Indonesia: Independent in the Cold War

Abstract

in December, 1949 Indonesia formally attained independence at the conclusion of the Round Table Conference in the Hague, the young Republic was in a state of near chaos. Security and ordered government were virtually non-existent beyond the urban coastal areas. Gangs of bandits, some of them veterans of the Republican army, religious fanatics seeking to establish an Islamic theocracy, remnants of the former Dutch colonial army and hordes of refugees and migrants seeking the safety of towns roamed the country side, extortion, murder and unrest following in their paths. Economically the country was perhaps worse off than at any other time in its history. External trade stood virtually still and since Indonesia traditionally depended heavily upon the export of raw agricultural and mineral goods and the import of capital and durable consumer commodities her economy was in a state of near collapse. Banking and the carefully built internal demand patterns had all but disappeared, production had reverted to a local subsistence basis, while cash crops had either been appropriated by the Republican Government to strengthen its financial reserves or had been destroyed by the ravages of war. Already during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia the communication and transportation plant had become badly disjointed; during the revolutionary period it virtually ceased to operate. The great capital gains of Indonesia in the colonial period, the bridges, highways, irrigation projects, agricultural experiment stations, etc. were either destroyed or so incapacitated that it would take years to rebuild them. Inflation had hit the country ever since the second world war ; in the aftermath of the revolution it reached fantastic proportions. And overall hovered the dangers of illiteracy, social chaos and the decline of the traditional order, and last but not least the problem of how to bring a sense of national and perhaps cultural unity to the scores of divers peoples, communities, tribes, clans and village organizations stretching from one end of the Archipelago to the other. Indonesia's foreign policy has been based first of all on a recognition of these internal problems. All Indonesian parties have stressed the primacy of rebuilding the country upon a firm national foundation and, with the exception of the Stalinists, have voiced the need for an independent foreign policy. Internal security, the building of sterling