Part one: the land and history

The Land

This 5,200-km stretch of islands embraces a total area of five million square kilometers, about one million square kilometers more than the total land area of the United States. The surrounding sea area is three times larger than the land, and Indonesians are one of the few peoples in the world who include water within the boundaries of their territory, calling their country Tanah Air Kita, literally 'Our Land and Water.'

Of the country's 17,110 islands, Indonesia claims the better part of three of the world's largest--New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra. Only 6,000 are named, and 992 permanently settled. Not all the islands in insular Southeast Asia belong to Indonesia. The massive island of New Guinea consists of Papua New Guinea on the east and Irian Jaya to the west, only the latter an Indonesian territory. The northern one-quarter of the island of Borneo belongs to Eastern Malaysia and Brunei, while the southern three-quarters comprises the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan.


Volcanos
Inhabiting a portion of the intensely volcanic Ring of Fire, most Indonesians live and die within sight of a volcano. The islands are the site of the earth's two greatest historic volcanic cataclysms, Krakatoa and Tambora, and each year brings an average of 10 major eruptions. This activity not only destroys, but provides great benefits. The Hindu monuments constructed for over 750 years on Java were for the most part built from cooled lava rock, ideal for carving. The chemical-rich ash produced by an eruption covers a wide area of surrounding land; rivers carry ash even farther by way of irrigation canals. Thus Indonesia enjoys some of the most fertile land on the planet. In places it's said you can shove a stick in the ground and it'll sprout leaves.

Indonesia is the place to see volcanic craters seething with bubbling, steaming gray mud, rocks covered in bright yellow sulphur, and vast rivers of black gaseous lava. The trapped heat under the earth is an almost limitless source of alternative energy. It's estimated there are at least 217 geothermal locations in Indonesia with a total potential of 16,035 megawatts.

Climate

Indonesia straddles the equator, and days are all roughly the same length. The sun rises promptly at 0600 and sets just as predictably at 1800. The country has a typical monsoonal equatorial climate with only two seasons: wet (Nov.-April) and hot (May-Oct.). It's always hot and always humid, with the temperature changing very little, so in reality the hot season generally is only slightly hotter and just not quite so wet as the wet season. Sometimes it rains so hard it's like standing under a tepid shower turned on full. With a roar the skies upend, spilling a solid wall of water on the earth below, flattening plants and flowers. The wettest places are in the mountains of all the main islands.

Locales east of Solo in Central Java have sharply defined dry seasons, the duration increasing the closer the area to Australia. The Palu Valley in Central Sulawesi receives less than 50 cm of rain per year. In the far southeastern islands of Timor and Roti, the dry season can last up to seven months. Sumatra and Kalimantan have no dry season. But don't put off your trip just because of the wet. When it rains the dust on the roads is reduced, flowers bloom, it's fresher and cooler, and everywhere it's green, like bright wet paint. With an extensive and ever-improving surfaced road system throughout the islands, the rains shouldn't slow you down at all.

Indonesians look upon climate differently than people in the West. Warmth is associated with 'hard work, pain, terror, bad,' while in the West most think 'pleasant, cozy, secure, healthy.' Indonesians prefer to socialize and promenade in the cool of the evenings. Because the hard winters of North America and Europe never occur here, there isn't the drive to finish tasks before the season changes. This explains in part the Indonesian jam karet (rubber time) mentality.

Agriculture

For Indonesia's rural, agriculturally based population, land is the most important commodity in the country. It's the single greatest source of litigation, poverty, and injustice in Indonesia, particularly where it's scarcest--on overpopulated Java. The government painfully wresting land from peasants has become a fact of life in the rapid industrialization process of the past 10 years.


The Desa
Three of five Indonesians work the soil. The desa is the entire productive community of a small village. In a Western sense, the desa is an authoritarian, undemocratic system, a sort of oriental kibbutz. Houses are loosely scattered around vegetable plots and fruit trees, with narrow pathways winding in every direction. Sometimes there are also community meeting places, barns, and fishponds. The desa is often surrounded by rice fields, hedges, and bamboo groves, with forests beyond. People work hard all day, then return home to pray, sing, dance, smoke, gossip, watch wayang or TV, sleep, then rise at 0400 to labor again in the fields.

Controlling every activity in the desa is a council of elected villagers. The headman is called the kepala desa. An ancient cooperative system, gotong royong, in which everyone lends a hand, parcels out land, supervises community seed beds, grows crops, and manages irrigation and rice storage. There are two systems of cultivation used in Indonesia, ladang and sawah.


Ladang
Ladang means shifting or swidden cultivation, a method characterized by prodigious human labor using uncomplicated, preindustrial implements. It's estimated as many as a third of all Indonesians still work ladang. The practice can be very complex; basically, it's an imitation of nature itself. Unirrigated, arable land is prepared by burning the jungle just before the start of the rains; the farmer clears the land and fertilizes and weeds the soil at the same time. Then comes planting of a wide variety of quick-growing, predominantly staple food crops such as rice, corn, yams, taro, or the starchy palm-like sago. Cultivators plant in rows, working usually uphill over fallen trees and rough ground. Men poke holes with sharpened sticks, while women follow behind dropping in unhusked seeds, a few per hole.

Ladang is usually practiced in the nonvolcanic, less fertile soil of the Outer Islands, and the soil soon becomes exhausted. The plot is then abandoned. At least 10 years is needed for the jungle to overgrow the cultivated plot and replenish the soil. The ladang farmer can then return and cultivate the plot for another two years, repeating the cycle. If the cycle is abbreviated and the forest denied the time to take root again, tenacious alang-alang grass colonizes the cleared forest area and depletes the soil of nourishment, leading to the so-called 'Green Deserts' of Indonesia. Farmers can return alang-alang fields to cultivation only with much hard work.

The ladang system requires roughly 10 times the area needed for wet-rice growing. In most parts of the world this slash-and-burn farming means a nomadic existence, but in Indonesia ladang farmers live in permanent villages. Ladang usually fosters somewhat archaic clans or genealogical communities, like those found on Flores, Sulawesi, and Timor. Because of the pressure of population and the introduction of improved agricultural methods, ladang is giving way all over Indonesia to the more intensive wet-rice cultivation, called sawah.


Sawah
Sawah, a type of wet-rice cultivation, is a spectacular form of agriculture which often looks like a soft green stairway climbing into the sky. Although it can be utilized up to 1,600 meters above sea level, sawah is commonly found in the monsoon areas of the low-lying plains, where the water supply is more plentiful and regular. Because such complicated irrigation systems and the people to maintain them traditionally required a despot as manager, sawah cultivation has encouraged Indonesia's history of strong agrarian communities supporting an aristocratic hierarchy.

Technically very intricate and delicate to manage, this system of complex waterworks is more productive than ladang, able to support some of the world's greatest rural population densities. Nowhere has sawah succeeded like on Java and Bali, because nowhere is there so little land available to accommodate such high birthrates. Two or even three crops a year are sometimes planted, and sawah has the capacity to produce undiminished yields year after year.

During the wet season, the land is planted with rice; during the dry the same fields are often planted with corn and cassava. Backbreaking planting, weeding, plowing, and harvesting are all done by hand, workers elbow- and knee-deep in mud, using iron and wood tools. Plows are pulled by kerbau (water buffalo), except on smaller fields close to the edges of terraces. In the southeastern islands, kerbau are driven over the fields, turning them into a slushy mire; in effect, the animal acts as the plow. Today gasoline-powered rototillers are appearing on the more prosperous islands of Java and Bali.

Many animist rites persist from the old days, when people were bound by strong religious ties to their communal land. When rice is planted on Java or Bali, a small plaited figure of a fertility goddess is placed under an umbrella and incense burned in her honor to insure good crops the following season. This rice goddess, Dewi Sri, is believed to literally dwell in the rice stalks. At harvest time the stalks must be cut in a certain way so as not to offend her. Using wood-mounted, razor-like handblades concealed in their palms, women deftly cut only three to four stalks at a time so Dewi Sri will not be frightened.

Flora And Fauna

Although covering only one percent of the earth's surface, Indonesia is amazingly rich in animal and plant life. Contained within its land and water territory are 17% of the world's bird species, 16% of the world's amphibians and reptiles, 12% of the world's mammals, and 10% of the world's flora. Not only does this sprawling island nation possess impressive quantity, but also immense variety. Spanning 4,800 kilometers across two biogeographic zones--the Oriental and the Australian--and with landforms ranging from mangrove swamps to glaciers, Indonesia is no doubt the most diverse natural wildlife repository on earth.

To acquaint yourself with Indonesia's incredible biodiversity, visit a Java zoo. The biggest and best zoo in the country is the Ragunan Zoo of Jakarta, with over 4,000 animals and birds, including white tigers, Java rhinos and Komodo dragons. Other zoos include Bandung in Western JA, Yogyakarta in Central Java, and Surabaya in Eastern Java.


Animal Life
Hundreds of different species of mammals are scattered throughout the archipelago. These include the orangutan, with its blazing orange shaggy coat; deep-black wild cattle weighing up to two tons; 35-cm-high miniature deer; clouded leopards; mountain goats; wild warthogs; the Asian sun bear, with a large white circle on its chest; and long-snouted tapirs which gallop like stallions, tossing their heads and whinnying. Two hundred mammal species, of the 500 in the world, are found only in Indonesia.

The fauna of Irian Jaya resembles that of Australia: vividly colored birds of paradise, spiny anteaters, mouse-like flying possums, bandicoots. In northern Sulawesi lives the world's smallest species of monkey, which can easily sit in the palm of the hand. Reptiles include the giant Komodo dragon, the reticulated python, and deep-croaking geckos.

Of approximately 1,500 bird species worldwide, 430 are found in Indonesia and nowhere else. There are peacocks, pheasants, partridges, turkey-sized pigeons, and jungle fowl who incubate their eggs in volcanic steam. Black ibis fly in V-formations, the blue-crowned hanging parrot of the Riaus emits sharp penetrating notes, the glossy black talking mynah of Nias mimics gibbons, and the rhinoceros hornbill of the Kalimantan jungle cackles gleefully with human-like laughter.

Chief among the country's many bird sanctuaries are the small coastal islets of Dua, Rambut, and Bokor, all within easy reach of Jakarta. The island of Sumba in the southeast has 10 endemic species of birds. Bird lovers should check out the spectacular native avifauna at Jakarta's Ragunan Zoo, as well as the bird park at Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature.

Insect and arachnid forms number in the hundreds of thousands: aquatic cockroaches, praying mantises like bright green banana leaves, beetles in the shape of violins, submarine-diving grasshoppers, and the world's most extraordinary moth, the Atlas, with a wingspan of 25 cm. There are spiders that catch and devour small birds in giant webs, and scorpions with bites like bee stings. The fabulously colored butterflies are world famous.

In Indonesia's seas are found the world's rarest shell, the Glory of the Seas; crabs who clip down coconuts and open them on the ground; bony-tongued and luminous fish; freshwater dolphins; fish that climb mangrove trees looking for insects; seaweed that reaches lengths of 75 meters; and the world's only poisonous fish.

Plants
Due to its extreme geographic fragmentation, Indonesia is richer in plant species than either the American or African tropics. Its flowering plant species number more than 40,000, representing 10% of all plant species in the world. There are 250 species of bamboo and 150 species of palm. In the more fertile areas flowers are rampant--hibiscus, jasmine, allamanda, frangipani, bougainvillea, lotus lilies one-half meter wide. Java alone has 5,000 plant species; there are twice as many species on Borneo as in all of Africa.

Of the world's 350 species of the commercially important dipterocarp tree, over half are found in Indonesia--155 species in Borneo alone. The tall, hardwood rainforest trees of Irian Jaya rival the giant sequoias of California. This island also possesses alpine moss and heath forests, the equivalent of South America's cloud forests.

Sumatra is home to the insectivorous corpse plant, which smells like putrefying animal flesh to lure insects, and the world's largest bloom, the one-meter-wide rafflesia. The luxurious vegetation of Borneo hosts seductive orchids which glow in the perpetual twilight of the jungle. Here is found the world's only black orchid, Coelogyne pandurata. Because of the unbelievable humidity, strong sunlight, and fecund volcanic soil, when you build a fence in Indonesia, six months later it's no longer a fence--it's a living wall of vegetation.


Nature Reserves
The most expedient way to view Indonesia's plant and animal life is to visit one of its 150 state-run reserves. To gain entry, you must obtain permission from Dinas Perlindungan dan Pengawetan Alam (PHPA), the Forest Authority, which maintains offices in all the major towns throughout Indonesia. The PHPA also staffs branch offices inside the reserves, where you may register and pay a nominal fee. Many also provide inexpensive accommodations in basic lodges, as well as the use of kitchens.

An outstanding reserve is Ujung Kulon National Park in far western Java, where you might see wild cattle, rusa, leopards, gibbons, and one of the last remaining Javan rhinos. The largest of Indonesia's reserves is the mighty 900,000-hectare Gunung Leuser National Park of northern Sumatra, which still marks extensive tracts of land as 'unexplored.' One of the least known, least visited, yet most accessible reserves is the remarkable Wasur National Park in southeast Irian Jaya, an excellent place to see a variety of large birds and mammals in the wild.

When looking for animals in the rainforest, be patient and go slow. The forest is packed with animals, most of whom hide or flee when loud, clumsy humans come crashing through. You'll see more animals if you walk slowly, stopping frequently, or sit very quietly. Scan the canopy for subtle branch movements. A tactic used by naturalists involves sitting on a rain poncho beneath a large fruiting forest tree. It's almost certain something will arrive to dine in a relatively short time. Sitting also gives you an opportunity to contact the diverse life on or near the forest floor. Use coconut tobacco juice to fight the leeches.

History

When you read Indonesian history, you read world history. This country is a subtle blend of every culture that ever landed here--Chinese, Indian, Melanesian, Portuguese, Polynesian, Arabian, English, Dutch, American . . . wave after wave of invaders and migrants who either absorbed earlier arrivals, killed them off, or pushed them into more remote regions. This ongoing and unending process explains Indonesia's astounding ethnic diversity

Prehistory

Java was one of the earliest places where human beings lived. In 1891 the fossil skull of Java Man (Homo erectus) was discovered at Trinil in Central Java. This erect near-man lived at a time when Europe was under ice and most of Indonesia was a part of Asia. The species ranged from Africa all the way north to the glacial border of Europe and east to China, thriving some 500,000 years ago at the very beginning of the Pleistocene epoch. Charcoal and charred bones indicate these people used fire. Homo erectus was not an ancestor of present-day Indonesians but a vanished race all its own; the species either couldn't adapt or was wiped out by more advanced incoming beings.

Excavations at Sangiran in Central Java uncovered an even more primitive type. Then, in 1931, 11 skullcaps were found at Ngandong, belonging to a more advanced race than Homo erectus--the so-called Solo Man. All 11 skullcaps had been deliberately cracked open: it is assumed Solo Man was a brain-eating cannibal. Found with the busted skulls was an astonishingly rich fossil bed of 23,000 mammalian bones, mostly of extinct oxen, elephants, and hippos. Also uncovered were scrapers, borers, choppers, and stone balls for use in slings.

Starting about 40,000 years ago, early Australoids entered New Guinea and the Lesser Sunda Islands. Other groups expanded into the archipelago from southern China about 30,000 years ago. Negritos, a pygmy people who began to radiate through the islands about this time, were some of the first known fully human migrants into Indonesia. There are still genetic traces of these short, woolly-haired, round-headed people in eastern Sumatra, the Lesser Sundas, and the deep interior of Irian Jaya.

More advanced than the Negritos were the two humans whose skulls were found at Wajak in East Java. The true ancestor of present-day Indonesians, the Wajak Man is the earliest known Homo sapiens found on Java, living about 10,000-12,000 years ago. These groups seeped and percolated into the archipelago from many directions over the span of centuries, rather than arriving in a series of coherent, monolithic, and coordinated mass migrations.

The Hindu/Buddhist Period

Indian chroniclers wrote of Java as early as 600 B.C., and the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana also mentions Indonesia. By the 2nd century A.D. Indian traders had arrived in Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Java. At the time of its colonializing efforts, India, then the pinnacle of civilization, was at the apex of its cultural vigor. Bronze Age Indonesians had many similar cultural traits that made the Indian culture easy to absorb. Indonesian feudal rulers most likely invited high-caste and learned Brahmans to migrate and work as a literate bureaucracy. Indian influences, including Hinduism, touched only the ruling classes; there was no significant impact on the rural people, who have always leaned more toward animism. By the 5th century, Indonesians were using southern Indian script to carve Hindu inscriptions.

Sanskrit words found in the Indonesian language today indicate the specific contributions Indians made during their period of influence in the islands, which lasted 1,400 years, from A.D. 200 to 1600: healing practices, astronomy, navigation techniques, the potter's wheel, horses and elephants, textile dyeing, plank boats and wheeled carts, figure sculpture and decorative arts, written literature, monumental architecture, spices. Sanskrit words such as angsa (duck) and gembala (shepherd) suggest Indians introduced techniques of animal husbandry. Many Hindu legal practices were also carried to Indonesia, as well as numerous titles relating to social rank and regal pomp.

The most far-reaching and significant Indian exports were metaphysics, philosophy, and the Hindu concept of a divine ruler with unchecked powers. Indians practiced a more integrated religious system than the Indonesians, featuring a hierarchy of gods with specific roles to play. By the 5th century, Brahmanist cults worshipping Shiva had sprung up on Java and temples confirmed the authority of Hindu religious beliefs. By the 9th century, syncretism appeared on Java, a belief system regarding both Shiva and Buddha as incarnations of the same being. In the 10th century Indonesian students were sent to the great Buddhist university of Nalanda in northeastern India; Indonesians even went as far as Tibet for learning and philosophy. The Sriwijaya Buddhist kingdom rose in southern Sumatra during the 7th century and exercised a wide sphere of influence over all of Southeast Asia. On Java, early Hindu states rose and fell--Pajajaran, Sailendra, Kediri, Singosari. Most, though very rich and powerful, were mainly coastal empires.


The Arrival Of Buddhism
Indian missionaries took Buddhism to Indonesia at a time when the religion was declining in India itself and as Indonesians were ready to go beyond the confines of their indigenous belief systems. Though adherents of Hinduism and Buddhism were enemies in India, in Indonesia most followers of these two religions lived side by side in peace, blending with and borrowing from one another. On the fertile ground of Southeast Asia, Mahayana Buddhism evolved into a new kind of polytheism. Sumatra remained primarily Buddhist, but Hinduism eventually took over on Java, though the world's largest Buddhist monument, the imposing Borobudur stupa, was built in the 9th century by Buddhist Sailendras in Central Java.


The Majapahit Empire
The Indonesian-Indian era reached its apogee in the 14th century East Javanese Majapahit Empire, considered the Golden Age of Indonesia. Though it thrived for barely 100 years (1294-1398), Majapahit was Indonesia's greatest state. Gajah Mada, its famous prime minister, worked so hard in his life to unite all the islands that it took four officials to do his job when he died. During this last mighty Java-Hindu kingdom, Indonesian sculpture and architecture suddenly veered away from Indian prototypes and a revitalized native folk art emerged. When Islamic traders arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, they found a complex of well-established Indianized kingdoms on Java and Sumatra. Borneo was still only marginally Indianized, Sulawesi barely at all.

Even though Islam ostensibly erased Indian cultural traditions from Java by the 16th century, much is still visible from Buddhist-Hindu times. The kraton courts of Solo and Yogyakarta are today hardcore enclaves of Java-Hindu culture. The religion and culture of Bali, the gamelan orchestra, and the five-note scale were also inherited from India. Bopati was the term used by the old Hindu aristocracy for a governor of a province, and the Indonesian bupati holds this power to this day.

Many motifs and styles of the earlier Hindu culture permeate Indonesian art: all over Java you can see Hindu-style gates leading to mosques and the cemeteries of the Islamic high saints. Indian epic poems have been adapted into living Indonesian theater and Indian mythic heroes dominate the plots. Place-names of Indian derivation are found all over Indonesia, and Indian scripts persisted until Indonesian was latinized in the 20th century.

Islam

Arabs started arriving in Indonesia as far back as the 4th century, engaged in trade with the great civilizations of the Mediterranean, India, Southeast Asia, and China. These early traders brought the oil palm and kapok tree from Africa. In the 14th century the Mohammedans consolidated their hold on Gujerat in India and began to expand their trade considerably in Indonesia. This was the beginning of the archipelago's Islamic period.

Islam caught on in far northern Sumatra first, then spread to Java. The capture of Melaka by the Portuguese in 1511 scattered Muslim merchants and their faith all over insular Southeast Asia. Islam took hold most solidly in those areas of Indonesia least affected by the earlier Hindu civilizations: the north-central Java coast, Banten in West Java, and the Aceh and Minangkabau regions of northern Sumatra. Demak was the first important Javanese city to turn Muslim, in 1477, followed by Cirebon in 1480. In 1478, a coalition of Muslim princes attacked what was left of the Hindu Majapahit Empire, and Islam was here to stay.


The Lure Of Islam
Indonesia is one of the few countries where Islam didn't supplant the existing religion purely by military conquest. Its appeal was first and foremost psychological. Comparitively egalitarian and possessing a scientific spirit, Islam arrived in these islands as a forceful revolutionary concept that freed the common people from feudal bondage. Until the appearance of Islam, Indonesia was a land where the king ruled as an absolute monarch and could take away a man's land and even his wife at whim. Islam, on the other hand, taught that in Allah's eyes all men are made of the same clay, that no man shall be set apart as superior. (Women, of course, are another story.) There were no mysterious sacraments or initiation rites, nor was there a priest class. With its direct and personal relationship between individual and God, Islam possessed great simplicity. Everyone could talk to Allah. Though Mohammed was Allah's only prophet, each follower was an equal of Mohammed.

Islam is ideally suited to an island nation; it's a trader's religion stressing the virtues of sound commercial law, prosperity, and hard work. It compelled people to bathe and keep clean, to travel and see the world, or at least Mecca. One could pray anywhere, even on board the deck of a ship. In short, Islam exerted a democratizing, modernizing, civilizing influence over the peoples of the archipelago. Islam also had a great political attraction, serving in the early 16th century as a force against Portuguese colonial domination, and 100 years later against the Dutch.

Java's Hindu princes were probably first converted to Islam by a desire for trade, wealth, valuable alliances, and power; then the people took up the faith of their ruler en masse. Pre-Islamic signal towers became Muslim minarets and the native Indonesian meeting hall was transformed into a mosque. Rulers placed their royal gamelan in the mosques and people came to listen, then returned converted to the new religion.


Islam And The Arts
During the 15th and 16th centuries, the arts, especially literature, were deeply affected by Islam. Arabic styles and themes provided models upon which local literature could be based. Stimulated by the coastal Javanese sultans, textile-decorating arts and armory flourished. Wayang and gamelan went through their most refined development during the fully Islamic 18th century.

Because Islam prohibits the worship of idols and bars portraits of all living creatures, early Islamic art was stiff and formal. This prohibition has been the main source of uniqueness and intrigue in Indonesian art forms; even on today's batik you often see the wings of birds or the antlers of deer, but not the animals themselves.

The Portuguese Period

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to enter Indonesia. Carrying their God before them, these vigorous and bold traders arrived in Indonesia 87 years before the Dutch. The Portuguese period lasted only about 150 years, from about 1512. Portuguese was the lingua franca of the archipelago in the 16th century and initially even Dutch merchants had to learn it. Portuguese involvement was largely commercial and did not involve territorial expansion; the period was of small significance economically and had little effect on the great intra-Asian trade artery stretching from Arabia to Nagasaki.

In 1570, the Portuguese murdered the sultan of Ternate in hopes they'd gain favor with his successor. The inhabitants revolted and threw them off the island, the beginning of Portuguese decline in Indonesia. The sun set permanently on Portuguese possessions in the area when Portugal decolonized East Timor in 1974.

What did the Portuguese leave behind? For their small numbers and the brevity of their tenure, the Portuguese had a deep impact. Much musical influence is evident: kroncong music, named for the sound of guitar strumming, is still a popular folk entertainment in Jakarta. Indonesian is sprinkled with hundreds of Portuguese loan words: mentega (butter), pesta (festival), sepatu (shoe), gereja (church), and meja (table), as well as many geographic locations. Tobacco was introduced by these medieval adventurers. Portuguese shipbuilding techniques and designs are still followed in Sulawesi and Nusatenggara. Old Portuguese helmets and spears are kept as family heirlooms, and scores of Portuguese forts are scattered around Maluku and other eastern islands.

The English Period

Early in the 17th century the English were direct rivals to the Dutch in the exploitation of the East Indies. The two great maritime powers even maintained outposts alongside one another in Banten, Makassar, Jakarta, and on Ambon. Although treaties dictated the two chartered companies would peacefully cooperate, they were far from amicable partners. Underlying enmity erupted at last on Ambon in 1623, when the personnel of an English factory were tortured and executed, accused of conspiring to seize the local Dutch fort. Vivid woodcut illustrations of the Amboyna Massacre printed in the popular press enraged the English public.

Almost 200 years later, during the Napoleonic Wars, Java was occupied by English forces and the sultan's kraton in Yogyakarta stormed and subdued. The young and energetic Lord Raffles, founder of Singapore, was appointed governor. He immersed himself enthusiastically in the history, culture, and customs of Indonesia, uncovering the famous Borobudur temple and meticulously recording the cannibalistic habits of the Batak of northern Sumatra.

But because England wanted to prepare Holland against attack by France and Prussia, most of the Indies were handed back to the Dutch in 1816. Raffles tried to perpetuate British interests in the islands--principally in Bengkulu, southwestern Sumatra--but by 1824 the English had shifted their attention to Singapore, and eventually abandoned Indonesia altogether. The most long-lasting result of British rule in Indonesia is left-hand driving.

The Dutch Era

By the time European traders reached the East Indies in the early 16th century, the islands had government, cities, monumental temples, irrigation systems, handicrafts, orchestras, shipping, art, literature, cannon-fire, and astronomy. With the notable exception of maritime prowess, it was Europe that was undeveloped, not Asia. The Dutch started their involvement here as traders, first entering Indonesia at Banten in 1596 with just four ships. When these ships returned safely to Holland with their valuable cargos of spices, the result was wild speculation. Backed by private companies, 12 expeditions totaling over 65 ships were sent to the East Indies between 1598 and 1605. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) was chartered in 1602, a private stock company empowered to trade, make treaties, build forts, maintain troops, and operate courts of law throughout the East Indies.

The Dutch did everything they could to isolate the islands from all other outside contact. They gained their first foothold in Batavia in the early 17th century and within 10 years were sinking all foreign vessels found in Indonesian waters. The Dutch opened strategic fortified 'factories,' or trading posts, over the length of the archipelago. Indonesian dynasties, continually feuding amongst themselves, were easy prey for such a strong external force, and by the mid-17th century the Dutch found themselves the new masters of huge amounts of territory. When sultans asked for Dutch arms and assistance to help put down rival sultans or usurpers, the Dutch would always assist--gaining more land in the bargain. Using a combination of arms, treaties, perfidy, and puppets, they became increasingly involved in the internal affairs of Indonesian states.


Dutch Hegemony
Not content with the roles of mere middlemen and carriers, the Dutch began to seek control of the sources of production. New crops were introduced and plantation agriculture established and expanded. When the VOC went bankrupt in 1799 because of corruption and mismanagement, it was gradually replaced by institutionalized imperialism in the form of a huge bureaucracy of colonial civil servants. The commercial enterprise had been transformed into a colonial empire.

An infamous forced cultivation system, the Culture System, was instituted in 1830, and soon coffee, sugar, indigo, pepper, tea, and cotton were raised to supply European demand. Virtually all of Java was turned into a vast state-owned labor camp, run somewhat like the antebellum slave plantations of the United States. Javanese farmers were starved to produce cash crops: in 1849-50 serious rice famines occurred in the great rice-producing area of Cirebon. Java made the Dutch such profits they were able to build railways, pay off the national debt, and fight a war with Belgium. By 1938 the Dutch owned and controlled over 2,400 estates, equally divided between Java and the Outer Islands.

Colonial Rule
The history of Dutch colonial rule was based on a racial caste structure perpetrated by a class of emigrant Dutchmen. Swimming pool signs read No Natives Or Dogs, and the formal position from which to address a Dutch master was from the floor. The Dutch regarded Indonesians as 'half-devil, half-child'; they carried their White Man's Burden with pride.

Under Dutch rule no higher education was available until the 1920s. In 1940, about 90% of the people were illiterate, only two million children were in school, and just 630 Indonesians had graduated from Dutch tertiary institutions. The Dutch, running an efficient, immense island empire with just 30,000 government officials, lived in big, stolid, one-story houses and plantation homes maintained by numerous servants, washing down huge lunches with vast quantities of beer. The men wore native costume around the house, and second-generation Dutch women freely intermarried with Indonesians. The Netherlanders pointed to Indonesians with pride as a happy people weaned from savagery, reared in prosperity by a system of paternal despotism.

The imperiousness of Dutch administration began to soften in the early 20th century, with the implementation of the Ethical Policy, which indicated a desire to begin a true partnership with the Indonesian people. But the colonialists never really considered handing these regions over to the indigenous peoples.

Nationalism

Intellectuals and aristocrats were the earliest nationalists. Diponegoro, the eldest son of a Javanese sultan, was the country's first nationalist leader. In 1825, after the Dutch built a road across his estate and committed various other abuses, Diponegoro embarked on a holy war against them. He was a masterful guerrilla tactician, and both sides waged a costly war of attrition in which 15,000 Dutchmen and 250,000 Indonesians died, mostly from disease. At one point the Dutch even considered pulling out of Java. Diponegoro fought for five years until treacherously lured into negotiations and arrested, living a life of exile until his death in 1855.


Early 20th-Century Nationalism
It was Raden Kartini, the daughter of a nobleman, who first asserted publicly the right of Indonesians to enjoy the same access to Western knowledge and ideas as Europeans. Although often reading like the jottings of a self-pitying pampered princess, her Letters (first published in 1911) were also sensitive, visionary, and full of fire. They caused people in both Europe and Asia to wake to the new spirit in the air. Kartini, also celebrated as Indonesia's first women's emancipationist, died in childbirth at age 24. Her memory and ideals are kept alive each 21 April when parades, programs, and social activities are held in her honor all over Indonesia.

Indonesians were intrigued when little Japan defeated mighty Russia in 1905. Indonesia didn't pass completely into Dutch hands until 1911, and that's when these foreigners started to lose it. Guided by the mistaken notion of to-know-us-is-to-love-us, gifted Indonesians from high-bred families were sent to Holland for higher education. Many of these same Western-educated Indonesians later became fiery nationalists; by providing education to Indonesians, the Dutch made themselves redundant. By the time WW I arrived, a number of nationalist organizations had sprung up suddenly and almost simultaneously, revealing the extreme dissatisfaction and impatience the Javanese masses felt for colonial rule. The Javanese were waiting for a Ratu Adil, a Righteous Prince, who would free them from their oppressors.

An organization of middle-class traders started the Sarekat Islam (Muslim Society) in 1912. Originally intended to help Indonesian batik and textile businessmen meet growing Chinese competition by sponsoring cooperatives, SI grew at a spectacular rate into Indonesia's first mass political organization; by 1919 it claimed a membership of two million members. The Indonesian National Party (PNI) was founded in 1927. PNI sought complete independence through Gandhi-style noncooperation, and an ex-engineer named Sukarno emerged as its chairman. With his oratorical power and dominating, charismatic style, Sukarno soon became Indonesia's most forceful political personality.

Grappling with the world depression of 1929, the Dutch were in no mood to bargain, determined to make up for their losses by increasing the exploitation of Indonesia's natural resources. A ruthlessly efficient secret police force imposed order throughout the islands. Increasingly repressive measures were enforced against nationalist leaders--Sukarno and his compatriots Hatta and Sjahrir were rounded up, exiled, released, rearrested. The Dutch broke up political parties and waived petitions. Anti-Dutch feelings grew. In 1940, when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, the capitulation of Holland had a shocking, sobering effect on the Dutch community in Indonesia. To the Indonesians the Dutch suddenly didn't seem so powerful. But instead of seeking to improve relations with Indonesians to form a united front against a possible Japanese invasion, the Dutch continued their repression.

World War II

Invasion Of The Indies

With the crippling of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the subsequent conquest of the Philippines, and the capture of Singapore, the Japanese brought the war to the doorstep of the Dutch East Indies. The loss of the British destroyers Prince of Wales and Repulse left the islands wide open to attack. The whole of the Indies suddenly became militarized. In January 1942 Japanese troops landed on Sulawesi and Borneo, and by February the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of Sumatra.

The crucial battle for Java was joined on 27 February when a small force of 14 Allied ships met a superior Japanese invasion fleet in the Sundra Strait and were blown out of the water. On 1 March 1942, Japanese forces landed in Batavia; the Dutch forces surrendered on 9 March.


The Japanese Occupation
The Indonesians were at first gratified that their Asian brothers had freed them from white oppression. The Japanese immediately backed the nationalists and orthodox Muslims, the two groups most opposed to Dutch rule. The new masters even spoke reassuringly of one day granting Indonesia its independence. But the Japanese soon proved themselves more ruthless, fascist, and cruel than the Dutch had ever been. Indonesia suffered terribly at the hands of its conquerors. The invaders forced 500,000 young men to serve as slave laborers in the jungles of Burma and Malaysia; only 70,000 returned. The Japanese also routinely rounded up Indonesian women to serve as sex slaves in army camp brothels.

Indonesia was included in Japan's mythical 'Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,' which in reality meant the country would be exploited of every possible resource. The islands were plundered of all raw materials: oil, rubber, rice, and spices. Cities were stripped clean of gold and jewels, as well as tons of wrought-iron fences and ornaments--shipped to Japan and smelted down to make pig iron for the war machine.

During their occupation, the Japanese also encouraged Indonesian nationalism and allowed political boards to form, but only with the intention of using these for their own war aims. Sukarno, who was retained by the Japanese to help them govern, cleverly used every opportunity to educate the masses, inculcating in them nationalist consciousness and fervor.

At first it was forbidden to speak in public any language but Japanese, and Indonesians were forced to learn it. But when the Japanese realized how difficult it was to implement this policy, they began to promote Bahasa Indonesia, which was eventually used to spread their propoganda out to the smallest villages. The language grew to become a gigantic symbol of nationalism and was disseminated on an ever-wider basis, further unifying the islands. The Japanese also created an armed home guard, later to become the core of a revolutionary militia that would fight the Dutch. As the war progressed and the Japanese began losing, greater real power began passing into the hands of Indonesians.

The Revolution

The British Role

Eleven days after Hiroshima, on 17 August 1945, Sukarno and Hatta declared independence in Jakarta and the Republic of Indonesia was born. Fearing the return of the Dutch, the Indonesians desperately tried to secure as many Japanese weapons as they could. Meanwhile, remnants of a shattered Dutch colonial army, weakened by the war, tried to regain a foothold on their precious islands.

The British, who first arrived in Jakarta in September 1945, were charged with the thankless task of rounding up Japanese troops and maintaining order. Duped into fighting for the Dutch, they got more than they bargained for in bloody street battles with Indonesian fighters, culminating in the furious month long Battle of Surabaya in November 1945. Convinced the republic was supported wholeheartedly by the Indonesian masses, the British informed the Republican government it was responsible for law and order in the interior. This constituted de facto recognition of the new Indonesian government.


Surprise, Surprise
The Dutch were back and they intended to start up just where they'd left off. But they were mistaken; it was not going to be business as usual. Once the Japanese army left their posts, bands of politically passionate young people (laskar) emerged. The total strength of these irregular armed troops surpassed by many times the numbers of the official Republican army. During the internal revolution against the Dutch (1945-49), communications were nonexistent and the provinces were on their own, administratively and militarily.

Internationally, in the early years of the struggle the Indonesians were almost alone in their fight against the Dutch. It was the independent Asian states, the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Arab states who first gave the new republic their support, not the U.S. and other Western powers. The latter tried to push compromises and watered-down solutions; United Nations resolutions were ignored, that world body's role a fiasco.

In January 1946 Sukarno considered Jakarta too vulnerable and moved the Republic's capital to Yogyakarta, where he could depend on the powerful sultan for support. In April negotiations began to decide the question of independence. The Dutch only used the resulting pacts and treaties to buy time. Dutch troops embarked on 'pacification' exercises, attacking many key cities on Java and Sumatra in July 1947 and butchering hundreds. In 1948 an ultraconservative government was voted into power in Holland, one that considered further negotiations futile. In December, Yogyakarta was bombed and strafed, then occupied by Dutch paratroopers. Sukarno and most of the members of his revolutionary cabinet were taken into 'protective' custody while three divisions of the Republican army evaporated into the countryside.

In spite of Dutch military successes in the cities, the countryside was controlled by Republicans, who launched endless guerrilla attacks. Outraged world opinion eventually rallied behind the new Republic and the UN applied real pressure. It was also pointed out that the amount the Dutch were spending to regain the islands was embarrassingly close to the sum the U.S. had granted Holland for war reconstruction aid under the Marshall Plan. The U.S. Congress rebelled, and in 1948 withdrew its support of the Dutch.

Indonesian Republicans controlled the highways, the food supply, and the villages. What they didn't control, they burned or blew up. 'Merdeka!' ('Freedom!') was on everybody's lips, the emotive word emblazoned across the railroad cars rumbling through the cities. Finally, the Dutch transfered sovereignty to a free Indonesia on 27 December 1949. On that day, all over Indonesia the Dutch red, white, and blue flag was hauled down and the red and white flag of Indonesia hoisted in its place.

Not turned over to the Indonesians was the territory of West New Guinea, over which the Dutch retained provisional control. Their stated intent was to keep the region from falling into the hands of Javanese 'imperialists,' to provide a home for dispossessed Indo-Europeans, and to exploit the great mining potential of the region. Since Irian was very much a part of the Dutch East Indies and never separated from it constitutionally, the Indonesians looked upon the territory as their natural legacy. They suspected the Dutch of trying to preserve colonialism in the region. The issue was a festering sore for the next 15 years.

Post-Independence

On 16 December 1949, the Indonesian House and Senate unanimously elected Sukarno president of the new Federal State of Indonesia. Indonesia was quickly recognized by most nations, and the UN admitted it as its 60th member in September 1950. After all the suffering, sacrifice, and fighting, it was now time to rebuild the nation.

'It was not enough to have won the war,' Hatta said. 'Now we must take care not to lose the peace.' It would not be easy. When the Dutch left, the Indonesians had nothing--no teachers, no higher-level civil service class, no national income. The mills and factories were closed or destroyed. There was serious fighting against secessionists, communists, and religious fanatics. Politicians who put the good of their party over the good of the country scrambled after power. The new Republic turned over cabinets every six months, and there was chaotic bickering and dissension among the military, religious, left-wing, and conservative factions in the embryonic government. In 1955, 169 different political parties fought for 257 seats.

To stop the chaos, Sukarno declared in 1956 his policy of 'Guided Democracy,' involving the creation of a National Council made up of members handpicked by himself. Sukarno declared the age-old Indonesian tradition of mufakat, or decision through consensus, would best suit Indonesia as a method of decision-making. Political parties and legislative bodies were abolished.

The Outer Islands continued to prove unruly, claiming rightfully that the central government was neglecting them and that Jakarta was too lenient toward communists. In February 1958, West Sumatra and North Celebes revolted, demanding more Outer Island, Muslim-oriented autonomy. Calling themselves anti-communists, they received aid, equipment, and arms from the United States. Thus commenced full-scale, though lackadaisical, civil war. Seventy army battalions were mobilized to suppress the insurgents. Sukarno ordered the landing of troops on the eastern coast of Sumatra and by 17 April 1958 central government troops took Padang. On 5 May Bukittinggi fell.

The Irian Jaya question came to a head in 1962, when Sukarno ordered amphibious landings and paratroop drops into the Dutch-controlled territory of West New Guinea. These forays stirred the U.S. to put relentless pressure on the Dutch to capitulate. The Netherlands turned the territory over to UN administration in 1962, which in turn handed it to the Indonesians in 1963 under the stipulation that an Act of Free Choice occur within five years. Predictably, an assembly of tribal leaders agreed without a vote to integrate with the Indonesian Republic in 1969.


Pariah Among Nations
By the late 1950s, Sukarno was accumulating ever more power, press censorship had appeared, and the jails were filling with politicians and intellectuals. During the early 1960s Indonesia left the UN and became militantly anti-Western. To prevent Sabah and Sarawak, the British-controlled sections of Borneo, from joining the proposed Malaysian federation, Sukarno initiated an aggressive konfrontasi military campaign. Raiders were sent to attack the Malaysian peninsula and skirmishes broke out in northern Borneo between Indonesian, British, and Australian troops. Sukarno aligned himself with Communist China, parroting its official anti-imperialist line.

For 20 years this visionary and mesmerizing leader welded the islands together by adroitly playing off powerful groups against one another, his government a hectic marriage of widely disparate political ideologies. When he told his people that Marxism, nationalism, and Islam were all reconciled in one political philosophy, 'Sukarnoism,' they embraced it. Sukarno squandered billions on colossal stadiums, conference halls, and grandiose Soviet-style statuary. The inflation rate was running at 650% per year; mammoth foreign debts had accumulated; opposed factions of the military, communists, Muslims, and other groups were grappling for control of the government. The political polarization between Army generals on the one side and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) on the other was nearing the breaking point.

The 1965 'Coup'
What happened before dawn on 1 October 1965 and all the events that followed have come under increasing scrutiny over the last 20 years. The truth will probably never be known, but the official Suharto version and Western conventional scholarship would have the world believe the PKI attempted a coup early that morning. Accumulating evidence, however, points to the possibility it was Indonesian army leaders and the American CIA who at least partly engineered events.

On the night of 30 September 1965, six top generals and their aides were abducted and brutally murdered. What followed was one of the most massive retaliatory bloodbaths in modern history. An unknown general named Suharto, provided with CIA-supplied death lists, mobilized the army strategic reserve (KOSTRAD) against 'communist conspirators.' The Indonesian army had never forgiven the communists for an attempted coup in 1948. While the armed forces stood aside, fanatical Muslim youths burned the PKI headquarters in Jakarta to the ground. Over the following months all of Java ran amok, resulting in the mass political murders of as many as half a million people--shot, knifed, strangled, and hacked to death. Tens of thousands were imprisoned without trial. The Communist Party was obliterated and the government bureaucracy purged. The army assumed control of the country, eventually developing a system of authoritarian domination and repression without precedent in Indonesia. A complete ideological and economic reversal occurred which continues to this day. In 1966 Indonesia's militant konfrontasi campaign with Malaysia was called off and the Jakarta-Peking axis abruptly ended. Suharto opened the country to Western investment and the Indonesian congress announced plans to rejoin the UN. Although his role in the plot was never made clear, Sukarno's power was systematically undermined by the new regime until his death in June 1970.

Ascent Of Suharto
A mild-mannered speaker, quiet, pragmatic, and a shrewd professional soldier, Suharto is today Indonesia's head of state. Born of humble parents in 1921 in a village near Yogyakarta in Central Java, the second president's personal style stands in stark contrast to his flamboyant and magnetic predecessor.

Suharto first distinguished himself in 1948 as the leader of an attack against Dutch forces occupying Yogyakarta. His first important military assignment was in 1956, as commander of the army's Diponegoro Division. In 1959 he was cashiered for collecting illegal levies. Two years later, however, he was appointed commander of KOSTRAD, the army's strategic reserve. Suharto was put in charge of the military campaign to wrest control of Irian Jaya from the Dutch, but happened to be in Jakarta at the time of the 1965 coup. In the right place at the right time, Suharto's troops played a decisive role in the turmoil of October. After dismantling Sukarno's Guided Democracy, Suharto installed a neomonarchial, patrimonial regime which soon became popularly known as the Ordu Baru ('New Order').

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