Reconciliating ethnic communities<\/p>\n
By Herb Feith<\/p>\n
PADANG (JP): In 1966, West Sumatra was a sullen, resentful
\npart of Indonesia, in the aftermath of the abortive regional
\nrebellion of 1958-1961. The \"Revolutionary Government of the
\nRepublic of Indonesia\", or PRRI, had been proclaimed in West
\nSumatra and Minangkabaus had been prominent among its leaders.<\/p>\n
But it had been crushed with surprising ease, in a way which
\nleft the Minangkabau ethnic community humiliated. This proud
\ncommunity, which had provided so much of the non-Javanese
\nleadership of the nationalist movement -- including four of its
\nfirst five prime ministers -- felt ignominiously defeated.<\/p>\n
In the early and middle 1960s, the senior positions in the
\nprovince were in the hands of outsiders, mostly Javanese.
\nJakarta's control was tight and heavily military. Power was in
\nthe hands of people who mistrusted the Minangkabaus. The
\nMinangkabaus resented them wholeheartedly. They still remember
\n1958-1966 as a dark time. As one of my university colleagues here
\nput it recently: \"It was worse than the Dutch period or the
\nJapanese one.\"<\/p>\n
But the atmosphere began to change in 1966. Harun Zain, a
\nMinangkabau economist who had recently been transferred from
\nJakarta to become rector of Padang's Andalas University, was made
\ngovernor in that year. He had been in the U.S. at the time of the
\nPRRI rebellion and so had avoided becoming involved in it on
\neither side. He was well-placed to reconcile Jakarta and the
\nMinangkabau community of West Sumatra, and that is what he
\nproceeded to do.<\/p>\n
His message to his fellow Minangkabaus was that Soeharto's
\nJakarta was very different from Sukarno's. The communists had
\nbeen crushed and economic development was now the central
\npriority.<\/p>\n
To Jakarta, his message was that the Minangkabaus had never
\nbeen traitors to Indonesia, that the PRRI rebellion had been a
\ntragic mistake. West Sumatra, he argued, would be able to make a
\nmajor contribution to Indonesian development if only the
\nMinangkabaus were allowed to regain their ethnic self-respect, if
\nonly they were given a chance to be masters in their own house.<\/p>\n
Ichlasul Amal of Gadjah Mada University told the Harun Zain
\nstory in his Monash University dissertation, which was published
\nby Gadjah Mada University Press in 1992 as Regional and Central
\nGovernment in Indonesia Politics, West Sumatra and South
\nSulawesi, 1949-1979.<\/p>\n
Ichlasul compares the role of Zain in post-PRRI West Sumatra
\nwith the role which Col. (later Gen.) Mohammad Jusuf had played
\nin South Sulawesi a few years earlier.<\/p>\n
Jusuf had fought against the Dutch during the revolution, in
\nboth South Sulawesi and Java. In 1951, his former commander,
\nKahar Muzakkar, began a rebellion against the central government
\nin the name of both Islam and ethnic justice for the Buginese and
\nMakassarese of South Sulawesi. His movement initially had
\nwidespread popular support, because South Sulawesians resented
\nthe way ethnic outsiders had been given the key positions in
\ntheir province. Buginese and Makassarese saw the government as
\nrefusing to recognize their contributions to the struggle for
\nindependence.<\/p>\n
Jusuf stuck with Jakarta at that point, though not
\nunreservedly. He played a key role for the central government in
\n1957-1958, when a part of the South Sulawesian elite was drawn to
\nthe side of the Minahasa-led Permesta movement. But in the
\nfollowing years, he pushed effectively for South Sulawesians
\n(Buginese and Makassarese) to be given prominent positions in the
\ngovernment of their region. He added to his local appeal in 1960
\nwhen he took the bold step of banning all communist activity in
\nhis region.<\/p>\n
As military commander in Makassar (Ujungpandang), Jusuf
\nmaneuvered to reduce the appeal of Kahar Muzakkar, whose movement
\nfinally crumbled in 1964-1965. He was rewarded by being appointed
\nas South Sulawesi's first-ever member of the national cabinet. He
\nplayed crucial roles in the Sukarno-Soeharto transition of March
\n1966 and remained a cabinet minister until 1983.<\/p>\n
Like Harun Zain in West Sumatra, Jusuf made a major
\ncontribution to undoing reciprocal mistrust between his own
\nethnic community and the national government.<\/p>\n
The peacemaking achievements of men like these deserve more
\nattention than they have received. Do they have lessons for other
\nareas?<\/p>\n
Governor Mario Carrascalao attempted to play a similar role in
\nEast Timor in the decade after 1982, with some early signs of
\nsuccess, but he eventually failed. Governor Bas Suebu was
\ncharting a similar course in Irian Jaya for five years, until
\n1993, but he failed to win a second term. Carrascalao and Suebu
\nhad been strongly independent governors, and the government
\neventually replaced them with people it could more easily
\ncontrol.<\/p>\n
A central message of Ichlasul Amal's study is that the central
\ngovernments of the pre-1965 period paid a heavy price for
\nneglecting ethnic grievances, for pretending that ethnic
\nsolidarities were less powerful than they were.<\/p>\n
That message is more important than ever in the present post-
\nCold War era, when international ethos factors are adding to the
\npersuasive power of ethnic and ethno-religious entities in many
\nparts of the world.<\/p>\n
The writer is a political scientist and Indonesia specialist
\nat Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently a
\nvisiting lecturer in the Social Sciences Faculty of University of
\nAndalas in Padang.<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/reconciliating-ethnic-communities-1447893297",
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