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Indonesia The National Revolution, 1945-50
Unlike Burma and the Philippines, Indonesia was not
granted
formal independence by the Japanese in 1943. No Indonesian
representative was sent to the Greater East Asia
Conference in
Tokyo in November 1943. But as the war became more
desperate, Japan
announced in September 1944 that not only Java but the
entire
archipelago would become independent. This announcement
was a
tremendous vindication of the seemingly collaborative
policies of
Sukarno and Hatta. In March 1945, the Investigating
Committee for
Preparatory Work for Indonesian Independence (BPUPKI) was
organized, and delegates came not only from Java but also
from
Sumatra and the eastern archipelago to decide the
constitution of
the new state. The committee wanted the new nation's
territory to
include not only the Netherlands Indies but also
Portuguese Timor
and British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. Thus the
basis
for a postwar Greater Indonesia (Indonesia Raya) policy,
pursued by
Sukarno in the 1950s and 1960s, was established. The
policy also
provided for a strong presidency. Sukarno's advocacy of a
unitary,
secular state, however, collided with Muslim aspirations.
An
agreement, known as the Jakarta Charter, was reached in
which the
state was based on belief in one God and required Muslims
to follow
the
sharia
(in Indonesian, syariah--Islamic law; see Glossary).
The Jakarta Charter was a compromise in which
key Muslim
leaders offered to give national independence precedence
over their
desire to shape the kind of state that was to come into
being.
Muslim leaders later viewed this compromise as a great
sacrifice on
their part for the national good and it became a point of
contention, since many of them thought it had not been
intended as
a permanent compromise. The committee chose Sukarno, who
favored a
unitary state, and Hatta, who wanted a federal system, as
president
and vice president, respectively--an association of two
very
different leaders that had survived the Japanese
occupation and
would continue until 1956.
On June 1, 1945, Sukarno gave a speech outlining the
Pancasila;
the five guiding principles of the Indonesian nation. Much
as he
had used the concept of Marhaenism to create a common
denominator
for the masses in the 1930s, so he used the Pancasila
concept to
provide a basis for a unified, independent state. The five
principles are belief in God, humanitarianism, national
unity,
democracy, and social justice.
On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered. The Indonesian
leadership, pressured by radical youth groups (the
pemuda),
were obliged to move quickly. With the cooperation of
individual
Japanese navy and army officers (others feared reprisals
from the
Allies or were not sympathetic to the Indonesian cause),
Sukarno
and Hatta formally declared the nation's independence on
August 17
at the former's residence in Jakarta, raised the red and
white
national flag, and sang the new nation's national anthem,
Indonesia
Raya (Greater Indonesia). The following day a new
constitution was
promulgated.
The Indonesian republic's prospects were highly
uncertain. The
Dutch, determined to reoccupy their colony, castigated
Sukarno and
Hatta as collaborators with the Japanese and the Republic
of
Indonesia as a creation of Japanese fascism. But the
Netherlands,
devastated by the Nazi occupation, lacked the resources to
reassert
its authority. The archipelago came under the jurisdiction
of
Admiral Earl Louis Mountbatten, the supreme Allied
commander in
Southeast Asia. Because of Indonesia's distance from the
main
theaters of war, Allied troops, mostly from the British
Commonwealth of Nations, did not land on Java until late
September.
Japanese troops stationed in the islands were told to
maintain law
and order. Their role in the early stages of the
republican
revolution was ambiguous: on the one hand, sometimes they
cooperated with the Allies and attempted to curb
republican
activities; on the other hand, some Japanese commanders,
usually
under duress, turned over arms to the republicans, and the
armed
forces established under Japanese auspices became an
important part
of postwar anti-Dutch resistance.
The Allies had no consistent policy concerning
Indonesia's
future apart from the vague hope that the republicans and
Dutch
could be induced to negotiate peacefully. Their immediate
goal in
bringing troops to the islands was to disarm and
repatriate the
Japanese and liberate Europeans held in internment camps.
Most
Indonesians, however, believed that the Allied goal was
the
restoration of Dutch rule. Thus, in the weeks between the
August 17
declaration of independence and the first Allied landings,
republican leaders hastily consolidated their political
power.
Because there was no time for nationwide elections, the
Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for
Indonesian
Independence transformed itself into the Central
Indonesian
National Committee (KNIP), with 135 members. KNIP
appointed
governors for each of the eight provinces into which it
had divided
the archipelago. Republican governments on Java retained
the
personnel and apparatus of the wartime Java Hokokai, a
body
established during the occupation that organized mass
support for
Japanese policies.
The situation in local areas was extremely complex.
Among the
few generalizations that can be made is that local
populations
generally perceived the situation as a revolutionary one
and
overthrew or at least seriously threatened local elites
who had,
for the most part, collaborated with both the Japanese and
the
Dutch. Activist young people, the pemuda, played a
central
role in these activities. As law and order broke down, it
was often
difficult to distinguish revolutionary from outlaw
activities. Old
social cleavages--between nominal and committed Muslims,
linguistic
and ethnic groups, and social classes in both rural and
urban
areas--were accentuated. Republican leaders in local areas
desperately struggled to survive Dutch onslaughts,
separatist
tendencies, and leftist insurgencies. Reactions to Dutch
attempts
to reassert their authority were largely negative, and few
wanted
a return to the old colonial order.
On October 28, 1945, major violence erupted in Surabaya
in East
Java, as occupying British troops clashed with
pemuda and
other armed groups. Following a major military disaster
for the
British in which their commander, A.W.S. Mallaby, and
hundreds of
troops were killed, the British launched a tough
counterattack. The
Battle of Surabaya (November 10-24) cost thousands of
lives and was
the bloodiest single engagement of the struggle for
independence.
It forced the Allies to come to terms with the republic.
In November 1945, through the efforts of Syahrir, the
new
republic was given a parliamentary form of government.
Syahrir, who
had refused to cooperate with the wartime Japanese regime
and had
campaigned hard against retaining occupation-era
institutions, such
as Peta, was appointed the first prime minister and headed
three
short-lived cabinets until he was ousted by his deputy,
Amir
Syarifuddin, in June 1947.
The Dutch, realizing their weak position during the
year
following the Japanese surrender, were initially disposed
to
negotiate with the republic for some form of commonwealth
relationship between the archipelago and the Netherlands.
The
negotiations resulted in the British-brokered Linggajati
Agreement,
initialled on November 12, 1946. The agreement provided
for Dutch
recognition of republican rule on Java and Sumatra, and
the
Netherlands-Indonesian Union under the Dutch crown
(consisting of
the Netherlands, the republic, and the eastern
archipelago). The
archipelago was to have a loose federal arrangement, the
Republic
of the United States of Indonesia (RUSI), comprising the
republic
(on Java and Sumatra), southern Kalimantan, and the "Great
East"
consisting of Sulawesi, Maluku, the Lesser Sunda Islands,
and West
New Guinea. The KNIP did not ratify the agreement until
March 1947,
and neither the republic nor the Dutch were happy with it.
The
agreement was signed on May 25, 1947.
On July 21, 1947, the Dutch, claiming violations of the
Linggajati Agreement, launched what was euphemistically
called a
"police action" against the republic. Dutch troops drove
the
republicans out of Sumatra and East and West Java,
confining them
to the Yogyakarta region of Central Java. The
international
reaction to the police action, however, was negative. The
United
Nations (UN) Security Council established a Good Offices
Committee
to sponsor further negotiations. This action led to the
Renville
Agreement (named for the United States Navy ship on which
the
negotiations were held), which was ratified by both sides
on
January 17, 1948. It recognized temporary Dutch control of
areas
taken by the police action but provided for referendums in
occupied
areas on their political future.
The Renville Agreement marked the low point of
republican
fortunes. The Dutch, moreover, were not the only threat.
In western
Java in 1948, an Islamic mystic named Kartosuwirjo, with
the
support of kyai and others, established a breakaway
regime
called the Indonesian Islamic State (Negara Islam
Indonesia),
better known as Darul Islam (from the Arabic,
dar-al-Islam,
house or country of Islam), a political movement committed
to the
establishment of a Muslim theocracy. Kartosuwirjo and his
followers
stirred the cauldron of local unrest in West Java until he
was
captured and executed in 1962.
More formidable were the revitalized PKI led by Musso,
a leader
of the party from the insurgency of the 1920s, and
Trotskyite
forces led by Tan Malaka. The leftists bridled at what
they saw as
the republic's unforgivable compromise of national
independence.
Local clashes between republican armed forces and the PKI
broke out
in September 1948 in Surakarta. The communists then
retreated to
Madiun in East Java and called on the masses to overthrow
the
government. The Madiun Affair was crushed by loyal
military forces;
Musso was killed, and Tan Malaka was captured and executed
by
republic troops in February 1949. An important
international
implication of the Madiun insurrection was that the United
States
now saw the republicans as anticommunist--rather than
"red" as the
Dutch claimed--and began to pressure the Netherlands to
accommodate
independence demands. Even though the republican
government
demonstrated it could crush the PKI at will and many PKI
members
abandoned the party, the PKI painfully rebuilt itself and
became a
political force to be reckoned with in the 1950s.
Immediately following the Madiun Affair, the Dutch
launched a
second "police action" that captured Yogyakarta on
December 19,
1948. Sukarno, Hatta, who was there serving both as vice
president
and prime minister, and other republican leaders were
arrested and
exiled to northern Sumatra or the island of Bangka. An
emergency
republican government was established in western Sumatra.
But The
Hague's hard-fisted policies aroused a strong
international
reaction not only among newly independent Asian countries,
such as
India, but also among members of the UN Security Council,
including
the United States. In January 1949, the Security Council
passed a
resolution demanding the reinstatement of the republican
government. The Dutch were also pressured to accept a full
transfer
of authority in the archipelago to Indonesians by July 1,
1950. The
Round Table Conference was held in The Hague from August
23 to
November 2, 1949 to determine the means by which the
transfer could
be accomplished. Parties to the negotiations were the
republic, the
Dutch, and the federal states that the Dutch had set up
following
their police actions.
The result of the conference was an agreement that the
Netherlands would recognize the RUSI as an independent
state, that
all Dutch military forces would be withdrawn, and that
elections
would be held for a Constituent Assembly. Two particularly
difficult questions slowed down the negotiations: the
status of
West New Guinea, which remained under Dutch control, and
the size
of debts owed by Indonesia to the Netherlands, an amount
of 4.3
billion guilders being agreed upon. Sovereignty was
formally
transferred on December 27, 1949.
The RUSI, an unwieldy federal creation, was made up of
sixteen
entities: the Republic of Indonesia, consisting of
territories in
Java and Sumatra with a total population of 31 million,
and the
fifteen states established by the Dutch, one of which,
Riau, had a
population of only 100,000. The RUSI constitution gave
these
territories outside the republic representation in the
RUSI
legislature that was far in excess of their populations.
In this
manner, the Dutch hoped to curb the influence of the
densely
populated republican territories and maintain a
postindependence
relationship that would be amenable to Dutch interests.
But a
constitutional provision giving the cabinet the power to
enact
emergency laws with the approval of the lower house of the
legislature opened the way to the dissolution of the
federal
structure. By May 1950, all the federal states had been
absorbed
into a unitary Republic of Indonesia, and Jakarta was
designated
the capital.
The consolidation process had been accelerated in
January 1950
by an abortive coup d'état in West Java led by Raymond
Paul Pierre
"The Turk" Westerling, a Dutch commando and
counterinsurgency
expert who, as a commander in the Royal Netherlands Indies
Army
(KNIL), had used terroristic, guerrilla-style pacification
methods
against local populations during the National Revolution.
Jakarta
extended its control over the West Java state of Pasundan
in
February. Other states, under strong pressure from
Jakarta,
relinquished their federal status during the following
months. But
in April 1950, the Republic of South Maluku (RMS) was
proclaimed at
Ambon. With its large Christian population and long
history of
collaboration with Dutch rule (Ambonese soldiers had
formed an
indispensable part of the colonial military), the region
was one of
the few with substantial pro-Dutch sentiment. The Republic
of South
Maluku was suppressed by November 1950, and the following
year some
12,000 Ambonese soldiers accompanied by their families
went to the
Netherlands, where they established a Republic of South
Maluku
government-in-exile.
Data as of November 1992
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