Second awakening needed

For Indonesia, the turn of the past century was a time of momentous importance. It was a time when the first stone was laid of an organized movement that would eventually lead the nation towards national independence.

However, when a group of Javanese medical students founded the country's first modern-based organization, Boedi Oetomo, on May 20, 1908, they could not have imagined that decades later that particular day would be recorded in Indonesian history books as National Awakening Day.

Boedi Oetomo was originally designed to help improve the lot of the Javanese people through education. Mas Ngabehi Wahidin Soedirohoesodo, a Javanese medical doctor and a prolific writer, had by that date already been campaigning for a couple of years to raise funds from the more privileged members of the Javanese community to help finance the education of the less-privileged Javanese youths. He strongly believed that under the hardships of colonialist rule in what was then called the Dutch East Indies, the life and welfare of the common Javanese could be improved only through education.

The idea was expanded after he met and discussed the idea with R. Soetomo, a student of STOVIA, a medical school for indigenous people. Together with other STOVIA students, they founded Boedi Oetomo, a student organization aiming to promote progress among the indigenous population in the East Indies without, however, antagonizing the Dutch colonial rulers. But their leaders quickly realized that the fate of the Javanese was closely intertwined with those of all the other oppressed peoples throughout the East Indies.

Boedi Oetomo, with branches in several cities in Java, soon became a meeting place for students from different ethnic, cultural, political, as well as religious backgrounds. In a way, they represented a miniature collection of the exceedingly diverse indigenous population of the East Indies, which contained some 17,000 islands and had more than 250 distinct languages and dialects. Nevertheless they realized they had something in common: they were being oppressed by colonial rule.

Boedi Oetomo never grew into a political organization. It did, however, generate the beginnings of a nation-building process. Other organizations later emerged from this process, culminating in the gathering of youths from all corners of the archipelago in Jakarta on October 28, 1928. In that meeting, they made the historic Youth Pledge: One Country, One Nation, One Language: Indonesia.

Indonesia's founding fathers thus envisioned the importance of nation building at a very early stage. They saw the need for consciously developing a common attitude, a common will, viewpoint, value orientation, character and behavior that would contribute to the goal of living together as one nation, of being, in fact, Indonesia. For the nascent Indonesia, that goal was formulated in the will to promote and realize the ideal of Indonesian unity.

Unfortunately, after national independence was achieved in 1945, the interpretation of that lofty concept and the execution of strategies towards the attainment of that goal has differed from one president to the next. And none has so far brought Indonesia any closer to the ideal.

Each time the efforts have failed because every successive government has emphasized the superiority of the state above the sovereignty of the people. Each time the government has fumbled because it is disregarding the importance of culture as a means of coordinating, regulating, and directing human endeavor towards achieving the common goal that the Indonesian nation, and indeed mankind, has set itself to achieve -- which is to secure a better existence.

It is indeed ironic that while the nation today celebrates its National Awakening Day, war is returning to Aceh, the people of Papua province are being torn apart, and the nation is being pushed towards disintegration by a legislative body that is supposed to represent the people in promoting and realizing the ideal of Indonesian unity. The education bill is one good example, but there are many more.

As the nation commemorates this auspicious day, it is indeed sad to have to note that many of our leaders have, and still are, betraying that vision of a nation as envisioned by our founding fathers. It could be that this nation needs a second awakening.