• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4461 0

as prime minister. He was the obvious choice: his opposition to the Japanese enabled him to negotiate with the Dutch; his support amongst the Jakarta pemuda gave him the radical credentials the times demanded. Under Sjahrir’s direction, the earlier working committee for independence reconstituted itself as a parliamentary government, and political parties were founded. Sjahrir was also the author of one of the key attempts in 1945 to analyse and direct the revolution, a pamphlet published as he came into power, entitled Perjuangan Kita, ‘Our Struggle’. Without naming Sukarno, it attacked the running dogs and henchmen of Japanese. It traced the psychological impact of the war on the young, a tragic legacy of confusion and hatred, and repudiated the millennial fire of battles such as Surabaya: ‘Many of them simply cling to the slogan Freedom or Death. Wherever they sense that freedom is still far from certain, and yet they themselves are not faced with death, they are seized with doubt and hesitation. The remedy for these doubts is generally sought in uninterrupted action.’ Sjahrir instead set the Indonesian revolution firmly in an international context. ‘Indonesia’s fate’, he wrote, ‘ultimately depends on the fate of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism.’ He argued the need for allies, and for the political maturity necessary to gain their respect, a sign of which would be Indonesia’s treatment of its ethnic minorities. There were no fewer than four Christians in Sjahrir’s cabinet.114 It was a bold move, in which Sjahrir repudiated the social revolution that had largely brought him to power, and heralded a long process of diplomacy that would drag on for the rest of the British occupation of Java and Sumatra.

In the wake of the fighting, war reporters began to arrive in Indonesia. The old scourge of the colonial establishment and ‘whiskyswilling planters’ of pre-war Singapore, Ian Morrison, was an eyewitness to events in Java for The Times. Martha Gellhorn reached an even wider audience with her vivid report on the ‘seedy ruin’ of Dutch imperialism and new political style of the ‘adolescent guerrillas’ of the pemuda. Like many Western journalists she was drawn into the circle of young dandyish intellectuals that had formed around Sutan Sjahrir. She shared a train journey with a young, delicate, bird-like poet named ‘Johnny’. As they talked she became charmed by ‘the place [the Indonesians] give a boy like Johnny; they know he is good for nothing except to write poetry once in a while but everyone loves him and respects him…’ It seems that ‘Johnny’ was Chairil Anwar, himself a protégé and distant relative of Sjahrir.115 These witnesses did not always understand well what they saw. When the New York Times reported the appointment of the new prime minister, it gave him a royal name: ‘Sultan Charir’. In common with many Javanese people, Sukarno had only one name. It was an American journalist who gave the Indonesian president a first name he did not possess: ‘Achmed’. It stuck.116

This revolution of artists and poet-philosophers fascinated Western observers. Some of its camp followers such as ‘Surabaya Sue’, K’tut Tantri, were part of the generation that ‘discovered’ Indonesian art and culture before the war, and it was what Sukarno termed the ‘Romanticism of revolution’ and its primordial energy that cast a spell. But others were drawn more to the rationalist internationalism personified by Sutan Sjahrir. His old friends and acquaintances in Europe mobilized support for the new republic, particularly among the British left. One prominent supporter was Dorothy Woodman, long-time companion of Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman and Nation. A great and well-connected artisan for Asian independence, she was under intense Secret Intelligence Service surveillance at the time as a suspected Soviet agent.117 Another convert to the cause was John Coast: a POW in Thailand, he had fallen in love with Indonesia after hearing the lilting popular music of the kronchong played by Dutch fellow prisoners, and he began to learn