Indonesia, Asia’s “Country of the Future,” Begins a New Era as a True “Working Democracy”

By Richard H. Curtiss

When I was a very young man living in an even younger country, the Republic of Indonesia, just two years after it had won its independence in 1949, my American Embassy colleagues and I would smile ruefully when American visitors referred to it as Asia’s “country of the future.” It had fewer than 500 university graduates, and although schools were opening everywhere, illiteracy was well over 90 percent.

The Dutch, who had colonized most of the Indonesian islands more than 300 years earlier, had never had any intention of giving it up. For that reason the few Indonesians who had acquired higher education were limited largely to engineering or medicine. Political science or administration degrees were out of the question.

Then had come four years of harsh Japanese occupation during World War II. But as U.S.-led forces approached, the militias of the puppet Indonesian regime established by the Japanese seized the arms of the occupiers and proclaimed their independence on Aug. 17, 1945.

The Indonesians fought a bloody and successful war of resistance against the Dutch soldiers, who having experienced a brutal foreign occupation themselves, probably understood very clearly why the Indonesians would never agree to their return. The war ended in 1949, thanks largely to strong U.S. support for United Nations intervention in favor of independence for this nation straddling the equator and comprising some 17,000 islands, of which 6,000 were inhabited.

When I arrived in Djakarta, there were exactly two air-conditioned rooms in the entire city. One was the Philips electronics showroom, and the other in the printing plant where Indonesian fractional currency was printed. Since I was the embassy’s press and publications officer, I tried to do all my negotiations for printing contracts sitting in the cool room where the mighty rotary presses spun off millions of the bills that were fueling the country’s inflation. There were no elevators in the entire city, but no one noticed since the architecture tended toward sprawling pavilions set among lush, tropical plants.

The Indonesians themselves seemed to be the world’s friendliest people, but they were very poor and there was virtually no industry. We were always aware that “amok” was a Malay word which describes what happens to people when they decide “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

The heady dose of nationalist inspiration had taken on a rosy retrospective glow.

We foreigners seized every chance we could to drive up to the country’s cool and misty mountain resorts, which seemed like gardens of Eden after hot, steamy Djakarta. It was on such visits that I became aware that some of the new government’s ministers, whose official salaries were minuscule, seemed to be building very comfortable second homes for themselves.

Whatever foreign aid was coming into the country seemed to be recycling very rapidly into House Beautiful-like living accommodations for the country’s tiny elite, many of them partially descended from an Arab aristocracy dating back to the days of Sinbad the sailor. But time seemed to be standing still in the ‘kampungs,” the urban slums of shanties with walls of reed matting and roofs of thatch.

When I left, the bright future for this “developing nation,” which became the world’s largest Muslim country after the breakup of Pakistan, still seemed very distant.

It was. President Ahmed Sukarno was truly loved throughout this vast archipelago because he had turned the false independence conferred by the Japanese into real independence purchased with Indonesian blood. But he seemed like a demogogue to me.

I realize now that, trained as an engineer, not a political scientist, he was performing a delicate balancing act. On one hand was a rapidly growing indigenous leftist movement closely supported by the Russians and the Chinese, who were still allies and very, very close to his shores. On the other hand was the United States and what we then called “the free world,” which had money, technical assistance, and manufacturing jobs in abundance to bestow on his country, but which also seemed too far off to come to his defense in a showdown with the leftist opposition. And he still had no Indonesian technocrats or middle class he could rely on as a power base of his own.

Before World War II the Dutch had kept all the big businesses for themselves and the Chinese had run everything else. After the Dutch left, the Chinese stepped into their economic shoes, but kept the middle-level business and industry as well. The tiny Indonesian elite seemed to feel that suddenly having a ministry to run was an opportunity to enrich oneself as quickly as possible before everything came crashing down.

Things did come crashing down in 1965. The conservatives said it began with a cruel communist coup in which dozens of army officers and ministers were killed in cold blood. The leftists called it a violent and particularly bloody military coup.

I wasn’t there so I don’t know. But since up to a million people were killed, I suspect there is truth in both accounts.

No End to Corruption

When the smoke cleared, literally, perhaps a million Indonesians and Chinese were dead, and the era of military government had begun under Generals Nasution and Suharto. The latter became a great favorite of the United States, but soon was at least as corrupt as any of his predecessors. It was during this period, in 1975, that Portuguese rule in East Timor crumbled, and Indonesian troops from West Timor invaded. That laid the groundwork for the bloody massacres of 1999, which we hope to examine in the next issue.

After I retired from 30 years of government service, my wife and I had the rare privilege of returning to Indonesia for two weeks in 1985 to inspect the same U.S. Information Agency operation I had helped to open 34 years earlier. Djakarta was a city transformed, thanks to nearly universal education and some oil wealth. Everything seemed air-conditioned, which gives anyone from a temperate climate a much more positive outlook. And the landscape was dotted with high buildings with elevators.

But there was no real political freedom. So the heady dose of nationalist inspiration to alleviate the poverty that characterized Sukarno’s rule had taken on a rosy retrospective glow for Indonesia’s still poverty-stricken masses.

The country now had a middle class of educated citizens and I remonstrated with a group of local employees at the U.S. Information Agency office where I had worked so many years earlier. “When you see your newly arrived American supervisors making mistakes, why don’t you tell them so?” I asked.

“It is against our culture to put ourselves forward,” a top Indonesian employee explained patiently. “It is impolite to tell someone he is wrong, and our Indonesian colleagues would not respect us if we did so.”

I’d been away a generation and a half, I reflected. But some things about the ever-charming Indonesians hadn’t changed at all.

In 1999 things did change, however. Indonesia had a genuinely free election, and the largest party elected to parliament was led by Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose last name, translated, means “daughter of Sukarno.” But, unskilled in the arts of compromise and deal-making, she lost the Oct. 20 presidential election by members of parliament to a sometime political ally, Abdurrahman Wahid, nicknamed “Gus Dur.” The following day Megawati was elected vice president.

It may be just as well. Nearly blind and crippled by a stroke, Gus Dur has the political smarts and she has the love of people who think of her father as the embodiment of their hopes for the future that never quite arrives. They’ll get along because they’re Indonesians.

Perhaps this time the future is here. I hope so. The 212 million Indonesians are awfully patient and likeable people. They deserve better leaders than they’ve had up to now. Hopefully, Gus Dur and Megawati will help them assume a role appropriate to the largest country in an Islamic bloc of nations that encompasses a fifth of the human race. Perhaps for East Asia’s “country of the future,” the future has finally arrived.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.