Buildings witness progress of history
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Masaaki Sanada, the Bangkok bureau chief of Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, was initially surprised to see the many pictures of former leaders of developing countries, like Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, on display inside the 64,000 sq m Jakarta Convention Center (JCC).
"I realized the reason later," said Sanada, when he was told the building was heavily renovated in 1992 by then-president Soeharto to be used as the venue of the 10th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in September that year.
The JCC, located in Senayan, Central Jakarta, along with the nearly 200-year-old Gedung Pancasila in the foreign ministry compound on Jl. Pejambon, also in Central Jakarta, will host three international meetings this week.
On Wednesday, foreign ministers of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will hold their annual ministerial meeting at Gedung Pancasila.
The ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conferences (PMCs), during which ASEAN will meet its major dialogue partners, will be held at the JCC on Thursday and finally, 22 Asia-Pacific foreign ministers and European Union representatives will attend the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) on Friday in the same building.
The JCC was expanded from its original 6,700 sq m just 10 months before the 1992 NAM summit at a cost of US$100 million, including a 950 meter-long underground corridor that connects to the Hilton International Hotel.
Today, the convention center is booked for various commercial events, from international business conventions, auto shows to the grand final of the Akademi Fantasi Indosiar, a TV talent contest. World-class singers such as Mariah Carey, Sting and Julio Iglesias have also performed at the JCC.
The Gedung Pancasila's date of establishment is not recorded, but historical documents indicate that it was built sometime in the 1830s under Dutch colonial rule.
On Dec. 5, 1828, the Dutch authority in Batavia sold the estate to the Roman Catholic Church Foundation, which built a church. The church collapsed on April 9, 1880, probably due to poor construction, and a cathedral was built in 1901.
In between, the original mansion was designed as a residence of the commander-in-chief of the Royal Netherlands Armed Forces in the East Indies, who was also the lieutenant governor-general of the Dutch East Indies. The commander's house was built later at a nearby estate known as Hertog's Park, named after Hertog van Saksen Weimar, the commander-in-chief of the Dutch East Indies from 1848 to 1851. Hertog's Park is now called Pejambon Park, after a garden on the estate.
The Dutch East Indies governing committee used the mansion as a meeting place of the people's representatives council, the Volksraad, and in May 1918, governor-general Count Limburg Stirum inaugurated it as the Volksraad Building.
The council, whose members were Indonesian citizens, was set up earlier as an advisory body to the Dutch governing committee, but was merely a rubber stamp.
In 1943, the building was used by the Japanese occupation forces for its Central Advisory Body and was named after it as the Chu-Ou Sangiin Building. The building then witnessed the rocky road to independence.
In 1944, the Japanese imperial government pledged independence for Indonesia without providing an exact date, and the building became a central witness to the country's rocky road to independence. On May 28, 1945, the Japanese military administration set up and inaugurated the Committee to Investigate Preparations for Independence (BPUPKI), tasked with researching and developing plans for an independent Indonesia, at the building.