The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0020/00204.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 27KB | 437 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00204}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Indonesia
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald M. Seekins}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{century
java
archipelago
indian
trade
eastern
portuguese
islam
indonesian
islands
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1982}
$Log{See Wayang Drama*0020401.scf
}
Title:       Indonesia
Book:        Indonesia, A Country Study
Author:      Donald M. Seekins
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Wayang Drama: Staging of a wayang drama calls for the use of this screen
at the start and close of a performance.]

     Since the first centuries A.D. the islands of the Indonesian
archipelago have attracted the attention of traders and colonizers intent on
exploiting their rich natural resources and controlling their strategic
location on the sea routes between China and India. Indonesia's place in
the world economic system has always played a special role in the nation's
development. First, the Chinese sought the aromatic resins of the eastern
archipelago as a substitute for the frankincense and myrrh they had
previously imported from the Middle East. Beginning in the sixteenth century,
Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and English merchant-adventurers came for cloves,
peppers, nutmeg, and mace. The nineteenth century witnessed the establishment
of a colonial administration on Java by the Dutch, which facilitated the
intense and highly profitable cultivation and export of cash crops, such as
coffee and sugar. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the modern
industries of the Western nations and Japan required the oil, rubber, and tin
of the archipelago, making it a rich prize for nations wishing to establish or
maintain a dominant position in the world economic and political system.

     World commercial interest in Indonesia over the centuries has had a
number of important consequences. One was the implantation of foreign
religious beliefs. Although historical records are fragmentary, Hindu-Buddhist
influences were confirmed on the archipelago as early as the fifth century
A.D. By the eighth century a civilization containing both indigenous and
Indian elements was flourishing on the islands of Java and Sumatra and perhaps
in Borneo and the eastern archipelago as well, epitomized by the great
Borobudur archaeological site in central Java. From the thirteenth century
Islamic influences appeared, and by the sixteenth century Islam had become
the dominant, though not the exclusive religion of the archipelago. It is
believed that both the Indian religions and Islam were brought to the islands
by merchants who wished to establish influence with native rulers.

     A second consequence was the rise of indigenous maritime empires that
came to control the trade within the archipelago. The Srivijaya empire,
which lasted from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, was located on
Sumatra but dominated interisland trade because of its control of the Strait
of Malacca. A second empire was the Majapahit on Java, which lasted from the
late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. During its period of greatest power
in the fourteenth century, it claimed vassals in Sumatra, Borneo, and the
eastern archipelago.

     With the appearance of aggressive Portuguese traders and fighters in
the early sixteenth century, a period was initiated in which established,
indigenous trade patterns were disrupted or eradicated and local
Indonesian rulers were deprived of their independence. Ultimately, the
archipelago was forcibly drawn into a tight trade monopoly controlled by the
Dutch-owned United East India Company. Although the company was disbanded at
the end of the eighteenth century and a dismantling of the Dutch state
monopolies was begun in 1870, by the early twentieth century the entire
archipelago, except the small Portuguese enclave on Timor, was under
Dutch colonial control.

     An "Indonesian" nation embracing the entire archipelago was,
geographically, a problematic notion. Although the waters separating the
islands were highways for trade, they made political centralization and
cultural homogenization difficult, if not impossible. The great majority of
the inhabitants, who speak Malayo-Polynesian languages, share a certain
cultural unity, but it is their diversity rather than a basic "Malay" identity
that is more apparent both to themselves and to outside observers. The
precolonial maritime empires, Srivijaya and Majapahit, attempted to unify the
archipelago, although the hold they exercised over their vassals and
dependencies was tenuous. The Islamic religion provided a potential basis for
unity, as some 90 percent of the people were Muslim. Yet Islam was itself a
divisive factor as revealed in the politically significant split between the
abangan, or nominal Muslims, who combined the foreign religion with indigenous
beliefs, and the santri, the more fundamentalist Muslims.

     The Dutch colonial empire as it stood at the beginning of the twentieth
century, however, provided a framework for a unified Indonesian nation. At
that time members of the elite, working hand in hand with progressive Dutch
officials, sought to promote educational reform and self-government within
the colonial political system. Demands for independence, however, grew during
the 1920s, and the geographic term Indonesia began to be used for the first
time in a political sense. The demands were met by more conservative Dutch
attitudes, which in turn stimulated a more militant anticolonial resistance.
The Japanese occupation of 1942-45 effectively broke the Dutch hold on the
archipelago, though the Dutch attempted unsuccessfully to reestablish control
during the war for independence of 1945-49.

     The forging of national unity was a long and difficult process.
Sukarno, the Republic of Indonesia's first president, had been working to
create its ideological bases since the 1920s. The ideas of Marhaenism,
pancasila (the five principles), and Nasakom (Nationalism, Religion, and
Communism) were developed to create a common ground for the archipelago's
diverse social, economic, and religious groupings. The armed forces played
what was perhaps the most important role in the unification process from as
early as the war for independence. Sukarno's Guided Democracy period (1957-65)
was sustained in part through the support of the armed forces, and with his
fall and the rise of General Soeharto to supreme power, the armed forces came
on center stage to dominate the political and economic systems. Although the
transition from Guided Democracy to Soeharto's New Order was one of bloody
confrontation, particularly as the army and Islamic groups sought to eliminate
the Indonesian Communist Party, there was a strong sense of continuity between
the two periods. In both, the importance of unity and consensus was stressed
over group or regional interests. Pluralistic, parliamentary political
institutions were repudiated in favor of those stressing traditional values of
consultation and consensus. Thus the five principles of pancasila first
declared by Sukarno in 1945-that the Indonesian state would be based on belief
in one God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social
justice-were adopted as the foundation of post-Sukarno political ideology
under the New Order.

Early Historic Indonesia

Hindu-Buddhist Era

     In the third and fourth centuries A.D. Indian sailors bound for China,
aided by monsoon winds, docked at the ports on the lower end of Sumatra, the
western tip of Java, and the east coast of the island of Borneo. By means
still being determined, an elaborate Hinduized culture developed in the
coastal communities along the main trade routes and preeminently in the
populous inland agricultural communities of Java. Finding no evidence to
suggest either large-scale settlement or control or invasion by Indians,
scholars attribute the heavy influence of Indian civilization in parts of the
archipelago to the readiness