A Brief History
In August of 1945, the Republic of Indonesia had just emerged as a nation freed from over three hundred years of Dutch colonialism, including several years of Japanese occupation, and so the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, which had already been accumulating for decades in the Dutch East Indies, finally took hold. Although innately complex, the new era of sovereignty for the Indonesian population looked promising for the first time in centuries. That was, however, until the events leading up to the New Order (1966–1998) ruled by Indonesia’s second president and dictator Suharto, involved a Western-backed coup that slowly ripped away the legitimacy of President Sukarno (1945–1967) and his attempts to represent and uplift the large and snowballing communist base of the country in his parliament and cabinet. As a further consequence, we will see that Indonesia’s rise in militarism and Western influence led the authoritarian regime outside of its borders and into Timor-Leste through means of brutal invasion and occupation under the justification that it was eliminating the influences of communism. This writing will analyze how and why the collective Indonesian nationalist identity was morphed from an originally revolutionary, freedom-fighter base into a violently anti-socialist, imperialist functionary that served the interests of Cold War era American nationalism and thus the contemporary hegemony of the West.
During the final decades of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies, the nationalist movement had begun to define more extensively what being Indonesian should entail. There is the argument that the nation did not encompass a full colonial identity as the indigenous population was a community of Islamic believers that paved the way for the idea of a political nation both in Malaysia and in Indonesia (Breuilly). Still, the sovereignty movement did not begin as a fully unified entity as it consisted of multiple national groups that sought different paths in the new nation’s future. It should be noted that it can get quite convoluted when diving into the histories and interests of each political group in early 20th-century Indonesia. While it is important to focus on the differing interests when imagining the beginning of the “Indonesian nationalist,” I chose to name just four of the most significant players leading up to the New Order and a brief stance on their political aspirations. Firstly, a prominent group that gained large support was Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) formed in 1926. This would be a largely popular Muslim group that led in popularity specifically in rural Java areas. In terms of political races during the liberal democracy era, NU would rival Masyumi, formed in 1943. Masyumi differed from NU in that it was a syncretic Muslim group instead of one that focused on devout Muslim values (Independent Indonesia to 1965). Later, Masyumi would be banned entirely due to conducting the revolt of the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia. Thirdly, the more radical yet popular Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) formed in 1914 unilaterally opposed all forms of Dutch colonialism, displayed in 1926 when PKI attempted to overthrow the occupational government through a failed communist insurrection. This led to the Dutch ultimately smothering any further party activities for the remainder of the colonial era and were forced to work underground (Singh, 65). Observing this, Sukarno, who chaired his own group, Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), worked to organize a stronger and more unified coalition that could appeal to a larger range of Indonesians by solely focusing on the basis of achieving national sovereignty. As seen through the nation’s division amongst early political groups, PNI managed to harness much of the pure grassroots energy of the populace that focused on the decolonization effort rather than fully committing to a preexisting system of governance. Later, PNI would essentially rival PKI with their differing values. They ultimately found success in their shared goal of liberation, and the country’s longer-term system of governance would be determined in Sukarno’s long and harsh 22 years of presidency.
A New Identity
After his appointment in 1945, Sukarno needed to secure the unification of the Indonesian nationalist identity amongst a largely diverse, rebellious population long-term through a single ideology. He did so by creating Pancasila, a simple but pivotal set of five principles prioritizing which values were most important to the country as a single body. These five principles were the belief in God, nationality, humanity, democracy, and social justice. With its foremost value as the belief in God, Sukarno made his first attempts to dislodge secularism as a national value, which most obviously targeted the PKI from branching too far into an entirely Marxist-Leninist approach to the ideology, ultimately condemning it. It could be said that Sukarno understood the Indonesian nationalist identity has always been strongly Muslim, and his commitment to honoring Islam as a foremost value was innately good politics within the region. Either way, PKI was yet to face its greatest threats as its popularity only grew stronger as the years passed, with no Dutch government to thwart their efforts. More importantly, the other values of Pancasila highlighted that Indonesia would be governing as a liberal democracy moving forward. This system could be compared with that of the Western world. As the years passed by, Pancila was simply not enough, as tensions and violence between these prominent political groups would incentivize the ambivalent Sukarno into committing further authoritarianism policies to keep his nation from falling apart. In 1959, Sukarno introduced to the world his system of “Guided Democracy,” which essentially worked as a way for him to control the flow of information, interfere in constitutional processes, and minimize political parties in Indonesia. Sukarno thought that his country faced an entirely different history from the Western world, and so he moved away from the system of liberal democracy completely.
American Intervention
As a result, Indonesian nationalists often indulge in the claim that they are unique from Western systems of governance and enforce overreach and oppression through cultural differences. Looking historically at American intervention throughout the Cold War era, however, we would find that this is not necessarily true. Instead, we see that the brutal authoritarian regime before, during, and after the New Order remains highly influenced by top-secret plans to sway Indonesia from giving Indonesian communists a spot at the table. By the Guided Democracy period, Sukarno was not entirely against the idea of communism, or at least as a non-western country that was not already fundamentally neoliberal, and so he fully recognized the rising popularity of this ideology. “PKI is well represented in parliament and the several high-level councils appointed by Sukarno to render advice to the government. The deputy governors of three of the four provinces in Java are communists, and as of March 9, 1962, the two main Party leaders acquired quasi-cabinet status” (Hindley, 915). The longer Sukarno’s commitment to befriending PKI lasted, the more heightened the actions taken by the McCarthyism-plagued United States became.
When the 1965 coup broke out and the mass killings of the Indonesian masses followed, the U.S. public had practically no idea how deeply its government had been involved in the affairs of Indonesia. Since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations manufactured misleading official explanations to address uncomfortable questions from the public and Congress, the U.S. public was completely ignorant of the specifics of its government’s Indonesian policies, not to mention their objectives. Even top-ranking members of Congress were kept in the dark about the progress and details of the U.S. subversion and infiltration in Indonesia. (Kim 72)
Anti-communist sentiments spread like wildfire as a result of covert action to eliminate PKI and remove Sukarno from the presidency entirely. The US embassy in Jakarta revealed over 30,000 pages displaying that they carefully inspected, armed, funded, and facilitated the infamous communist massacre that murdered an estimated 500,000 to 2 million people from 1965–1966 (Varagur). The physical and psychological operations that the United States enacted were so expansive and engrossed in the same violent, manufactured ideals they were also imposing in other countries, that it essentially became ingrained within the new Indonesian nationalist identity. Sections of NU worked closely with anti-communists in other political parties and the army to build an informal anti-PKI alliance, playing a huge part in the massacre (Fealy). We see that as a result of American nationalist policies imposing itself upon Indonesia, it swayed other nationalist groups to align with the West’s principles of domination.
Indonesian-Imposed Imperialism
By 1968, the military general Suharto would replace Sukarno after his resignment, and the long, gruesome New Order would begin. Well into Suharto’s fascist regime, the country took measures to invade and occupy the recently sovereign Timor-Leste (1974–99). This decision was justified and bypassed by the consent of Western powers through the justification that Indonesia would be eliminating and pacifying the threat of neighboring communism.
In 1974, a coup in Portugal ousted that country’s dictatorship and brought a new government into power that was committed to rapid decolonization. After a short and violent struggle with the rival Timorese Democratic Union Party (UDT,) the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) came to power in East Timor. Indonesia, whose territory already included the western half of the island of Timor, invaded East Timor in late 1975. Indonesia sought international support for its annexation of East Timor by asserting that it was preventing the spread of communism, which it claimed Fretilin advocated. (Modern Conflicts: Conflict Profile East Timor — Indonesia (1975–1999)
In fact, during the occupational process Indonesia would not have ever succeeded in invading the small state without the help of Western powers in the United States and Australia, most notoriously with the help of the infamous war criminal and U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger. At this point, about 90% of weapons in Indonesia’s arsenal came from America, and Kissinger successfully squashed the potential of Congress restricting sending any more military aid, commending his department for acting “illegally and beautifully” (Jong). Without the anti-communist sentiments that plagued Suharto’s agenda, neither the country’s domestic massacre nor the invasion of Timor-Leste would have had a basis and thus avoided entirely. Instead, the empire was solidified and now had its interests in annexing land, conforming its citizens into far-right ideologies, and growing its large military into a bargaining, fear-mongering force so that it could have its cake and eat it.
As we see in its early history, Indonesia had the momentum and organization it required to prosper from centuries of brutal occupation and transition into a country that could resist both Western modes of proxy violence while sustaining itself democratically in the long term. This alternate timeline was then smothered by first, an autocratic system in which its initial two transfer of powers worked to maintain a brutally experimental executive order, and two, the West’s interventionist approach in its support for a military overthrow, ultimately using Indonesia’s large nationalist momentum to serve America’s very own interests in Southeast Asia. The notorious mass killings of innocent civilians who kept that very same revolutionary fighting spirit since the early decolonization initiative sent the larger message that this country had long seized its identity of becoming anything greater than a replication of its most depraved puppeteer, the United States. Its occupation of Timor-Leste has proved that the largely capable economic powerhouse of Southeast Asia is concerned less with alleviating and uplifting the oppression of a neighboring country not far different from its own roots, and more interested in maintaining a strictly nationalistic ideology that it theoretically should have never possessed. Currently, Indonesia remains a country that prioritizes a system of profit and owns a multitude of exploitation issues that come with the capitalist model of governance with much of its population impoverished and essentially forced into working in the large industry of manufacturing jobs that assemble and produce capital for the wealthy countries of the global north. Now more than ever, Indonesians have every political and economic reason to someday awaken the sleeping giant and mobilize its large capacity for a structured resistance against the powers that shoved them here.
Bibliography
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