Reconciliating ethnic communities

Reconciliating ethnic communities

By Herb Feith

PADANG (JP): In 1966, West Sumatra was a sullen, resentful
part of Indonesia, in the aftermath of the abortive regional
rebellion of 1958-1961. The "Revolutionary Government of the
Republic of Indonesia", or PRRI, had been proclaimed in West
Sumatra and Minangkabaus had been prominent among its leaders.

But it had been crushed with surprising ease, in a way which
left the Minangkabau ethnic community humiliated. This proud
community, which had provided so much of the non-Javanese
leadership of the nationalist movement -- including four of its
first five prime ministers -- felt ignominiously defeated.

In the early and middle 1960s, the senior positions in the
province were in the hands of outsiders, mostly Javanese.
Jakarta's control was tight and heavily military. Power was in
the hands of people who mistrusted the Minangkabaus. The
Minangkabaus resented them wholeheartedly. They still remember
1958-1966 as a dark time. As one of my university colleagues here
put it recently: "It was worse than the Dutch period or the
Japanese one."

But the atmosphere began to change in 1966. Harun Zain, a
Minangkabau economist who had recently been transferred from
Jakarta to become rector of Padang's Andalas University, was made
governor in that year. He had been in the U.S. at the time of the
PRRI rebellion and so had avoided becoming involved in it on
either side. He was well-placed to reconcile Jakarta and the
Minangkabau community of West Sumatra, and that is what he
proceeded to do.

His message to his fellow Minangkabaus was that Soeharto's
Jakarta was very different from Sukarno's. The communists had
been crushed and economic development was now the central
priority.

To Jakarta, his message was that the Minangkabaus had never
been traitors to Indonesia, that the PRRI rebellion had been a
tragic mistake. West Sumatra, he argued, would be able to make a
major contribution to Indonesian development if only the
Minangkabaus were allowed to regain their ethnic self-respect, if
only they were given a chance to be masters in their own house.

Ichlasul Amal of Gadjah Mada University told the Harun Zain
story in his Monash University dissertation, which was published
by Gadjah Mada University Press in 1992 as Regional and Central
Government in Indonesia Politics, West Sumatra and South
Sulawesi, 1949-1979.

Ichlasul compares the role of Zain in post-PRRI West Sumatra
with the role which Col. (later Gen.) Mohammad Jusuf had played
in South Sulawesi a few years earlier.

Jusuf had fought against the Dutch during the revolution, in
both South Sulawesi and Java. In 1951, his former commander,
Kahar Muzakkar, began a rebellion against the central government
in the name of both Islam and ethnic justice for the Buginese and
Makassarese of South Sulawesi. His movement initially had
widespread popular support, because South Sulawesians resented
the way ethnic outsiders had been given the key positions in
their province. Buginese and Makassarese saw the government as
refusing to recognize their contributions to the struggle for
independence.

Jusuf stuck with Jakarta at that point, though not
unreservedly. He played a key role for the central government in
1957-1958, when a part of the South Sulawesian elite was drawn to
the side of the Minahasa-led Permesta movement. But in the
following years, he pushed effectively for South Sulawesians
(Buginese and Makassarese) to be given prominent positions in the
government of their region. He added to his local appeal in 1960
when he took the bold step of banning all communist activity in
his region.

As military commander in Makassar (Ujungpandang), Jusuf
maneuvered to reduce the appeal of Kahar Muzakkar, whose movement
finally crumbled in 1964-1965. He was rewarded by being appointed
as South Sulawesi's first-ever member of the national cabinet. He
played crucial roles in the Sukarno-Soeharto transition of March
1966 and remained a cabinet minister until 1983.

Like Harun Zain in West Sumatra, Jusuf made a major
contribution to undoing reciprocal mistrust between his own
ethnic community and the national government.

The peacemaking achievements of men like these deserve more
attention than they have received. Do they have lessons for other
areas?

Governor Mario Carrascalao attempted to play a similar role in
East Timor in the decade after 1982, with some early signs of
success, but he eventually failed. Governor Bas Suebu was
charting a similar course in Irian Jaya for five years, until
1993, but he failed to win a second term. Carrascalao and Suebu
had been strongly independent governors, and the government
eventually replaced them with people it could more easily
control.

A central message of Ichlasul Amal's study is that the central
governments of the pre-1965 period paid a heavy price for
neglecting ethnic grievances, for pretending that ethnic
solidarities were less powerful than they were.

That message is more important than ever in the present post-
Cold War era, when international ethos factors are adding to the
persuasive power of ethnic and ethno-religious entities in many
parts of the world.

The writer is a political scientist and Indonesia specialist
at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently a
visiting lecturer in the Social Sciences Faculty of University of
Andalas in Padang.