Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (94 page)

Sukarno was eminently suited to preside over this gathering. No one illustrated better than he the illusions, the political religiosity and the inner heartlessness of the post-colonial leadership. The Dutch East
Indies had been cobbled together into an administrative unit from thousands of islands. It was an empire in itself. Until 1870 it had been run on principles of pure cupidity. Thereafter, under the inspiration of the great Islamic scholar C. Snouck Hurgronje, a combination of Westernization, ‘association’ and the creation of native élites was introduced under the name of ‘ethical policy’.
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It was well-intended but it was really a reflection of Dutch nationalism; it had no answer when a rival, Javanese, nationalism appeared in the 1930s. This seems to have been worked out from 1927 onwards, by Sukarno and others, in the internment camp for native agitators at Upper Digul in New Guinea.
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It was an unimpressive mixture of Islamic, Marxist and European liberal clichés, but garnished by resounding phraseology. Whatever else he was, Sukarno was the great phrase-maker of his time. When the Dutch were ousted in 1941 their will to rule collapsed. In 1945 the Javanese nationalists began to take over. The Dutch left, taking 83 per cent of the mixed races with them. The Chinese became an unrepresented and increasingly persecuted minority. The non-Javanese majority, many of them in primitive tribal confederations, found themselves colonial subjects of a Javanese empire named ‘Indonesia’.

Sukarno had no more moral mandate to rule 100 millions than Nehru had in India; rather less in fact. He too was devoid of administrative skills. But he had the gift of words. Faced with a problem, he solved it with a phrase. Then he turned the phrase into an acronym, to be chanted by crowds of well-drilled illiterates. He ruled by
Konsepsi
, concepts. His party cadres painted buildings with the slogan implement President Sukarno’s Concepts’. His first concept in 1945 was
Pantja Sila
, or the Five Fundamental Principles: Nationalism, Internationalism (Humanitarianism), Democracy, Social Prosperity, Belief in God. These were ‘the Essence of the Indonesian Spirit’.
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The cabinet was
NASAKOM
, uniting the three main streams of the ‘revolution’:
Nasionalisme, Agama
(religion) and
Komunisme.
The constitution was
USDEK
. His political manifesto was
MANIPOL
. A cabinet coalition was
gotong-rojong
, ‘mutual help’. Then there were
musjawarah
and
mufakat
, ‘Deliberation leading to Consensus’ and ‘functional representation’ (his term for corporatism). Dissatisfied with party government, he made a ‘Bury the Parties’ speech, followed by the introduction of what he termed ‘guided democracy’ or
Demokrasi Terpimpin.
This introduced a ‘Guided Economy’ or
Ekonomi Terpimpin
which expressed ‘Indonesian identity’,
Kepribadian Indonesia.
He felt himself called to do the guiding or, as he put it, ‘President Sukarno has called on Citizen Sukarno to form a government.’
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As Sukarno’s internal difficulties mounted in the 1950s, he spent
more time and words on foreign matters. He spoke of ‘Free and active neutralism’; then of the dichotomy of ‘old established’ and ‘new emerging forces’; then of the ‘Djakarta-Phnom-Penh-Peking-Pyongyang Axis’. He harassed his Chinese subjects. He attacked the international Boy Scout movement. One of his axioms was ‘A Nation Always Needs an Enemy’. So he introduced another
Konsepsi
, ‘Greater Indonesia’, which meant expansion into Dutch New Guinea, which he re-christened West Irian, Malaysia, Portuguese Timor and the Australian territories. For this purpose he invented the term ‘confrontation’, coined the phrase
Ganjang Malaysia
, ‘Crush Malaysia!’ and developed a technique of staging ‘controlled demonstrations’ outside foreign embassies, occasionally letting them become ‘over-enthusiastic’ (as in 1963 when the British Embassy was burned down). The crowd was given a slogan for every occasion. For foreign abuse there was
“NEKOLIM
(’Neo-Colonialism, Colonialism and Imperialism’). When foreign aid was cut off or he was criticized by the
UN
there was
BERDIKARI
(’standing on one’s own feet’). 1962, when he got hold of West Irian, was ‘the year of triumph’; 1963, when he failed with Malaysia, was ‘the year of living dangerously’. This last,
Tahun Vivere Pericoloso
, and his stock
RESOPIM
(’Revolution, Indonesian socialism, natural leadership’) reflect the curious amalgam of Dutch, Indonesian, French, Italian and English words (and ideas) with which Sukarno kept his tottering empire going.
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If anyone believed in living dangerously it was the talkative, hyperactive, pleasure-loving Sukarno. Practising multiracialism, he acquired a notably varied collection of wives and mistresses, and extended his research still further on his numerous foreign jaunts. The Chinese secret police filmed him in action and so preserved his sexual
Konsepsi
for posterity. Khrushchev, already briefed in this respect by private Tass reports, was still deeply shocked, on his visit in 1960, to see the President chatting gaily with a naked woman.
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But as the 1960s progressed, the Indonesian economy moved closer to collapse. The virtual extinction of the Chinese minority destroyed the internal distribution system. Food rotted in the countryside. The towns starved. Foreign investment vanished. Apart from oil, which still flowed, industry was nationalized and slowly subsided under a rapacious bureaucracy. By autumn 1965 foreign debt amounted to over $2,400 million, and credit was exhausted. Sukarno had run out even of slogans. Not knowing what to do, Sukarno appears to have given the go-ahead to a
coup
by the Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI).

The
putsch
took place in the early hours of 1 October. The plan was to destroy the leadership of the armed forces. General Abdul Yani, the Army Chief of Staff, and two other generals were shot on the spot. The
Defence Minister, General Nasution, escaped by climbing over the wall of his house, though his daughter was murdered. Three other generals were captured and then tortured to death, in ritual fashion, by the women and children of the
PKI
: their eyes were gouged out and their genitals sliced off, then their bodies thrown into the Lubang Buaja, the Crocodile Hole.
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The events were later investigated by a special military tribunal, whose voluminous transcripts leave no doubt about Communist guilt.
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But the movement, termed
Gestapu
, was a failure. General Suharto, the Strategic Reserve Commander, took over. A fearful retribution followed. The revenge killings began on 8 October when the
PKI
Djakarta headquarters was burned. The massacres were organized in the local collective fashion, so that all were equally involved in responsibility, and entire families expiated the guilt. It was one of the great systematic slaughters of the twentieth century, the age of slaughter. The toll may have been as high as 1 million, though the consensus of authorities puts it in the region of 200,000 to 250.000.
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Sukarno, under house arrest in his palace, repeatedly but impotently called for an end to the killing, for the dead were essentially his supporters. But he was ignored, and his offices gradually stripped from him by a process of slow political torture. At each progressive stage in his degradation, one of his wives left him, and only one remained when he died, of kidney disease, on 21 June 1970, forgotten and speechless.

But this, too, was in the future. At Bandung in 1955 the all-conquering word still held sway. Among those present was the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, a handsome newcomer to the new humbug but already an accomplished rhetorician in his own right. Israel, undoubtedly an Afro—Asian state, was not represented at the Conference. Therein lay a long and complex tale, produced by the bisection of two of the strongest and most paranoid twentieth-century forces: the insatiable demand for oil and the evil of anti-Semitism.

Britain had moved into the Middle Eastern oilfields in 1908 and had been followed by America in 1924. By 1936 Britain controlled 524 million tons of proven reserves, against 93 million by America; in 1944 the figures had jumped to 2,181 million and 1,768 million; and by 1949 American output, coming chiefly from the richest fields of all in Saudi Arabia, had passed British.
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By the early 1940s it was already recognized that the Middle East held most of the world’s oil reserves: The centre of gravity of world oil production’, said Everett DeGolyer, head of the US Petroleum Commission in 1944, ‘is shifting until it is firmly established in that area.’ At the same time there were the first hints that America might run out of
domestic oil – by 1944 the calculation was that only fourteen years’ supply remained.
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Four years later Defence Secretary Forrestal was telling the oil industry: ‘Unless we had access to Middle East oil, the American automobile companies would have to devise a four-cylinder motor car.’
⁵⁷
European dependence increased much faster. By the time of Bandung its oil consumption was growing by 13 per cent annually, and the Middle East proportion had jumped from 25 per cent in 1938 to 50 per cent in 1949 and now stood at over 80 per cent.
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The growing dependence of US and European industry on a single source of oil was itself worrying. What turned it into an intractable problem was its conflation with the irreconcilable claims of Arabs and Jews to Palestine. The Balfour Declaration and the idea of a Jewish National Home was one of the post-dated cheques Britain signed to win the Great War. It might conceivably have been honoured without detriment to the Arabs – for it did not imply a Zionist state as such – but for one critical British mistake. In 1921 they authorized a Supreme Muslim Council to direct religious affairs; and it appointed Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, head of the biggest landowning clan in Palestine, to be senior judge or Mufti of Jerusalem for life. It was one of the most fatal appointments in modern history. The year before he had been given ten years’ hard labour for provoking bloody anti-Jewish riots. He had innocent blue eyes and a quiet, almost cringing manner, but he was a dedicated killer who devoted his entire adult life to race-murder. There is a photograph of him taken with Himmler: the two men smile sweetly at one another; beneath, a charming inscription by the
S
S
chief to ‘His Eminence the Grossmufti’: the date was 1943 when the ‘Final Solution’ was moving into top gear.

The Mufti outrivalled Hitler in his hatred for Jews. But he did something even more destructive than killing Jewish settlers. He organized the systematic destruction of Arab moderates. There were many of them in 1920s Palestine. Some of them even welcomed Jewish settlers with modern agricultural ideas, and sold land to them. Arabs and Jews might have lived together as two prosperous communities. But the Mufti found in Emile Ghori a terrorist leader of exceptional ability, whose assassination squads systematically murdered the leading Arab moderates – the great majority of the Mufti’s victims were Arabs – and silenced the rest. By the end of the 1930s Arab moderate opinion had ceased to exist, at least in public, the Arab states had been mobilized behind Arab extremism, the British Foreign Office had been persuaded that continued access to oil was incompatible with continued Jewish immigration, and the 1939 White Paper virtually brought it to an end and, in effect,
repudiated the Balfour Declaration: ‘a gross breach of faith’, as Churchill put it.
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Then in 1942 came the first authenticated reports of the ‘Final Solution’. They aroused not pity but fear. America tightened its visa regulations. Seven Latin-American countries followed suit; so did Turkey.
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At this stage Chaim Weizmann still believed agreement could be reached with Britain to resume the flow of immigrants. In October 1943, Churchill (with Attlee present to represent the Labour Party) told him that partition was acceptable, and on 4 November 1944 he promised Weizmann that 1 to 1.5 million Jews could go to Palestine over ten years.
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But Churchill was virtually the only Zionist at the top of British politics. More worthwhile, because concrete and immediate, was his creation, within the British army, of an independent Jewish brigade, whose members ultimately formed the professional nucleus of the Haganah, the defence force of the Jewish Agency, when it turned itself into an army.

At this stage Churchill still thought Britain could control the destiny of Palestine. In fact it was already slipping from her grasp. There were two main factors. The first was Jewish terrorism. This was created by Abraham Stern, a Polish Jew who had become a fascist and an Anglophobe at Florence University, and later tried to get Nazi finance for his organization through Vichy Syria. Stern was killed by police in 1942 but his gang continued, as did a much bigger terrorist group, the Irgun, commanded from 1944 by Menachem Begin. This was a fateful development, because for the first time modern propaganda was combined with Leninist cell-structure and advanced technology to advance political aims through murder During the next forty years the example was to be followed all over the world: a cancer of modern times, eating at the heart of humanity. Churchill, with his unfailing gift for driving to the root of events, warned of the tragedy ‘if our dreams of Zionism are to end in the smoke of an assassin’s pistol and the labours for its future produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany’. Weizmann promised that the Jewish people ‘will go to the utmost limits of its power to cut off this evil from its midst’.
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Haganah, in fact, attempted to destroy both Irgun and the Stern gang. But as the war ended and the efforts of Jews to reach Palestine became more frantic, it devoted its energies to the legitimate object of assisting illegal immigration. The ‘Final Solution’ did not end anti-Semitism. Thus, on 5 July 1946 in the Polish town of Kielce, a rumour that Jews were engaged in the ritual killing of Gentile children stirred up a mob which, with the connivance of the Communist police and army, beat to death forty Jews.
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This was one of many incidents which accelerated the stampede.