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.