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.