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17. Indonesia: From Foe to Friend
When Indonesia faced separatist rebellions in 1957, Western arms dealers
arrived in Singapore to sell weapons to rebels in Sumatra and Sulawesi. The
Indonesian consul-general, Lieutenant-General Jatikusomo, met me in 1958
when I was an opposition leader. I assured him that if we became the
government, these arms dealers would be expelled. When the PAP won the 1959
general election I kept this promise, and Jatikusomo – a dapper, intelligent,
courteous and active Javanese aristocrat – proposed that I consolidate our
relationship with Jakarta with an official visit. I agreed.
In August 1960 my delegation and I were taken to the Merdeka Palace, once
the residence of the Dutch governor-general, to meet President Sukarno. He
wore a smart beige beribboned uniform and carried a field marshal’s baton or
swagger stick. It was a stifling, warm and humid Jakarta morning, but neither
fans nor air-conditioning were allowed in the palace; he disliked them. I could
see sweat coming through his shirt onto the jacket of his uniform. I was in a
lounge suit like the rest of my party, and was also sweating copiously.
He was an outstanding orator and mobiliser of people, a charismatic leader.
Once, in February 1959, when I was driving from Singapore to Fraser’s Hill, a
seven-hour drive, I had listened to a broadcast as he addressed several hundred
thousand Indonesians in central Java. I had tuned in at 8:30 am, then lost him for
long periods because radio reception in a moving car was erratic. But three hours
later, when I was in Malacca, he was still in full flow – a beautiful voice, so
expressive that he had the crowds roaring and shouting with him. I had therefore
looked forward to meeting the great man in person.
Sukarno did most of the talking for some 20 minutes. He spoke in Bahasa
Indonesia, which is similar to Malay. He asked, “How big is your population?”
“One and a half million,” I replied. He had 100 million. “How many cars do you
have?” “About 10,000,” I said. Jakarta had 50,000. I was puzzled but readily
conceded that he occupied first place in Southeast Asia in terms of size. Then he
expounded his political system of “guided democracy”. The Indonesian people
wanted to revolutionise everything, including their economy and culture:
Western democracy was “not very suitable” for them. He had said this in so
many speeches before; I was disappointed by the insubstantial conversation.
The Dutch had not left many trained Indonesian administrators and
professionals; there were few institutions that could carry the country forward,
and three and half years of Japanese occupation had wrecked whatever
administration there was. Then the fighting between the Indonesian nationalists
and the Dutch, which recurred intermittently between 1945 and 1949, when the
Dutch finally conceded independence, had further damaged the economy and
weakened the infrastructure. Nationalisation of foreign enterprises and a
nationalistic economic policy under Sukarno discouraged foreign trade and
investments and impoverished this vast, sprawling republic.
We stayed at the Hotel des Indes in Jakarta, the equivalent of Raffles Hotel
in Singapore. Alas, when it rained the roof leaked and as a matter of routine the
staff immediately produced basins and pails to catch the dripping water. When I
unthinkingly pulled the door of my bedroom to close it, not realising that it had
been latched to the wall, the plaster came away with the catch for the latch.
When I came back that afternoon, the damage had been repaired – with a piece
of paper that had been pasted over it and whitewashed.
When I asked Lee Khoon Choy, then parliamentary secretary at the ministry
of culture, to buy me a few Indonesian-English and English-Indonesian
dictionaries, they cost less than two dollars each. Many shops were nearly
stripped of dictionaries by members of my Singapore party who bought them for
friends learning Malay. The Indonesian rupiah was in a parlous state as a result
of inflation.
From Jakarta we drove in a motorcade with motorcycle escorts to Bogor,
formerly the summer resort of the Dutch governor-general, and then on to
Bandung. From there we flew to Jogjakarta, an ancient capital in central Java, in
the president’s personal twin-propeller aircraft, a gift from the government of the
Soviet Union, bigger than the commercial DC-3 I had flown in. The clock above
the aisle had stopped, shaking my confidence in Russian technology and
Indonesian maintenance. If that could happen to a clock on the presidential
plane, what about moving engine parts?
Before my departure I issued a joint statement with Prime Minister Djuanda
on trade and cultural matters. We had had several talks since he received me at
Jakarta airport. He was an excellent man – able, highly educated, realistic and
resigned to the difficulties of his country. We had spoken for hours, sometimes
in Bahasa Indonesia. During one exchange over dinner I remarked that Indonesia
was blessed with very fertile soil, a favourable climate and abundant resources.
He looked at me sadly and said, “God is for us, but we are against ourselves.” I
felt I could do business with a man of such honesty and sincerity. I left feeling
that we had become friends. I could speak Malay and was to him more like an
Indonesian
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