The Example of Sutan Sjahrir: 1909-1966

On April 19, 250,000 Indonesians paid public homage to the memory of Sutan Sjahrir, the Sumatra-born socialist leader of the early Indonesian Republic and its first premier. He had spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner of President Sukarno, that sinister, aging buffoon, because he had opposed the authoritarian spirit of Sukarno’s “guided democracy.” Released in 1965, his health broken by a series of imprisonments under the Dutch, the Japanese, and then his compatriots, Sjahrir was a stricken man who had already lost his power of speech. A few weeks later he died in a Swiss hospital.

How bitter a commentary the parallel careers of Sjahrir and Sukarno form upon the destiny of Indonesia! Both had been leaders in the nationalist movement, and when Indonesia achieved independence, the two men were for a brief moment collaborators in trying to create a new nation. But soon it became clear that they were utterly different in spirit and quality. Sjahrir believed in the validity of Western political and cultural values as these would be adapted to an Indonesian context; he opposed the mindless xenophobia which Sukarno made into his special mark and which is often a prop for the authoritarianism that has followed the independence of certain new nations. Sjahrir believed in representative government and free political parties—not simply in order to ape the West, but because he was devoted in principle to the idea of liberty, and because he understood that free institutions would be needed to meet the requirements of a state that consists of thousands of islands, hundreds of different ethnic groups, scores of languages, and dozens of cultures and religions. He fought, in vain, against Sukarno’s notion of the “unitary state”—later to be used by “Bung Karno” as an excuse for employing the army in a series of wars at the edges of the Indonesian archipelago. What Sukarno was in practice doing, amidst all his chatter about opposing neo-colonialism, was to destroy the democratic processes the Indonesians themselves had already established; and he was undermining, as well, the local autonomy of the various Indonesian islands, while establishing Javanese domination.