Photo: Sukarno “Sipping Kopi Tubruk, the strong black Javanese coffee I cannot live without, during college days in Bandung, 1925″ (from Sukarno: An Autobiography, As Told to Cindy Adams, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965).
A useful time line of the War if Independence, 1945-1950, can be found here at Sejarah Indonesia:
August 17, 1945 is the appropriate date to recognize Indonesian independence. It is equivalent to July, 4, 1776 in the United States. In the case of both nations all that achieved on these respective dates was to declare that they were free of the colonial order.
The time line states that:
“August 29 The New Republic: The constitution that had been drafted by the PPKI preparatory committee, and announced on the 18th, is adopted (UUD 45). Sukarno is declared President, Hatta is declared Vice-President. PPKI (originally BPUPKI, founded under the Japanese occupation the previous March) is remade into KNIP (Central Indonesian National Committee). KNIP is the temporary governing body until elections can be held. The new government is installed on August 31.”
In 1947 Egypt and Syria were the first nations to officially recognize RI.
Sukarno was the exemplary center of Indonesian nationalism. No other political figure of his time or this has exhibited the single-minded purpose of the Indonesian Nation as Sukarno. Sukarno was, in fact, Indonesia and it is difficult to conceive of the nation without this most remarkable man.
Sukarno speaks:
“The city of pilgrimage”, as Jogja became known, numbered 170,000 inhabitants. In the next few week, the entire government moved inland and the population swelled to 600,000. Our ministers were billeted in home with Jogjanese families. Our ministries were the front parlors. Our flags which ran the whole length of a bamboo pole flew in every yard.
We operated more like a band of thieves than a government. We had nothing. No typewriters, stationary, airplanes; the only salvageable radio equipment was of 1935 vintage. We also had no money. Indonesia’s Japanese currency has depreciated. In the first minutes after independence, Dr. Suharto [not THE Suharto] acted as our treasurer. And his was a one-man business. He had no time to count out devalued bills so he’d weigh up a pile and parcel it out to us by the kilo. By the time we moved to Central Java we had our own money. That is the Republic was grinding out currency on a hand printing press, so in theory we had our own money, but it wasn’t good anywhere. Nobody would accept it. We had nothing to back it up but our printing press.
The only way to get what we desperately needed was to smuggle. And everybody smuggled for the Republic. My current Ambassador to Japan ran sugar. My former Ambassador to America ran opium. Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Manila were four excellent smugglers’ towns. My men worked all four.
Singapore was a goldmine. We robbed warehouses for textiles until we discovered the British were easily corrupted and could be bribed with contraband we’d smuggle elsewhere in return for ready made uniforms from military stores. Singapore suddenly suffered a big rash of fires of army supply stores. Our contacts couldn’t dare tell their superiors that they were being bribed so one by one each burned his emporium down to “legitimately” account for the losses.
You could always tell where my men made a killing. One week a military unit sported Canadian hats. The following month another blossomed forth in English blouses. Following a run of good luck, our top smuggler presented me with a package. “It’s a skirt from the Australian Women’s Army Corp”, he beamed happily. “The material’s very good quality and never been worn.” I wasn’t the sort who looked trim in brown wool skirts but I badly needed something so I remade it into a pair of military shorts and had aperfectly good outfit for a long while.
A high official in my Cabinet smuggled nine kilograms of gold and 300 kilograms of silver from Sumatra as a down payment for 20,000 uniforms. Our men were judged differently depending on whose side you were on. The man who arranged the gold and silver trade and also spirited out 8,000 tons of rubber was Pak Gani. The Netherlands called him a top swindler. The Indonesians knew him as the Minister of Economics.
Besides those foreign soldiers of fortune who’d hijack anybody for money, we were also helped by idealists. One dear boy just showed up from nowhere one day and introduced himself. “My name’s Bob Freberg. I’m an American. I’m a pilot and I sympathize with your struggle. How can I help?”
After the war Hong Kong had a sale on used airplanes. I mean, what can’t you buy in Hong Kong, right? Everything’s for sale there if you’ve got the price. And by hook or crook, by gold or opium, we managed to get the price. We bought two second-hand Dakotas and Bob Freberg flew me everywhere. He crashed in ‘47 when I sent him to Palembang with money to aid the Sumatran guerrillas. Never will I forget my American friend, Bob Freberg.
The Indians were helpful, too. During the battle of Surabaya, 600 deserted to us. We got many good things out of the Indians. They’re born smugglers. India was starving. In return for tons of rice, friends there smuggled us an airplane. Always altering its course its course, this plane ferried back and forth to Manila. It loaded at two a.m. with a cargo of coffee or quinine and returned immediately with a spare parts, medicines, supplies, and munitions they had ready for me. The Dutch finally shot it down in Jogja.”
The Nation and the State
In his classic study of nationalism “Imagined Communities” published in 1983 [Imagined Communities, Verso, 2006] Benedict Anderson relates the following:
“In 1913, the Dutch colonial regime in Batavia, taking its lead from the Hague, sponsored massive colony-wide festivities to celebrate the centennial of the ‘national liberation’ of the Nathelands from French Imperialism. Orders went out the secure physical participation and financial contributions, not merely from the local Dutch and Eurasian communities, but also from the subject native population. In protest, the early Javanese-Indonesian nationalist Suwardi Surjaningat (Ki Hadjar Dewantoro) wrote his famous Dutch-language newspaper article ‘A;s ik eens Nederlander was’ (If I were for once to be a Dutchman).
In my opinion, there is something out of place – something indecent – if we (I was still being a Dutchman in my imagination) ask the natives to join festivities which celebrate our independence. Firstly, we will hurt their sensitive feelings because we are here celebrating our own independence in their native country which we colonize. At the moment we are very happy because a hundred years ago we liberated ourselves from foreign domination; and all of this is occurring in from of the eyes of those who are still under our domination. Does it not occur to us that these poor slaves are also longing for such a moment as this, when they like us will be able to celebrate their independence? Or do we perhaps feel that because of our soul-destroying policy we regard all human souls as dead? If that is so, then we are deluding ourselves, because no matter how primitive a community is, it is against any type of oppression. If I were a Dutchman, I would not organize an independence celebration in a country where the independence of the people has been stolen.
With these words Suwardi was able to turn Dutch history against the Dutch, by scraping boldly at the weld between Dutch nationalism and imperialism. Furthermore, by the imaginary transformation of himself into a temporary Dutchman (which invited a reciprocal transformation of his Dutch readers into temporary Indonesians) he undermined all the racists fatalities that underlay Dutch colonial ideology.”
Ann Laura Stoler in ‘Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieities and Colonial Common Sense’ [Princeton University Press, 2009] asks:
“Why is it easier to imagine, as Benedict Anderson writes, that “millions of people…willingly die for [nations]” but not for states? How is that a citizenry can accrue virtue by sacrificing their lives for nations, even though people are killed not by nations but by states? “Nation” and “sentiment” are often treated as an obvious pairing while “state” and “sentiment” are not. How is it that states are commonly viewed as institutional machines that squelch and counter passions, while nations are envisioned as culturally rich producers of them? Why does the pairing of “state” and “sentiment” read as an oxymoron?”
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
This is truly a fine sentiment but the unfortunate reality is that all men are not created equal in the eyes of other men. In American history this is manifestly apparent in the American Civil War in which the war dead exceeds in numbers all the other wars America has fought combined.
The issues of equality are still being vigorously fought over. American history is rife with crimes against humanity from the treatment of Native American Native peoples through to the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But is this the “nation” speaking or is it the “state”?
In Indonesia the concept of ‘pancasila’ was first articulated on June 1, 1945, in a speech delivered by Sukarno. Sukarno argued that the future Indonesian state should be based on the Five Principles: Indonesian nationalism; internationalism, or humanism; consent, or democracy; social prosperity; and belief in one God.
While some have regarded this as a “state” philosophy I would rather see it as a “national” one. As best that could be brought forth given Indonesia’s wide cultural, political, and religious diversity.
But, as the United States, Indonesia has a long list of crimes against humanity to contend with. The suppression and torture of political prisoners, writers, and poets. The suppression of nationalist movements in Aceh, Maluku, Timor, and Papua. The 1965-66 purges of the PKI. The entire regime of the New Oder. The uneven development which has left its cities with masses of urban poor.
This August 17 it is worth the time to note the meaning of the “nation” and the meaning of the “state” .
There is a difference.
Perhaps one is worth celebrating and one is not.























