Henk Schulte Nordholt:
A State of Violence
On 22 June 2000, Henk Schulte Nordholt was installed as the IIAS Extraordinary Chair in Asian History at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Two excerpts from his oration text, 'A State of Violence', are presented here together with an interview made with him shortly after the event.
By MARIEKE BRAND
In your oration you describe a strong link of continuity stretching from the colonial period to the New Order regime of Soeharto and indeed to the present day. Is the history of Indonesia really this coherent?Well, I exaggerated a little bit to make my point, because a lot of emphasis is currently laid on the violence in present-day Indonesia. And even for Indonesians, the mass killings of the 1960s are the starting point of all violence that came afterwards. But I think that in order to understand structured patterns of violence, you must look further back in time to the colonial period. That is why I emphasized this violent nature of colonial rule, because it is not only Indonesian historiography that needs to be decolonized, but Dutch historiography as well. Colonial violence as a structural phenomenon is taboo in Dutch historiography. A lot of Dutch people seem to believe that the Indonesians liked Dutch presence in the Netherlands Indies. This is simply a myth!
You show that local colonial rule was sustained by developing a symbiosis with petty crime. Do you also see parallels with the present day in this respect?
Nowadays, in Indonesia, when thieves are caught, people kill them. People do not rely on the police, they do not trust them. They just go after the criminals and chop them to pieces, literally. They say: 'We learned from the New Order that when there is a problem, you can solve it by using violence, and now we do it ourselves'. This implies the decentralization and privatization of violence. But the linkage between government and crime goes back to the late nineteenth century when it was the cheapest solution available for a colonial system to keep society under control. I make a comparison between Java and Sicily at the same moment in time, and the similarities are striking. Therefore, there is nothing Javanese about the local criminals, although they were called Jago and so on. You can only understand the system by comparing it with the same kind of system in Italy, where the process of state formation was somewhat halfway. This gave the local population the impression that the state was more or less run by crooks, and they were probably right. This is something you will never read in colonial reports, there you see a very civilized image of the state. Only because the system was not perfect do these kinds of reports enter by accident. Once you see this, you can find other traces as well in the colonial reports. There is a very strong continuity between the late colonial state and the New Order state, as both used criminals to get things done. And this is also the way power structures are organized today. Politics and the fight for prominence are now done in the streets, no longer in the parliament I am afraid.
You write that Indonesians need a new historiography with which the various groups of people in Indonesian society can identify.
Yes. What you see now in the actual post-New Order period is the emergence of ethnic, regional, and religious conflicts. I am very worried about the fate of the nation in Indonesia after so many years of dictatorship. I think that a shared sense of belonging to a nation can keep Indonesia together. Moreover, this sense of nationhood can, ultimately, help to overcome the bloody conflicts we see today. As Ben Anderson says, nationalism is directed towards the future. But the narrative that gives direction to the future has to do with the past; it tells people where they come from, and what they share. This should be a story that includes the victims, in the same way as the history of Europe should include the victims of that history. Therefore, the history of Indonesia should include the killings of '65. As long as this is not the case, it is not a true history with which people can identify.
How do you locate these killings within the genealogy of violence that you trace in Indonesian history?
A great deal of what happened in that period in Indonesia has been described and analysed very well, for example by Jeff Robinson in The Dark Side of Paradise. Nevertheless, I am still puzzled by how many people were actually killed. In certain parts of Bali, Java, and Sumatra really thousands and thousands of people were killed. At a certain moment, the PKI [Communist Party] was totally dismantled and the military could have taken over power, but the violence went on and on. For me, the only way to make sense of this extraordinary violence is by viewing it as a ritual of purification, or a ritual cleansing. In Indonesia, this violence marked the establishment of a regime of fear that parallels the regime of fear that the Dutch established at the beginning of the twentieth century through the violent expansion of colonial rule. For a very long time, people remembered this violence and, although there was a 'rule of order', it was basically built upon the fear of the colonial guns and violence. A similar situation arose in the 1960s: after the mass killings, the people were really afraid of the state.
Has the Chair in Rotterdam and the writing of this oration influenced your understanding of the history of Indonesia in a specific way?
Most of all it gave me the opportunity to march through time, from the nineteenth century towards the twentieth and back again. The Chair in Rotterdam is at the Department of Societal History, where comparisons are extremely important. So, in Rotterdam, I gave a course on mass killings in Indonesia and Cambodia and made use of much more general literature on genocide and the Holocaust. I am getting more familiar with this comparative approach and of dealing with very specific situations, and I like that very much. *
Marieke Brand teaches anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
E-mail: brand@pscw.uva.nl
A STATE OF VIOLENCE
(EXCERPTS):
Colonial crime
Official sources are inclined to conceal colonial violence. These sources, however, occasionally display openings through which one can suddenly see a different reality. An example is an unsolicited report, submitted to the colonial government by the tobacco planter C. Amand in 1872, that caused considerable unrest among colonial officials. With this report, Amand denied the prevailing colonial picture of the Javanese peasant community as a 'palladium of peace' by depicting a world in which cattle theft, extortion, opium smuggling, violence, and especially intimidation were daily phenomena. The most important actors in this regard appeared to be the so-called jagos. Literally, jago means 'cock' and the term not only refers to a culture in which masculinity, fighting skills, and magically achieved power are emphasized, but also to a new category of local strongmen who, operating in the shade of the official colonial government during the nineteenth century, in fact controlled the Javanese countryside.
As Amand tells us, 'On Java, the occupation of the thief is bound to the local institutions which provide a vocation to many, for some an opportunity to invest money, and, conversely, the thieves offer advantages to their protectors.' To this he adds that 'no village leader considers his village to be complete, nor in order, if it does not, at least, have one thief, ore even several, all of whom are under the command of the oldest and wisest thief, called a jago.'
Vain attempts were made in Batavia to bring the credibility of this report into doubt, whereas efforts to keep it from the public were quite successful. The message was indeed shocking: the entire construction of the colonial government on Java was based, in fact, on an extensive network of rural crime, largely due to the inability of the official Javanese governing body to control all of Java. For this reason, it was forced to bring the so-called local strongmen into their service, in exchange for which these jagos were free to carry out their own criminal activities.
Jagos were no noble bandits who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and neither did they form a remnant of an old and decaying culture. Rather, they were the product of a new colonial relationship. A comparison with the emergence of the mafia in Sicily during the same period shows that, in both cases, we are dealing with a stagnating process of state formation through which a new group of brokers in violence could emerge. These brokers were in service of the rural and colonial elite and generally operated against the rest of the population. On Java, crime and the state were largely formed and reinforced by each other. Apparently the colonial state was not able to control the crime that it had helped to create. Here again, we come across an important colonial heritage that was to play a dangerous role in post-colonial Indonesia.
Decolonization
of Indonesian historiography
The rough outline of the genealogy of violence I have provided here shows how the concubinage of a repressive colonial state and local crime has produced poorly raised children. In accordance with colonial tradition, these militias were never officially recognized, but they determined and, to a large extent, still determine the public appearance of post-colonial Indonesian politics. The violence and fear have yet to find a place in official Indonesian history books, where the rigid continuation of a colonial perspective is evident.
In his recent book, Seeing Like a State, James Scott shows how state institutions have attempted to reduce complex realities into clearly arranged ideas in order to control society. Such simplifications cause a great deal of local and particular knowledge to be lost.1 Although Scott does not deal with this directly, national historiography is pre-eminently an activity which streamlines the complex and multidimensional narratives about the past by erasing large parts of these stories. Indeed, national historiography is the officially approved simplification of the past. The birthplace of this conventional historiography was the nation-state which took shape in the course of the nineteenth century in Europe. Based on data from official archives, the account of the birth, growth, and flourishing of 'the fatherland' was told. In this regard, colonial history formed a sort of overseas appendix to the national epic and told the story of the establishment and development of the Dutch Indies, or rather, Tropical Holland.
Following decolonization, nationalist historians in the former colonies adhered primarily to patterns founded by colonial historians, but embraced a different moral approach; colonial 'development' became 'exploitation' and 'religious fanatics' became 'nationalist freedom fighters.' The new national history consecutively outlined the story of the nation in terms of a grand pre-colonial civilization which already contained the essence of the national identity, the heroic struggle against western imperialism, the martyrdom following colonial exploitation, the subsequent national awakening, the struggle for freedom, and, finally, the heavily fought battles for national independence.2 During the New Order, a closing chapter was added which tells how the nation fell prey to internal discord, how it was saved just in time by Soeharto, and how he then led the country to lasting development and permanent stability and opened the door to the end of history. It is a pitiful history which remembers only official heroes and is silent about the thousands of victims. Colonial as well as nationalist historians put forward this perspective and, therefore, centralize the primacy of the state. They show little interest in comparisons with other regions or in themes which do not serve the interests of the state. Indonesia is no exception in this regard, as political violence and the silence of history is a common phenomenon in many post-colonial societies in Asia as well as in Africa, and is therefore best understood in a comparative way.
In a certain sense, Indonesians are momentarily 'a people without history.' Since his fall, Soeharto's version of history is no longer credible, but an alternative has not yet emerged. Indeed, fifty-five years after independence, Indonesia still has to decolonize its own historiography. In March of this year, President Abdurrahman Wahid broke an important taboo in this respect by making a public appeal for investigations of the murders in 1965 and '66, and also offered an apology for the role that the militias of his own organization had played.3
It will be interesting to see whether a new Indonesian historiography will succeed in liberating itself from the interests, perspective, and conceptual framework of the state. An important question in this regard is whether there is still anything left of the nation after so many years of state domination. The concept of a plural nation is with economic recovery perhaps the only approach the nation state can take to protect itself from disintegrating religious, ethnic, regional, and criminal violence, and to promote democracy. Although such a nation is in the first place heading for a common future, a new national history must, however, provide the accompanying story in which the diversity of the country is honoured and room is made for the victims. No small responsibility rests upon Indonesian historians to tell this story.
1 James Scott, Seeing Like a State. How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven/London: Yale University Press (1998).
2 Anthony Reid, 'The Nationalist Quest for an Indonesian Past,' in Anthony Reid and David Marr (eds), Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, pp 281-99. Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books (1979).
3 Kompas 15-3-2000; Siar News Service
17-3-2000. From this, it appears that offering apologies does not close the past, but makes it accessible.