Read an Excerpt
A New Criminal Type in Jakarta
Counter-Revolution Today
By James T. Siegel Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8251-5
CHAPTER 1
Illegitimacy and "The People"
In the Adat [customary] law even an illegitimate child can become an heir. —Kijaji R. H. Moh. Adnan
In his Autobiography: As Told to Cindy Adams (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1965) President Sukarno speaks of his youth; he tells how poor his family was. His father could not afford a midwife. Then he leaps forward in time to speak of the rumor about his birth that circulated after he became prominent and that one could still hear in 1965. He says they say:
"He is the illegitimate son of a Dutch planter who made love with a native peasant in the field, then farmed the baby out for adoption."
Unfortunately the only witness to swear to my real father and to testify that I did, indeed, come from my true mother, not some coffee worker in the field, had long since passed away. (18–19)
It is a question of his parentage and, therefore, of his legitimacy. The story was told by the Dutch in order to claim him for themselves and thus, no doubt, to show that an opponent who could defeat them must be one of them, not a mere "native." For the Dutch who told this story, at least, Sukarno is an illegitimate Dutchman. It is a strange sort of racism that denies the Other by making him one of their own.
The story, as I remember, could be heard without much trouble in Dutch circles. But it was more widespread than that, being told also in Jakarta among certain Indonesians in the 1960s. It is interesting to speculate for a moment on the idea that the first president of the Republic of Indonesia was illegitimate. Sukarno was, in a sense, the father of the nation. The scandal, of course, is that somehow the legitimacy of the nation and the legitimacy of the president would be confused.
Mixing the legitimacy of the state and the legitimacy of the person of its president is perhaps not entirely an accident. At least that is the suggestion when one sees that in his own autobiography (also as-told-to), President Suharto concerns himself at great length with the same issue. But it takes him a while to reach it:
I have to clarify my genealogy because there is someone who wrote a falsehood in October, 1974 in a certain magazine. I ordered Dipo (G. Dwipayana) to refute this piece of writing and to circulate [the refusal] in the magazines and newspapers published in Jakarta. But a day later I ordered reporters to the Palace to my office. I wanted to clarify my genealogy myself. In front of reporters both from abroad and not, I explained that I had no noble blood. (6)
One would think that this false notion would not stimulate so much concern on the part of someone who had the affairs of the nation to take care of, particularly because it would seem only to enhance him. But not only did Suharto himself "personally" (as he emphasized) make the denial, he produced what he termed witnesses:
I presented to this collection of reporters several old people, witnesses, still living, who were well familiar with my genealogy. I am the descendant of Bapak Kertosudiro alias Kertogejo, ulu-ulu [village irrigation official] who himself did not own an inch of rice field. (6–7)
Suharto, like Sukarno, insists on his poverty, a topic to which I shall return. He is not proud of his poverty as, for instance, a U.S. politician might be. It does not indicate that he worked his way up, that he is responsible for his success himself. It is, rather, a source of shame. He writes apropos of the poverty of his parents:
I will be frank: in facing life when I was small, I suffered much that others perhaps never experienced. (7)
He confesses his poverty because it is the truth of his descent. If he is credited with noble birth, it would be dangerous. There would be a risk he feels he cannot take.
I told them, these false written reports about my genealogy could be misinterpreted or could be used as ammunition for those who want not only to hurt me but my family and forefathers and perhaps also the Indonesian state and nation. (7)
We have reached the point where the state and the person of the president are confounded, this time explicitly. The problem with being called "noble" when it is untrue is that it could be misinterpreted. There is only one direction this misinterpretation would take:
At the very least I believe that this false report could make people start to ask questions and could confuse them. In fact, this President now, what exactly is his descent? (8)
Once people start to wonder about the genealogy of the president, there is no way to control what they will think and say:
If a for and against arises, automatically each one will defend his own position and there could be controversy. (7)
The problem with controversy is that it makes trouble:
This could be a good opportunity for those who engage in subversion and carry out guerrilla activities, and could disturb national stability (8)
Suharto imagines that given the opportunity, others will think about his birth. The result is that, rather than be impressed by the favorable but untrue information already disseminated in the Indonesian press, diversity of opinion would arise. This would damage not only him, his family, and his ancestors, but the nation itself. It would provoke guerrilla action and the nation could be destabilized. It is an extraordinary train of thought and it does not end there:
In fact, we are in great need of national stability in order to develop. And I think there is even more. If this writing is true, it shows that a boy of 6 was given away by his mother just like that to a friend in Kemusuk Village. This pictures a woman without [moral] value. Automatically conflict between men and women will appear in this business of evaluation. This too can give a picture of an undesirable situation. Maybe an impression even worse than that can arise; why would a wife give away a child so young, only 6 years old; perhaps because the marriage wasn't valid. (7)
We have reached the point of illegitimacy again. And, once again, this illegitimacy will damage the nation.
Thus, if invalid [speaking of the marriage], an illegitimate child, a bastard. Wouldn't that stain the name of the nation and the state? (7)
Of course, unlike the case of Sukarno, nothing occurred. There is no gossip about Suharto's illegitimate birth, at least so far as he acknowledges. It is rather that, as he says in the following sentences, he "looks to the future" when this gossip might arise with the result that not only his "private name" [sic], his ancestors, but him "as the person who by chance has gained the trust of the people (rakyat) to be president...." I cannot finish the sentence because of Suharto's garbled syntax, but he explains that "writing like that" will be, once more, material for subversion and political guerrillas. "Because of that my genealogy has to be made clear." (8)
Illegitimacy is connected with the nation, with nationalism, and with the state. In both instances it is also connected with gossip. There seems to be no actual illegitimacy; it is merely hearsay, but, it is feared, widely circulated hearsay. It is for that reason that it is harmful to "the nation and the state" according to Suharto. He is not explicit about how this would damage the state; presumably because the people would lose confidence in him. But more is involved than that because, as I have said, he does not hear gossip; he starts simply from having read a piece about his parentage that attributes noble birth to him. When he sees his name in print and sees that he has been attributed a father who was not actually his own father, he pictures people gossiping. And when he pictures gossip, he invents what they will say and finds "them" revising his own past. National security being at stake, he sets the record straight, not only ordering an aide to do so, but doing so himself, summoning witnesses, and so on.
This is a lot of effort to head off a possibility that he seems to be the first to have envisioned. It makes one want to look further into the relation of the nation, the president, illegitimacy, and gossip. To find out more about how these connections are made we can turn back to President Sukarno. Sukarno was born of a Balinese mother and a Javanese father. He considered precisely this mixture to be typically Indonesian:
Through generations, Indonesian blood has mixed with the Indian, Arab, some pure Polynesian strain and, of course, Chinese. We are basically a Malay tribe. From the root of Ma comes Manila, Madagascar, Malaya, Madura, Maori, Himalaya. Our ancestors migrated across Asia, settled in 3,000 islands and became Balinese, Javanese, Atjehnese, Ambonese, Sumatran, and so forth. (19)
It is this mixture that defines "Indonesian"; but it is a mixture that leaves out Dutch and European. This omission is not a question of when Malay identity was formed, which might exclude the Dutch on grounds of their late arrival. But although they are not exactly coterminous with Arabs and Chinese, the Dutch arrived at nearly the same time as large numbers of Chinese.
Mixture is a source of legitimacy just so long as Europeans are not included. One might attribute this question of legitimacy to the Dutch practice of taking concubines in the Indies and the fact that acknowledgment by the father of his offspring conferred the civil status of Dutch, leaving those with Dutch fathers who refused to acknowledge them as bastards and with the civil status of their mothers ("Javanese" for instance). But even those children of mixed European and "native" couples who did not marry could acquire the status European by being acknowledged by their fathers. Paternity was linked to nation in the oldest senses of that term, by multiple means. But this meant as well that for some, nationality could indicate illegitimacy of birth. It is this, of course, that the Dutch relied on in claiming Sukarno as one of their own by his paternity while at the same time denying him because of the illegitimacy of that paternity. The same questions might arise with the birth of a child from, for instance, a Javanese mother and a Minangkabau or a Chinese father. But with the rise of nationalism precisely this possibility was legitimated while European parentage continued to imply illegitimacy. Sukarno's response to gossip that no doubt originated in the Dutch community, was to state that his father was Javanese, his mother Balinese, and to claim the very mixture as a new possibility indicating a certain protonationalism.
No sooner does Sukarno make the claim for legitimacy based on the identity of his father and mother than he implicitly raises the question of legitimacy again, this time, and more strangely, because of his mother. Sukarno's mother's father refused the request of Sukarno's father to marry his daughter. "We'll lose our daughter," Sukarno reports him as saying. So they eloped. And, Sukarno adds, elopement is part of the tradition of Balinese marriage. But:
Balinese elopement follows strict rules. Elopers spend their wedding night in the home of friends while couriers are dispatched to the bride's parents to inform them their daughter is now married. Mother and father sought refuge with the Javanese chief of police who was a friend of father's. Mother's family came to take her back, but the Police Chief said, "No, she's under my protection."
It is not our habit to haul a groom into court, but those were unusual circumstances. After all, he was a Javanese Muslim Theosophist and she a Balinese Hindu-Buddhist. When the case came up, Mother was asked, "Did this man force you against his will?" And Mother replied, "Oh no. I loved him and eloped because I wanted to."
There was no choice but to allow the marriage. Nonetheless, the court fined mother 25 seringget [sic], the equivalent of $25. Mother had inherited several gold bracelets and to pay the money she sold the ornaments.
Rightfully feeling unloved in Bali, Father applied to the Department of Education for a transfer to Java. He was sent to Surabaya and there I was born." (21; end of chapter one)
What makes Sukarno's parents legitimately married, it seems, is that they followed the wedding customs of his mother's people. But there was a certain irregularity, indicated by the fine they had to pay. As I understand Balinese adat, a couple can marry by elopement but, as Sukarno pointed out, they have to inform the bride's parents within a few days. Before that time, her parents can reclaim her. In this case, it seems that the custom was not strictly followed. It was, nonetheless, allowed by the colonial court. And allowed on the basis of a theme of nationalist stories: love. "Oh no. I loved him and eloped because I wanted to," are the words Sukarno puts into his mother's mouth as she speaks to the judge.
Love, justifying marriage by the consent of the couple even against the wishes of parents, is a theme of nationalist novels, particularly Sumatran ones, from the 1920s and 1930s. There are two effects of this love. First, the authority of parents is strictly limited. It is against their wishes that a Javanese marries a Balinese. But this coupling furthers the mixture of peoples that composes the Indonesian nation. If it is counter to one set of norms, regional or local ones, it is, nonetheless, still legitimate because it is in keeping with another set. The love of nationalists in novels is always legitimate. It ends either in marriage or, in the earlier novels in particular, in the death of the couple, or of at least one of them, because they cannot suffer that norms be broken. Nationalism and love are linked because through it, peoples are mixed and a new authority is claimed. The authority of the family is claimed by the nation. Still, this claim to a national authority ensured morality was made against an earlier, familial claim. Conflict with parental authority no doubt informed the feeling of susceptibility to being thought illegitimate of Sukarno and, we shall see, other nationalists.
I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere that the morality of nationalist love upheld against familial authority not only reclaimed familial authority for the nation but made Europeans the locus of immorality, displacing to their continent and those people the sexual freedom that might otherwise have gone into the making of the nation. As it was, the making of the Indonesian nation was a double process: the mixing of peoples we have seen, and the exclusion of some peoples, a sort of early form of not ethnic but national cleansing. Were love to be what it was in eighteenth-century France, the course of nationalism, if not the revolution, might have been different.
Family and Nation
At the beginning of this chapter is a quote taken from the transcript of a conversation on 22 July 1940, between the advisor for native affairs of the Dutch East Indies and the leader of an organization of Islamic judges. The Dutch had revised the court system giving preference to traditional systems of inheritance over Islamic law. K. H. Adnan was an opponent of these changes. He had many arguments but the one quoted, that according to traditional law even illegitimate children could inherit, was perhaps the most deeply felt. Of course, from the point of view of indigenous societies, the children considered illegitimate would not necessarily be so. The cases most troublesome for the Islamic judges were those when a child was taken into the household and afterwards became an heir even though there was no formal adoption. It seems to be this that K. H. Adnan referred to in his statement. This conflict of legitimacies is only apparent in retrospect. Before the claim by Islam, the heir would think he was entitled to what he received. Afterwards he might think that the person whom he called father was not really his father, and that he himself was, somehow, illegitimate even if all of his experience said the opposite.
That is more or less the case with Indonesian nationalists. With them it was not usually a question of inheritance but, as I have said, of the right of parents to chose marriage partners for their children. It was in the name of another law that the authority of parents was abridged without being outlawed entirely. Nationalist activity brought a sense of solidarity to peoples who before did not feel solidarity as marked by intermarriage. Even within a single group it also created a new authority allowing freedom of choice of marriage partners. The sense of illegitimacy was created precisely because a new legitimacy was pronounced. Like Islam, nationalism intruded on traditional societies in Indonesia. Its force was, in part, derived from its intrusive quality, which is to say that in local terms it was ununderstandable. Parents, for instance, were scandalized to think that they were no longer to control marriage choices of their progeny. They looked for marriage partners in the interest of the family including their children; they felt innocent of wrong doing. And yet they were labeled unenlightened by standards that began not as illumination but as something perhaps desirable but not entirely comprehensible. Even young nationalists tended to believe in the forces of enlightenment and nationalism rather than to understand them. The binding quality of nationalism, its ability to make itself felt as right and as obligatory, was tied to the sense that it was something other than one knew, that nothing within traditional society prepared one for it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A New Criminal Type in Jakarta by James T. Siegel. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
