Dr. Kahin is no ordinary historian<\/p>\n
By Endy M. Bayuni<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): If there's one historian who can reminisce about
\nthe Indonesian revolution in great detail, objectively and
\npassionately, it's American Dr. George McTurnan Kahin.<\/p>\n
Now 77 years old, Kahin is no ordinary historian.<\/p>\n
Not only is he the most authoritative foreign historian on the
\nIndonesian revolution, he is also a living witness of the
\nunfolding of a new nation. And he was to some extent a player in
\nthe events that he wrote about in his 1952 work Nationalism and
\nRevolution in Indonesia, which is still regarded as the best
\nhistory of the Indonesian revolution.<\/p>\n
Can a historian claim to be objective if he was a party to the
\nevents that he studied? Maybe not. But Kahin's a special case.<\/p>\n
Kahin became interested in Indonesia by chance, for, as he
\nrecalled, he started out to become a specialist on Peru. World
\nWar II changed his plans.<\/p>\n
\"I was supposed to work on Peru. And I was already to go down
\nthere, I had my shots, I had my steamship ticket but
\nunfortunately the draft board wouldn't let me go.\"<\/p>\n
He later was drafted and went through endless basic training
\nin Texas.<\/p>\n
\"The American Army wanted volunteers for certain offensive
\nassignments. I'd been in Texas for too long and wanted to get
\nout ... so I volunteered.<\/p>\n
\"The idea was that we were going to be parachuted into the
\nJapanese occupied Indonesia to destroy bridges and things like
\nthat. So that in the course of that, I had nine months of special
\ncourse of language and something on the area, and it was quite
\ninteresting and we started learning Indonesian,\" he said.<\/p>\n
But the mission was called off, partly because the Dutch
\nintelligence pulled some strings in Washington after learning
\nthat most of the GI's were anti-colonial, and also because
\nGeneral MacArthur decided to bypass Indonesia in favor of New
\nGuinea on his way to Japan.<\/p>\n
Kahin finally did arrive in Indonesia in early 1948, a
\n30-year-old graduate of the John Hopkins University gathering
\nmaterial for his study of the Indonesian revolution. His work was
\nfunded by the American Social Science Research Council.<\/p>\n
He arrived during the height of the Indonesian war for
\nindependence, just as the Netherlands was trying to reimpose its
\ncolonial rule over Indonesia after World War II.<\/p>\n
Besides collecting material for his doctorate, he also
\nprovided America and the rest of the world, which had been
\nrelying on Dutch accounts, with more sympathetic, if not
\nobjective, reports about the war in the young republic.<\/p>\n
\"I was a correspondent for Overseas News Agency, I did that as
\na second string to my bow, so I could get around in the
\nrepublic,\" Kahin told The Jakarta Post during a recent visit.<\/p>\n
With the help of the Indonesian Republic government he managed
\nto send his news dispatches, circumventing the Dutch gag on news
\nabout the war.<\/p>\n
Or so he thought.<\/p>\n
The Dutch soon broke the Indonesian's code a discovered what
\nhe was up to. He was caught, put under house arrest, and later
\nexpelled by the Dutch.<\/p>\n
During the course of his journalistic work, Kahin once did
\nmanage to smuggle the text of speeches by the republic leaders to
\nJakarta, from where it was then broadcast to the world.<\/p>\n
The speeches by president Sukarno, vice president Mohammad
\nHatta and minister of information Mohammad Natsir urged the
\npeople to continue to fight. They were never read because the
\nrepublic's radio station in Yogyakarta had been bombed.<\/p>\n
He witnessed the second Dutch military aggression in late 1948
\nin Yogyakarta from the hotel room in which he was detained.<\/p>\n
His story is the recounting of Indonesian history, and he
\nknows his stuff well. He is passionate when it comes to retelling
\nhis own story.<\/p>\n
\"Yogya was a city of many refugees coming from the
\ncountryside. People were in very bad shape really. There wasn't
\nenough food. The Dutch had a tight blockade in defiance of the
\nRenville Agreement... They weren't supposed to,\" he said when
\nasked to describe what Yogyakarta was like at the time.<\/p>\n
\"People couldn't even get medicine. I tried to get some
\nmedicine for a clinic nearby that needed medicine badly.<\/p>\n
\"People often had rags from gunnysacks to dress in. Mohammad
\nNatsir, the minister of information, had one shirt... He was
\nprobably one of those who refused to take any kind of favor from
\nanybody.<\/p>\n
\"Most of the people I talked to were apprehensive about Dutch
\nattack, there would be one sooner or later, and that affected the
\natmosphere certainly,\" he said.<\/p>\n
After Kahin left Indonesia in 1949, he lobbied the American
\nSenate to change a provision in the 1949 Roundtable Agreement
\nbetween Indonesia and the Netherlands, whereby Indonesia had to
\nshoulder the Netherlands' East Indies' debt of US$1.13 billion.<\/p>\n
\"It didn't seem to me that it was a just situation,
\nparticularly considering that at least $300 million of that was
\naccountable to Dutch military action -- to try to reassert
\ncontrol over Indonesia.<\/p>\n
\"And so I did try, unsuccessfully, to get the Senate to
\nintervene there,\" he said.<\/p>\n
Because the Dutch were allies in World War II, there was a
\nstrong disposition in Washington to support the Netherlands in
\nits attempt to return to Indonesia.<\/p>\n
Kahin recalled that he was closer to Australian diplomat
\nThomas Critchley in 1948 than with Merle Cochran, the American
\ndiplomat representing the UN Development Committee in Indonesia.
\n\"He was not nearly as supportive. So I didn't deal with him.\"<\/p>\n
As he remembers it, it was Cochran who convinced vice
\npresident Mohammad Hatta to accept the terms of the Roundtable
\nAgreement in 1949 after impressing upon him that the Republic
\ncould look forward to considerable amount of financial and
\neconomic support.<\/p>\n
\"It didn't happen,\" Kahin said, pointing out that a small loan
\nof $100 million was extended, which was payable with interest.<\/p>\n
Kahin would not claim credit for changing America's attitude
\ntoward the Indonesia-Netherlands conflict.<\/p>\n
\"It was really the Madiun rebellion that changed the American
\nattitude,\" he said of the 1948 communist putsch.<\/p>\n
\"Up to that time the Dutch had been able to convince senior
\nAmerican leaders that the Republic leaders were too far to the
\nleft, that they were subject to communist influence and that
\nSukarno and Hatta would lead the country towards the communist
\nsphere.<\/p>\n
\"But once the communist putsch was put down, American policy
\nmakers realized this government in Yogyakarta was not communist.
\nIt couldn't be, they just put that down,\" he said.<\/p>\n
Another major factor in changing American policy was the
\nNetherlands' constant defiance of the United Nations by ignoring
\nthe 1948 Renville Agreement, Kahin said.<\/p>\n
That, as he recalled, was the first challenge to the authority
\nof the world body. \"There was a fear in the United States that if
\nthe Dutch were able to continue defying the United Nations, the
\nUN would go the way of the League of Nations, becoming a
\ntoothless, powerless organization.\"<\/p>\n
America's understanding of Indonesia after the war was further
\nhelped along when Kahin founded the Modern Indonesia Project at
\nCornell University in 1954.<\/p>\n
His enhancement of Indonesian-U.S. relations and his
\ncontribution to the Indonesian independence struggle was duly,
\nalthough belatedly, acknowledged when he was conferred the Jasa
\nPratama medal of merit in Jakarta in 1991.<\/p>\n
Ironically, he was awarded the medal after being banned from
\nentering Indonesia for the previous 15 years.<\/p>\n
He recounted being refused entry by immigration officials at
\nthe airport who thought he was still banned from Indonesia. He
\nwas allowed in after convincing the officer he was here to
\nreceive a medal.<\/p>\n
He then had troubles leaving Indonesia afterwards when equally
\nill-informed immigration authorities insisted that he was not
\nsupposed to have entered the country.<\/p>\n
Kahin is believed to have been blacklisted because two of his
\nstudents at Cornell published a controversial paper suggesting
\nthat the September 1965 coup in Indonesia was an internal Army
\naffair, challenging Jakarta's version that blames the coup on the
\nIndonesian Communist Party.<\/p>\n
Being blacklisted for so long obviously troubles him and he
\nmakes it clear that he does not wish to talk at great length
\nabout it, particularly the reason for the ban.<\/p>\n
\"I've talked about the Cornell Paper so many times since I've
\nbeen here, that I'm getting sick of it. I hope it's dead and
\nburied,\" he professed.<\/p>\n
One thing he does like to talk about is his latest book, which
\nhe wrote with his wife Audrey Kahin. It is about the American
\nrole in the PRRI rebellion.<\/p>\n
The rebellion was launched in 1958 by regional administrations
\ndisgruntled at the way Jakarta was managing the country.<\/p>\n
The book Subversion as Foreign Policy -- The Eisenhower-
\nDulles Secret Debacle in Indonesia, published by the New Press,
\nNew York, came out last month.<\/p>\n
It draws extensively on declassified U.S. government documents
\nand interviews with the two American ambassadors to Indonesia
\nduring the time -- John Allison and Howard Jones.<\/p>\n
He began working on the study as far back 1958 when he
\ninterviewed rebel leaders Mohammad Natsir and Syaffruddin
\nPrawiranegara as well as the leaders in Jakarta.<\/p>\n
\"Most people weren't even aware of the extent to which the
\nAmerican Navy was involved, the extent to which the U.S. was
\nproviding camouflage air force, to the point people couldn't tell
\nwhether it was American or not, to the rebels.<\/p>\n
\"If that Air Force had been in place in Sumatra just a little
\nbit sooner, PRRI in their fighting would probably have been much
\nmore effective,\" Kahin said.<\/p>\n
The book also tells about the role of Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino,
\nthe Philippine opposition leader killed by President Ferdinand
\nMarcos in 1983, in the American-supported rebellions in Indonesia
\nin the 1950s.<\/p>\n
\"Ninoy Aquino played quite an important role. He was
\n(Philippine) president Garcia's representative on the rebel side,
\nfunds were channeled from the CIA to president Garcia through
\nNinoy Aquino to the people in Permesta,\" Kahin said of a similar
\nseparatist rebellion launched in northern Sulawesi.<\/p>\n
\"I can't tell you anymore stories, you might not buy the
\nbook,\" Kahin said with a wry smile, ending the discussion
\nabruptly.<\/p>",
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