Dr. Kahin is no ordinary historian
By Endy M. Bayuni
JAKARTA (JP): If there's one historian who can reminisce about the Indonesian revolution in great detail, objectively and passionately, it's American Dr. George McTurnan Kahin.
Now 77 years old, Kahin is no ordinary historian.
Not only is he the most authoritative foreign historian on the Indonesian revolution, he is also a living witness of the unfolding of a new nation. And he was to some extent a player in the events that he wrote about in his 1952 work Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, which is still regarded as the best history of the Indonesian revolution.
Can a historian claim to be objective if he was a party to the events that he studied? Maybe not. But Kahin's a special case.
Kahin became interested in Indonesia by chance, for, as he recalled, he started out to become a specialist on Peru. World War II changed his plans.
"I was supposed to work on Peru. And I was already to go down there, I had my shots, I had my steamship ticket but unfortunately the draft board wouldn't let me go."
He later was drafted and went through endless basic training in Texas.
"The American Army wanted volunteers for certain offensive assignments. I'd been in Texas for too long and wanted to get out ... so I volunteered.
"The idea was that we were going to be parachuted into the Japanese occupied Indonesia to destroy bridges and things like that. So that in the course of that, I had nine months of special course of language and something on the area, and it was quite interesting and we started learning Indonesian," he said.
But the mission was called off, partly because the Dutch intelligence pulled some strings in Washington after learning that most of the GI's were anti-colonial, and also because General MacArthur decided to bypass Indonesia in favor of New Guinea on his way to Japan.
Kahin finally did arrive in Indonesia in early 1948, a 30-year-old graduate of the John Hopkins University gathering material for his study of the Indonesian revolution. His work was funded by the American Social Science Research Council.
He arrived during the height of the Indonesian war for independence, just as the Netherlands was trying to reimpose its colonial rule over Indonesia after World War II.
Besides collecting material for his doctorate, he also provided America and the rest of the world, which had been relying on Dutch accounts, with more sympathetic, if not objective, reports about the war in the young republic.
"I was a correspondent for Overseas News Agency, I did that as a second string to my bow, so I could get around in the republic," Kahin told The Jakarta Post during a recent visit.
With the help of the Indonesian Republic government he managed to send his news dispatches, circumventing the Dutch gag on news about the war.
Or so he thought.
The Dutch soon broke the Indonesian's code a discovered what he was up to. He was caught, put under house arrest, and later expelled by the Dutch.
During the course of his journalistic work, Kahin once did manage to smuggle the text of speeches by the republic leaders to Jakarta, from where it was then broadcast to the world.
The speeches by president Sukarno, vice president Mohammad Hatta and minister of information Mohammad Natsir urged the people to continue to fight. They were never read because the republic's radio station in Yogyakarta had been bombed.
He witnessed the second Dutch military aggression in late 1948 in Yogyakarta from the hotel room in which he was detained.
His story is the recounting of Indonesian history, and he knows his stuff well. He is passionate when it comes to retelling his own story.
"Yogya was a city of many refugees coming from the countryside. People were in very bad shape really. There wasn't enough food. The Dutch had a tight blockade in defiance of the Renville Agreement... They weren't supposed to," he said when asked to describe what Yogyakarta was like at the time.
"People couldn't even get medicine. I tried to get some medicine for a clinic nearby that needed medicine badly.
"People often had rags from gunnysacks to dress in. Mohammad Natsir, the minister of information, had one shirt... He was probably one of those who refused to take any kind of favor from anybody.
"Most of the people I talked to were apprehensive about Dutch attack, there would be one sooner or later, and that affected the atmosphere certainly," he said.
After Kahin left Indonesia in 1949, he lobbied the American Senate to change a provision in the 1949 Roundtable Agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands, whereby Indonesia had to shoulder the Netherlands' East Indies' debt of US$1.13 billion.
"It didn't seem to me that it was a just situation, particularly considering that at least $300 million of that was accountable to Dutch military action -- to try to reassert control over Indonesia.
"And so I did try, unsuccessfully, to get the Senate to intervene there," he said.
Because the Dutch were allies in World War II, there was a strong disposition in Washington to support the Netherlands in its attempt to return to Indonesia.
Kahin recalled that he was closer to Australian diplomat Thomas Critchley in 1948 than with Merle Cochran, the American diplomat representing the UN Development Committee in Indonesia. "He was not nearly as supportive. So I didn't deal with him."
As he remembers it, it was Cochran who convinced vice president Mohammad Hatta to accept the terms of the Roundtable Agreement in 1949 after impressing upon him that the Republic could look forward to considerable amount of financial and economic support.
"It didn't happen," Kahin said, pointing out that a small loan of $100 million was extended, which was payable with interest.
Kahin would not claim credit for changing America's attitude toward the Indonesia-Netherlands conflict.
"It was really the Madiun rebellion that changed the American attitude," he said of the 1948 communist putsch.
"Up to that time the Dutch had been able to convince senior American leaders that the Republic leaders were too far to the left, that they were subject to communist influence and that Sukarno and Hatta would lead the country towards the communist sphere.
"But once the communist putsch was put down, American policy makers realized this government in Yogyakarta was not communist. It couldn't be, they just put that down," he said.
Another major factor in changing American policy was the Netherlands' constant defiance of the United Nations by ignoring the 1948 Renville Agreement, Kahin said.
That, as he recalled, was the first challenge to the authority of the world body. "There was a fear in the United States that if the Dutch were able to continue defying the United Nations, the UN would go the way of the League of Nations, becoming a toothless, powerless organization."
America's understanding of Indonesia after the war was further helped along when Kahin founded the Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell University in 1954.
His enhancement of Indonesian-U.S. relations and his contribution to the Indonesian independence struggle was duly, although belatedly, acknowledged when he was conferred the Jasa Pratama medal of merit in Jakarta in 1991.
Ironically, he was awarded the medal after being banned from entering Indonesia for the previous 15 years.
He recounted being refused entry by immigration officials at the airport who thought he was still banned from Indonesia. He was allowed in after convincing the officer he was here to receive a medal.
He then had troubles leaving Indonesia afterwards when equally ill-informed immigration authorities insisted that he was not supposed to have entered the country.
Kahin is believed to have been blacklisted because two of his students at Cornell published a controversial paper suggesting that the September 1965 coup in Indonesia was an internal Army affair, challenging Jakarta's version that blames the coup on the Indonesian Communist Party.
Being blacklisted for so long obviously troubles him and he makes it clear that he does not wish to talk at great length about it, particularly the reason for the ban.
"I've talked about the Cornell Paper so many times since I've been here, that I'm getting sick of it. I hope it's dead and buried," he professed.
One thing he does like to talk about is his latest book, which he wrote with his wife Audrey Kahin. It is about the American role in the PRRI rebellion.
The rebellion was launched in 1958 by regional administrations disgruntled at the way Jakarta was managing the country.
The book Subversion as Foreign Policy -- The Eisenhower- Dulles Secret Debacle in Indonesia, published by the New Press, New York, came out last month.
It draws extensively on declassified U.S. government documents and interviews with the two American ambassadors to Indonesia during the time -- John Allison and Howard Jones.
He began working on the study as far back 1958 when he interviewed rebel leaders Mohammad Natsir and Syaffruddin Prawiranegara as well as the leaders in Jakarta.
"Most people weren't even aware of the extent to which the American Navy was involved, the extent to which the U.S. was providing camouflage air force, to the point people couldn't tell whether it was American or not, to the rebels.
"If that Air Force had been in place in Sumatra just a little bit sooner, PRRI in their fighting would probably have been much more effective," Kahin said.
The book also tells about the role of Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, the Philippine opposition leader killed by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1983, in the American-supported rebellions in Indonesia in the 1950s.
"Ninoy Aquino played quite an important role. He was (Philippine) president Garcia's representative on the rebel side, funds were channeled from the CIA to president Garcia through Ninoy Aquino to the people in Permesta," Kahin said of a similar separatist rebellion launched in northern Sulawesi.
"I can't tell you anymore stories, you might not buy the book," Kahin said with a wry smile, ending the discussion abruptly.