Poodle patting in int'l relations: An Asian experience

Poodle patting in int'l relations: An Asian experience

Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin remembers, with
affection, an Indonesian friend whom he met many years ago, and
applies to today's Asian crisis the lesson which that friend
taught him. This is the first of two articles.

HONG KONG (JP): As the tumultuous events unfolded in Indonesia
recently, I have been wondering, not once, but several times --
whatever happened to my friend Soepomo?

It is a bit late in the day to be remembering him. Soepomo
and I knew each other well in Melbourne in the late 1950s and
early 1960s. We last met in 1962 around the time that Indonesia
was campaigning hard to regain West New Guinea (as it then was)
from Dutch colonial rule, and, with the help of Robert Kennedy's
mediation, turning it into West Irian.

Soepomo was a different kind of a person to those Asian
friends I had made, up to that point, in Ceylon (as it then was),
India, Pakistan, and Malaya. In those countries, independence had
proceeded from a belief in non-violence, and had been ultimately
agreed as a result of a relatively peaceful struggle with the
British colonial power.

So they experienced continuity, while Soepomo had grappled
with discontinuity. Indonesia unilaterally declared its
independence in 1945. There was no agreed handover when the Dutch
colonialists sought to return after World War II. The Indonesians
were forced to fight for their independence.

Soepomo had been in the thick of the struggle. The necessity
for violent struggle had tempered his character. He was a
revolutionary in more ways than one. In the late 1950s, there
were already a large number of Malaysian and Singaporean students
in Melbourne. Soepomo found their tendency towards political
apathy hard to take. "They don't know what life is all about," I
remember him once murmuring.

Soepomo was one of those rare human beings blessed with the
quality of directness in both thought and speech. He said what he
meant, and meant what he said -- which is why I have often
thought of him in subsequent years, and tried to find him,
without success. He has often come to mind as I have grappled, in
later years, with the frequently devious and often indirect
circumlocutions of political dialog from Japan to Java.

Soepomo, who, when I first met him, was studying at Melbourne
University, had graduated very early in the demanding high school
of actual experience. He was one of that band of Indonesian
students who had briefly kidnapped Sukarno and Mohamad Hatta,
during the dying days of the Japanese occupation, and forced them
to make the Aug. 17, 1945 Declaration of Independence, at a
moment when Sukarno was inclined to temporize.

When the fighting ceased, and Sukarno became the first
President of the Republic in 1949, he didn't temporize on one
small, but for him important, detail. Anxious to stay in power as
long as he could, he sent those demanding, forthright students of
1945, who had dared to think of kidnapping him, to study overseas
as far away as possible from Jakarta. In the late 1950s, I should
add, Melbourne was a long way from Asia in more ways than one.

The incident which comes to mind most frequently whenever I
think of Soepomo took place in 1958 or 1959. It was a small
matter, but it forever secured, for Soepomo, a permanent niche in
my consciousness.

We went one evening to Melbourne's upper class suburb of
Toorak to attend a meeting of an Australian-Asian Friendship
Association -- or some such pretentiously named organization.

For me, it seemed a dull though well-meaning occasion but
Soepomo was obviously bored. So we did not stay for long. Once
outside I immediately asked him what he thought of the
proceedings.

"When I first came to Melbourne a few years ago," Soepomo
intoned, waving his hand towards the Toorak residence, "these
people (said with an edge in his voice) had a fad of owning
poodles. Now they don't pat poodles -- they pat Asians instead."

At that unforgettable moment, Soepomo gave me an invaluable
tool for understanding global politics and international
relations. Poodle-patting is a pervasive and undesirable
phenomenon which inhibits nations from properly understanding and
coexisting with one another. It is surprising how many leading
lights indulge in it.

Soepomo was then making a comment on the ostentatious and
patronizing attitudes, which at that time, and on even until
today, sometimes lay just beneath the surface of Asian-Australian
relations. Perhaps it was in part guilt. Undoubtedly there was a
genuine desire by some to go along and to get along. There were
many reasons.

"Of course they mean well," Soepomo argued with me," but that
is not the point".

For him, those who tried so hard to be nice were, in a very
real way, guilty of extending the colonial period. Soepomo didn't
want to be patronized. He even preferred it if people were
honestly indifferent to him. But what he really wanted was to be
treated as an equal.

Generally speaking, Australians were extremely frank with one
another. Soepomo wanted them to be as frank with him, on exactly
the same basis. He didn't want to experience any poodle-patting.

It did not take long for me to begin to realize that the
poodle-patting concept had a wider relevance than just
Australian-Asian relations. It certainly applied to American-
Asian relations, too. This became abundantly clear to me a few
years after Soepomo made his classic remark, as the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) swept across the face of
China.