Toward reconciliation in Indonesia

By Willem Oltmans

AMSTERDAM (JP): Rimbaud once wrote that love should be reinvented. Psychohistorians in America feel history should be reinvented. In studying the emotional life of nations they decode history by using psychoanalytical methods to unravel and carefully examine what happened and why it happened.

The psychohistorian probes the dynamic interaction of character, society, human thought and action. Forces of passion and irrationality which are all about us, wherever we are, in America, in Holland, in Indonesia or in China, are often overwhelming in history. They must not be denied or overlooked.

As Marc Bloch has said, "Historical facts are, in essence, psychological facts." In his study Decoding the Past, Peter Loewenberg of the University of California wrote, "Psychohistorians pursue visible traces of the unconscious and its defenses." Psychohistory follows Freudian teaching in studying neurotic and normal processes and how they interact. Nobody will deny that at the turn of this century Indonesia seems to hover between a nervous breakdown and manic depression. A personality oscillating between overactivity and inability to summon up energy or make decisions suffers from manic-depression.

The day Megawati Soekarnoputri was shamefully prevented from cashing in on her victory in the 1999 general election, her followers went on a wild rampage. The very next day, the same followers danced in the streets because their idol had been thrown a leftover to keep her from becoming the leader of the opposition.

Terry McCarthy described these events in Time as manic- depressive behavior. October 21, 1999, is not, as President Abdurrahman Wahid would have us believe, a second declaration of independence. Indonesia has been standing on its own feet since 1945. What now needs to be done is this: Indonesia needs to be reinvented.

But prior to Abdurrahman and Megawati being able to launch a second stage of nation-building, a clean break with the past is a must, an essential prerequisite. After 1986, this writer lived for six years in South Africa and witnessed the march to freedom by Nelson Mandela.

Blacks and whites had been at each other's throats for decades, but they agreed that in order to proceed in a peaceful way, they had to come to terms with their past: history had to be decoded in a psychoanalytic manner, namely through all parties concerned telling their stories, reliving the past and for once being honest about it.

A Truth Commission was set up in South Africa which perhaps will go down in history not only as a near perfect tool for conflict solving and reinventing the emotional life of the South African nation, but also as an example for nations elsewhere to take a cue from Mandela and F.W. de Klerk.

Together they received the Nobel Prize for the way in which they taught mankind how to solve in harmony their political and emotional problems.

The CIA initiated the bloodbath in Indonesia in 1965 and the following years of military terror against the people. Nobody can or should forget the island of Buru, where tens of thousands of people lingered for many years. And when they finally got out, their identification papers were stamped, like Hitler made Jews wear a yellow star.

These crimes against humanity committed by former president Soeharto and his American criminal friends must be cleared up for the collective sanity of the Indonesian people. The whole purpose of psychoanalysis is the return to normality through confession and reconstructing the truth. No one advocated in South Africa a witch-hunt to punish the guilty and send mass murderers of the white regime in Pretoria to the gallows. No. Blacks also committed hideous crimes in the process of their struggle for liberation.

South Africa turned a page in its history by clearing everybody's mind about what happened in the past by instituting a Truth Commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. One can imagine a similar venture and development in Indonesia.

Because it is particularly bad business to enter a new millennium and act as if nothing happened, to shove mass murder and treason committed in collaboration with the CIA and all the rest under the rug. When Henry Kissinger approved on behalf of Richard Nixon the murder and overthrow of democratically elected president Salvador Allende of Chile, Gen. August Pinochet was handed by Washington a list of 3,000 Chileans that needed "to disappear".

Pinochet obliged willingly, the same way Reich Commissar A. Seyss-Inquart rounded up Jews and Dutchmen alike on behalf of Hitler during World War II. He had them shot or disappear in concentration camps. Pinochet -- just like Soeharto 10 years earlier -- sent 200,000 of his countrymen to concentration camps and asked Kissinger to help them set up and dispatch the neces sary Yankee experts to Chile. This was all documented only last year from Washington archives, and hence, Mr. Pinochet is now being held in London for possible trial in Spain of all places.

Perhaps this is not a solution that will be helpful to either Chile, the United Kingdom or Spain. Those who suffered under Pinochet's coup and military regime -- which, and let us not forget this, was an invention of American minds -- would be better served by following the South African psychoanalytical solution of clearing the collective mind of the entire country.

Because the forceful ejection from consciousness of impulses, memories or experiences that are painful or shameful will generate high levels of anxiety. Millions and millions of Indonesians today suffer repressed anger and the only way the nation can return to normalcy is by calmly reexamining the past, without revenge, without continued hatred, in a peaceful way. In other words: the example of Nelson Mandela should be studied, and in my opinion followed to the letter in Indonesia.

Which brings me to Indonesia's founding president Sukarno, known as Bung Karno. When I met him in Rome and suddenly stood face to face with him in the garden of the Indonesian Embassy on June 12, 1956, I was nervous. Why? Because I was Dutch and in some ways I felt guilty. We had imprisoned this man for more than 11 years, while all he ever wanted was freedom for his people.

I had an idea how this felt, because I lived through the five years of Nazi occupation of my country, between the ages of 14 and 19. Bung Karno stretched out his hand in friendship, and even invited me on the spot to join him on the presidential train on his visit to different parts of Italy, ending in Venice.

He ordered his adjutant Sugandhi to make the proper arrangements. Here I was, having parachuted into Indonesia as a Dutch journalist, in the presidential party having lunch in the restaurant-car with his entourage, including Col. Warrouw, Wim Latumeten, A.M. Hanafih, Maj. Sabur, even his son Guntur Soekarnoputra, who was 12, and being accepted by them as a friend.

My father was born in Semarang. My grandfather was born in Semarang. My great-grandfather, Alexander Oltmans, was president of the Netherlands East Indies Railways (1864-1889) in Semarang. I was born and raised in Holland, but nevertheless the descendent of a typical colonial family being raised at the dinner table with lots of sambalan.

My father would tell us how he, at our age, would go crocodile hunting on Sumatra. However, I was also a product of Holland and was totally amazed at the warmth of Bung Karno's reception during that trip through Italy. Looking back to 1956 and all those years of living and loving in Indonesia, I am nevertheless reminded of Rudyard Kipling's dictum in his famous Ballad of 1889: "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

In this day and age of globalization and of creating a global village, unless the West learns from the East, from the Mahatma Gandhis, the Sukarnos and the Mandelas that we are in this world to forgive and not to hate or seek revenge, there will be no peace.

Ibu Hartini Sukarno told me in 1995, "Soeharto is een lieve man" (Soeharto is a likeable man), to which I exploded, "But he killed your husband!" What I, as a Dutchman was forgetting, was that Afro-Asians base human rights on forgiveness, while the West aims at revenge. For the West and the East to come together it is essential the we in Europe and America begin to understand the meaning of the South African Truth Commission. When Bung Karno extended a hand of friendship in Rome was when I began to learn from the East.

The writer is a journalist based in the Netherlands.