Three Pictures
In the seventeenth century the kingdom of Mataram was ruled by Amangkurat I. Almost all historical records of the time mention his cruelty. “If he felt a bit unhapy,” wrote the Javanese chronicle writers as quoted by Raffles in The History of Java, “he would murder those who were thought to be cause of his unhappines.”
He once gathered together six thousand people in the town square – Islamic religious teacher with heir wives and children. Then , after a signal given by the firing of a cannon, they were all slaughtered in less than thirty minutes. He once put sixty fisherman into a dark cell and left them there to starve to death, because he was upset that one his wives had hied. When he found out that the Crown Prince had taken one of his own concubines, Amangkurat ordered all those involved decapitated, and then commanded his son to stab the young woman while embacing her.
The Babad Tanah Jawi describes this reign of terror in a very matter-of-fact-way, but the dread is nonetheless apparent. All Mataram lived in terror, the chronicle relates. The rains fell out of reason, there were earthquake, and meteors appeared in the sky every day at dark.
The people were destitute, and still the king could take from them whatever he wanted. Amangkurat I forbade his people to sail out of the Mataram kingdom, or trade. Rijklof van Goens, the Dutchman who stayed for a while with Amangkurat I, once decided to suggets to the King that he allow his people “to sail and become rich”. Amangkurat replied, “My people do not themselves own a single one of their possession.”
We move to the nineteenth century now, to 1811, when under Sir Stamford Raffles England took control of Java and the Moluccas from the Dutch. Raffles, like many other Europeans of his time, believed that free trade, free labour and free production were the correct ideals. He wanted “liberal” government.
He had faith in the people of Jawa. He denied that they were slow and lazy. “Just look,” he wrote, “at the way they till the soil, at their remarkbale rice fields, and at their overflowing harvest.” Raffles wanted the farmers to be left alone to determine their own ways of agriculture and to choose their own crops. But in economic terms, Raffles government failed. The British returned Indonesia to the Dutch. When the new Dutch bureaucracy attempted to continue Raffles liberal approach, the result was near-bankruptcy.
The Dutch then borught in J. van den Bosch. He arrived in July 1829 with two million guilders as cash and two million more as credit, Bosch who had lived in the East Indies before, from 1798 to 1810, had firms idea about the way to tule Jawa: he believe that the Javanese were the intellectual equivalent of twelve-year-old Dutch children. Liberty or freedom for them was therefore absurd. “The government must care of them, and must not permit them just to do things for themselves,” he wrotes in one of his reports in the 1830s.
We know now what was born from this attitude. His aim –in his own words “to act the father”—took the form of forced labour. He managed to bring down the deficit – and in fact even to create a surplus (the renowned “batige stolen”), but by 1845 the roads of Cirebon were strewn with starving people. Indonesia entered the tweentieth century lacking a society able to provide an inheritance for its own grandchildren. The people were left with nothing, having already been forced into silence.
The twenty-first century. Can Indonesia enter this century with the benefit of hindsight gained through experience? Our people are no longer completely desitute – but nor are they completely free from silence. They have already been given much – but this does not mean they have been given an invitation to join the ranks of the givers, let alone given respect.
19 January 1980