EXILE Conversations with Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira Edited by Nagesh Rao

Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois

 2006 Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira Introduction Nagesh Rao Exile: Conversations with Pramoedya Ananta Toer First published in 2006 by Haymarket Books PO Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org Cover design by Ragina Johnson Printed in Canada 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 1925 Exile : conversations with Pramoedya Ananta Toer / Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira ; edited by Nagesh Rao. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-1-931859-28-8 ISBN-10: 1-931859-28-0 1. IndonesiaPolitics and government19501966. 2. Indonesia Politics and government19661998. 3. IndonesiaPolitics and government1998 4. Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 1925 I. Title: Conversations with Pramoedya Ananta Toer. II. Vltchek, Andre. III. Indira, Rossie. IV. Rao, Nagesh. V. Title. DS644.4.T675 2006 959.803--dc22 2006008706

Contents
Foreword by Chris GoGwilt Introduction by Nagesh Rao Prologue: Meeting in Jakarta 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Before 1965: History, Colonialism, and the Sukarno Years The 1965 Coup Culture and Javanism Writing Suhartos Regime and Indonesia Today American Involvement Reconciliation? Revolution: The Future of Indonesia Before Parting 7 17 39 51 67 85 105 119 133 141 145 153 155 161 163 165

Glossary Chronology Selected Works Contributors

Introduction
Nagesh Rao

I have so much to say. I want to speak about the young generations and about the students who fought until Suharto was forced to resign. I want to speak about other times, the occasions when people were hunted down, killed, and dumped into the sea. I have no access to the media and no organization to support me. I am burning inside. You came here so we can talk, so now I can open up and bother you with all the frustrations and curses that have accumulated inside me over long decades. Thus begins this extraordinary conversation with Indonesias literary giant, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This is the first ever book-length interview with Pramoedya, a novelist and writer widely regarded as the artist who gave expression to a revolutionary vision of Indonesian cultural identity. Fusing anticolonial nationalism, humanism, and epic narratives into literary masterpieces, Pramoedyas works rank among those by the finest of modern writers, alongside the novels of Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and Naguib Mahfouz. If

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Pramoedya is not quite so well known in literary and academic circles in the West, it is because of the extraordinary conditions of exile, imprisonment, censorship, and repression that he has had to work under. His relative obscurity outside the circles of Indonesia and Southeast Asia specialistsis also a consequence of the sordid history of cozy relations between the U.S. ruling establishment and the dictatorship of General Suharto. Exiled for ten years on the Buru Island internment camp and now too weak to write any longer, here is a writer who is still burning inside, carrying within him an undying passion for truth, justice, and human dignity. Like Rushdie, Garca Mrquez, Mahfouz, and other writers of the postcolonial era, Pramoedya writes with a deep sense of the currency of history, so a brief outline of this history might help the uninitiated reader to get a better grasp of the issues that Pramoedya raises in these conversations with Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira. The Scramble for Asia The Dutch conquest and control of the East Indies was part of a long historical process that saw virtually all of Asia come under the control of the newly emerging capitalist states of Europe. This first phase of European expansion and conquest of Asia dates roughly from 1500 to 1850, 350 years that were characterized by an increasingly frenzied rivalry among the emerging European powers to capture larger and larger portions of the flourishing Asian trade in spices, silk, and tea. For centuries before the development of capitalism

INTRODUCTION

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in Europe, India, China, and the Southeast Asian archipelago that we know today as Indonesia had been flourishing centers of trade, commerce, and culture. With trade routes cutting across the whole of Asia and Europe, and reaching even to the west coast of Africa, India and China were, by the time of the European Middle Ages, far ahead of western Europe in commercial and technological development. The historian K. M. Panikkar writes that [a]fter the early Crusades Europes interest in Asia increased greatly and both Venice and Genoa possessed detailed knowledge of Indian conditions and trade.1 Centuries later, Hegel noted that India as a land of Desire formed an essential element in general history. From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels. The way by which these treasures have passed to the West has at all times been a matter of world historical importance.2 By the fifteenth century, Muslim traders and merchants had a virtual monopoly on the flourishing spice trade, due to the immense power and prestige of the Turkish Ottoman empire in West Asia, and later the Persian Safavid empire and the Mughal empire farther east. Panikkar writes: From the time of Saladin, who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, Islam based on Egypt had been organized as an immensely powerful barrier between Asia and Europe.3 European merchants had thus been looking for a sea route to the Indian Ocean that would allow them to bypass the land routes that were monopolized by the Arabs. When, in 1498, the Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama arrived at the western

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coast of India, he fulfilled a two-hundred-year-old dream of European merchants and traders. This particular expedition, financed by the Portuguese king, Dom Manuel, had taken eleven long months to make the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. There was little doubt in the minds of the European traders that control of the sea routes would guarantee them immense profits, and they had reason enough to think so. For instance, when Ferdinand Magellans ship, Victoria, circumnavigated the globe in 1521, it stopped off in Sumatra (part of Indonesia today) and loaded up its holds with cloves, which Magellan then sold for a profit of 2,500 percent in Europe.4 Profit was guaranteed to those who controlled the flow of goods, rather than their actual production. Traders from all over Europe began to set out to follow in da Gamas wake, with the Dutch, the British, and the French arriving at different points throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their eyes were set on three key regions: India, Indonesia (and the Malay Peninsula), and China. At first, the foreign traders were cautiously welcomed, and in many instances were allowed to set up trading posts in various coastal regions. Where they were not welcomed, they forced their way in, as for instance in 1511, when the Portuguese soldier Afonso Albuquerque arrived in Malacca with a fleet of eighteen ships.5 Before opening negotiations with the sultan of Malacca, he burnt the ships lying in the harbor and provoked the sultan into an attack. After defeating the sultan, Albuquerques forces ransacked the city, mas-

INTRODUCTION

21

sacring its inhabitants. Those who survived the massacre were sold into slavery, and the plunder of the city yielded no less than two hundred thousand gold cruzados for the king of Portugal. The history of these early years of European expansion is full of such stories of murder, death, and destruction, on the one hand, and intrigue and subterfuge, on the other. Where they could, the European traders bribed, cajoled, and deceived their way into obtaining trading rights; where necessary, they looted and plundered. And in all instances, the various European traders were competing not only with local merchants, but with one another as well. The traders and merchants were thus constantly involved in military actions and had to combine commerce with warfare to get their way. The French, the Portuguese, and the British tried to elbow one another out of India. The Portuguese and the Dutch, and later the Dutch and the British, fought numerous short wars for control of the Indonesian islands. To some degree, these wars were a projection overseas of bitter rivalries that were exploding at home. Thus the Dutch war of independence against Spain, which lasted eighty years, from 1568 to 1648, was one of the factors that pushed the Netherlands to expand overseas. As M. C. Ricklefs points out, The Dutch had acted as middlemen in retailing spices from Portugal in northern Europe, but the war and the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580 disrupted their access to spices brought from Asia by the Portuguese. This naturally only increased their desire to ship spices from Asia themselves.6 The first Dutch expedition to the East Indies set sail

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in 1595, and by 1602, various competing Dutch firms merged to form the United East India Company, known by its Dutch initials, VOC. Dutch rule over the East Indies was characterized by the most repugnant racism. In the coming years, as virtually the entire population of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo was forced into plantation-based slave labor, the democratic ideals of the bourgeois revolutions of France and Holland were not considered applicable to the people of the East Indies. The government in Holland declared: The doctrines of liberty and equality cannot be transferred to nor applied to the East Indian possessions of the State so long as the security of these possessions depends on the existing and necessary state of subordination [of the Indonesians].7 Nor could slavery be abolished until a higher order of general civilization will permit amelioration of their fate.8 Jan Pieterszoon Coen, one of the founders of Dutch colonialism, put it plainly: May not a man in Europe do what he likes with his cattle? Even so does the master here do with his men, for everywhere, these with all that belongs to them are as much the property of the master, as are brute beasts in the Netherlands.9 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, VOC control over the East Indies was never quite complete or stable, as it faced increasingly belligerent local rulers, as well as peasant revolts and rebellions, particularly in Java and Sumatra.10 Gradually, however, the Dutch began to rely on the rigid social hierarchies of the indigenous societies to administer the territories, relying on the bupatis, or aristocratic elites. They thus helped bolster the aristocra-

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cies of the islands and turned a blind eye to their customary authority over their subjects. Furthermore, the Dutch faced opposition to their hegemony in the region from the British, who were the most powerful naval and commercial force in the Malay-Indonesian area.11 The Birth of Indonesian Nationalism In the early twentieth century, the Netherlands government, which had now taken over the administration of the East Indies from the VOC, adopted a so-called Ethical Policy. Liberal critiques of colonialism had gained ground in Europe, at least since the publication, in 1860, of a novel titled Max Havelaar, written by a former colonial official, Eduard Douwes Dekker, under the pseudonym Multatuli. Max Havelaars expos of the oppressive and corrupt colonial regime was influential enough that it is sometimes considered the first literary expression of modern Indonesian anticolonial nationalism. As Ricklefs argues, however, the liberals faced a dilemma, for they wanted to be rid of the cultuurstelsel [culture system, or plantation economy] but not of the profits which Dutchmen gained from Java.12 Convinced that the best way to profit from their control of this vast territory was through education and the raising of living standards, the better to shift the economy toward a modernized capitalism, Dutch administrators gradually began to introduce some social and political reforms. For all the rhetoric of the Ethical Policy, however, the vast majority of their colonial subjects lived miserable lives, exploited both by the Dutch and by local elites. Thus, as late as 1920, for instance,

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the number of Indonesian students enrolled in secondary education was alarmingly minuscule: a mere seventy-eight out of a total population of over forty-eight million!13 In 1930, the literacy rate of adult Indonesians was at a shocking 7.4 percent, while in some areas like Bali and Lombok, it was lower still.14 Nevertheless, the Ethical Policy saw the rise of a new educated elite and, consequently, of a modern Indonesian nationalism. Indeed, the future leader of the Indonesian struggle for independence and undoubtedly the most important political figure in Indonesias recent history, Achmed Sukarno, was very much a product of this period. Sukarno was educated at one of the few secondary schools that admitted Indonesian natives, the Hogere Burger School in Surabaya. The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of the first nationalist association, the Budi Utomo (Pure Endeavor), which later morphed into the first truly mass organization of Indonesians, the Sarekat Islam (SI). Sarekat Islam was formed initially by Javanese merchants in defense of their interests against the growing power of Chinese merchants, whom the Dutch favored. At first, the SI gatherings were local spaces for traders and businessmen to seek redress for what they saw as unfair treatment at the hands of the Dutch. Soon, however, these local SI branches became a magnet for ordinary Indonesianspeasants, workers, and the poorto voice their grievances as well. The formation of the SI and the founding, in 1920, of the Communist Party of Indonesia (known by its Indonesian initials,

INTRODUCTION

25

PKI) opened up a new era in Indonesian history, that of mass anticolonial nationalism. Indonesian nationalism was from the beginning a heterogeneous combination of different, sometimes contradictory, tendencies. As early as 1918, the SI newspaper, Utusan Hindia, proclaimed: We are pursuing not independence but freedom. We call for the freedom of mankind, for wiping out the difference between rich and poor. 15 Similarly, Sukarno developed a style and rhetoric of leadership that allowed him to deftly straddle different ideological currents. Thus, in 1921, he declared in an Utusan Hindia article: Socialism, communism, incarnations of Vishnu Murti, awaken everywhere! Abolish capitalism, propped up by the imperialism that is its slave! God grant Islam the strength that it may succeed.16 On the basis of this ideological synthesis of nationalism, Islam, and Marxism, Sukarno founded the Partai Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Party), or PNI, which was to be the main vehicle for anticolonial agitation in the years to come. This mlange of religion and Marxism would remain the hallmark of Sukarnos political strategy up until his death in 1970. The Japanese Occupation The Dutch, however, faced no serious challenge to their rule during the first decades of the twentieth century; rather, it was the Japanese army that broke the back of the Dutch colonialists during the Second World War. When the imperialist rivalries of the Great Powers exploded in the form of the Second World War, the Asia-Pacific region became the stage

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of a contest between the United States, on the one hand, and Japan on the other. None of the European powers had much of a role to play in the Pacific war, and they were rapidly defeated by advancing Japanese forces. The Japanese had already captured the imagination of the colonized nations of East and Southeast Asia by defeating Russia earlier in the century; now, as the European colonies fell one by one to the Japanese onslaught, many were ready to welcome the latter as liberators. Any illusions to this end were, nevertheless, soon destroyed, as the Japanese forces proved to be just as brutal and oppressive toward the Indonesians, and in some instances more so, than the Dutch. The Japanese occupied Indonesia for three and a half years, from 1942 to 1945. During this time, however, they paradoxically set the stage for a future Indonesian revolt that would ultimately lead to independence and self-rule. As Ricklefs argues:
Japanese policy towards Indonesians had two priorities: to wipe out Western influences among them and to mobilize them in the interests of Japanese victory. The Japanese, like the Dutch, intended to control Indonesia for their own interests. They faced many of the same problems as the Dutch and employed many of the same solutions (indeed, Dutch colonial law remained in force except where it conflicted with Japanese military law). But the Japanese, in the midst of an enormous war requiring maximum utilization of resources, decided to control through mobilization rather than by imposing an orderly quiet. As the war progressed, their increasingly frenetic efforts to mobilize Indonesians laid the groundwork for the Revolution which was to follow.17

The United States, of course, won the war. Japan was crushed, with the firebombing of Tokyo and the dropping of

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atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 15, 1945, the Japanese surrendered. The United States began its years-long occupation of Japan, which it used as a base to project its power throughout the Pacific, from Korea to Vietnam to Indonesia itself. It has often been suggested that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not the final shot of the Second World War but the opening salvo of the Cold War. The whole world was now carved up into two huge empires, one headed up by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. Independence, Sukarno, and the PKI Two days after the Japanese defeat on August 17, Sukarno read out the Indonesian declaration of independence at a small ceremony outside his house. Meanwhile, the victorious Allies shamelessly rushed to reclaim their colonies as the Japanese troops were leaving. The Dutch troops who returned to stake their claim to Indonesia were aided by British commandos and American forces (although by 1947 the United States began to push within the UN for a Dutch withdrawal and for Indonesian independence18). Recolonization, however, was impossible, as the Indonesians launched a revolutionary war of independence and finally drove out the Dutch in 1948. Several political currents that had been driven underground in the recent past now reemerged, stronger than before, including the PKI, the Socialist Party, and the PNI. Sukarno by this time had established an unquestionable dominance over the progressive forces in the country and en-

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joyed a degree of popular support that few postcolonial rulers have had. In part, this is attributable to his remarkable ability to fuse together left-minded reformism, anti-imperialism, and religious sentiments in his own unique brand of political ideology. By 1960, he had given it a label, Nasakom, derived from the Indonesian terms for nationalism, religion, and communism. Thus he called for a national front against imperialism. The most dramatic development in the postindependence decades was the rise to prominence of the PKI as the third-largest communist party in the world, after those of Russia and China. Throughout the Cold War years, both the Russians and the Chinese had enormous influence over the PKI and other mass communist parties that had emerged in Asia. There were differences in the tactics that each of them advocated in the struggle against imperialismMaoism tended to appear more militant and left-wing, while Stalinism tended to appear more moderate. But while their tactics may have been different, their strategy was ultimately geared toward the same endconsolidating strong national states, with top-down, bureaucratic regimes in control. In other words, they tried to remake Asia in their own image. On the other hand, the U.S. strategy during the Cold War was one of containment, which meant putting down any resistance that threatened to bring the former colonies into the Russian or Chinese orbit. Asia thus bore the brunt of the Cold War more heavily than any other region in the world. Two major wars in Korea and in Vietnam alone accounted for some five million deaths, with the United States

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testing its newly acquired weapons of mass destruction, napalm and Agent Orange. The struggles of the Left, particularly in Indonesia and Vietnam, were thus shaped by the Cold War more than anything else. Revolutionaries around the region were urged, by both Russia and China (although differently), to support their national bourgeoisies against Western imperialism. Strengthening the national state against imperialist aggression meant, however, that the overthrow of their own ruling classes would have to wait for some later stage. This strategy was to prove disastrous in a number of instances, especially in Indonesia. As the PKI grew in influence, it attracted an impressive following among workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals. Thus Pramoedya Ananta Toer, while not a card-holding member of the Party, found himself on the board of the PKIs cultural organization, LEKRA, which at its height claimed a membership of some one hundred thousand. By the early 1960s, the PKI had a membership of some two million and had become the largest and most organized political force in the country. However, the PKI, in keeping with the approach advocated by Moscow and Beijing, called for a united national front that would include the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. The tasks of the Party, the PKI insisted, were to bring about not socialist, but democratic reforms.19 In so doing, however, the PKI risked losing its independence, as its leader, Aidit, himself recognized when he wrote that while unity with the national bourgeoisie is getting closer and closer the alliance of workers and peasants is

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not strong.... There is danger of losing the Partys independent character, the danger of its merging itself with the bourgeoisie. In the very next sentence of this document, however, Aidit characteristically went on to insist that the Party must preserve this united front with all its might.20 Meanwhile, Sukarno continued his balancing act between the various political and ideological currents that were jostling for power in postindependence Indonesia: the religious groups, the Communists, and the army. In a speech delivered on June 1, 1945, Sukarno laid out his doctrine of Pancasila (Five Principles),* which codified in philosophical terms the political strategy that he hoped would allow him to stay in control of an increasingly unstable political milieu. Pancasila would, in the coming years, become the official ideology of Indonesian nationalism. The five principles were: belief in God, nationalism, humanitarianism, social justice and democracy.21 Furthermore, notwithstanding his overtures to the PKI and his lip service to Marxism, Sukarnos Pancasila was also based on gotong rojong, or mutual cooperation, between the rich and the poor, between the Moslem and the Christian.22 By 1957, Sukarno set out to establish what he referred to as Guided Democracy, which reflected a deepening of the crises that this balancing act was meant to dampen. During the period of Guided Democracy, the army began to play an increasingly central role in administration and politics. Ricklefs argues that in the following years Sukarno had little power of his own and was obliged to manipulate, threaten
* See Glossary

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and cajole other powerful men. Intrigue and conspiracy became the common fare of politics. The political elite became a complex of cliques around influential men. 23 In retrospect, therefore, it becomes all too clear that the PKIs desire to maintain its alliance with Sukarno, on the one hand, and to stay true to its revolutionary principles, on the other, was doomed to failure. The 1965 Coup and Suhartos Reign As John Pilger points out, Sukarno had relied on the communists as a counterweight to the army, which, having been trained by the Japanese during the Second World War, basked in its own mythology as guardian of the nation. 24 The PKI, in turn, had developed a trusting relationship with the charismatic Sukarno, even as it adopted revolutionary goals and rhetoric in its propaganda. The contradictory character of the PKIs politics would ultimately lead to its downfall. On October 1, 1965, a failed coup attempt by some army officers was blamed on the PKI. Before the day was out, reports Rex Mortimer, the head of the armys strategic command, General Suharto, had put the rebel forces to flight and brought the capital under control.25 Mortimer goes on to describe the aftermath of this failed coup:
[T]he capital was in a state of shock. Rumors and lurid reports relating to the affair swept the city. Although Sukarno insisted on devising a political solution to the crisis, and forbade punitive action, the army moved on its own initiative to ban PKI activities, arrest Communists and suspects, and suspend members of the party holding official positions. A ruthless campaign of extermination of Communists and alleged Communists

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was inaugurated in Central Java and quickly spread to East Java and other provinces.26

The bloodbath that followed is estimated to have resulted in the massacre of an estimated one to three million Communists, radicals, and activists. According to a report by the CIA, In terms of the numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century;27 nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the CIA was itself responsible for spreading the myth that Suharto and the military had saved the nations honor from an attempted coup by the PKI, whose carnage had caused a spontaneous, popular revulsion.28 According to Joseph Lazarsky, the deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta, We were getting a good account in Jakarta of who was being picked up. The army had a shooting list of about 4,000 or 5,000 people. They didnt have enough goon squads to zap them all, and some individuals were valuable for interrogation. The infrastructure [of the PKI] was zapped almost immediately. We knew what they were doing. Suharto and his advisers said, if you keep them alive, you have to feed them.29 Tragically, the PKI disintegrated without much of a struggle to defend itself. Mortimer explains: A dispersed and shattered leadership seems to have lost all capacity to rally the party or cope with the decimation of its ranks. Sticking to the last to the hope that Sukarno would pull their irons out of the fire, the leaders went into hiding and became to all intents and purposes deactivated.30 The conflagration that engulfed the nation also changed Pramoedyas life forever. On October 13, he was arrested by

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an armed mob and taken first to the Army Strategic Reserve Command Post and then to the Regional Military Command Post in Jakarta. His library was ransacked, and thousands of books, documents, and years of accumulated research were piled up and burnt to ashes.31 Thus, at the age of forty-one, Pramoedya was imprisoned and banished to Buru, a remote, isolated island, where he spent the next fourteen years in exile. As Willem Samuels tells us, even in these conditions of severe repression and deprivation, he somehow managed to write and, with the help of sympathetic missionaries and visitors, smuggle from the island five historical novels [four of which form the famous Buru QuartetNR], a play, and an estimated thousand pages of scattered papers.32 The New Order military dictatorship of General Suharto, perhaps one of the most brutally repressive the world has seen, lasted for more than thirty years, thanks in large measure to the benevolence of the Western powers. Suhartos Indonesia was long considered by Western capitalists and their institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, as a model pupil, so that, as Pilger puts it, globalization in Asia was conceived in Indonesias bloodbath.33 During this time, the World Bank handed out more than $30 billion to Suhartos regime, some 20 to 30 percent of which went into the coffers of Suharto and his cronies, according to a secret internal World Bank report.34 The U.S., British, and Australian governments lavished praise on Suhartos dictatorship for bringing stability to Indonesia, with Margaret Thatcher referring to him as one of our very best and most valuable friends.

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Suhartos crimes during his ascension to power were many, but were soon to be rivaled by his brutal invasion and annexation of the tiny neighboring island of East Timor in 1975. As is now well known, the Indonesian military invaded this country of six hundred thousand within hours of the departure of visiting U.S. president Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Despite the fact that, in the following five years alone, the Indonesian military is estimated to have killed nearly a third of the population of this former Portuguese colony, the major powers, including Australia, the United States, Britain, and France continued to supply the Indonesian military with arms, money, and training.35 Southeast Asia expert Benedict Anderson reports that
90 percent of the weapons used for the invasion came from the USA. Although their use outside Indonesia was expressly prohibited by a 1958 American-Indonesian agreement, Washington, well informed by the CIA of Jakartas preparations for invasion, turned a blind eye to the violation.36

When the regime desperately required Bronco aircraft for aerial bombardment of Timorese resistance fighters, the Carter administration secretly supplied them, while lying to Congress and the public that an embargo on military equipment was in place.37 It is this history of U.S. duplicity and connivance with the Indonesian dictatorship that fuels Pramoedyas rage against the American government. The Western powers self-assured confidence in the stability of the Suharto regime received a rude shock in May 1998, when, a few weeks after he was sworn in for a seventh consecutive term as president, Suhartos brutal rule finally

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came to an end. A mass uprising, led primarily by students, overthrew his regime on the heels of a terrible economic crisis.38 On May 12, snipers shot and killed four students at Trisakti University. The Australian socialist Tom OLincoln describes what happened next:
Students began to drift into the streets. Here they were joined by workers, the unemployed and the poor. The police marched up and street fighting began; I tasted tear gas for the first time since 1969. Around Atmajaya University in the heart of the city, office workers left their desks and came into the streets to express their support for the students. By nightfall, riots were spreading and the following day saw Jakarta in flames. Few corners of greater Jakarta were untouched. Some neighborhoods looked like war zones. Finally the dictatorship cracked.39

This revolt was the latest chapter in a long history of courageous struggles waged by ordinary Indonesians against oppression and tyranny. Nevertheless, there is yet much to be done, and Pramoedyas words in the pages of this book ring with the sense of urgency that one has come to expect from a writer and activist who has lived through some of the most volatile moments in Indonesias history. OLincoln continues: But the May unrest was only partly an uprising. Yes, there were sensational actions directed against the government. But it also involved race riots, rapes and apolitical mass looting, and a significant amount of it was orchestrated. Thus the reformasi movement was contradictory; on the one hand, it represented the outpouring of accumulated anger against the Suharto regime, while on the other it failed to put forward a liberatory alternative

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to the domination of Indonesian elites. The anti-Chinese riots, the numerous accounts of women being gang-raped while hysterical crowds cheered, and the chaos and looting were symptoms of a movement that had little conception of a way forward. Consequently, early characterizations of the upsurge as heading toward a liberatory revolution appear in retrospect to have been astoundingly mistaken and misleading. Consider, for instance, that the current Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is a former army general and is married to the daughter of General Wibowo, who played a leading role in the 1965 coup and subsequent massacres. The army, it appears, has not loosened its grip on the Indonesian state, and corruption in high places is as rampant as before, and probably more conspicuous. Thus it is not surprising to find, in the conversations that follow, Pramoedyas outrage against the bankruptcy of contemporary Indonesian politics and culture. As he suggests, the New Order regime has merely recycled itself and, absent the renewal of a politics of liberation, especially among Indonesias youth, will remain in power, bleeding Indonesias social, economic, and cultural spheres of life and vitality.
1. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (New Delhi: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), 21. 2. Quoted in Panikkar, 21. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Ibid., 87. 5. Ibid., 40. 6. M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1300, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 26.

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7. Panikkar, 86. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. See Ricklefs, 94ff. 11. Ibid., 142. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Bernard Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 29. 14. Ricklefs, 160. 15. Dahm, 37. 16. Quoted in Dahm, 39. 17. Ricklefs, 201. 18. The United States in the postwar period painted itself as a champion of democracy and self-determination, the better to strip its imperial rivals of their colonial possessions and thus strengthen the political, economic, and military supremacy that it had gained as a result of the war. 19. Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 19591965, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 46. 20. Ibid., 4748. 21. Ricklefs, 209. 22. George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1952), 126. 23. Ricklefs, 257. 24. John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (New York: Verso, 2002), 26. 25. Mortimer, 388. 26. Mortimer, 38890. 27. Quoted in Pilger, 25. 28. Ibid., 2526. 29. Quoted in Pilger, 30. 30. Mortimer, 390. 31. Willem Samuels, Introduction to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mutes Soliloquy: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1999), xix. 32. Ibid., xxi. 33. Pilger, 28.

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34. Ibid., 20. 35. For an excellent account of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, see Constncio Pinto and Matthew Jardine, East Timors Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1997). 36. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (New York: Verso, 1998), 133. 37. Ibid. 38. For an overview of the process that led to the downfall of Suhartos regime, see Anthony Arnove, Indonesia: Crisis and Revolt, International Socialist Review 5 (Fall 1998), and Tom OLincoln, Indonesia: The Rhythm of Revolt, International Socialist Review 32 (NovemberDecember 2003). Available online at www.isreview.org/issues/32/indonesia1.shtml. 39. Tom OLincoln, Indonesia: The Rhythm of Revolt.

Prologue

Meeting in Jakarta

The twentieth century was an almost uninterrupted orgy of terror and violence, deceit and betrayal. Men and women on all continents learned that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth, that brutal occupation can be described as an act of liberation, and that a massacre of millions of innocent people can be defended by rulers of mighty and not so mighty nations as an advancement of humanism, civilization, and national interests. Millions of men and women vanished in crematoria and concentration camps, on battlefields, or in the rubble of their bombed cities. However, the twentieth century will not be remembered only for its brutality. In the midst of plunder and chaos, it also gave birth to extraordinary men and women who stood tall and, against all odds, defended the defenseless, the victims of governments and dictatorships: people who opposed demagoguery, militarism, and selfish economic interests with

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the two most powerful tools of resistance known to humankind: knowledge and truth. Some died in the process; others suffered but survived. Many became icons for independence and resistance movements. They were not prophets or gurus. They were brave but not fanatical. As Albert Camus wrote in the unforgettable final chapter of The Plague, Unable to become saints, they became doctors. While entire continents were being plundered and innocent people exterminated or thrown into prisons, these men and women of principle were tirelessly identifying the symptoms of insanity, diagnosing the illness, and searching for the cure. They were countering lies with simple words of reason, damaging myths with facts, fanaticism with truth. Some faced the madness with sarcastic smiles on their lips, others with tense expressions on their faces. Some rebelled and defended reason and truth with mailed fists; others raised their barely audible voices, which nevertheless made inroads into the minds of millions of people all over the world. They were born in Europe and the Americas, in Africa and Asia, in every corner of the world. Most were raised by parents who were themselves victims, but many were the sons and daughters of the victimizers. Whatever their origin, the message was invariably universal and based on a single principle: all men and women are equal, regardless of their color or race, their nationality or gender, or their status and material possessions. Indonesia, an enormous archipelago country made up of

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diverse states, ethnic groups, cultures, and languages unified only after World War II, was previously controlled and exploited by colonial powers for centuries. After an honorable start to self-determination and twenty short years of genuine independence, it was plunged into the terror of military dictatorship after the 1965 coup. Teachers were killed, film studios and theaters closed down, the Chinese language and almost all symbols of Chinese culture outlawed. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people lost their lives: Communists, progressives, members of ethnic minorities, atheists. Political, ethnic, and religious intolerance asserted their grip on power in this unfortunate country. Peoples ability to argue, to question, and to compare disappeared. Creativity was crushed or simply discredited. Diversity was discouraged. Foreign travel became possible only for economic and political elites who were profiting from the New and post-New Orders. Eventually Indonesia experienced social collapse. The great majority of its people now live in despicable conditions, most of them with no safe drinking water, many without electricity, more than half surviving on less than two dollars a day. Truth was rarely allowed to surface; artists became complacent, and the media censored themselves. During these forty years, a soft-spoken man from central Java wrote countless books, trying to define the essence and history of his young and suffering nation. He wrote in prisons, in camps, and under house arrest. He wrote in internal exile, outraged and horrified about the state of the world

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behind his windows. Many of his books were burnt, and those that survived were banned. It was my personal challenge to the dictatorship, he said later. All his books had one common theme and message: Colonialism and imperialismexternal and internalare always wrong. The elites that enrich themselves by plundering their own people are immoral. In order to keep his dignity, a man has to fight injustice. In a country so young and so troubled, where history had been distorted and corrupted, where unity was based more on Javanese lust for power and geographical considerations than on common ideals and culture, it is hardly surprising that the loudest voice of moral resistance attempting to unite the nation against terror and injustice should be that of the countys greatest writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. * * * We first met Pram, as he is known in Indonesia, in his house in East Jakarta in December 2003. At the time, we were preparing to shoot a long documentary film, Terlena The Breaking of a Nation, about the murder and imprisonment of Indonesian intellectuals after the 1965 U.S.-sponsored military coup. Our objective was to convince Pram, arguably the foremost living Southeast Asian novelist, to participate in the project. After all, he had dedicated his life to defining the essence of this enormous fledgling nation, criticizing its negative aspects in the process. It was he who had denounced Suhartos regime as morally corrupt. Pram

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spent decades in jails and concentration camps and under house arrest. His manuscripts were burned by the regime and his books banned in Indonesia until 1999. We arrived at his house accompanied by two young Indonesian journalists, both excited about meeting the great master of Indonesian letters; both very anxious, repeating that Pram has a reputation of being extremely impatient, explosive and even arrogant. We had to wait for at least half an hour. During that time, Prams brother appeared. He refused to speak English, but then, with a knowing expression, he addressed us in Russian: Of course, as an American you dont speak a word of Russian, he said. Im wondering what the heck youre doing here. I came to convince your brother to participate in a documentary film about the events of 1965, Andre answered in fluent Russian, a response that left him gasping for air. He gave me a big smile, sat down, and indicated that the ice was broken. Then everything is fine, he responded. Should I go out and get some vodka? We had to decline his kind offer: it was still too early in the morning. Pram appeared suddenly, accompanied by his wife and several relatives. He was frail and unshaven and smoked his clove cigarettes like a chimney, one after another. He could hardly hear, so questions had to be screamed directly into his ear. We were sweating liberally as the sun climbed steadily, beating mercilessly on the roof and the walls of the house. As in most dwellings in Java, there were no air conditioners.

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Pram asked several questions, and we got involved in a conversation about the books of Noam Chomsky, about Z Magazine, and the World Social Forum. He asked me to convey my greetings and thanks to Chomsky: for all that he has done to help to uncover the truth about Indonesias past. He then asked how old Chomsky was. Seventy-three? Thats good: hes still a young man compared to me, he said, laughing. There was no hint of arrogance in his behavior. If anything, he was warm-hearted, sarcastic, laughing, and joking, his face constantly changing and expressive. Sometimes there were long pauses in our conversation, as he withdrew into the world of his memories. During these moments he would touch his unshaven face with the hand holding the cigarette, his eyes concentrating on some point on the opposite wall. When we asked him about the Indonesian press, his tone of voice changed. I have become so impatient with them. They come here and ask me all those stupid questions. They dont know what they are talking about. I really cannot deal with them. He happily accepted our invitation to participate in the film and invited us to his main dwelling, an isolated house in a remote suburb of Jakarta called Bojong Gede, Depok. After a while, his facial expression changed again. He suddenly looked very old and vulnerable: Sometimes I feel very isolated. Im living in my own world, and its like being in internal exile. Im wondering if people still care about what I really think. We told him that they did and still do, that probably

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hundreds of thousands of men and women all over the world would like to read his thoughts, especially now, after his long years of literary silence. Im never going to write anything, anymore, he said. I cant: I simply cant write. My last book will be just a collection of some old letters that I sent, years ago, to several important political and cultural figures. Without much thinking Andre said, So why dont we write a book together? I will be working in Indonesia for several months, maybe years. Why dont we try to re-create the past, together? I am not burdened by the details; we can search together for the essence of what has occurred in your country. Why dont you say all that you always wanted to say and never did? To our surprise, he didnt hesitate at all. Lets do it, then, he agreed. He wondered aloud whether we were good for each other; hardly surprising considering that it was the United States that had brought down Sukarno and destroyed Indonesia, after all! Before leaving his house, he confessed that later that afternoon he intended to travel to east Java by bus. I want to see Indonesia again. As we stood up to shake hands, he almost fainted from exhaustion. Andre had to carry him to his relatives, and was shocked by the fragility of his body. Back in the crowded center of Jakarta, we were overwhelmed by the weight of the enormous responsibility that was falling upon us. It was going to be we who would be bringing the last words and thoughts of the author of The Girl from the Coast and the Buru Quartet to the world; of

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one of the founders of Indonesia and a committed opponent of Suhartos terror. All doubts disappeared two months later when we sat with Pram in his dark living room around a large circular table. Two recorders were running, and the endless smoke curling from his cigarettes was coloring the air and caressing the ceiling. He hardly looked at us. Sometimes we werent sure whether he was aware of our presence: he seemed to accept our questions as if they were coming from some abstract, undefined source. His mind was traveling in the far remote past, to a different Indonesia, a country that both of us were too young to remember. We were in his Indonesia, an imaginary country forever lost. Those days of work were difficult and often painful. Pram would get tired easily. Often he would repeat the same thought several times. He would get angry and frustrated remembering the past. Sometimes there were tears in his eyes. It seemed that all his hopes for Indonesia had collapsed. One day he declared that Dutch and Japanese colonialism had been better than the current ruthless plunder by the Indonesian elites. We wanted to make sure that we understood correctly: this was hardly a statement one would expect from one of the founders of the nation. Or from a man who despises colonialism! But Pram insisted on what he had said: Javanism and Javanese colonialism had been much more brutal to the people inhabiting this enormous archipelago than had foreign colonial rule. He drank endless cups of tea and smoked incessantly. He refused to be labeled. Is he a Marxist? No, Im a

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Pramist, he answered in a determined voice. He doesnt believe in religion (although religion is the only thing even he is afraid to criticize openly in Indonesia). He is not a member of any political party. Socialist Realism is the literary form closest to his heart. And the most compassionate social system in the world can be found not in Asia or the United States, but in todays secular Europe. It was obvious that he wanted to speak, that he had to speak, and there we were, trying to help him to shed the burden of his accumulated knowledge and pain by asking the questions that had, for decades, been forbidden even to be asked. He had fought for an independent Indonesia and had put tremendous effort into building it: as a writer, thinker, historian, and journalist. He had expressed his love for his country through labor and struggle, not through the empty words of a racist patriotism. He had admired Sukarno but when the Chinese minority had been threatened even under Sukarnos rule, he had preferred to go to jail rather than remain silent. When Indonesia collapsed in 1965, with the military unleashing terror and ordinary citizens participating in religious and ethnic cleansing, Pramimprisoned in Buru Campwrote some of his greatest novels, attempting to preserve the essence and the spirit of the young independent nation. Today in Indonesia, he is hardly known. He lives in total isolation, in his internal exile. Forty years of the free market economy, omnipresent propaganda, and the destruction of culture and intellectualism have created a climate where

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Prams thoughts are too terrifying to those who prefer to hide from the truth. He is an invisible giant in a nation whose people have been beaten downmorally and intellectually. But perhaps Indonesia will eventually change. Perhaps the fear will subside; questions will be asked again, people will stand up for their rights. When this happens, Indonesians will once again search their past for personalities on whose principles to rebuild this bruised land. Then Pram will become, once again, a native son as well as one of the fathers of the nation; a man of tremendous creativity, moral integrity, humanism, and bravery. His comeback will announce the revival of Indonesia. Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira Jakarta, October 28, 2005 * * * Have you ever written specifically about the Indonesian dictatorship and the impact it had on you and on people close to you? Only in my letters and notes, and sometimes in my books. These things come directly from inside, but I have never written about it directly, as a memory. Have you ever published a book in the form of questions and answers? No, this format has only been used in interviews with me interviews for magazines and newspapers. Nevertheless, I re-

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ally welcome your idea of creating such a book. However, I can foresee a problem about writing this book with you. You are an American. Indonesia collapsed mainly because of the United States. In the past, Indonesia had chosen its own way, the path of development advocated by President Sukarno. He was our true leader. However, what was the U.S. reaction? The then-President Eisenhower issued orders to depose our freely elected president! I know they still hate Sukarno in your country because he strongly denounced colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, even though he was a colonial product himself. That makes me wonder if we are right for each otherto write this book together. On the other hand, when I was serving my time in prisons and camps, I was helped by American people. But thats exactly why we want to write this book with you. We have to tell the truth about the pastand how it influenced the presenceto both your readers here and your readers in the West. Yes, I agree. So, why dont we try to write this book? I have so much to say. I want to speak about the young generations and about the students who fought until Suharto was forced to resign. I want to speak about other times, the occasions when people were hunted down, killed, and dumped into the sea. I have no access to the media and no organization to support me. I am burning inside. You came here so we can talk, so now I can open up and bother you with all the frustrations and curses that have accumulated inside me over long decades.