Sjahrir: Great due to failure

Sjahrir: Great due to failure

Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia; Rudolf Mrazek; Published by Cornell Southeast Asia Program; Ithaca, New York; 525 pages.

JAKARTA (JP): At last there is a complete biography of Sutan Sjahrir, a central figure of Indonesia's intellectual circle during the country's revolution and a manifestant of the Greek tragedy that is Indonesian politics.

Placed by historians in the big three of the Indonesian revolution, together with first President Sukarno and Vice President Muhammad Hatta, Sjahrir's life was filled with tumults, passion, struggle, determination and, above all, endless soul searching. The other two were among his comrades that founded the state of Indonesia. Sukarno later exiled him just like the Dutch had previously. He survived the Dutch-imposed exile, but not Sukarno's. He died far away from his country, in Switzerland.

"Some who read the book in manuscript suggested this was a biography of a man who failed. I cannot disagree more. But I hope that what follows may help our understanding of what a failure really is," Rudolf Mrazek writes in the introduction of his 525-page book, which took about ten years to complete.

History shows that great persons who fail, very often become an inexhaustible source of inspiration and reflection to following generations. So can Sjahrir.

Writes Mrazek: "Sjahrir's failure in politics ... signifies his greatness. Or, expressed in slightly different way, in the political memory of present Indonesia, 'Sjahrir is a forgotten statesman'."

Young Indonesians know little about him, and may fail to see his greatness or forget about him if they depend on their high school history textbook. The texts just list him as the first prime minister of the nascent Republic of Indonesia after it proclaimed independence in 1945.

As a matter of fact, the shadow of his former grandeur can be seen surrounding some prominent personalities of the New Order era with whom the young generation are more familiar. The late intellectual Soedjatmoko, journalist Mochtar Lubis, Indonesia's most-respected economics guru Sumitro Djojohadikoesoemo and the late author-philosopher Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana are a few. They're all, in Mrazek's word, "Sjahririans".

Exile

Born in 1909 in Padang Panjang, West Sumatra in the house of a jaksa (native legal official), Sjahrir was known as a bright kid at school. He received a European-style education in Medan, and then Bandung. It was here that he started to practice politics and got to know young Sukarno.

He then sailed to Holland to pursue his studies, and met Hatta, who was studying economics. Sukarno was then jailed in the Dutch Indies for his political activities. Aware that there was a leadership vacuum in the independence movement, Hatta and Sjahrir decided one of them should return home. Sjahrir sailed back, and Hatta remained to complete his studies.

Sjahrir formed a party, which declared cooperation with the Dutch. Yet, two years later, in 1933, the party was banned because the Dutch suspected it was leaning towards communism; Sjahrir and Hatta, who had returned, were arrested.

From 1934 to 1935, Hatta and Sjahrir lived in exile in the communist-internment camp of Tanah Merah on the upper reaches of the crocodile-infested Digul River in the New Guinea's (now Irian Jaya) jungle. They were later moved to a more decent, humane place in Banda Neira, Maluku. They lived there until the Japanese invasion in 1942.

Sjahrir used his time in exile to shape and develop his political and philosophical views. His views were later published and earned him respect as a thinker. He wrote down all his thoughts in his letters to his Dutch first-wife Maria Duchateau, the ex-wife of Sal Tal, a close Dutch friend during his stay in Holland. Duchateau had been deported from the Dutch Indies to the Netherlands by the authorities, and was forbidden entry to the Indies, on the grounds that their marriage was illegal.

While other leaders cooperated with the Japanese occupiers, Sjahrir organized an underground resistance movement. After the Allies defeated the Japanese and Indonesia declared independence, Sjahrir became prime minister at the age 36. He was prime minister in the following two cabinets. Later he traveled around the world as an "ambassador at large" with the task of collecting support for Indonesian independence.

From 1950 his glory declined and then ended in tragedy. At a time when he was still revered as a leading politician with intellectual cadres around him, his Indonesian Socialist Party gained negligible seats in the first general elections of 1955. More tragically, he was jailed in 1962 on faked charges of involvement in an attempted assassination of Sukarno several days earlier. In jail, Sjahrir fell into paralysis, and was sent to Zurich, Switzerland for treatment. There, in 1966, he died as a political prisoner beside his second wife Siti Wahjunah, his secretary as prime minister.

Feeling of duty

Sjahrir's magnetism lies in his thoughts and deeds. Mrazek sheds light on both, unveiling why is idolized.

Sjahrir had always been a serious intellectual, like Marx, Freud, Kant, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Nietzsche. Like other Indonesian intellectuals of his time, he was especially overwhelmed by the argument that Indonesians should cast away their submissive Eastern culture for a Western one. He believed in socialism.

His knowledge was amazingly borderless. Once during his exile in Banda Neira, a local Calvinist curate was so impressed by Sjahrir's knowledge about Christianity, that the curate asked him to take the church when he left the island. The curate didn't know that Sjahrir was Moslem.

Sjahrir loved children. A childish vitality and innocence underlaid his personality. It is this trait that made him stick to morals in the midst of dirty politics; made him able to defend in his writings about the good aspects of the Dutch who exiled him, and later, like a saint, even told his followers to side with Sukarno who had jailed him.

Mrazek quotes Sjahrir's friend's Sal Tal: "At the bottom of his heart, Sjahrir did not love politics. He engaged in it from a feeling of duty, but not from interest. He was not fascinated by that remarkable, turbulent, passionate phenomenon -- sometimes noble, often dirty, utterly human -- which we call politics... It is dangerous to engage in politics solely from a feeling of duty."

Sjahrir's thoughts and lifelong soul searching become clear under Mrazek's deep, sharp analysis. Thanks to his outstanding prose style, Sjahrir's life as well as the political settings of his time is represented very touchingly and vividly. The prose makes the biography read more like a novel. It nails us to the book and forces us to read it again.

-- Johannes Simbolon