old PKI voters seem to have swung in behind Golkar, the government's standard-bearer (it
claims not to be a political party), rather than joined the Muslim parties, their old enemy, even
though the latter are now the most vocal opponents of a government which has crushed and harassed
the PKI and its supporters. In other words, the basic political polarisation between the devoutly
Muslim (santri) elements and the syncreticly Muslim (abangan) people in Java, which constituted the
basic cleavage around which the political struggle was fought out in the years 1945—65, with the
Outer Islands generally tending to align with the former on most issues, has broadly persisted,
although the role of the Outer Islands in relation to Golkar and the central power balance in Jakarta
has changed somewhat since 1965.
It is well known that the fundamental explanation for this state of affairs lies in the communal or
ethnic basis of political loyalties (in Java, the aliran cleavages)." Against the persistence of these ties,
neither the class appeal of the PKI nor the potential for a military-civilian cleavage in the 1970s has
been strong enough to change the basic parameters of Indonesian life. Yet we need to understand this
central phenomenon of Indonesian politics also within a historical context. Is it something im-
mutable, with roots deep in the past (something to do with the incomplete process of Islamisation in
Java in the 16th—17th century), or a phenomenon which itself is slowly envolving? I suspect we
might find that this socio-religious polarisation, while it undoubtedly has roots further back in
previous centuries, has been sharpened by the intensification of mobilisation politics in Java between
1945—65. There were special reasons why the struggle for power was peculiarly intense at that time
— competition between party leaders to mobilise a following on the broadest basis they could find,
and the ideological dispute at the heart of Indonesian politics over the question of whether the new
state should be constituted on an Islamic or Marxist or Pantja Sila basis. Today, however, those fac-
tors are a good deal less influential. Is it conceivable that the communal cleavage itself might gradual-
ly become less salient as a determinant of political alignments, not tomorrow or the next day, of
course, but over a longer life-span? And if so, how long? These are questions of key importance to
the assessment of political changes in Indonesia, but they are not easy questions to answer.
The high degree of political mobilisation that occurred throughtout many levels of Indonesian
society in the years 1945-65, which contrasts so sharply with the process of almost complete
depoliticisation since 1970, constitutes one of the most striking discontinuities of recent decades.20
The character of the pre-1965 political regime was profoundly affected by it, just as the character of
the Suharto regime has been affected by the reaction against all that turbulence and disorder. One of
the main reasons why the Army leaders have been so unsympathetic to the idea of revitalising party
politics since 1966 and have, on the contrary, gone to such lengths to emasculate those parties that
have been permitted to survive, must be sought in their unhappy memories of the late Sukarno years.
At that time, despite many curbs on party freedoms and the fact that elections, both national and
regional, had been indefinitely shelved after 1957, the political parties were far from dead and the
PKI in particular managed to play a vigorous and influential role by exploiting the opportunities
open to it for mass mobilisation through demonstrations, slogan campaigns and exploitation of the
symbols of nationalism. This was unnerving for many members of the elite who found their positions
and privileges under increasing challenge, yet political intrigue became so much a part of the Indone-
sian way of life that it has been hard for many to change their habits. Around 1970, people in Jakarta

8
who had for years been addicted to the constant excitements, spicy gossip and uncertainty of the
capital's endless political maneouvrings would often complain that life under the New Order was
utterly dull and boring. Like addicts deprived of their drug, they were still subject to lingering
cravings.
It would be an oversimplification to attribute the process of depoliticisation since 1965 solely to
the Army's heavy-handed and repressive measures in defence of its own interests. Initially, there ap-
pears to have been something of a revulsion against the all-pervasive politicisation (and the
exploitation of communal and ethnic sentiments) that had developed during the last years of
Sukarno, when individuals in all walks of life were under tremendous pressure to take sides and
declare themselves, frequently with their jobs and livelihood at risk. (The "Cultural Manifesto" con-
troversy and intense factional conflict in the sphere of education in 1964 epitomised this trend, which
became even more alarming in 1965.) Hence there was apparently a good deal of support for the pro-
position that political campaigning needed to be damped down to some extent, although the political
parties and mass organisations supporting the New Order in 1966—67 had conflicting ideas on how
this should be done and how far it should go.21 In general, however, they were determined to curb the
Old Order parties, who were otherwise likely to reemerge as the strongest, and to exclude or handicap
the PKI's former supporters somehow or other. But they certainly did not anticipate that the govern-
ment and Army would go as far as they have in reducing the political parties (and even Golkar itself)
to mere cyphers.
The main point to be made here, however, is that the period of intense political mobilisation in
Indonesia between 1945—65 was a highly abnormal state of affairs. There was nothing quite like it
anywhere else in Southeast Asia (not even in Vietnam). I know of no precedent for it in the earlier
history of Indonesia, there was no deep commitment to the institutions or practices or values of
parliamentary democracy, nor even a very long or meaningful tradition of political party activity
before independence was achieved.22 Hence Indonesians were still looking for a pattern of political
institutions appropriate to their "national personality" throughout that period and they have been
looking for it ever since. There were few defenders of liberal parliamentary democracy on the
1949—59 pattern, then or now. This is a dismaying thought for advocates of a more democratic form
of government, but it should hardly be surprising. One may hope, of course, that just as the pen-
dulum swung initially towards the extreme of very intense political mobilisation, then back to the
opposite extreme of excessive demobilisation, it may in time swing back and oscillate less violently
around a more acceptable mean. It will probably be a long time before it settles down at a point of
equilibrium.
Another feature of both the New Order and, in lesser degree, the previous twenty years has been
the gradual transmutation of the Indonesian political system into a fully-fledged bureaucratic polity,
a beamtenstaat or negara pejabat. There could be little argument against the proposition that virtual-
ly all key decisions and policies are now determined within the bureaucratic apparatus (if we use that
term to embrace also the military) in the light of the bureaucracy's notions of what is best for the
country and the people. (This is not quite the same as saying that the bureaucracy thinks and acts
solely in its own interest.) Other sources of potential countervailing power in the political system have
been curbed — and to a large extent in the society also, although Islam remains a symbol and rallying
point for dissidence, while students and intellectuals have from time to time been able to assert a
degree of independence.
In this respect the character of the Suharto regime has changed greatly since 1966—67, when the

9
 "New Order" was a rather motley coalition of Army (but not the Air Force, Navy or Police), Muslim
organisations, student groups and other anti-communist elements. And the situation contrasts great-
ly with that of 1945—59, when the bureaucracy inherited from the Dutch was very much on the
defensive against the challenges to its authority launched by Republican irregular units, civilian
politicians and parliament, the armed forces, political parties, and regional assemblies in their turn.
In fact, the future of the pamong praja looked very bleak in 1957—58, at a time when administrator
types seemed to be loosing all their battles with the "solidarity-makers" among the politicos. But
Sukarno's inauguration of "guided democracy" restored the bureaucracy to a role of greater impor-
tance and since 1966 its position has been steadily strengthened. It is easy to identify a number of
factors which have brought about the triumph of the bureaucracy — traditional notions of the state
and the "Javanese conception of power", with its stress on the Tightness of a concentration of
authority, with power streaming down and out from the sacred centre; the Dutch legacy of a tutelary
rather than participant form of government; the additional strength the central government derives
from foreign aid and oil revenues; the predisposition of the first generation of Indonesian
nationalists towards anti-capitalist and "socialist" (or at least étatist) views about the relationship of
government and society; the weakness of social classes or interest groups capable of articulating alter-
native ideologies; the general lack of support for notions of either individualism or pluralism. But it
is again worth emphasising that these factors are not immutable. Their influence could wax and
wane, even though for the time being the forces making for continuity seem to be dominant here.
Two other trends which one can trace right through the years since 1945 but which have become
particularly significant under the New Order are the processes of what I will call elite consolidation
and "nation-building" (if one may use that hackneyed term in an almost literal sense). About the
first of these, I will simply observe that something like a "middle class" is beginning to emerge in the
1970s, particularly in Jakarta and the other big cities, in a sense in which one simply could not use
that term during the 1950s. It is a middle class characterised not by the ownership of property for the
most part, for by far the largest part of it is made up of civil servants, professional people, the
salariat generally, with still relatively few businessmen (to regard it as a bourgeoisie in a classical
Marxist sense, with a coherent ideology and aspirations to exercise state power in the interests of a
class would be quite misleading, in my view), but united — so far as it is — by a shared lifestyle ("the
metropolitan superculture") and similar aspirations for the future of their children, by a gradually
emerging sense of common interests in greater security of property rights, in less arbitrary govern-
ment procedures, greater regularity and predictability of administration, even "the rule of law" in
some still obscurely formulated sense.23 The members of this stratum of society do not yet constitute
a class in a fully-fledged sense, either as defined by the Marxist criterion of relationship to the means
of production, or in a broader sense of sharing common political interests. Most would still tend to
identify politically and socially with the communal groups from which they originate (or with the
armed forces, in the case of that unique "aliran") and even draw many of their basic ideas, values
and attitudes from that source. But change is certainly taking place. Twenty or thirty years ago one
would have been more inclined to analyse this phenomenon in terms solely of elite rivalries between
the leaders of vertically segmented groups within the community, mainly engaged in a struggle for
power to lay down what the character of the new state of Indonesia would be. The differences bet-
ween them were then more marked than the similarities, but I doubt if one could say that today.
This brings me back to my final point, which is about "nation-building" and its relevance to the
analysis of recent Indonesian politics. Unless one takes into account the fact that the territorial

10
integration of Indonesia was a matter which could still not be taken for granted throughout the first
two decades of independence, one is likely to underestimate the significance of the Suharto govern-
ment's achievement in this respect. During the 1950s, Indonesia's territorial integrity was directly
threatened by regional dissidence on several occasions. Although the threats receded during the
"guided democracy" period, the ravages of inflation and administrative breakdown gravely weaken-
ed the power of the central government in relation to the provinces and by 1965—66 the possibility of
Indonesia's disintegration in the event of serious fighting between communists and anti-communists
in Java could not be disregarded. Under the New Order, the situation has been utterly reversed.
There has been no significant threat of regional dissidence. In a variety of ways, the processes of
government and the economic life of the provinces, even of the most distant and the most neglected
of them, have become increasingly bound into the cobweb of common interests, financial and com-
munications linkages, shipping, trade and movement of people that is gradually binding Indonesia
together.
Moreover, there is now a much greater sense of common identification with what "Indonesia"
stands for than there was prior to 1965, when the conflict between Marxist, Muslim and Pantj a Sila
conceptions of the proper ideological foundations for the state were still unresolved and when the
political cleavage between the "Javanese-patrimonial" and "Islamic entrepreneurial" poles of
political orientation constituted the major rift in the polity. (The resolution of the ideological conflict
may have been a brutal process, and the Muslims are still far from happy about their lack of
influence in the new regime; but I doubt if their leaders really aspire any longer to the hope of
creating an Islamic state.) It must be admitted, of course, that the centralisation of power under the
Suharto regime, over both the armed forces in 1969—70, the system of regional government in 1974
and the political parties after 1972, has been imposed willy nilly by sheer force majeure. The regional
authorities have been left with very little real autonomy under the strongly centralised system of
regional government, although they now receive vastly greater financial subventions from the centre
than ever before. Above all, the machinery of government and economic planning is now working
relatively efficiently throughout the country, in a way which had not happened since colonial times.
These changes have been extremely important, I believe, in giving the country time to settle down and
knit itself together after all the turbulence and strains of 1945—65. Sheer time and (relative) tran-
quillity have perhaps been as valuable as anything else for this purpose. There is still a brittle
character to Indonesia's unity, but the chances that the country will hold together through future
strains and shocks are now greater than they were fifteen years ago, I believe.

In conclusion, however, I must add several qualifications and caveats. I have been trying here to
sketch the outlines of an alternative way of looking at the Indonesian political system over recent
decades. For that purpose, I have been more inclined (in the words of the old song) to "accentuate
the positive, eliminate the negative" than common prudence would dictate. Many of my analyses and
prognoses could be proved wrong tomorrow if events took a sudden turn for the worse in Indonesia
(a disastrous rice harvest, for instance). The country will undoubtedly face serious economic pro-
blems, hence probably also social and political strains, in the middle or late 'eighties when (or if) its
oil revenues diminish. This could bode ill for an authoritarian government which has had a serious
legitimacy problem in recent years and has been steadily narrowing its political base instead of

11
widening it (precisely the mistake made by the Shah of Iran). I prefer to be optimistic about the
chances that Indonesia's leaders will foresee these dangers and avoid them. But it is difficult to deny
that there seems to have developed in the 1970s an intermeshing of the structures of power, privilege,
interest and repression of dissent which can only be called systemic, hence not readily amenable to
piecemeal change. Yet the political system in Indonesia is never as monolithic as it seems from out-
side. (Nor, it should be stressed, is political repression usually as senselessly brutal in Indonesia as in
other authoritarian regimes.) In the last resort, however, it is the sagacity and good sense of
Indonesia's leaders themselves on which the country's future will mostly depend, not the validity of
this or that theory.

Footnotes

1. The Indonesian authorities have absorbed into their own rhetoric many of the ideas and policies advanced by opponents
of the regime, about more egalitarian distribution patterns, popular participation and basic human needs, thereby
depriving them of some of their force and meaning. In many respects, some of them seem quite genuinely to want to
achieve the objectives stated, though not by the same routes as their critics have in mind. In a 1973 seminar at Monash,
Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Lt. Gen. Ali Moertopo spoke about the need for "alternative development
strategies" with an almost glowing enthusiasm.

2. Some of the most trenchant criticisms of the Suharto government's economic policies I have encountered have been
made by staunch supporters of the regime and of the "technocrats" advising it on economic policies; see, for example,
Bruce Glassburner's comments on monetary policy and inappropriately capital-intensive investments in "Political
Economy and the Soeharto Regime", Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (hereafter BIES), vol. XIV, no. 3, Nov.
1978, pp. 37, 43—45; also H.W. Arndt, "Survey of Recent Developments", BIES, vol. XIV, no. 1, March 1978 pp
27—28.

3. I know of no neocolonialist interpretation of Indonesian politics (or of any other Southeast Asian country) which has
actually dug out the statistics of capital inflows at different times or from different countries. Nor does any point out
that despite the high levels of foreign investment approvals in Indonesia since about 1970, the rates of actually realised
investment have been very low, averaging about $200 million p.a., a rate well below Singapore's rate of capital inflow. I
am indebted for this information to Peter McCauley, The Indonesian Economy Under Suharto (forthcoming).

4. It is difficult to deny the force of the systemic connection between these elements in Benedict Anderson's charge that
"the treatment of political prisoners is not an isolated blemish on an otherwise humane record . . . (Although there are
many sincere and idealistic people both inside and outside the Indonesian government who are seriously concerned
about the situation and would very much like to improve it . . . the channels for expressing concern are being steadily
closed and the risks involved increasing . . . The problem lies not in individuals abusing their authority but with a
government that has shown itself over a whole decade to be increasingly authoritarian, suspicious of its own citizens
and indifferent to the rights of the weak and vulnerable". Prepared Testimony of the Question of Human Rights in
Indonesia; Subcommittee on International Organisations of the Committee on International Relations, House of
Representatives, US Congress, 3 May 1976.

5. In their more popularised forms, theories that purport to explain Indonesia's ills in terms of "neocolonialism" or
"dependency" are often expressed in tautologous fashion, impervious to contrary arguments and evidence. Even in
Showcase State (Angus & Robertson, 1973), which gives a fully worked out formulation of these arguments, one finds
in the best chapter, Rex Mortimer's "Indonesia: Growth or Development", a tendency to couch his definitions in such
a way that the conclusions he wishes to draw are logically inescapable under that definition, hence empirically
untestable (e.g. pp. 54 and 57).

). I have dealt more fully with this point in "The Atrophy of Control Mechanisms" in my Problems of the Indonesian
Inflation (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Monograph Series, 1967), pp. 53—60.

'. Robert Reid Smith has made a persuasive case for the relevance to Javanese rural conditions of the Chinese model of
collectivisation in "Impasse in Java's Agriculture: the Case for Chinese Style Collectivization" (Monash University,
Politics Department, M.A. thesis, 1974). But the political feasibility of carrying through such policies seem so remote as
to be out of the question. Even when the PKI was at the peak of its strength in 1964—65, if it had made any bid to seize
power in Java and carry through a collectivisation of land, it would almost certainly have precipitated the secession of
the islands controlling the country's main export resources.

12
8. Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp.
597—608 and passim.

9. Herbert Feith, "Indonesia" in G. McT. Kahin (ed.), Government and Politics of Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1959), p. 181.

10. Clifford Geertz, "Afterword: the Politics of Meaning", in Claire Holt (ed.), Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 322.

11. ibid.

12. ibid., pp. 333—34.

13. The most carefully argued Indonesian account of the coup attempt is by Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismael Saleh, The
Coup Attempt of the 'September 30th Movement'in Indonesia (Jakarta, Pembimbing Masa, 1968). Several Indonesian
writers have ventured to deal with some aspects of the coup; e.g. Umar Kayam's two short stories, "Bawuk" and
"Musim Gugur di Connecticut" and Usamah "Perang dan Manusia" ("War and Humanity: Notes on Personal Ex-
periences" Indonesia, no. 9, October 1970, pp. 89—100). See also Gestapu: Indonesian Short Stories on the Abortive
Communist Coup of 30th September 1965, edited and translated by Harry Aveling (University of Hawaii, Southeast
Asian Studies Working Paper, No. 6, 1975).

14. Simon Leys, "Introduction", p. 14, to his translation of Chen Jo-Hsi. The Execution of Mayor Lin (Indiana University
Press, 1978).

15. For a judicious summary of the problems of interpreting the coup, see Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in
Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), ch. 4.

16. See Rex Mortimer, The Indonesian Communist Party and Land Reform, 1959—1965 (Monash Papers on Southeast
Asia, no. 1, 1973).

17. Geertz, op. cit., p. 323.

18. A comparison of the 1955 and 1971 elections is given by A. van Marie, "Indonesian Electorial Geography under ORLA
and ORBA" in Oey Hong Lee, (ed.), Indonesia after the 1971 Elections (Hull Monographs on South-East Asian
Studies, no. 5, 1974). See also the excellent study by Ken Ward, The 1971 Election in Indonesia: An East Java Case
Study (Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, no. 2, 1974).

19. The best analysis of this problem is given by Ruth McVey in her "Introduction" to Sukarno, Nationalism, Islam and
Marxism (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Monograph Series, 1970).

20. For a good account of the political mobilisation processes in rural Java between 1945—55, see Selosoemardjan, Social
Changes in Jogjakarta (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), chs. 4—6.

21. See Crouch, op. cit., pp. 247—53.

22. "The Dutch had taught them that government was the wielding of power and the suppression of opposition, not the
fostering of democratic practices. Indonesians had had no tradition of democratic government and the Dutch in the
Indies generally informed that democracy was unsuitable for them . . . " Susan Abeyasekere, One Hand Clapping:
Indonesian Nationalists and the Dutch 1939—1942 (Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, no. 5, 1976), p. 90.

23. In a forthcoming article on "Judicial Authority and Rechtsstaat in Indonesia", Daniel S. Lev shows well how and why
some parts of the new Indonesia middle classes have been striving for the establishment of a negara hukum (rechtsstaat
— virtually "the rule of law") there, for the sake of "certainty, regularity, protection of personal rights, and pro-
cedural equity". — with very limited success so far, for the authority of the law and legal institutions has never been
firmly grounded there, even in the colonial era, but with sufficient persistence to make it probable that the idea, because
it does have support, will have some influence on the evolution of Indonesian politics. For background information on
the Jakarta "middle class", I am greatly indebted to Russell Lapthorne for the opportunity to see drafts of his Monash
M.A. thesis on the 'metropolitan superculture".

13
L
 FROM SUKARNO TO SUHARTO: A REPLY TO JAMIE MACKIE

Herb Feith

Jamie Mackie has given you a beautifully nuanced discussion of many of the themes of Indone-
sian social and political life in the last 33 years. I will be briefer and cruder, and concentrate on two or
three areas where our positions are at odds.
One general disagreement I have with Mackie's position is over the importance of external con-
ditioning factors for Indonesian socio-political trends. I agree entirely with his emphasis on history,
on the need to look, back a long way past 1945 if we are to understand the character of Indonesian
poverty and the failure of successive governments of the post-independence period to alleviate it. But
my perspective on Indonesian poverty is one which focuses on the destructive aspects of the colonial
impact rather than on the lowness of productivity levels in the pre-colonial period. In particular I see
the roots of Indonesian poverty as lying in the ways in which demographic and ecological balances
were destroyed in the century after 1830. And I would insist that many of the structures and processes
through which the metropolitan centres of world capitalism have been appropriating Indonesia's
resources in the period since 1830, and shaping its social structure,.have survived into the period since
1945.
The elaborate bridgehead built up in the late colonial period — including Dutch government of-
ficials and businessmen, British planters and American oil men, Eurasian technical and clerical staff,
aristocratic bupatis, wedanas and camats, Chinese middlemen traders and Ambonese and
Menadonese soldiers — was largely smashed when the Japanese invaded Indonesia in 1942. And
many components of it which survived the Japanese occupation were dismantled in the years of
revolution which followed it. But efforts to reassemble a similar structure of mediation and domina-
tion were resumed soon after the Japanese collapse. Indeed a great deal of the politics of the
1945—65 period can be seen as a contest over efforts of this kind, as a contest between one coalition
of forces which wanted such a new bridgehead structure established quickly, and was willing to give
foreign business easy terms, and another coalition which stood out against efforts to erect such a
structure or wanted tougher conditions. The various battles which recurred in those decades, between
Hatta and the moderate-nationalist groups around the Masyumi and the Socialist Party on the one
hand and Sukarno and the radical-nationalist forces on the other, including particularly the Com-
munists, the PNI nationalists and the NU Muslims — battles over foreign aid, over the terms of
foreign investment and over exchange rates — those were not just contests between different interest
groups within Indonesia, and certainly not just contests betweeen different communities or cultural
segments. They were also battles over the terms on which Indonesia would be reintegrated into the
global capitalist system and over the safeguards by which national and popular interests might be
protected in a new accommodation. I see them as resulting from attempts by the moderate-nationalist
segments of the dominant class to persuade other segments that the genie of popular politics had to
be put back in the bottle. That genie, which had burst forth so imperiously in the wake of the
Japanese defeat, and had so frequently animated both inter-communal hostilities and anti-imperialist
causes in the subsequent period, was finally destroyed as a result of the massacres and mass arrests of
1965—66.

15
 With the radical-nationalist forces defeated and the Communists dead or imprisoned, popular
policits was able to be switched off in the interests of "development", the Way was clear for a new
version of the old 'colonial' bridgehead to be constructed, and with minimal safeguards. Some of its
component parts had been dovetailing their interests for many years: generals, economists and
engineers, Chinese businessmen and aristocratic provincial officials. But most of the crucial foreign
components were new, or at least vastly expanded: the American and Japanese aid officials and their
I.M.F. associates, the new investors in oil, copper, timber and textiles and the Gleichschaltung
specialists in hotels, construction and management. As I see it, Mackie's approach underestimates
the extent to which Suharto's Indonesia has been the Indonesia of this new bridgehead, a new ar-
rangement whereby the locally dominant classes serve as agents for metropolitan business, borrowing
much of the power they wield within Indonesia from overseas sources. What is hidden in the Mackie
analysis is the connection between the mediating roles the bridgehead plays in relation to the outside
world and its repressive roles in relation to popular politics. Equally hidden is the fact that the new
arrangement has served to undo much of the central thrust of Indonesia's anti-colonial nationalism,
the efforts of nationalists over many decades, both before and after 1945, to find Indonesian solu-
tions to Indonesian problems.
A second principal disagreement I have with his paper has to do with his tendency to look at In-
donesia's problems from the vantage point of its policy makers. He pins his faith "in the last resort"
on "the sagacity and good sense of Indonesia's leaders," where I would argue that it is just as impor-
tant to look to the sagacity and good sense of the Indonesian people, and their unwillingness to go on
putting up with poverty, exploitation, oppression and cultural domination. Unhappy as Mackie is
about the repressive features of the Suharto policy, he draws comfort from the fact that "the
machinery of government and economic planning is now working relatively efficiently throughout
the country." These changes, he thinks, have given the country "time to settle down and knit itself
together after all the turbulence and strains of 1945—65."
Mackie's model is one of good governance and enlightened leadership. It is one which involves
faith in large professionalized bureaucratic agencies and efficient business corporations, both foreign
and local, and in transfers of technology from the advanced capitalist world. It sees the mass of the
Indonesian people as likely beneficiaries of "evolution from above," of order and the "trickledown"
of wealth. It does not see them as citizens and makers of their own history.
Our disagreement here is partly of course a matter of political values. Mackie is more of a con-
servative than I, more sympathetic to technocratic planners and less interested in emancipatory pro-
jects. In his eyes I make too much of egalitarianism, participatory democracy and the creativity of
peasants, and pay too little attention to the human costs of political instability.
But I want to insist that our dispute about the mapping of Indonesian political territory is more
than a reflection of our disagreement on values. As I see it, Mackie's perspective leads him to
underestimate the power of opposition to the Suharto regime. Moreover it leads him to
underestimate the extent to which the regime needs to devote large resources to repressing its op-
ponents and buying off individuals in their ranks. In Mackie's view "the period of intense political
mobilization . . . between 1945 and 1965 was a highly abnormal state of affairs. There was nothing
quite like it anywhere else in Southeast Asia (not even in Vietnam). I know of no precedent for it in
the earlier history of Indonesia. There was no deep commitment to the institutions or values of
parliamentary democracy." All of that leads to the implied conclusion that Suharto's is somehow the
natural road, one that fits with Indonesia's history and the values of its people, or with the trends of

16
world history in the twentieth century, or both. Nothing about the emancipatory and populist themes
of the pre-war nationalist movement, nothing about the way in which socialist ideas were part of the
consensus of Indonesian politics for 40 years, nothing about the way in which kerakyatan democracy
was fused in Sukarno's thinking with economic self-reliance and cultural autonomy.
My argument about the power of opposition to Suharto rests partly on what I was able to learn
in the course of a short visit I paid to Indonesia at the beginning of this year. One vivid impression I
gained then was that the anti-populist tide, which served as so powerful an ideological buttress to
military rule in the late 1960's, and was still important in the early 1970's, has now ebbed away. The
mood of the late 1960's was one of recovery from shock, after years of economic and administrative
chaos and political polarization, culminating in the coup and countercoup and the terrible massacres.
In that situation what Suharto stood for, suppressing politics in the interests of IMF-style economic
stabilization and development, made sense to a lot of Indonesians, particularly middle class people.
"We have tried mass politics", these people said, "and it did not work. After the end of the revolu-
tion, Sukarno kept stirring up everybody, and particularly the young. He kept saying we had to main-
tain the spirit of the revolution, and so we had popular agitation all the time. All those slogans and
rallies and campaigns — the campaign for West Irian, and then the one against Malaysia and all that
talk of the New Emerging Forces and their world-wide struggle against the Old Established Forces.
And where did it all get us? Eventually the inflation was so bad that the whole machine of govern-
ment had almost stopped running and it looked as if the Communists would soon be taking over.
And Sukarno's politics is ultimately to blame for the massacres that followed when Suharto brought
in his New Order. Are they not ultimately to be laid at the door of the man who kept politics at fever
pitch level for two decades, who introduced political ideology to the villages, where it got all mixed
up with religion, with santris increasingly hostile to their abangan neighbours and so on? What we
need now is a firm hand at the wheel, so that the country can get past that obsession with politics at
last and get on with development."
Now that basic view of what Indonesia's problems are and how they should be solved, was per-
suasive to large numbers of Indonesians ten years ago, and not only members of the middle class.
And its prevalence was a major factor in bringing about the transition to military-compradore rule.
But it has far less power to convince today — outside a small group of top and middle bureaucrats.
In today's situation, the people who are talked about as leaders and persons of authority are op-
position figures. Most of them are people whose names were linked to the student protest movement
which flourished in the second half of 1977 and was suppressed in the first three months of this year,
immediately before the People's Consultative Congress session at which Suharto was reelected. I am
thinking of figures like the poet and dramatist Rendra, the lawyer and legal aid organizer Buyung
Nasution, the ex-diplomat and social theorist Soedjatmoko, the Muslim reform leader Dawam
Raharjo and the Jesuit architect and columnist Mangunwijaya. The student movement had not been
brought into existence by men like these, but one major reason why it came to be so powerful has to
do with the way in which these men's ideas and those of others like them had prepared the ground for
it. They had done so through Prisma, the country's principal social science journal, through Tempo,
the country's most widely read weekly, and through the Catholic-liberal Kompas, the country's
largest daily, as well as through a host of smaller publications.
The student movement of that nine-month period should, I think, be seen as a front-line
representative of a coalition of middle-class groupings. I see that coalition as one whose core lies in a
triangle of professionals outside the government service, Islamic functionaries and students. Its

17
 periphery includes many professionals within the government complex, and sub-professionals like
teachers, as well as people from many segments of the business world. This broader coalition had two
types of concerns, overlapping but distinct, a regularizing one voiced particularly by liberal profes-
sional men of high prestige, and a populist concern expressed mainly by students.
The regularizers — journalists, lawyers, academics and so on — are people who want Indonesian
capitalism to run more smoothly and predictably, who want modernization to proceed further along
the paths it has taken in the last 12 years but with less corruption, less waste, less monopoly, less
nepotism and less military privilege. They want the Government and its bureaucrats to do more to
justify the large amounts of wealth they consume. They want the rule of law to characterize a lot
more transactions than it currently does. And they want more efficient performance by the Govern-
ment. A lot of these people admire Ali Sadikin, the former mayor of Jakarta. "He showed what
government can be like in Indonesia. He was dynamic. He had vision. He got things done.
Everywhere else we look we see officials who are rake-off merchants, or second-rate colonels who
have been around for so long that they eventually had to be given a job as district heads."
The populist concern is more like a mood than a critique. It is clearer in what it dislikes about the
Suharto politique than what it wants to see put in its place. Some of its ideas have come from the
world outside, from Ivan Illich and Andre Gunder Frank, Mahbub ul Huq, Julius Nyerere and E.F.
Schumacher. Within Indonesia its antecedents lie in a series of small student movements with
Socialist Party connections, movements which fashioned an increasingly coherent critique of Suhar-
to's developmentalism in the years after 1969. Some of that critique came out in the Yogyakarta stu-
dent journal Sendi in 1971-72, more of it in the small publications of the Discussion Group of the
University of Indonesia in Jakarta in 1971—74 and more again in a series of Rendra plays put on be-
tween 1973 and 1977.
In some of its forms this critique is sharply anti-imperialist, holding that Suharto is a puppet of
the multinationals and that there will be no meaningful development in Indonesia until a government
comes in which cuts the country's ties with the centres of world business. In other forms it is prin-
cipally hostile to technocratism and slavish imitation of the West. In other forms again it concen-
trates on the demand that Indonesia should learn fro,m China, about autocentric and employment-
centred strategies of national development, strategies in which village people have a central role to
play. Finally, the critique has always had major anti-bureaucratic themes, and in its franker forms
anti-militaristic ones as well.
Both the regularizing criticisms of the government and the populist ones had come out into the
open in the last months of the thaw which preceded the Malari riots of January 1974. By the time of
the next thaw in 1977 their influence had grown much wider, both within the student community and
in other sections of the newspaper reading public. Among the students populist themes were no
longer distinctively associated with the Socialist Party tradition. Muslim, Nationalist and Christian
student organizations were under their sway to almost the same degree.
It became clear in the thaw period of late 1977 that there is a good deal of tension between anti-
Suharto critics whose principal concern is for regularization and other critics who see themselves as
fighting for more far-reaching changes. Many of the middle-class Indonesians who sympathized with
the goals of regularization in a general way, drew back from the cause of anti-Suharto opposition in
the months before March 1978, because they were positively frightened by student leaders talking
about action by the people. Equally significant however was the fact that sizeable numbers of highly
placed professionals, people with strong anti-communist convictions like Generals Nasution and

18
Dharsono, stuck with the student movement in its phase of radical defiance of the government.
The movement has now of course been suppressed. Student councils throughout the country
have been banned, and scores of student leaders are in jail. Seven Jakarta dailies which supported the
movement were banned for two weeks, and their editors were required to give far-reaching
assurances before they were allowed to re-open. Those papers are now very tame again, much as they
were after the crackdown which followed Malari in January 1974. But the government's credibility
problem remains unsolved.
It is true that many government leaders have adapted their rhetoric to the critics' themes. Some
of them have been paying lipservice to self-reliance, decentralization and Basic Human Needs for
years, and have persistently talked of the importance of popular participation in the implementation
of government programs. More recently some of the top figures of the government have gone to great
lengths to associate themselves with the revival of pro-Sukarno feeling. But these me-too-ist gestures,
unaccompanied as they are by major changes in policy direction, do little or nothing to redeem the
government's good name. Indeed they leave it vulnerable to new charges of hypocrisy. Indirectly they
reflect the moral strength of the critics and the weakness of support for the developmentalist ideology
by which military rule and exclusionary politics is ultimately justified. The widespread rebirth of
fascination with Sukarno has particularly threatening implications, reflecting as it does the search for
leaders of broad social vision, leaders who know how to talk to young people, who can talk about
justice and struggle, about national identity and history and the future, not only about development,
security, and management.
My final point of disagreement with Mackie has to do with an element of historical context
which his account of the transition from Sukarno to Suharto leaves out. It is an element which has to
do with "disEuropeanization", the long-term trend, which has waxed and waned a great deal in this
century but never abated, for the peoples of the non-Western world to lay effective claim to political,
cultural and technological autonomy.'
As I see it the Suharto project was launched at a particular time in the history of West-non-West
relations. It was a time when the Pax Americana was still largely intact, when the United Nations was
an American-controlled forum, when efforts to organize Third World states into an anti-Western
bloc seemed to be getting nowhere. The attempt of the Argentinian Raul Prebisch to get better terms
of trade for raw materials producing countries through UNCTAD, the U.N. Conference on Trade
and Development, had achieved almost as little success by the middle 1960's as those of Sukarno to
organize a Conference of New Emerging Forces to out-flank the United Nations. The solidarity
achieved at the Bandung Conference of Asian and African Nations in 1955 was a thing of the past,
not least because of the India-China war. And the Non-Aligned Movement was deeply divided. Anti-
Americanism was not working, so there seemed to be a case for "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em."
Moreover American social science notions of what the Third World countries' problems are enjoyed
high prestige among a growing number of Third World intellectuals. Those American notions of
development and modernization, as tasks which require moving into a post-nationalist phase of
politics, attracted younger intellectuals in many Third World countries, and not only the most highly
professionalized or most highly xenophilic. DisEuropeanization looked like a spent force.
Things are very different in the late 1970's. The US has been defeated in Indochina and
humiliated by Watergate. The example of OPEC has given great impetus to the efforts of Third
World states to get better terms of trade. And the UN has become a forum at which the U.S. and
other First World countries must step gently. It is true that the drive of the Group of 77 for a New
International Economic Order has yet to achieve major results. But the rich countries' efforts to
19
 divide the Group have largely backfired. And there is every indication that the pressure on First
World states to make more concessions in the direction of a New International Economic Order will
be maintained, if only because so many of the leaders of Third World countries are aware that they
are riding a tiger, as inequalities rise in their own societies.
Equally important, the goal of catching up to the advanced countries has lost a lot of its lustre as
Third World leaders have seen the way in which industrialism has come to be questioned in the West,
as they have seen more and more Westerners grow disenchanted with one or other aspect of the world'
of large, hierarchical, centralized and inanimate energy-intensive institutions. In the words of the
Brazilian, F.H. Cardoso, "People in the Third World are convinced that alternative styles of
development are possible precisely because there is a crisis of confidence over the predatory-
industrializing model among the elites of the industrialized countries."2
So the search is on, among intellectuals, students and social activists in many parts of the Third
World, for far-reaching new definitions of development, for new technologies and new political
forms through which "eco-development" of Another Development might be realized.
It is a search which has already churned up a lot of the ground on which the Suharto project has
been built, and it threatens to churn up a lot more. So it may well persuade the project's managers
and their foreign associates that more extreme forms of repression are needed to shore it up.
At this point it becomes important to refer to the interdependence between what is happening in
the poor countries and what is happening in the rich. Those people in Indonesia and other parts of
the Third World who are engaged in the search for Another Development, and in the struggle against
the repressive power of "development" as enshrined in their dominant classes and their foreign sup-
porters, are coming to cooperate more and more with their First World counterparts, those who are
groping and fighting here for alternative technologies and what Ivan Illich calls convivial institutions,
and against the encroachments of political repression.3
The task of overcoming underdevelopment in countries like Indonesia should thus be seen in
global context. In this focus it is not only parallel to the struggle against overdevelopment in rich
countries like Australia but also closely connected with it, particularly inasmuch as each struggle is
threatened by the inclination of adversary elites to resort to repressive responses when their power to
persuade fails. In this context overdevelopment refers not only to the rich countries' exploitation of
the poor or to the way in which their governments and corporations underpin the power of repressive
regimes overseas. Nor does it refer only to the rich countries' crazy patterns of energy use, pollution
and resource depletion, which deny the solidarity of our generation with the generations of the
future. It also has to do with the rich countries' militarism, racism and internal colonialism, and the
disabling power of their professional monopolies. Above all, it refers to their rulers' disposition to
use their vast technological capacities, including nuclear power, to defend an oppressively centralized
and hierarchical socio-political status quo.
If I may end on a note of exhortation, it seems to me that the time has passed when people like us
here could concern themselves with the overcoming of underdevelopment in Indonesia without also
concerning themselves at least equally with the struggle against overdevelopment in Australia.
Footnotes
1. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction and Readings, Allen Lane
1969, p.5.
2. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "Towards Another Development", in M. Nerfin, ed., Another Development:
Approaches and Strategies, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala, 1971, p.31.

3. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, Boyars, 1973.

20
 REGIONALISM AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION IN INDONESIA:
THE ACEHNESE EXPERIENCE

Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin

In this paper I am talking about regionalism and national integration in Indonesia with an emphasis
on the Acehnese experience in the 1950s. There are many reasons why this paper is focused on Aceh,
and I would like here to draw your attention especially to three of them. First, although in terms of
time, the Acehnese resistance against the central government was relatively shorter than those of
West Java and South Sulawesi, in terms of massiveness of popular support it surpassed the other
two, which was well reflected in the government's eventual preparedness to meet the Acehnese
demands. Second, Aceh is a unique case; its historical and cultural distinctiveness had made Aceh a
peculiar political problem for the central government to face. On the one hand, Aceh had had a long
record of resistance against the Dutch as well as a slight degree of integration with the rest of In-
donesia in the colonial period since it had almost no contact with nationalist organizations operating
in other areas of the country. But on the other hand, its performance in the national struggle for
Indonesian independence had set up a special relationship between the revolutionary central govern-
ment and the Acehnese. Third, its rebellious leader, Daud Beureueh, was, unlike Kahar Muzakkar of
South Sulawesi, for instance, a man of high personal prestige, a regional nationalist leader whose
leadership in the region was acknowledged as outstanding by central leaders.

The years 1950—62 were a period of Indonesian history in which the newly independent state
had to face a serious set of rebellions in several regions. The Darul Islam insurrection in West Java,
originating in 1947, was followed by a secessionist movement in the Moluccas at the end of April
1950. In South Sulawesi, dissatisfaction developing within the local military structure in the early
part of 1950 soon led the region to join the West Javanese Darul Islam movement. Similarly,
Kalimantan was by no means at peace. This list of troubles does not stop here. Before the central
government was able to put an end to the resistance in West Java, Kalimantan and South Sulawesi,
the Darul Islam movement had been strengthened by an Acehnese rebellion that broke out in
September 1953. In 1958 a combination of nationally respected civilian leaders and regional military
officers launched another rebellion in Sumatra and North Sulawesi, the PRRI {Pemerintah Revolu-
sioner Republik Indonesia, Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia).
Thus, in its first decade of independence Indonesia was plagued by centrifugal rebellions. There
was a challenge from every major island apart from West Irian, and several of them placed the coun-
try's survival as a unified entity in jeopardy. Why did all this happen? Considering the fact that most
of the rebellions occurred in the aftermath of the revolution, could it be simply said that Indonesian
nationalism and patriotism were, as many Indonesians believed, only capable of driving foreign
powers out but incapable of welding national integration? Or is it right to assume that all the
challenges were brought about by the re-emergence of horizontal and vertical cleavages after in-
dependence had actually been achieved?

21
 This situation of frail integration, it seems, was rooted in a division between two main political
cultures, the Javanese-aristocratic and the Islamic entrepreneurial in Feith's language or, in plainer
language, in the clash between Pancasila and Islamic ideologies.' An Indonesian scholar, Nawawi,
relates this reality with social stagnation created by colonial circumstances.2 But others, like Clifford
Geertz, would argue that the rebellions should not be seen as the result of "clashes of opposed men-
talities" but rather as the substance of a struggle to create a functioning institutional structure.3
Another view, Hans Schmitt's, is that the source of Indonesia's political conflicts in that period lay in
the difference of economic interest between Java and the Outer Islands." I am of the opinion that the
root of Indonesia's problems of integration lies in strong ethnic sentiments. Acknowledged or not,
both the majority and minority ethnic groups still until today base their social, political and economic
interests on ethnicity.
No matter "how we pose the arguments of the origins of those conflicts, the fact is that Indonesia,
whether its people like it or not, is not a tightly integrated nation. Although in terms of race and
language, the country is more integrated than Malaysia and India, respectively. Indonesians possess
two major horizontal and vertical impediments which stand in the way of unifying their country.
Horizontally, the country is geographically fragmented into more or less 13,000 islands and the
substantial concentration of population is on the major islands of Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan and
Sulawesi. This geographical fragmentation is complemented by ethnic heterogeneity that accom-
modates more than 300 different ethnic groups possessing their own cultural identities and speaking
about 250 distinct languages. Of these, at least ten are major ethnic groups numbering one million or
more people and having a strong sense of ethnic identity. And there is one ethnic giant, the Javanese,
with about half of the whole population of Indonesia. In the religious front, too, Indonesia, is a
divided nation. Although Islam is a dominant religion in the country, its failure in the past to
penetrate the whole archipelago intensified religious cleavages among the people; between Moslems,
Christians, Hinduists, Buddhists, and the so-called "animists". In addition, the unequal intensity of
its spread has left remarkable division in the Moslem community itself, creating the abangan and san-
tri polarization, of which Geertz and many others have written, while the different emphasis of its
teachings had acquainted Indonesians with various outloooks of Islam: reformism, orthodoxy,
legalism (syariat) and sufi-mysticism.
There are two things to say about these horizontal cleavages. First, pre-colonial Indonesia was
not unified, except through trading networks, Islam and a more or less common experience of the
external world. The political unification of the region in the pre-Dutch period was relatively short-
lived. It was achieved at two different periods by the two ancient kingdoms of Sriwijaya and Ma-
japahit, centred on South Sumatra and East Java, respectively. But the South Sumatran base of the
one and the East Javanese base of the other provoked suspicion towards these kingdoms from the
rest of the country. As important as the first point is, secondly, the distinction of economic interest
between densely populated Java and the far more sparsely populated Outer Islands. The
preponderant economic interest of Java in the 1950s was import-oriented which meant that Java ab-
sorbed a large part of the resources produced by the export-oriented Outer Islands.
In addition to the cleavages based on ethnic and geographical diversity, there is an enormous gap
between the national elite and the mass on the one hand, and there are divisions within the elite camp
itself on the other. Vertically, the elite is very diffeent from the mass. Receiving Western education,
and to a great extent influenced by Western life styles, the Indonesian elite numbering only a few
thousand persons consists of "civilian and military bureaucrats, politicians, and some non-

22
 governmental professionals and businessmen"5; it is virtually a metropolitan urban elite/ By con-
trast, the majority of the population is peasants, and urban workers and petty traders With these
distinct socio-cultural backgrounds there surely exists a gap of communication between the two
segments, one that originates from their difference of interests as well as the differences between their
pattern of thinking.
The gap between the people and their leaders is not an unbridgeable one, however. There is com-
munication between the two - partly provided by the fragmentation within the elite camp. But this
kind of communication often produces disintegrative outputs as well as integrative ones. Despite the
socio-cultural gap, the leaders and the rest of the population still have some things in common-
ideology, or almost anything that runs from religious ties to ethnicity. The danger that may emerge
from this is that leaders tend to make use of these links whenever divisions within their camp develop
into an unavoidable clash. A good example of this is shown by the PRRI rebellion in which several
leaders at national level returned to their bases of support in order to protect their political interests.
In spite of these cleavages, the sense of having a common fate and wanting to have a common
future gave rise to nationalism, to the movement to build an independent nation-state. Close contacts
between the youth leaders from various islands had led in late 1928 to a decision to merge all the
ethnic and youth organizations to create an Indonesian youth movement which committed to create
one state, one nation and one language, Indonesia. On August 17, 1945, two days after the collapse
of the Japanese interregnum, without much argument the leaders proclaimed the independence of
Indonesia. Thanks to the tradition which the October 1928 Oath had generated, consensus among the
leaders was easily reached. Not only had they consented to include all parts of the Dutch ex-colony in
the archipelago into the newly born Republic, they also equipped it with the necessary state
machinery in a relatively short time. Sukarno was appointed the first President and Hatta the Vice-
President. In the next few weeks the leaders had set forth a temporary constitution, which is now
known as the 1945 Constitution, which obviously symbolized consensus among nationalist leaders of
all groups, a quasi-parliament Central National Committee of Indonesia consisting of 135 men, and a
presidential cabinet. Just before the Dutch returned, the nationalist leaders had completed restructur-
ing regional administration, particularly in Sumatra and Java.
Events in the following months show that these movements had strong support from the majori-
ty of the population, as the people enthusiastically welcome the declaration of independence. Spon-
taneous response, turned the population to a revolution. Cleavages, both horizontal and vertical,
were put aside. Ethnic and regional bonds seemed to vanish and were channelled towards bolstering
the revolutionary national leadership. Loyalty to national leaders was not only in the form of
acceptance of their guidance by local people, but also in the form of fighting men as well as financial
support. In this regard, the peasant masses were hand in hand with their local leaders and the rest of
the population in seizing Japanese arms and fighting the returning Dutch. Moreover, when
sovereignty had been internationally recognized in 1949 popular enthusiasm was extended to'the ex-
tent of symbolizing national unity by rejecting federalism which the Dutch had tried to build up and
adopting a unitary system.
In Aceh, the revolution had placed the Acehnese in a unique position. In order to describe this
uniqueness, we should glance at the historical setting of Aceh under colonial powers. Although the
Dutch had been fighting the Acehnese since 1873, the region was not controlled by the Dutch until
1902 when the last Acehnese Sultan surrendered. Even after 1902 the region was far from subjugated,
for the Acehnese continued their struggle under the leadership of the ulamas (religious scholars), who

23
transformed it into an ideological struggle and engaged in guerrilla warfare. What this meant to the
Dutch was well reflected in the development of the Dutch administrative system in Aceh in which a
civilian administration was not set up until 1918. And anti-Dutch sentiments, based partly on Islamic
faith, continued to be strong among the Acehnese.
To defeat the Acehnese, the Dutch played off the ulebalangs (the local petty rulers) against the
ulamas and the Sultan. That is why the palace aristrocrats (the Sultan's descendants) eventually sided
with the ulama group in the conflict against the ulebalangs in the later revolutionary period. In the
socio-economic field, although the introduction of development programs also benifitted the ulamas,
the Dutch failed to eliminate anti-Dutch sentiments among the Acehnese. On the other hand, the
Dutch tried not to disturb the Acehnese by preserving their values from outside influence. Never-
theless, anti-Dutch sentiments reappeared in the form of widespread revolts against the Dutch at the
beginning of 1942, revolts in which the ulamas and the ulebalangs cooperated closely.
The quarantine imposed by the Dutch secluded the Acehnese from the rest of Sumatra, and even
moreso from Java and the other islands. Hence the rise of Indonesian nationalism hardly touched
Aceh, although the sound of the national anthem, Indonesia Raya, did reach the region in the early
1930s, several years after it was first introduced in Java. Knowledge about the rest of Indonesia
trickled in from a handful of Acehnese students studying in other parts of the country and from
religious periodicals. In addition, Mecca served as a channel of communication between the
Acehnese and other Indonesian Moslems. In this connection, thus, the scope of Acehnese world was
small and is perhaps aptly dscribed by an Indonesian proverb saying "bagaikan katak dalam tem-
purung" (like a frog underneath a coconut-shell). No wonder most Acehnese in those days thought
that all Indonesians were Moslems.
The Japanese, like the Dutch, employed the policy of playing the ulebalangs and ulamas off
against each other. Probably the Japanese coercive system brought the two segments of the Acehnese
community more completely under Japanese control than they ever had been under Dutch.
Nonetheless the Acehnese did not cease their resistance. They resisted the Japanese when the latter
violated their religious and customary values and continuously suppressed them in economic field.
Lack of earlier contact with nationalism in other regions did not prevent the Acehnese from
backing up the national revolution when it broke out in 1945. To the Acehnese, the national revolu-
tion was a time of regaining regional autonomy in the social, economic and political fields. The
revolutionary Central Government was incapable of interfering in Acehnese local affairs, while the
Acehnese succeeded in preventing Dutch reoccupation of their region. In fact Aceh was the only ma-
jor region which remained independent and beyond Dutch control throughout the period of
1945—49. The Acehnese ulamas first manoeuvred the ulabalangs from political power in 1946 and
after that successfully exerted control over the region and gave a religious colour to the national
revolution in Aceh. These developments enabled Pusa, an ulama organization which was founded in
1939 and of which Daud Beureueh was chairman, to establish itself as the spearhead of Acehnese
identity in 1945—49 period. Aceh played an important part in the revolution, in the sense of both
fighting men and financial support, and this contributed greatly to Acehnese bargaining power in the
relation to the national government in achieving their demands. On the other hand, the need for
Acehnese support caused the Central Government to indulge Aceh by granting high local positions
for its leaders. As far as the revolutionary Republic was concerned, Banda Aceh became the political
centre of the North Sumatran Province throughout the period of 1947—49.
It has been said earlier that as soon as foreign power had been driven out, national loyalty and

24
 revolutionary enthusiasm faded away from many regions outside Java. This was mainly because the
Cental Government moved to affirm its grip over the regions by threatening local interests. The
Province of Kalimantan, for instance, was restless because its Javanese governor had 'imported'
most of his staff from Java and neglected the able local officials. In South Sulawesi, there was a
mutiny by a group of Netherlands Indies Army officers led by Captain Andi Aziz. And the
discriminatory way in which rationalization policies were applied towards local irregular units heated
up the whole situation. Similarly, the Christian Ambonese in the Moluccas felt threatened as they
believed their past association with the Dutch would now effect their religious and political interests.
The Acehnese were also affected by the policies the Central Government was applying in the
early 1950s. Despite the outstanding role Aceh had played in the national revolution, the government
policies hit the Acehnese harder than many other ethnic groups, inasmuch as many of the others were
at least given provincial status. In January 1951, the Natsir Government led by a leader of the large
Moslem party Masyumi, dissolved the Province of Aceh, which had been established by the Indone-
sian Temporary Government in Sumatra in 1949, and reincorporated it into the Province of North
Sumatra, under a governor in Medan. This was not an easy move for Jakarta, as the proposal, which
had been put forward by the Hatta Cabinet in early 1950, had strong opposition from Pusa, the
powerful ulama organization. Pusa demanded that Aceh should keep its provincial status and it
pushed for this by establishing the Gerakan Otonomi (Movement for Autonomy). This opposition
led the Central Government to send several leaders, including Vice-President Hatta and Prime
Minister Natsir, to Aceh to persuade the Acehnese leaders. On the other hand, some ulebalang
elements who had been out of power on the local scene since 1946 now began to restore their in-
fluence in Jakarta by opposing the Pusa demands. In Aceh these ulebalang elements were supported
by Pusa's opponent in the religious field, the orthodox ulamas. After the Province of Aceh was
dissolved in January 1951, Daud Beureueh, the Pusa leader, protested by refusing to accept his seat
in the Parliament.
The dissolution of the Province of Aceh was followed by several other unpopular consequences
including resentment at the downgrading of Acehnese leaders and at the appointment of non-
Acehnese (including subordination to non-Moslem Bataks) in Banda Aceh, the disbanding of
Division X, the predominantly Acehnese unit of the Indonesian National Army, as part of the army
rationalization programs of 1951—52, and a related search raid upon Pusa leaders, including Daud
Beureueh, by army officials in 1951. Other consequences included the suspension of the right to
direct barter trade with Singapore and Penang, which adversely affected Acehnese producers of cash
crops, and the arousing of strong religious sentiments because of the intrusion of "new cultural
elements" ("cosmopolitanization") proscribed by Islam (gambling, liquor, moral laxity, etc.)
associated with the non-Acehnese officials.
In September 1953 Daud Beureueh proclaimed Aceh an Islamic State in defiance of the authority
of the Jakarta Government, now headed by Ali Sastroamidjojo of the PNI from which the Masyumi
was excluded. Daud Beureueh's troops held many of the urban centres of Aceh until early 1954. And
they continued to control most of the vast interior of the region after that, at least until 1959.
Many Acehnese elements (of non-ulebalang orientation) in civilian and military structures out-
side Aceh were involved in the preparations for the rebellion. Some non-Acehnese ulamas of North
Sumatra were also involved. A meeting between some Acehnese military officers stationed in North
Sumatra and the organizer of the rebellion was held in a small town in North Sumatra in mid-1953 to
discuss the D-Day and a plan to kill President Sukarno, who was expected to visit Medan in

25
September. Relations with Darul Islam movement of West Java, led by Kartosuwirjo, had been
established after a visit of Kartosuwirjo's envoy to Aceh some time before the outbreak of the
rebellion in 1953.
The rebellion broke out before the preparations had been completed. This resulted in the failure
of the rebels to gain control of all of the urban centres. In this connection, two factors were impor-
tant. The first was the arrest of Kartosuwirjo's envoy in Jakarta, on his return to West Java from
Aceh. The central government got prior warning from him about the movement in Aceh, and
suspected that the envoy had surrendered in order to force the Acehnese to join the Darul Islam
movement. Secondly, some Acehnese officers withdrew their commitment to join the rebellion, ap-
parently because they feared that the Acehnese plan had been disclosed to the Jakarta authorities by
the arrested envoy. This withdrawal meant that the rebels failed to gain military support from
Acehnese military units in North Sumatra.
The factors to which the revolt has been attributed are essentially those mentioned earlier plus
dissatisfaction over the course of national politics at that time, in particular over a speech that Presi-
dent Sukarno had made in Amuntai in Kalimantan earlier in that year, in which he strongly opposed
the call to declare Indonesia an Islamic State. Thus the cause of the rebellion could be divided into
two categories: regional and religious.
The activities of ulebalang elements and the pro-ulebalang attitude of Jakarta were also
important. The ulebalangs saw the post-1950 period as one in which they had a chance to regain some
of the ground they had lost in 1945—46, or at least to retaliate against the Pusa regime. In this con-
nection they saw the nationalist party PNI as their natural ally. So they were encouraged by the fall of
the Natsir Cabinet, from which the PNI had been excluded, in March 1951.
Reacting to the rebellion, the central government pursued a policy, described by Prime Minister
Ali Sastroamidjojo as, "when your house is burning, put the fire out without asking a lot of ques-
tions"; therefore harsh action was taken against the Acehnese. This "hawkish" policy provoked the
Acehnese to demonstrate their military capabilities on which they had long prided themselves.
The colonial "divide and rule" tactic was again applied in Aceh. First, the ulebalang elements in
Aceh were played off against the rebellious ulamas, while on the other hand, in the ulama camp, the
orthodox were used to oppose the reformist who were now leading the rebellion. Secondly, Jakarta
reinforced Acehnese grievances against the Bataks and the Minangkabaus by sending troops of those
ethnic origins to suppress the rebellion. But there was also a softer, "dovish" side to Jakarta's
policies, an attempt to separate the rebel leaders from the mass of the people by trying to regain the
people's hearts. First of all, the central government appointed SM Amin, an Acehnese-oriented of-
ficial of Mandailing or Moslem Batak origin, as Governor of North Sumatra. Secondly, in order to
refute the rebel's allegations that Aceh was economically neglected, Jakarta introduced a scheme of
economic development. That was started even in the period of the first Ali Cabinet, so before the
middle of 1955. In the eyes of most Acehnese, however, that simply proved that the rebels were right.
The main change from tough policies to softer ones came in August 1955. There are three factors
which caused the central government to modify its policies. First, the fact that military strength had
failed to subjugate the rebels made Jakarta realise that a political solution was needed. Second, the
fall of the PNI Cabinet under Ali Sastroamidjojo and the return to power of another Masyumi-led
cabinet in August 1955 provided Jakarta with an opportunity to give a better deal to the Acehnese
without losing much face, for the new cabinet wanted to restore the image of the Masyumi in Aceh;
and third, the decline in Jakarta's authority throughout Indonesia, particularly in the rest of Sumatra

26
and North Sulawesi, where various military commanders were defying the central government in
increasingly bold ways, during the 1955—56 period, made it important to seek a settlement by
negotiation.
The basic shift attitudes embodied in this "soft" policy can be seen in the readiness of the central
government to let Acehnese hold the key positions in governing of Aceh. The possibility for Aceh to
regain its provincial status began to be discussed in 1955. When the second Ali Cabinet replaced the
Masyumi in early 1956, it too proceeded with the plan to give provincial status for Aceh (at the end of
the year). This was followed by the appointment of Ali Hasjmy, a young Pusa leader, as Governor of
Aceh. In the military field, Jakarta appointed an Acehnese, Sjammaun Gaharu, as the Regimental
Commander in Aceh (responsible directly to the Army Chief of Staff, General Nasution, after the
end of 1956) and allowed many Acehnese soldiers stationed outside Aceh to return to the province.
This "soft" policy did eliminate some of the grievances. However, considering the political
background of Ali Hasjmy, who had not been close to Daud Beureueh since 1946, and of
Sajammaun Gaharu, who had been regarded as an opponent of the ulama forces during the revolu-
tion, it could be said that Jakarta was still playing off the two new leaders against Daud Beureueh
and his group.
The reestablishment of the Province of Aceh in January 1957 was one of the things which led to
a ceasefire between the government and rebel forces in 1957—58 period. This ceasefire proved
especially important for the central government as it gave Jakarta an opportunity to concentrate its
strength on the suppression of the PRRI rebellion in West Sumatra and North Sulawesi. This
ceasefire also led to a split in the rebels' leadership in February 1959 which resulted in the establish-
ment of a Revolutionary Council by some leaders of the rebellion, in defiance of Daud Beureueh's
authority. This group of leaders wanted to end the rebellion. In this case Daud Beureueh suffered in
terms of military strength since most of his military units followed the Revolutionary Council. The
regional military command recognised it as the representative of the Darul Islam movement in Aceh
and persuaded Jakarta to negotiate with the Revolutionary Council. Most of the Revolutionary
Council's demands, such as granting Aceh the status of a special region were met by Jakarta.
The split within the rebel leadership was the result of a rift between one group of hard-line
ideologues and another group of military pragmatists. To the latter, the defeat the PRRI had been
suffering in various parts of Sumatra and in North Sulawesi in 1958 were signals to end the struggle
and to try to achieve the best possible deal with Jakarta. But the ideologues around Daud Beureueh
believed that the defeat of the PRRI had nothing to do with their movement.
After the coup launched by the Revolutionary Council within the rebel camp, Daud Beureueh
established closer contacts with the remnants of the PRRI, which later brought about the formation
of a new rebel state, the Republik Persatuan Indonesia (RPI, Federal Republic of Indonesia). Under
this new agreement Aceh was proclaimed a part of the RPI and known as the Republik Islam Aceh
(RIA, Islamic Republic of Aceh). The RIA was very weak however, and almost no clashes occurred
between its military units and the government forces. But Daud Beureueh kept insisting that he had
no intention to abandon his struggle until Jakarta met his terms: the validity of Islamic law in Aceh.
On the other hand, the Regional Military Commander hesitated to launch a major military operation
against Daud Beureueh, because the leader was still very popular among the Acehnese, and there
were now more Acehnese personnel in the government forces. In April 1962, the new Regional
Military Commander, a half-Javanese-half-Acehnese Colonel, agreed to announce that Islamic Law
would hold sway in Aceh. A month after that Daud Beureueh ceased his resistance and gave himself

27
 up. That was the end of the eight-and-half-year rebellion.
Now let us link the Acehnese rebellion to the broader problem of integration in Indonesia.
Various theoretical explanations have been put forward to explain the state of near-disintegration
that Indonesia was in in the 1950s. First of all, it was attributed to the consequences of the national
revolution which was characterized by a high degree of social mobilization involving a large section
of the population, and the widespread distribution of arms, which was to have its costs in the post-
independence period. Heroism had to be put aside while bureaucracy was to replace it, as the people
thought that the end of colonialism was the beginning of overall national development. Because ex-
pectations were too high, the political system failed to fulfill them. In conjunction with this, sharp
cleavages in the political elite and the gap between them and the masses were other factors responsible
for this failure, which in turn created frustration and alienation. On the other hand, the former
revolutionary movements which had remained relatively independent and powerful in some regions
felt threatened as the central government moved toward the replacement of the shattered colonial ad-
ministration in the regions. To make it even worse, there was no single political party which had the
capacity to integrate the political factors, while the army and irregular formations were far from
cohesive.
Furthermore, the problem of frail national integration in multi-ethnic Indonesia can be analysed
in terms of economic development. The difference of economic interests between Java and the Outer
Islands meant that it was impossible to avoid inequalities in programming national development.
Ethnic sentiments were always present in the background of the difference of economic development.
Ethnic and geographical difference alone would not have been threats to national integration; but
the perceived injustice in the distribution of the benefits of economic development added another
dimension to ethnic and regional grievances.
As far as Aceh was concerned, the Acehnese resented both the bureaucratic centralising of the
early post-1950 cabinets (symbolised by the Hatta Cabinet's decision for a single province of North
Sumatra in which Aceh was to be merged with East Sumatra and Tapanuli) and the later agita-
tionalism of Sukarno — and his half-hearted Moslem attitude too. The Acehnese felt neglected when
the leaders of the central government disregarded thern in their rush to bureaucratise the machinery
of government and to prepare programs for national development which they expected to be dis-
advantageous to them. They thought that the central government had not paid enough attention to
them. Their ideological ties with the Moslem party Masyumi seemed inadequate as a means of ensur-
ing representation of their interests in Jakarta. This was because the Masyumi party was pursuing a
policy of avoiding ethic particularism and of preferring a universalist, nation wide approach to
problem solving. Many Acehnese saw this as a sign of the party's neglect of Islamic solidarity and of
regional interests, and this left them frustrated and alienated. And the very weakness of the central
government in the 1950s was a major factor which encouraged the Acehnese to challenge it.
The strengthening of the central government's authority and its success in overcoming the dif-
ficulties it faced in other part of the country are parts of the answer to the question why the Acehnese
rebellion diminished in 1959, though it did not cease completely until 1962. While there is no doubt
that the rebellion was supported by most Acehnese, which made if difficult to defeat, political
developments outside Aceh had some impact on it. The crushing of the PRRI rebellion in West
Sumatra and North Sulawesi in 1958 had strengthened the central government's control over regions
outside Java in political and military terms, while its military organisation had been significantly im-
proved. Nevertheless, the central government's improved military capacity should not

28
be seen as more decisive than its efforts towards a political solution, i.e., giving provincial status to
Aceh and letting the Acehnese hold key positions in the region as well as abandoning the policy of
provoking ulama-ulebalang conflict.
Taking into account the weakness of the central government, its policies of avoiding ethnic par-
ticularism and preferring an all-Indonesian approach were probably unwise. It seems the central
leaders of the early 1950s were too idealistic or prematuraly idealistic. They thought that the
nationalism that had bound the archipelago into one nation-state would again in the aftermath of the
revolution be able to overcome ethnic diversity. They expected that ethnic particularism would disap-
pear or become politically unimportant once contacts between ethnic groups had been expanded.
Indeed Karl Deutsch suggested in the 1950s, social communication sometimes does bring about an ex-
pansion of national consciousness.7 But in the 1970s another scholar, Walker Connor, argued that
that does not always happen. According to Connor, increased communication between people of dif-
ferent cultural backgrounds sometimes leads to a sharpening of group conflict.8
Finally, I have particularly confined myself to the situation of 1950s. However, the essence of
integrative problems mentioned above is indeed valid beyond this limitation of time. Ethnic dissatis-
faction remains in Indonesia today, and there are possibilities of ethnic explosions in some areas. But
they are very much determined by the effectiveness of national control.

Footnotes

1. On the two main political cultures of Indonesia, see Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in
Indonesia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 30—31.

2. M.A. Nawawi, "Regionalism and Regional Conflicts in Indonesia" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton Universi-
ty, 1968).

3. Clifford Geertz, "The Politics of Meaning" in Claire Holt (ed.), Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1972), p. 322.

4. Hans O. Schmitt, "Foreign Capital and Social Conflict in Indonesia 1950—1958", in Economic Development and
Cultural Change, X/3 (April 1962), pp. 284—93.

5. R. William Liddle, Ethnicity, Party and National Integration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1970), pp. 4—6.

6. Hildred Geertz, "Indonesian Cultures and Communities" in Ruth T. McVey (ed.), Indonesia (New Haven: HRAF
Press, 1967), p. 36.

7. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The M.I.T.
Press, 1969), pp. 174—75.

8. Walker Connor, "Nation-Building or Nation Destroying?", in World Politics, 3 (April 1972), pp. 319—55.

29
 THE LAST PHASE OF THE 1945 GENERATION:CRITICAL
PROBLEMS OF THE YEARS AHEAD

Hamish McDonald

It's almost impossible to hear a speech at a military handover ceremony or an anniversary parade in
Indonesia these days without hearing the word 'regenerasi'. By this is meant the process whereby the
current government and military leadership around and including President Suharto retires in favour
of a new generation. With a few exceptions Suharto's closest colleagues are men from the so-called
'45 Generation, men who were in their early twenties or late teens in 1945 and who fought as junior or
middle-ranking officers for the Republic in 1945—49, moved through the regular armed forces in the
fifties and who emerged holding power in 1966.
Suharto has enjoyed a respectable 12 years in power since Supersemar, a prospect few would
have conceded him at the start. He has emerged with apparently firm authority from two recent
periods of unrest, the financial crisis of a massive state enterprise (Pertamina) involving one of his
closest associates, and a costly and mishandled external conflict (Timor). Yet the opportunities
presented during the preliminaries to the recent session of the MPR (Peoples Consultative Assembly)
were not taken up by any critical military individuals or groups — in the serving ranks, at least, where
it counts. Indeed the last few months may be seen as a demonstration of centralised power in the
Armed Forces. Power taken away from the individual services, the regional commands, or the
"groups" around independent-thinking generals. In the key city of Bandung where students had
been trying hard to open up lines to and win support from the Siliwangi Division, it was the
Siliwangi's best troops, the Kujan (or "Raider") battalions, who were fielded against demonstrators
by their new master, the Army's strategic reserve (KOSTRAD) whose headquarters are in Jakarta.
And probably coincidentally, January [1978] saw the transfer of a brigade from each of the three
main commands of Java to KOSTRAD, thereby doubling KOSTRAD's strength and marking a fur-
ther drastic dimunition of the field force directly available to KODAM (military region)
commanders.
Queries raised by Major General Dharsono, one of the military men known as the barisan sakit
hati, (disgruntled group) caused no outward deviation of military loyalty, although his activities —
along with those of the association of retired armed forces men, PEPABRI, and other peripheral
groups — added greatly to the charged atmosphere. The New Order thus passed up a constitutionally
appropriate occasion to 'regenerate' its leaders, and as shown in the handling of the vice-presidency
after the withdrawal of Sultan Hamengkubuwono was ready to install an heir apparent. In long-
postoned Cabinet changes and senior armed forces promotions the emphasis has been on con-
solidating political power in the hands of established figures: the two Supersemar survivors Amin
Machmud and Mohammed Yusuf; and in the security and intelligence area Admiral Sudomo, Lieut-
General Yoga Sugama and Major General Benny Murdani. Portfolios involved in the distribution of
social and economic services have been subject to quite sweeping changes, and similar moves are also
expected in the director-generalships of various ministries but few changes could be described as
developing leadership potential for more senior roles in the years ahead.

31
 The current leadership shows every sign that it intends staying on for some time yet, and that it
will remain military-based. From the clues it occasionally drops to the more privileged observers -
who don't often include foreign journalists - it is still looking within ABRI (the Armed Forces)
ranks for successors. A fundamental decision seems to have been taken that the current '45 Genera-
tion, and apparently the same individuals, will hang on until the first products of Indonesia's military
academy at Magelang, Central Java, flow into the higher ranks. It's worth noting that by 1984 only
some 14 of the current generals will be left on active service. The policy is naturally regretted by those
officers who preceded Magelang, but so far at least they are accepting it.
What are the Magelang graduates like? Let's look at one of the early front-runners, Colonel
Soegiharto, who's currently heading the Indonesia contigent to the UN Mid-East Peace Force He
joined Magelang after starting a medical course at Gajah Mada, finished with the first graduates in
1960, rose to command the elite Banteng Raiders battalion of the Diponegoro Division in 1972, mov-
ed the next year to become operations chief in Irian Jaya, then to a KOSTRAD airborne brigade
which was to drop on Timor in December 1975, before a prestige job back at Magelang. At the age of
42 he has operational experience against a variety of Muslim, communist and successionist enemies in
West Java, South Sulawesi, West Kalimantan, Irian Jaya and possibly Timor. It's an impressive
enough record of soldiering but one wonders if in a few years' time, he and his fellows could be
described as Harold Crouch does the army leadership of 1965, as already "experienced and adroit
politicians" when their big moment comes.
The intention is to give such officers experience in government and diplomacy, by special
assignments at home and abroad. Now, President Suharto's time in office ends in 1983, assuming he
completes his current term. This year is often cited as the year Indonesia will enter'the phase of
'regeneration'. Suharto himself has recently put the process as occurring between five and ten years
from now. At the shorter limit the program therefore gives precious little time for the newly emerging
colonels to broaden their so far largely military experience. A number of difficulties could therefore
emerge.
An army cannot of course just promote someone to be president. There is no line of succession
To groom candidates is to invite the kind of factionalism that the Indonesian forces have successfully
managed to cut down in the last three or four years. Problems of age are hitting the 1945 Generation
leadership as hard as other Indonesians in their mid-fifties, and it may not be possible to hold the cen-
tre with the present close-knit group. The influence of the younger memebers of the Suharto group
particularly General Yusuf, who is only just 50, and General Benny Murdani, who is 46, will be
critical in the transition.
Then there is the question of legitimacy within the armed forces themselves. Leaders tend to be
made by performance under crisis and the accumulation of patronage, especially in the case of the
older ABRI men where officers tended to gain a deep bapak relationship with their anakbuah. How
strong are these loyalties now, with so many service and corps links diffused? Is KOSTRAD perhaps
the channel for the army's political elite? Where officers have gone through similar training and ex-
perience might rivalries be stronger? An officer might ask: Why should I be stuck here in
Palangkaraya and old so-and-so be up there in Jakarta?
What continuing acceptance will there be of military intervention in politics, of that role by the
Magelang generation themselves? High hopes are held for the Magelang officers, chiefly that they
might have more integrity than the '45 Generation in conducting dwi-fungsi, the dual function doc-
trine which gives the Armed Forces both a "security" role and a "social" one. Take, for example

32
the words of the Army Provost chief, Brigadier General Kartoyo, at a promotion ceremony in April
when several Magelang officers were made Lieutenant-Colonels, the first time in the military police.
General Kartoyo said he'd received a number of surat kaleng, anonymous letters, which accused him
of treating Magelang graduates more harshly than '45 Generation officers. Well, he said, he did it
deliberately because it was hoped these officers would carry on the values of the '45 struggle. He went
on: we knew where the officer corps would be in 10—15 years if they were influenced or blinded by
the desire to seek wealth and a more luxurious lifestyle, and were enchanted by well-built ladies like
people were today!
How different are they from their elders? Their training was more purely professional. But this
has been in Indonesia and they have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the ABRI ideology: that the In-
donesian soldier cannot be a "dead instrument" in the hands of the poltical power but & per juang, a
struggler, and that without this ideal the Armed Forces would loose their calling. The litany of
IPOLEKSOSBUDMIL dan AGAMA — ideology, politics, economics, social affairs, culture,
military matters and religion — recited at the Magelang academy gives some idea of the legitimate
concerns of the perjuang. Entry standards are high. In fact the academy has been unable for some
time to get anywhere near its target intake. From casual observation biases in selection tend to be a
result of unequal educational opportunities as with other institutions, favouring the children of well-
off civil service and military families from the cities of Java, although there is a conscious effort to
see that all regions are represented. The kesatria-style officers' code, the proliferation of Hinduistic
concepts and so on tend to place young officers in the priyayi mould if they are not there already.
Vocally anti-communist, they seem almost as suspicious of political Islam. By the time they are a few
years into the system, trying to raise a family on their still modest pay, they will have made a few
compromises on such matters as outside finances.
The compelling financial reasons for military involvement in the widest range of government
and commercial functions are unlikely to fade. Re-equipment originally planned for a five-year pro-
gram starting in 1978 began two years ahead of schedule because of the demands of Timor and
through the perceived need to set up what's called a "security belt" in the South China Sea, following
the unexpectedly early collapse of Saigon. Yet with the end of the oil boom, government expenditure
has come under quite severe restraint with the development (i.e. capital expenditure) side of the
budget showing little real growth in the current year. Defence and security was one of the few areas to
enjoy great expansion, but a rise of more than 100 per cent to nearly US$280 million leaves official
spending modest for the size and state of the forces. For political reasons as much as anything else the
Defence Department is committed to improving soldier's welfare. Some idea of the task can be gain-
ed from General Yusuf's comments in July 1978 that only 20 per cent of ABRI accommodation was
up to standard. The forces, like the civil service generally, have benefitted from substantial pay rises
in recent years but rates remain too low to be the sole means of support in many cases — hence the
large number of soldiers driving becak and manning late night sate stalls — and the rates seem unlike-
ly to rise quickly in the foreseeable future. Towards the end of the Sukarno period official budgets
even in grossly overvalued rupiah terms covered only about 80 per cent of actual military needs. The
figure is still very low, perhaps only around 15 per cent of actual expenditure according to some in-
formed guesswork. With a limited government ability to expand the official budget, a tightening up
of revenue collection and closer scrutiny of government agencies, particularly in the case of Per-
tamina, the squeeze is likely to become more acute and will be u strong encouragement to maintain
the widest involvement of military friends throughout the government apparatus.

33
 There is, however, some disillusionment in military circles with dwi-fungsi as it's now practised.
The poor showing of many units, in the early stages at least, of the East Timor fighting was blamed
by many officers on the distractions of dwi-fungsi eroding professional military capability. The pro-
minence of the Army Chief of Staff, General Widodo, at a congress of the Kosgoro organisation in
July 1978 gave a certain respectability to its criticism of Golkar's present state, and one hears that
General Nasution's concepts of an ABRI rather more withdrawn from direct political competition
are under discussion. General Widodo himself has been talking for some time about a "rift" between
ABRI and the people. Another general said frankly that people nowadays identified dwi-fungsi by its
abuses. It was in implicit response to some of these criticisms that Suharto, in his last Armed Forces
day speech, urged a purification of dwi-fungsi in order to perpetuate it. More recently the ABRI
social role was given its first constitutional status when adopted in the broad outlines of state policy
adopted by the MPR this March. Suharto was arguing for greater discrimination in kekaryaan (non
military) secondments under dwi-fungsi. (The official ceiling for such appointments is now said to be
10,000 but this is thought to be exceeded at some times in practice.) "With dwi-fungsi it certainly
does not mean that ABRI should interfere with or take over all civilian functions, especially areas or
tasks that are already being carried out well," Suharto said.
The basic conflict tends to.be that what's good for public respect for the Armed Forces and ac-
ceptance of their role is not at all good for the improvements the forces now feel owing to them. This
is not a new situation, but it's not going to resolve itself soon. The temptation may therefore be to
close up the political system, especially as the time of leadership transition draws nearer. Yet the
country's underlying economic and social problems seem to call out for solutions that bring big
political risks, and this seems to be recognised in the Suharto Government. Let's look at two problem
areas, energy and food production, to see the dilemma.
As mentioned earlier the oil industry is in a more subdued state than it's been since the early
seventies. Oil production has reached its peak and may run down a little over the next few years
before new discoveries are brought on stream. Growth in oil revenue will depend on price rises deter-
mined by OPEC and these could be conservative for some time. A more worrying threat to oil ex-
ports is the growth of domestic oil consumption, now about 16 per cent of production but rising at 13
to 15 per cent a year with no sign of slackening. A shift in production from the large onshore fields in
Sumatra to small, more costly offshore fields will also erode revenues received by Jakarta. Since
petroleum provides about 57 per cent of Indonesia's exports and over 50 per cent of domestic
revenue, the implications for the economy are serious. The situation has been called a "doomsday"
scenario by one senior official. It illustrates the kind of conflict between long-term strategy and im-
mediate political and welfare needs. Large investments are needed immediately for energy substitu-
tion in coal, geothermal and hydo-electric schemes but these will not pay off until the mid or late
1980's, and even then will affect only the power-generation and industrial sectors which account for
about 30 per cent of current usage of oil. There is no feasible alternative yet for the rapidly expanding
transport sector, and in the case of kerosene which could be the main area of substitution and which
takes up the remaining 30 per cent a difficulty arises. Here you have the government subsidising a
product it is trying to conserve, for the very sound reason of providing a substitute for firewood, the
collection of which is now causing calamitous environmental effects throughout Java by deforesta-
tion. Yet the cheapest kerosene in the world is still too expensive for the Javanese peasant who is still
walking further and further up the mountain to load up his bamboo pikul with wood. Drop the sub-
sidy? Then you would increase the amount of firewood being trucked into towns commercially as

34
well as causing unrest among those urban kampung dwellers who have to use kerosene.
Then, as you will have read, great difficulties are being experienced with food production. The
sustained increases in rice output achieved in the first 10 years of the New Order have slipped back in
the last two or three years for a variety of reasons. After a long dry season and repeated insect
plagues, the poorer people in some parts of Java, including Krawang which is only an hour's drive
from Jakarta, came close to starvation. It was through skilful purchasing and a fair amount of luck
that the Government was able to order some 2.6 million tonnes of rice overseas, about 25 per cent of
the world's export surplus. The same circumstances may not apply in the world market in any future
crisis. Moreover patterns of rice consumption and the low increases in domestic production mean
that unless the first is diversified to other staples and/or the second is improved Indonesia will con-
tinue to be dependent on a volatile foreign market. Looking at rice distribution policy since the quite
severe shortage and price rise of five years ago, one has to concede that market manipulation by the
national logistics agency Bulog under General Bustanil Arifin has been highly effective in damping
down fluctuations in supply and price. So effective, in fact, that the real price of rice has been falling,
encouraging the persistent rise in average rice consumption and discouraging use of alternative crops.
Raising the price of rice might seem the neatest solution, particularly in spreading greater income to
the rice-growing peasants. But of course a large proportion of the rice-growers are landless labourers
or own parcels of land so small that over the year they are net rice consumers. They as well as the
non-agricultural classes would suffer from an increase, given the short to medium term problems of
improving the availability and acceptability of substitutes. But a break in the pattern may be called
for.
I've dwelt on these two problems at some length because it will be how they and other issues are
handled that will decide what kind of a ride the regime gets during the leadership changeover and
beyond. They are, of course, critical to whether Indonesia can surmount the demographic pressure
towards further mass poverty and environmental degradation on Java. If there is discernible pro-
gress, it might be that the regime has hit on the right formula of alternating tightness and relaxation
of security measures so that political dissent is controlled. The Suharto Government has moved to
centralise decision-making, understandably enough in its early days, in order to gain a degree of
economic management. When protests get strong enough, it does make efforts to sort out the
bureaucratic processes that become conspicuously counterproductive. But such efforts are all too
often subverted by a civil service that needs complicated procedures to justify and support its
numbers. The centralisation has resulted in a significant loss of accountability, especially when com-
bined with the New Order tenet that politics are an obstruction to development — again something
that was more understandable 12 years ago. As well as getting a "leakage"of funds, as it's known,
commonly estimated at around 30 per cent, actual project expenditure is often blatantly distorted in
its benefits: pilot electrification projects giving inordinate amounts of highly subsidised power to the
homes of officials, irrigation schemes giving priority to the lurah's bengkok land and that of his
friends. These bureaucratic shortcomings form a massive disincentive to enterprise in a direct way,
and are increasingly identified as a principal cause of Indonesia's extraordinarily high-cost economy.
Official attitudes actively attack enterprise and capital formation, as with the harassment of the kaki-
lima (small vendor) traders in the big cities out of a desire to see the landscape teratur dan tertib (in
better order). So many economic policies are consciously or unconsciously geared towards large
capital-intensive projects.
The problems with which Indonesia has been brought face-to-face since the distractions of the

35
 oil boom call for a quite different approach from the government. They seem to require a mixture of
public involvement, attention to small details, emphasis on performance and self-restraint by those in
power that is similar to the "basic needs" model of development. The Suharto Government from
time to time takes initiatives that reflect some of this thinking, although execution is tempered by
bureaucratic and other institutional barriers. The composition of the new cabinet does in some ways
also show a desire to move in new directions with creation of posts for co-operatives, food supply and
people's housing. In one spectacular instance, family planning, the regime has successfully avoided
the bureaucratic dead-hand without too much use of authority. The National Family Planning Co-
ordination Body (BKKBN) has developed an effective use of existing buildings and resources, non-
specialist workers, innovative campaigns and efficient monitoring of performance, as well as
receiving a high degree of support and commitment in the Government and Armed Forces. The
transfer of the body's former chief, Dr Suwardjono Suryaningrat, to the Health portfolio indicates
an intention to extend such an example to other areas, community health being an obvious first
move.
On a wider scale the implications could well encourage the return of politics to the village, an
abandonment of the official "floating mass" line. Indeed Suharto made an intriguing appeal after
his re-election for the political parties to become involved in co-operatives. This may be the kind of
wedge the parties need to break the virtual ban on village organisation contained in the 1975 political
party law. To a significant degree the Muslim-based Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP) is further
advanced than the Golkar camp in formulating policies of the basic needs type, often drawing in-
spiration from the model of self-help and austerity found in the network of pesantren. The success of
the PPP in the 1977 general elections and its steadfast performance in the MPR session despite con-
siderable direct harassment and the provocation of the so-called Komando Jihad have certainly
alarmed the Government and may not have been entirely due to so-called "promordial" appeal. The
Muslim threat is, I believe, the main reason behind the Government's recent rediscovery of the great
Proklamator, Bung Karno, given its official kick-off by General Ali Murtopo at the Indonesian
Democratic Party (PDI) congress in February. Sukarnoism is intended to boost the PDI, with its
former nationalist (PNI) elements to the fore, and overflow a little towards Golkar, combining with
the widening recognition of Javanism. An unavoidable next step of this could well be a flow of party
activity into areas previously bebas politik, out where a straight contest was in fact continuing be-
tween Golkar, using the Government apparatus, and the PPP, working through the religious in-
frastructure. Should the New Order be moving to tackle its basic problems, a fair amount of disrup-
tion to the harmonious new Mataram may therefore be expected, a situation that will test to the
utmost the preparation of Colonel Soegiharto and his fellow officers.

36
Other Monash Publications

Annual Indonesia Lecture Series

1. Religion and Social Ethos in Indonesia by Anderson, Nakamura and Slamet. 1977. A$2.50
(interstate and overseas postage please add 50 cents)..

2. People and Society in Indonesia: A Biographical Approach by Andaya, Coppel and Suzuki.
1977. AS2.50 (postage please add 50 cents).

3. The Life of the Poor in Indonesian Cities, by Jellinek, Manning and Jones. 1978. AS2.50
(postage please add 50 cents).

Monash Papers on Southeast Asia

The Indonesian Communist Party and Land Reform, 1959—1965 by Rex Mortimer. 1972.
* Out of print. Available in photocopy format A$2.20 (postage included).

2. The 1971 Election in Indonesia: An East Java Case Study by Ken Ward. 1974. AS5.00 (in-
terstate and overseas postage please add 75 cents).

3. India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa by Paul Mus. 1975.
AS3.80 (postage included).

4. Perhimpunan Indonesia and the Indonesian Nationalist Movement, 1923—1928 by John

Ingleson. 1975. A$4.00 (postage included).

5. One Hand Clapping: Indonesian Nationalists and the Dutch 1939—1942 by Susan
Abeyasekere. 1976. A$4.20 (postage included).

6. The Constitutionalist Party in Cochinchina: The Years of Decline, 1930—1942 by Megan

Cook. 1977. AS7.10 (interstate and overseas postage please add 90 cents).

7. Studies in Indonesian Music. Edited by Margaret J. Kartomi. 1978. AS7.00 (interstate and
overseas postgage please add $1.00).

Working Papers*

1. Life in a Javanese Village by Supomo Surjohudojo. 1974.

2. Some Questions Regarding Timber Exploitation in East Kalimantan by Gale Dixon. 1974.

3. Population Control in Village Java: The Case of Maguwohardjo by Terence Hill. 1974.
4.& 5. The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath, 1967—1970: The Origins of Cambodia's Libera-
tion Movement by Ben Kiernan. Part I and II. 1975.

6. Rice Harvesting in the Krawang Region (West Java) in Relation to High Yielding Varieties
by Boedhisantoso. 1975.

7. Traditional Yogya in the Changing World by Supomo Surjohudojo. 1976.

8. The Friends Who Tried to Empty the Sea: Eleven Cambodian Folk Tales by David
Chandler. 1976.
9. The Life of a Jakarta Street Trader by Lea Jellinek. 1976.

10. The Early Phases of Liberation in Northwestern Cambodia: Conversations with Peang
Sophi by David Chandler. 1976.

11.* Early Thai History: A Select Bibliography edited by Ian Mabbett. 1977.

12. Analysing Theories of Development by David Goldsworthy. 1977

13. The Life of a Jakarta Street Trader — Two Years Later by Lea Jellinek. 1977.

14. The Cultivation System and "Agricultural Involution" by R.E. Elson. 1978.

15. Brahmin and Mandarin: A Comparison of the Cambodian and Vietnamese Revolutions by
Robert S. Newman. 1978.

16.* Notes on the structure of the Classical Malay Hikayat by A. Bausani a translation from the
Italian by Lode Brakel. 1978.

17. The Pedlars of Ujung Pandang by Dean Forbes. 1978.

* Price: A$1.25, with the exception of Paper No. 11 and 16, which is AS1.75.

Miscellaneous Papers
1. Secondary Schools' Guide to Resources on Indonesia by Susan Abeyasekere et al. 1973.
A$2.75 (interstate and overseas postage please add 50 cents).

2. The Image of Asia in Children's Literature: 1814—1964 by Cecile Parrish. 1977. A$l .75 (in-
terstate and overseas postage please add 50 cents).
 ORDER FORM

The Secretary, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies,

Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168, AUSTRALIA.
Please supply the following publications:
Monash Papers on S.E.A. copies of nos
Working Papers copies of n o s . . . .
Miscellaneous Papers copies of nos
Annual Indonesian Lecture Series . copies of nos
Prepayment: Remittance with order would be appreciated.
PLEASE NOTE: Any orders less than $5.00 (Aust) must be accompanied by remittance.

Name:
Address:
****************

I wish to be placed on — (1) mailing list for notification of future publications

(2) standing order list for

(a) Monash Papers ... ... LJ
(b) Working Papers
(c) Miscellaneous Papers ...
(d) Annual Indonesian Lecture Series