Regions Southeast Asia - IIAS Newsletter Online

IIASN26-P30-01B A recreated classroom with full-size figures of students at the Museum/STOVIA.
GREG SUHARSONO

The site of the museum itself is intertwined with this history. In the early twentieth century, the medical school, or School Tot Opleiding Van Inlandsche Artsen (STOVIA) was one of the few post-secondary education institutions open to indigenous peoples; its students set up associations that were forerunners of more strident political groups of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. After graduation, as doctors or former doctors, many became active nationalists.

Museum displays tell how a common cause developed among the peoples of the then Netherlands Indies for the establishment of a single and independent state for the whole of the archipelago. Its standard bearers were young men and women, their spirit recalled in displays of black and white photographs of the famous Congress of Indonesian Youth held in Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1928. Groups representing different ethnic and religious affiliations 'Young Java,' 'Young Sumatra,' 'Young Celebes,' 'Young Betawi,' 'Islamic Youth,' 'Association of Indonesian Students,' the 'Indonesian Youth,' and 'Sekar Roekoen,' pledged themselves to create 'one country, Indonesia; one people, Indonesian; and one language; Bahasa Indonesia'. But it took another twenty years before the nationalists gained the chance to build a new country. In 1949, the Dutch, after trying to reassert authority with military force upon their return at the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, transferred sovereignty to an Indonesian state.

It is an idealistic story that jars against the discord and divisiveness now threatening Indonesia. Communal violence has occurred all over the country and separatist calls are still loud in several regions. While there are hopes that wounds can be healed under the new president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, her government, in office only since August, has yet to prove itself. The spectre of Indonesia following in the path of former Yugoslavia and fracturing into separate states remains.

So, is the museum's message redundant? Absolutely not, argues the director of the museum, Retno Sulistianingsih. Past events and heroes need to be recalled more than ever before, she says:'The museum can make people think about, make people realize the struggles and sacrifices especially of the younger generation, and implant again the sense of being one nation, having unity as Indonesia.'

A quiet oasis

The museum is a quiet oasis amid the congestion of modern Jakarta. Situated just off the main roads of central Jakarta, near Jalan Prapatan not far from the Hotel Aryaduta, the museum is walled off from the outside by the thick whitewashed backs of the old STOVIA buildings, broken on one street side by a large arched gateway. Two long L-shaped one-storey buildings, roofed with red tiles, enclose a grassy, palm tree dotted garden.

Evocative of an earlier age architecturally in a city where much of the built past has disappeared, the museum is rarely on the tourist itinerary. The museum is mainly host to visits by school children to its photographic displays, dioramas of key events, and recreated classrooms where nationalist heroes themselves once studied and lived.

It was a very different city in those days. The STOVIA, built in 1900 adjacent to a military hospital, was on the edge of what was the best part of town, the leafy uptown European quarter known as Weltevreden, or 'Well Content', twelve kilometres south of the older port town of Batavia. Established in the 1600s by the the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Batavia was the centre of the colonial world until it was superseded after the early 1800s by Weltevreden, a much healthier setting compared with the soggy marshes around old Batavia, or 'Kota,' as it is now known. Weltevreden was a residential retreat and centre of government administration surrounding two squares, Waterloo Plein, today's Lapangan Benteng opposite the Hotel Borobudur, and the large Konings Plein, now Medan Merdeka.

The STOVIA offered a higher level of training than an earlier medical school that had opened in 1862. Its position close to the European centre of affairs reflected its function to produce technical expertise that was expected to support development of the Netherlands Indies. ĽIIASN26-P30-02

Among the statues of major figures of the independence movement
is this statue of Sukarno, Indonesia's first president.
GREG SUHARSONO

In 1927, the medical school gained full university status (catering to both local European as well as Indonesian students), having shifted premises in 1920 to the edge of the new elite suburb Menteng not far away to the south today still a sought-after place to live, but now firmly in the heart of the city. The medical school remains there today in an impressive 1920s art deco-influenced building on Jalan Salemba Raya where it forms part of the campus of the University of Indonesia.

A view of the Jakarta of the STOVIA at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the first stirrings of a national consciousness, is given by Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his Jejak Langka, or Footsteps in the Mire, the third volume of his Buru Quartet. Pramoedya's hero, Minke, a son of an aristocratic local governor or 'Bupati' in the Dutch administration, arriving for the first time in the capital from his home near Surabaya in East Java, discovers a grand world:

'I gazed across Koningsplein field the pride of the Indies. One kilometre square, beautifully tended lawns, no flowers, where the people of Betawi met and played.... In my shirt pocket were two neatly folded pieces of paper my graduation diploma and a summons from the Batavia medical school -- STOVIA. Fantastic! Not just Betawi but the medical school too must open its doors to me.'

But Minke, who is based by Pramoedya on the life of an early nationalist, Tirto Adi Suryo, comes to see a more complex and exploitative colonial world while a student at the STOVIA. His impatience for change takes him away from a medical career to agitate for reform as editor of a newspaper and founder of a modern political organization.

The story of Pramoedya's creation of his saga itself is a window on a later chapter in modern Indonesian history. Pramoedya's work on the novel series was abruptly halted with the downfall of Sukarno in 1965, Indonesia's charismatic first President and father of the new President and the rise to power of Suharto, the general seen to have saved the country from a communist coup. A casualty of the purging of left-leaning figures, Pramoedya became a prisoner on the island of Buru in eastern Indonesia for eleven years until 1979. There he completed his work.

Inspiration or myth?

Today, looking back on tangential forces unleashed with the end of the thirty-two-year regime of former President Suharto in May 1998, the museum's story of a united struggle for independence might be condemned as mythology used to reinforce his authoritarian rule. Opened as the Museum of National Awakening in 1974 by Suharto himself, some might argue that history was used to justify loyalty to Jakarta. Extolling the need to maintain the national unity fought for in the past camouflaged what many see as, in fact, a highly centralized and inequitable regime. Suharto resisted any real devolution of political authority and government functions away from Jakarta. As far as many people in the outer islands are concerned, too much of their wealth has been sucked out to Jakarta and the heavily populated and most industrialized island of Java and too little put back. For the Acehnese separatist leaders in northern Sumatra, the modern Indonesian state is simply, they say, a replacement of the Dutch empire in the Indies with a Javanese one.

Certainly, there is a danger of oversimplifying the past and painting the nationalists as a single and widespread movement of idealists from across the archipelago who forgot all differences in the pursuit of independence. The history is far more complex. There were damaging divisions and disputes among the nationalists. At one end of the spectrum was the communist left; on the other, the conservative Islamic right. Javanese and Sumatrans, by weight of numbers, did figure more prominently than nationalists from the other islands. After 1949, the fact that the independence movement was far from monolithic was revealed by struggles for the next decade between the new secular government of the Republic of Indonesia and both separatists and Islamists.

Yet, despite these divisions, the idea of Indonesia as a single and inclusive state bringing about modernity and prosperity was a real and strongly held vision of the early nationalists, says historian Robert Cribb of the University of Queensland, Australia.

'The idea of Indonesia was meant to be one which transcended regional ethnic identity in much the way that the idea of the United States was meant to transcend ethnic identity, at least for immigrants. Indonesia occupied the modern sector; regional ethnic identity occupied the traditional sector of people's minds. There was a general assumption that all sorts of good things were possible on a pan-Indonesian scale, which would not be possible on a local or regional scale,' Cribb says.

This belief drove forward an often-fractious independence movement and, after 1949, motivated development of the archipelago. The question now is whether the idea of Indonesia can still forge a common endeavour or whether it has been too corrupted by the Suharto years. The spirit of the times may also not be as encouraging as it was fifty years ago, says Cribb. Whereas people once thought bigger, inclusive states would bring success, now there is a prevailing wisdom that ethnic states are the more natural condition. Small can be successful.

Perhaps, though, the idea of Indonesia can be reinvigorated and reformulated through current efforts by the central government to give more authority to the regions. Promised is an unprecedented devolution of power. Maybe a federated state of Indonesia might evolve from this decentralization, an option that was never pursued by the nationalists.

For novelist Pramoedya, despite having suffered from Indonesia's failings, the ideals of earlier times should not be abandoned, even though he says he is disappointed in how far short the country has fallen of them. Observing it all now from his home in East Jakarta, he says, 'there is cannibalism everywhere.' Pramoedya, born in 1925, grew up in East Java surrounded by earlier ideals, as his father, a schoolteacher, was an active nationalist. He recalls his childhood growing up in the last years of colonial rule, when he says there was hope of an Indonesia 'independent, modern and democratic.'

'The dream of Indonesia is so difficult to achieve,' Pramoedya says. 'I admire the people in Aceh fighting for justice, but if they gain independence then it will set off more bloodshed in Indonesia, more and more fighting between Indonesians. I would rather see Indonesians as they did in the past working, towards one unified nation.'

The Museum of National Awakening itself may prove to be a barometer for the outcome of efforts now to recast an inclusive and tolerant Indonesia. The museum plans to take its story beyond 1949 to the present day. No doubt, the nature of the new Indonesia and what it takes from the past to shape its future will be revealed in its new displays and their messages. *

Testament to the Idea of Indonesia