Common people forgotten heroes

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)