Wake up and smell the rot

Wake up and smell the rot

The National Awakening Day, commemorated today, comes at a
time when Indonesia is at a crucial juncture which could
determine our existence as a nation. Given the current state of
affairs, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the nation-
building process is already heading in the wrong direction: That
we, as a nation, are deteriorating, albeit slowly, from the
inside out. Unless we reverse the trend, Indonesia, as a nation,
will soon cease to exist.

Let us first recall what it was that made today such an
historic occasion for us to celebrate every year, each time
professing that we hold on to the vision of our founding fathers.

On May 20, 1908, a group of Javanese medical students founded
Boedi Oetomo, a movement designed to help improve the lot of the
Javanese people through education. Leaders of the movement
however quickly realized that the fate of the Javanese was
closely intertwined with those of the other oppressed people in
the rest of the archipelago, then known as the Dutch East Indies.
They expanded their goal and thus turned Boedi Oetomo into the
first organization that held a vision of Indonesia as a nation.

Other organizations with similar causes emerged afterwards,
and the struggle for nationhood culminated with the gathering of
youths from all corners of the archipelago in Jakarta on Oct. 28,
1928. Here, they made the historic Youth Pledge: One Nation, One
Country, One Language: Indonesia.

The struggle for this nation-building process received a
tremendous boost when a group of young people proclaimed
Indonesia's independence on Aug. 17, 1945, a few days after the
Japanese surrendered to the Allied Forces. This move preempted
the return of the Dutch colonial rulers to Indonesia. After five
years of bloody struggle, Indonesia won its full independence.
Theoretically at least, we became an independent nation.

Nobody said that building a nation, out of a collection of
very diverse peoples living on some 17,000 islands, would be
easy. But these people have many things in common -- from a
shared historical past, including being ruled by the Dutch, their
common heritage including, a shared working language, to their
geographical proximity. But most importantly, and this was
something that our founding fathers strongly believed, was the
view that the fate of these people would always be interlinked.
Since we had a common destiny, we must then have a shared vision
that the advancement and prosperity of everyone in the
archipelago would be best served and promoted by acting as one
nation, or so the argument went.

Our experience in building this nation in the last 50 years or
so has been rocky, and filled with blood. And we would be
deceiving ourselves if we claimed that we have succeeded.

Today, we are not anywhere near the vision of one happy and
prosperous nation that our founding fathers meant it to be when
they set out to fight for a nation called Indonesia.

Where exactly do we stand today in terms of that vision of a
unified and prosperous nation? Indonesia today is not only poor,
but it is also a nation of stark contrasts and divisions: The
generally wealthier people in the western islands against the
poorer people from the eastern islands; the ruling urban people
versus the exploited rural people; the educated elite minority
against the ignorant majority; the powerful few against the weak
masses; the generally developed island of Java against the
backwardness of other islands.

With such a state of affairs, we could hardly justify calling
ourselves a nation. Many of us may still believe in the need for
a shared vision, but our experience of more than 50 years of
nationhood has been one of exploitation by one group of people
against the other. We have hardly departed from the condition of
the Dutch colonial era. Java merely replaced Holland in
extracting the riches of the other islands in the archipelago.

Yet, this is the state of affairs that suited most power-
hungry politicians. No wonder that our leaders since independence
had no interest in redressing the problem. Instead, they sought
to perpetuate the status quo because this was the way to hold on
to power. This explains why post-independent Indonesia has
managed to produce authoritarian and ruthless leaders, and turned
the country into a fertile breeding ground for sectarian politics
that seek to exploit the wide disparities in our society.

If today we can barely call ourselves a nation, that is
because we have hardly done anything in terms of nation-building
in the last 50 years. None of our leaders, from the 1950s to
present day politicians, have ever matched the same vision of a
nation that our founding fathers laid out in 1908 and 1928.

Many of these leaders have betrayed that vision of a nation.
They have little concern for nation-building, and are instead
indulging in power struggles to fulfill their personal ambitions
or to serve the interests of their own groups.

In honoring our visionary founding fathers on this National
Awakening Day, we should start by making an honest admission that
we have not only failed to lived up to their dreams, but are also
on the verge of betraying their dream and all their sacrifices by
putting the nation on a dangerous course towards extinction. We
do not need a second awakening as some people have suggested. We
just need to wake up and smell the rot.