Dr. Kahin is no ordinary historian

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.