McVey's focus on RI came by chance

By Linawati Sidarto

MONTISI, Italy (JP): The color still high on her cheeks as she returned to her 19th century three-story house from tending her olive garden, the thin, silver-haired woman looked very much a part of the lush, sprawling Tuscany countryside.

Except that she is far from your average resident in Montisi, a quaint village nestled in the midst of the most beautiful landscape in central Italy. She is Ruth McVey, the American-born academic who is also one of the most prominent scholars on Indonesian politics.

"I first came here in the early 1970s to visit my friend Heather Sutherland (another Indonesia specialist), who owns a home nearby. I just fell in love with the area," McVey said as she sipped a glass of red wine in her rustic yet comfortable sitting room, resting from her routine morning gardening. She bought her own farm and house there 20 years ago.

She was still trying to shake off jet lag as she had just returned from two weeks in the Philippines for a seminar on Southeast Asia.

"I am currently working on a book on Thailand. After that's finished, maybe I'll do something on Indonesia again," she said.

Idleness seems to be an unknown in McVey's life. After finishing her bachelor's degree in German and Russian studies in 1952 from Cornell University, and before commencing her doctoral studies at Harvard, she went on a Fulbright scholarship to the Netherlands at the suggestion of her Russian Studies teacher, who was Dutch.

"She told me that it was important for young Americans to go outside the U.S. to broaden their horizons."

Little did she know at the time that her part-time job as a typist in Amsterdam would mark the beginning of her long-term relationship with the then newly independent ex-colony of the Netherlands. The office she had the job with was a news agency called Antara.

"Antara's Netherlands branch was headed by Muhammad Chudory at the time. I also met the young Adam Malik there."

Adam Malik later became minister of foreign affairs and vice- president, while Chudory became The Jakarta Post's general manager.

While she was in the Netherlands she wrote a short paper on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) "based on material I found in Holland".

"When my professors at Harvard realized I had written the paper, they became very excited. In those years very little had been done on Indonesia in the U.S., and at first it took me by surprise that suddenly I was the 'Indonesia expert' with that short paper."

Even though she was accepted at Harvard to do Russian studies, "many of my professors encouraged me to do more on Indonesia, so I did".

Her expertise on Indonesia and Southeast Asia eventually led to research and teaching positions at premier universities in her native USA and Great Britain, where she taught at the venerable SOAS (School for Overseas and Asian Studies).

Controversial

McVey went to Indonesia for the first time in 1958, and has been a frequent visitor from that time on.

Indonesian historian Onghokham remembers touring around Java with McVey in 1964.

"It was a great trip. We used any mode of transport available: buses, cars, trains. Those were quite hard times, but she had no problem adapting herself to the situation at hand," he recalled.

Onghokham dubbed her "an outstanding scholar" on Indonesia, "one of the best".

"She is really tough, and she has an incredible memory," he said of McVey.

A Dutch academic on Indonesia, who has known her for years, said that he had "never seen anyone else who could wade through piles and piles of data and take out just the right information".

McVey's numerous books and articles on Indonesia include Making Indonesia, together with another U.S. academic Daniel Lev, Southeast Asian Capitalists, The Soviet View of the Indonesian Revolution, and Communist Uprisings of 1926-1927 in Indonesia.

The one work, written together with Cornell University academic Ben Anderson, which is still arguably her most famous, and for some the most notorious, is the so-called Cornell Paper, containing theories which try to explain the failed coup of September 30, 1965.

Her prominence as one of the most knowledgeable academics on Indonesian communism has not made her popular in some circles in Indonesia given the sensitivity of the subject.

J.A. Maulani, a former Tanjungpura military commander, in the March 30, 1996 edition of the Gatra weekly magazine described McVey as one of the "leftist" academics "whose views on Indonesia are never honest".

However, on an overcast summer afternoon in Montisi, comments such as Maulani's, as well as praise from others, seemed to have little effect on McVey as she lovingly described Il Picciolo, her twelve-hectare farm overflowing with olive trees and orchards, complemented by sheep, geese and a very happy-looking dog.

When asked to comment on the current political situation in light of the frequent outbursts of mass violence over the last year, especially during the general election campaign, she only said that during her last visit to Indonesia in January she "didn't find quite the brewing tensions within the society as I did when I visited in the mid-sixties".

She makes and sells her own olive oil, which has been praised by friends, customers and gourmet magazines as truly outstanding.

In the summers, McVey rents out the second floor of her home to visitors. Her simple brochure describes her farm, which does "not have the atmosphere and amenities of a resort. It offers the tranquility, beauty and friendliness of rural Tuscany but won't suit if what you want is bright lights and action".

She has apparently reserved her bright lights and action for her academic endeavors.