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.