'Indonesian Destinies': On the road to nowhere?

Mohammad Sadli, Contributor, Jakarta

For foreigners and Indonesians alike, Theodore Friend's book is a rich informative source to better understand the country's post- colonial history. This scholarly work has an engaging, often reflective narrative style that is always full of details from numerous interviews conducted since the writer first started visiting the country, sometime in 1967-1968.

Not all the gossipy particulars are 100 percent correct but they add spice, along with the inclusion of many captivating color prints.

It is composed of three parts: the Sukarno period; the Soeharto years; and the present, ending with the epilogue, Daughter in the Palace. The thickest part covers the Soeharto period and its aftermath, which the writer knows best from first- hand observation. Clifford Geertz, the well-known anthropologist from the 1950s, calls the book: "A major work based on incomparable first person experience of a stunningly wide range of critical events and major personalities. Friend seems to have known everyone and been everywhere."

Even for those Indonesians mentioned in the book who were part of the story, there are interesting, not commonly known details from interviews and other documentary sources, like how Sumitro, Sudarpo and Sudjatmoko financed their diplomatic operations in New York by smuggling gold bars and opium during 1947-1948 when defending the fledgling republic, with the consent of then Vice President Mohamad Hatta.

Friend seems to have as his major goal the education of the interested reader in the United States, who has been attracted by more recent news about Indonesia. Such news has been projected against the background of the threat of international terrorism, yet radical Islam is only one part of the story and not even the most important to understand the country.

Friend is at times ambivalent in his appreciation of the country, especially of its post-independence history. This was often a tumultuous and bloody period, and all of its past presidents, from Sukarno to Soeharto, B.J. Habibie to Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, did not leave office in the public's good graces.

Perhaps this is why he chose the book's title. At a dinner for Friend at the U.S. ambassador's residence in early December 2003, I asked him why he chose the plural "destinies". Friend, a former president of Swarthmore College, the president emeritus of Eisenhower Fellowships and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, did not give a definite answer, but it's obvious that, by using the plural, it becomes an open-ended proposition. The country does not have a single destiny.

Friend's ambivalence is reflected in his quote from an interview with the late Roman Catholic priest, Romo Mangunwijaya, in 1997 in Yogyakarta, where Romo was known as "the friend of the poor and homeless" but was no admirer of Soeharto.

"If Soeharto is disposed -- and remember, as bad as we know him, Soeharto is ultimately an example only -- we will still have Javanese culture to deal with," he said.

He expounded: "Javanese culture is like a tapeworm. It is very unlike the tooth and claws of the Russian bear, or the Chinese dragon, or the lion of the Netherlands and the UK. Or the beak and talon of the American eagle. It is 'esthetic' and silent; it is polite (no commotion); it is insinuating. It weakens without turmoil and (is) ultimately deadly.

"Javanese culture, like the tapeworm, cannot be yanked out or cut out. It will require strong and repeated doses of medicine to free it out".

Of course, not all Javanese agree with this conviction. Goenawan Muhammad, the founder of Tempo magazine, remarked that "there are many Javas, and which one should be assailed?"

There is the heartland of Javanese culture -- Surakarta (Solo) and Yogyakarta (Soeharto is from Yogyakarta and his wife came from the Mangkunegaran palace circles in Surakarta), but there is East Java with a more direct subculture.

Sukarno came from East Java; Gus Dur comes from East Java but from the pesantren (Islamic boarding school) culture. Problems emerge when a Javanese becomes a power holder (for too long).

The cover carries an intriguing satirical portrait of Raden Ajeng Kartini, the daughter of a Javanese regent who became the symbol of early women's emancipation. Dede Eri Supria, then a young university student, painted Kartini in 1981 in protest against the Soeharto regime, which commandeered her image as a mother figure in the service of its state ideology of state-as- family.

The painting depicts her enshacklement, and that of contemporary women, through the hair dryer and lipstick (false beautification), fundamental betrayal (an almost bloody tear of suffering) and a revolver in her right hand (suicidal rage or murderous revenge?).

What does Friend have to say about Megawati Soekarnoputri? There is not much that is flattering and, again, there is ambivalence.

"Megawati shirked a great role in educating the people, the public, the rakyat, the masses. She cast herself narrowly as combining in that image a disdain for the media and contempt for the bureaucracy. The 'public' was therefore left to be aroused, cozened or played to by hungry media and political greed. The rakyat -- the not-so-sovereign revolutionary 'people' of Megawati's father -- were sinking more quickly into myth, or even oblivion, than would have been the case with more sustained focus in national educational policy."

He acknowledges that her "personal steadiness" was refreshing after the tumultuous presidencies of Habibie and Gus Dur, but questions her "sense of proportion".

"In her first visit to New York she went shopping at Bloomingdales rather than attending a pre-breakfast meeting with American business," Friend writes. "A more likely formula from Mega and the military would be, on a wide front of issues, a combination of concessions and resistance that would effectively replace the phase of reformasi (reform) with one that could be called restorasi."

There is a message of guarded optimism.

"The Indonesian republic at its legislative apex moved in 2002 to an operating position far less vulnerable to being undermined by dictatorship, military control or radical Islamism. This success in patient, committee-based constitutional reform is a hopeful and potentially transformative achievement, and an eloquent rebuke of those who say that reformasi ended in 1999.

He ends his book with a many sided question: "Can the largest Muslim nation in the world remain the most pluralist, by its own ideal design? Can a republic, founded in the hope of justice and prosperity by revolution against a western empire, now renew that hope by fairly mothering and mastering its own cultures, histories, habits and resources?

"Indonesia is being tested as part of a world struggle to determine again that which any nation must endlessly re-resolve: What makes a livable society?"

Indonesian Destinies, By Theodore Friend, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Press, 2003, 600 pp, US$35

The reviewer is emeritus professor of economics at the University of Indonesia and a former minister of mines and energy.