Opium money helped fund RI independence struggle
JAKARTA (JP): Opium smuggling helped raise money to finance Indonesia's independence fight against the Dutch in the 1940s, historians said yesterday.
They said in a seminar to review the revolution years 50 years ago that such operations were condoned by the fledgling Republican government in a desperate effort to raise funds to finance the struggle for independence.
"After attempts to raise money through (legitimate) trade failed, the Republican government (under Prime Minister Amir Sjarifuddin) made the decision in July 1947 to sell its stock of opium," Yong Mun Cheong of the National University of Singapore said. He did not explain where the opium had come from in the first place.
Cheong was one of the speakers on the third of a four-day international conference on the national revolution at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.
Cheong said the smuggling was carried out even by respected people, some knowingly, others not. "Apparently, no one who could be used as a 'trafficker' was spared."
A group of members of the Indonesian Women's Organization traveling to New Delhi via Singapore for an Inter-Asian Women's congress in 1947 reportedly carried opium hidden in their luggage, he said.
Cheong based his assertion on writings by Suryono Darusman, an official involved in the smuggling of weapons, whom he interviewed.
The luggage of Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir, traveling to Singapore on a United Nations aircraft, was also once used to hide opium, he added.
The official Sjahrir appointed as Representative of the Government of Indonesia in Singapore, Utoyo, was subject to interrogation by the Singapore police on his role in smuggling opium, Cheong quoted Darusman from a 1992 interview.
Upon arrival in Singapore, the opium would be handed over to a field worker, who with Darusman worked for the Indonesia Office, said Cheong in his paper entitled "Indonesia's Singapore Connection, 1945-48."
The Indonesia Office was set up in Singapore under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs following a decision by Sjahrir to mount a diplomatic campaign for the international recognition of the Republic.
Audrey Kahin of the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, noted that opium was bartered for weapons and clothing, and sold and the money used "to support Indonesian pilots studying in India and paying for spare parts for the Indonesian Air Force."
Focusing on the economy of West Sumatra, Kahin said about 32 cases of opium remained at the time of the Second Dutch Aggression. "The Republican government took (the opium cases) with them as they retreated from Bukittinggi."
"Small in bulk and high in value, the 'black gold' could be relatively easily smuggled out of Indonesia...where it became an item of exchange primarily with the Chinese communities, who cooperated with the Republicans by providing them with cloth and weapons..," Kahin wrote.
Other illegal operations were the smuggling of gold and estate products, such as rubber, in financing the Republic.
Kahin also elaborated on the 10 percent 'iuran perang' or war tax on various types of agricultural produce which, though heavy on the people, was managed without friction through avoiding direct contact between military and civilian authorities.
However, she said, "the Republic's dependence upon taxes meant that it needed to enlist more than passive allegiance from the population."
Mestika Zed of the state-owned teachers college in Padang, quoted 1946 estimates that the Republic spent 58 percent of revenues on military needs from October 1945 to March 1946.
Of the 118.5 million Dutch guilders spent during those years, 70 million were drawn from taxes, 15 million from oil and 12 million from forest products. Opium sales gathered 8.1 million Dutch guilders and salt, 8.4 million, Mestika said. (anr)