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Indonesia Sukarno and the Nationalist Movement
The late 1920s witnessed the rise of Sukarno to a
position of
prominence among political leaders. He became the
country's first
truly national figure and served as president from
independence
until his forced retirement from political life in 1966.
The son of
a lower priyayi schoolteacher and a Balinese
mother, Sukarno
associated with leaders of the Indies Party and Sarekat
Islam in
his youth and was especially close to Cokroaminoto until
his
divorce from Cokroaminoto's daughter in 1922. A graduate
of the
technical college at Bandung in July 1927, he, along with
members
of the General Study Club (Algemene Studieclub)
established the
Indonesian Nationalist Union (PNI) the following year.
Known after
May 1928 as the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), the
party
stressed mass organization, noncooperation with the
colonial
authorities, and the ultimate goal of independence.
Unlike most earlier nationalist leaders, Sukarno had a
talent
for bringing together Javanese tradition (especially the
lore of
wayang theater with its depictions of the battle
between
good and evil), Islam, and his own version of Marxism to
gain a
huge mass following. An important theme was what he called
"Marhaenism." Marhaen (meaning farmer in Sundanese) was
the name
given by Sukarno to a man he claimed to have met in 1930
while
cycling through the countryside near Bandung. The mythical
Marhaen
was made to embody the predicament of the Indonesian
masses: not
proletarians in the Marxist sense, they suffered from
poverty as
the result of colonial exploitation and the islands'
dependence on
European and American markets. Beyond the goal of
independence,
Sukarno envisioned a future Indonesian society freed from
dependence on foreign capital: a community of classless
but happy
Marhaens, rather than greedy (Western-style)
individualists, that
would reflect the idealized values of the traditional
village, the
notion of gotong-royong or mutual self-help.
Marhaenism,
despite its convenient vagueness, was developed enough
that by 1933
nine theses on Marhaenism were developed in which the
concept was
synonymous with socio-nationalism and the struggle for
independence. Mutual self-help in diverse contexts became
a
centerpiece of Sukarno's ideology after independence and
was not
abandoned by his successor, Suharto, when the latter
established
his New Order regime in 1966. Considering himself a Muslim
of
modernist persuasion, like Ataturk in Turkey, Sukarno
advocated the
establishment of a secular rather than Islamic state. This
understandably diminished his appeal among Islamic
conservatives in
Java and elsewhere.
The Minangkabau Sutan Syahrir (1909-66) and Mohammad
Hatta
became Sukarno's most important political rivals.
Graduates of
Dutch universities, they were social democrats in outlook
and more
rational in their political style than Sukarno, whom they
criticized for his romanticism and preoccupation with
rousing the
masses. In December 1931 they established a group
officially called
Indonesian National Education (PNI-Baru) but often taken
to mean
New PNI. The use of the term "education" reflected Hatta's
gradualist, cadre-driven education process to expand
political
consciousness.
By the late 1920s, the colonial government seemed to
have moved
a long way from the idealistic commitments of the Ethical
Policy.
Attitudes hardened in the face of growing Indonesian
demands for
independence. Sukarno was arrested in December 1929 and
put on
trial for sedition in 1930. Although he made an eloquent
speech in
his own defense, he was found guilty and sentenced to four
years in
prison. His sentence was commuted after two years, but he
was
arrested again and exiled to the island of Flores, later
being
transferred to the town of Bengkulu in Sumatra. In April
1931, what
remained of the PNI was dissolved. To replace the PNI, the
Indonesia Party (Partindo) was soon established and, in
1932,
Sukarno and thousands of others joined it. Partindo called
for
independence but was repressed by the Dutch and it
dissolved itself
in 1934. After Japanese forces occupied the Netherlands
Indies in
March 1942, however, Sukarno was allowed to reenter the
political
arena to play a central role in the struggle for
independence.
Data as of November 1992
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