Toward reconciliation in Indonesia

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.