National Liberation?

Long before the democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring, Europe’s own Spring of Nations in 1848 brought an unprecedented wave of democratization, but their colonies, locked in exploitative economic relationships, did not enjoy the same luxury. This brief history will track the efforts of the Acehnese to achieve merdeka, fighting the center-periphery relations that persist from one political configuration to the next.

Indonesia was once one of the Netherlands’s most important colonies, driving the Dutch spice and cash crop trade (Hart, 2008).  In Aceh traditional elites, the uleebeng, were enrolled into international trade networks, resulting in increased local exploitation and malcontent (Siegel, 2000). Exploitation only intensified during World War II. Aceh was occupied by Japan who used the uleebeng in what they called “political participation,” an attempt to put a local face on their policies of forced labor and excessive rice exports to Japan while the Achenese suffered widespread famine and clothing shortages (Schulze, 2010).

Returning at the close of WWII, the Dutch faced armed resistance in Indonesia. Acehnese religious leaders declared the struggle against the Dutch in Java a jihad, killing or jailing all the uleebeng in the province while helping to finance the resistance in Jakarta (Reid, 2010). Ultimately the Dutch were repelled and Achmad Sukarno, educated in philosophies of Islamic Socialism in Bandung, became Indonesia’s first president (Schulze, 2010).

Indonesia was at the forefront of a global anti-colonial movement: a wave of decolonization and democratization spread throughout Asia and Africa. It was at the Afro-Asian Conference of non-aligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia where Mao Zedong’s spokesperson Chou En-Lai popularized the term “Third World.” As opposed to the Western-aligned First World and the Soviet-aligned Second World, the goal of the Third World, Mao encouraged, was to break free of post-colonial domination and achieve “national liberation” for the non-aligned (Churchill, 2009).

This was easier said than done.  Promising that Indonesia would not be a puppet of Western interests, Sukarno quickly nationalized key portions of the Indonesian economy, particularly oil and gas. “Our ideal is an automobile for everybody...” Time reported that Sukarno proclaimed at a speech, “But our ideals will not be realized easily.  We must struggle for them.” (1946).  Distressed, the United States orchestrated coup attempts against Sukarno, and supplied arms to rebellious generals; they may have supplied arms to the Achenese as well. Increasingly paranoid, Sukarno consolidated power domestically, implementing a “guided democracy” that controlled the press and dissident factions within Indonesia. He planned to consolidate all of the island of Sumatra into a single political unit, undermining Aceh’s local autonomy and strengthening Jakarta’s control over the island.  Jakarta, housed on island of Java and controlled by the Javanese, was cast by Achenese ulama (religious scholars) as new imperialists and an uprising began (Schulze 2010).

Sukarno was able to negotiate peace in Aceh, but he ultimately fell prey to a U.S.-sanctioned military coup. Lauded as Indonesia’s savior in the American press, the military dictator Suharto led a reign of terror throughout Indonesia, filling mass graves with a million men, women and children in a violent purge of all his opponents, claiming they were Communists (Hitchens 2001). Locally, religious leaders and community leaders were stripped of their traditional roles and replaced by Suharto’s state-centered New Order (Kell 1995). Days after the coup, multinational corporations were invited to write Indonesia’s new mineral policies. Harvard economists designed “a late-20th Century American ‘development’ plan that sounds suspiciously like the mid-19th century Dutch colonial strategy.... The plan brought an industrial renaissance to the Netherlands, but only an expanding misery to Indonesia” (Ransom 1970). In this policy context, the American corporation Mobil Oil acquired strategic Acehnese natural gas concessions. By 1971, it had discovered one of the largest known reserves of natural gas (LNG) in the world near the city of Lhoksumawe, estimated at 14 trillion cubic feet (Ross 2005).

            It was shortly after the discovery of LNG in Aceh that Hasan di Tiro declared another war of succession:

 

The Javanese, nevertheless, are attempting to perpetuate colonialism which all the Western colonial powers have abandoned and all the world has condemned. During these last thirty years the people of Acheh, Sumatra, have witnessed how our fatherland has been exploited and driven into ruinous conditions by the Javanese neo-colonialists: they have stolen our properties; they have robbed us from our livelihood; they have abused the education of our children; they have exiled our leaders; they have put our people in chains of tyranny, poverty, and neglect: the life-expectancy of our people is 34 years and is decreasing - compare this to the world's standard of 70 years and is increasing! While Acheh, Sumatra, has been producing a revenue of over 15 billion US dollars yearly for the Javanese neo-colonialists, which they used totally for the benefit of Java and the Javanese. (Tiro, 1976)

 

By 1984, oil and gas comprised 67% of Aceh’s economy, but less than 3% of the labor force, nearly ¾ of the population worked in farming, largely subsistence and cash cropping. Private operations from oil to timber began to put strain on subsistence livelihoods. Where locals refused to log forests that held spiritual significance or supported traditional livelihoods, businesses employed transmigrants from Java to log the forest as part of a transmigration program coordinated by Jakarta and encouraged by the World Bank (Prasetyo and Aditjondro, 2010).  By the end of the 1980s, child malnutrition in Aceh was double the incidence of child malnutrition as Jakarta (BPS, 1992). However LNG exports at the time amounted to 4 billion dollars a year, accounting for a quarter of Mobil Oil’s profits and making Indonesia the largest LNG producer in the world (Martinkus 2004, Rist 2010). An Achenese analyst recounted that of the revenues generated “less than 1% stays in Aceh. We are like the rat who dies in the rice barn!”

This economic transition was facilitated via intimidation and violence.  In fact, the district surrounding Mobil Oil was the epicenter of the province’s violence: mass murder, kidnappings, torture, rape (Ross, 2005). On one occasion, 150 people, 50 of whom were boarding school students, were executed and buried in a hole near Mobil Oil’s drill site using Mobil Oil’s earth moving equipment.  One of the Acehnese janitorial staff working for Mobil Oil reported that when one of the victims was not killed by the gunfire, they used a back-hoe to slice him in half.  It was the Acehnese man’s job to clean the blood of his neighbors from the earth-moving equipment (Engardio et al, 1998).

Mobil Oil’s Bukit Indah, a modern suburban subdivision in the jungle complete with tennis courts and swimming pools, stood in stark contrast to the frail shacks situated on small plots turned into non-arable flood plains as a result of LNG-related construction. Villagers dreamed of the salaries held by the foreign workers that came there to work. As Sukarno had promised cars for Java, the rebels recruited villagers claiming that once Aceh had its freedom, everyone would have a salary.

The center-periphery relationships established by the Dutch were continued after Indonesia’s national liberation.  While the Dutch used traditional aristocrats, the uleebeng, as their surrogates, U.S.-authored “development” plans were advanced by the Javanese students of Ivy League American economists.  This relation was maintained with unspeakable violence, violence that only worsened when Suharto fell and democracy returned to Indonesia.

Reviews

[.]

:: thank you for writing and sharing this insightful account... "oil" seems to be the reason why a lot of monopolists get motivated to manipulate so skillfully and so brutally that all those who are not in their circle of wealth obviously suffer and suffer and suffer... :: although this is an academic paper, you've written it with a very humane ink... the narration is not cold or unreal... it's very earnest and authentic... i can almost hear the voice of the narrator... :: excellent work...