Second awakening needed

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.