Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: Indonesia, a Nation-State in Séarch of Identity and StructureAfter almost fifty-six years of independence, Indonesian society seems more divided than ever.*The word 'seems' is appropriate here since, although the separatist movements at the end of the nineteen fifties and the dreadful massacres of political opponents in the mid-sixties were larger in scale and cut deeper than the present social crisis -notwithstanding the present violencethis crisis is experienced as a kristal, or total crisis.One can say that perhaps the memory of those two awful periods in the past even acts as a restraint on the actions of the elite today.J Adam Schwartz's seminal work on Suharto's New Order, first published in 1994 and updated in 1999 in a third edition covering the shift in power of May 1998, bore the interesting, optimistic title A Nation in Waiting.In 2001, KITLV Press published a voluminous work by Kees van Dijk in which the developments of the past three years are discussed under the title A Country in Despair.It would be logical to complete the sequence in the same vein by This article is a translation of the slightly revised text of an address given at the annual members' meeting of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology in Leiden on 19 May 2001.The developments after May 19th, as far as relevant, will be described in the footnotes on the basis of a working visit to Indonesia in June and July 2001.I will very briefly address the question of the significance of the change of president in Indonesia at the end of July 2001 and of President Megawati's new cabinet in relation to the theme of this address -the search for identity and structure -in the epilogue, written on 17 August 2001.1 Apart from some terrorist bomb attacks in Jakarta in July, the shift in power was the first one to take place unattended by violence.This is partly because former President Wahid had publicly announced his intention of issuing a decree proclaiming a state of emergency long before, as a result of which his political opponents were prepared for anything.Furthermore, Wahid had repeatedly given explicit orders for the mass of his NU supporters to remain in East Java and refrain from acts of violence of any kind.During the weekend of July 21-22 only a few thousand kiayi gathered in Tangerang (near Jakarta) as a sign of spiritual support for their president, Wahid.
Author: Nico Schulte Nordholt
Language: Dutch
Topic: Asian Studies and History
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2067887692