Common people forgotten heroes

JAKARTA (JP): As Indonesians mark their 50th independence anniversary this year, two historians ask that they give some thought to two groups of people whose contribution to the revolution were equally important yet often forgotten: women and rural people.

Sartono Kartodirdjo of Indonesia and Anton Lucas of Australia raised this issue at a seminar which looked back at the revolution years. The seminar, which ended yesterday, was held at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI).

"One should not forget the valuable contribution of peasants to the struggle for independence," Sartono, a history professor at the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said on Thursday.

Lucas, from Flinders University and a former pupil of Sartono, noted that the word "people" in the study of the Indonesian independence struggle refers very often to the male gender.

"The Indonesian revolution does not only belong to the men, but the women as well," he said.

Sartono, who heads Gadjah Mada's Center for Research on Village Studies, said villagers helped feed and accommodate the massive exodus of people from Yogyakarta after the first clash with the Dutch colonial army in 1947.

"The refugees in Bosnia suffer more now than evacuees of the Yogyakarta exodus did. At those times you could get free lunch and even free breakfast from the from any village you passed," he said.

Rural people were also targets of human rights abuses by the Dutch army, he said. "In the still of the night you could hear gunshots breaking the silence and in the next morning there were bloody corpses lying in the middle of the streets and railroads."

Lucas said historians and even artists have not properly portrayed the role women played in those crucial years.

"Painter Sudjojono's painting of the exodus, with women hanging onto their spouses, is an incorrect portrayal of events," he said.

Instead, a more accurate portrayal might be women in tight kebayas struggling to carry their belongings and children in the absence of their husbands.

He admitted, though, that there are many older women today who do not see themselves as once being an integral part of the revolutionary struggle. "They place themselves in a traditional family household role and do not feel they have freedom to think they were important to the revolution," he said. (06)