In the 15th century, when the Renaissance was just pulling Europe from the Middle Ages, the islands of Java and Sumatra already had a 1,000-year heritage of advanced civilization, which spanned two major empires. During the 7th-14th centuries, the Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya flourished on Sumatra. At its peak, the Indianized Srivijaya Empire reached as far as West Java and the Malay Peninsula. By the 14th century also, the Hindu Kingdom of Majapahit had risen in eastern Java. Gadjah Mada, the chief minister who virtually ruled the empire from 1331-64, succeeded in gaining allegiance from most of what is now modern Indonesia and much of the Malay archipelago as well. Legacies from Gadjah Mada's time include a codification of law and an epic poem.
Islam arrived in Indonesia in the 12th century and had almost wholly supplanted Hinduism by the end of the 16th century in Java and Sumatra. Bali, however, retains its Hindu heritage to this day. In the eastern archipelago, both Christian and Islamic proselytizing took place in the 16th and 17th centuries and, currently, there are large communities of both religions on these islands. The Islamization of Indonesia was, in general, a process of gradual assimilation rather than violent conquest.
Beginning in 1602 the Dutch, exploiting the weakness of the fragmented small kingdoms that were the heirs of Majapahit, slowly established themselves as rulers of all the islands of present-day Indonesia, except the eastern half of the island of Timor, which Portuguese authorities occupied until 1975. During their 300-year rule (interrupted only by a brief British interregnum during the Napoleonic period), the Dutch developed the Netherlands East Indies into one of the world's richest colonial possessions.
The Indonesian independence movement began during the first decade of the 20th century and expanded rapidly between the two World Wars. Its leaders came from a small group of young professional men and students, some of whom had been educated in the Netherlands. Many were imprisoned for their political activities, including Indonesia's first president, Sukarno.
The Japanese occupied Indonesia for 3 years during World War II and, for their own purposes, encouraged a nationalist movement. Many Indonesians took up positions in the civil administration, which had been closed to all but token ruling nobles under the Dutch. On August 17, 1945, 3 days after the Japanese surrender, a small group of Indonesians, led by Sukarno, proclaimed independence and established the Republic of Indonesia. Dutch efforts to reestablish complete control met strong resistance from the new republic. After 4 years of warfare and negotiations, the Dutch transferred sovereignty to a federal Indonesian entity in 1949. U.S. diplomatic efforts were instrumental in helping Indonesia to achieve independence. In 1950, Indonesia became the 60th member of the United Nations.
At the time of independence, the Dutch retained control over the western half of New Guinea, known as West Irian. Negotiations with the Dutch on the incorporation of West Irian into Indonesia failed, and armed clashes broke out between Indonesian and Dutch troops in 1961. In August 1962, the two sides reached an agreement, and Indonesia assumed administrative responsibility for West Irian on May 1, 1963. An Act of Free Choice, held in West Irian under UN supervision in 1969, confirmed the transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia.
For more than four centuries, until 1975, East Timor was a Portuguese colony. As a result of political events in Portugal, Portuguese authorities abruptly withdrew from Timor in 1975, exacerbating power struggles among several Timorese political factions. An avowedly Marxist faction called "Fretilin" achieved military superiority. Fretilin's ascent in an area contiguous to Indonesian territory alarmed the Indonesian Government, which regarded it as a threatening movement. Following appeals from some of Fretilin's Timorese opponents, Indonesian military forces intervened in East Timor and overcame Fretilin's regular forces. Indonesia declared East Timor its 27th province in 1976.
Shortly after hostilities with the Dutch ended in 1949, Indonesia adopted a new constitution providing for a parliamentary system of government in which the executive was chosen by and made responsible to parliament. Parliament was divided among many political parties before and after the country's first nationwide election in 1955, and stable governmental coalitions were difficult to attain. Unsuccessful rebellions in Sumatra, Sulawesi, and other islands beginning in 1958 and a long succession of short-lived national governments discredited the parliamentary system so that President Sukarno met little opposition when, in 1959, he reinstated by decree the 1945 constitution, which provided for broad presidential authority.
During the early 1960s, President Sukarno moved rapidly to impose an authoritarian regime under the label of "Guided Democracy." Concurrently, he pushed Indonesia's foreign policy toward what became, after the 1955 meeting in the Indonesian city of Bandung, the Nonaligned Movement. He closely worked with Asian communist states and increasingly favored the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in domestic affairs.
By 1965, the PKI controlled many of the mass organizations that Sukarno had established to mobilize support for his regime and, with Sukarno's acquiescence, embarked on a campaign to establish a "fifth armed force" to arm its supporters. Army leaders resisted this campaign. On October 1, 1965, PKI sympathizers within the military, including elements from Sukarno's palace guards, occupied key locations in Jakarta and kidnapped and murdered six senior generals.
The army liquidated the plotters within a few days, but unsettled conditions persisted through 1966. Violence swept throughout Indonesia. Rightist gangs killed tens of thousands, perhaps more than 100,000 alleged communists in rural areas. The violence was especially brutal in Java and Bali. The emotions created by this crisis persist today.
After the failed coup, President Sukarno vainly attempted to restore his political position and shift the country back to its pre-October 1965 position. Although he remained president, in March 1966, Sukarno had to transfer key political and military powers to Gen. Soeharto, the officer who had rallied the military to defeat the coup attempt. In March 1967, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) named Gen. Soeharto acting president. Sukarno ceased to be a political force and lived quietly until his death in 1970.
President Soeharto proclaimed a "New Order" in Indonesian politics and dramatically shifted foreign and domestic policies away from the course of the final years of Sukarno's government. The New Order set economic rehabilitation and development as its primary goals and pursued its policies through an administrative structure dominated by the military but with advice from Western-educated economic experts.
In 1968, the MPR formally elected Soeharto to a full-year term as president, and he was reelected to additional 5-year terms in 1973, 1978, 1983, and 1988. Parliamentary elections held in 1987 gave a 73% majority to Golkar, a federation of groups--civil servants, youth, labor, farmers, and women--which, in effect, operates as a government political party.
Current Political Conditions
Indonesia is a republic based on the 1945 constitution providing for a limited separation of executive, legislative, and judicial power. The president, elected for a 5-year term, is the overwhelmingly dominant government and political figure.
The president appoints the cabinet, currently composed of three coordinating ministers (in the fields of political and security affairs, economic affairs, and people's welfare), 8 state ministers, 20 ministers, and 6 junior ministers, and 3 high-ranking nonministerial figures.
Although constitutionally the judiciary is a separate branch of government, in practice, judges are employees of, and beholden to, the executive branch.
Legislative authority is divided between the House of Representatives (DPR) and the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), both renewed every 5 years. The House, with 400 elected and 100 appointed members, performs legislative functions, although not in the manner of similar bodies in Western democratic systems. The MPR, consisting of the House plus an equal number of appointed members, meets only once in its 5-year term, to formulate the overall principles and aims of the government and to elect the president and vice president. Representative bodies at all levels in Indonesia shun voting, preferring to arrive at decisions through "consultation and consensus."
The party system reflects the Soeharto government's determination to shift the political focus from Indonesia's deep ethnic and religious differences, which caused the collapse of an earlier experiment in parliamentary democracy, to an authoritarian, program-based, development-oriented politics. In 1973, a large number of disparate parties, some representing ethnic and religious constituencies, were amalgamated into two new organization--the United Development Party (PPP), composed of various Muslim groups; and the Indonesian Democracy Party (PDI), composed of Christian, socialist, and nationalist elements. Appointed parliamentary members from the military and the government Golkar organization dominate the House and the MPR.
The armed forces have shaped and staffed Soeharto's New Order since it came to power in the wake of the abortive 1965 uprising. Military officers, especially from the army, have been key advisers to Soeharto and have great influence on policy. Under the dwi fungsi (dual function) concept, military officers serve in the civilian bureaucracy at all government levels.
Indonesia is divided into 27 provinces and subdivided into 246 districts and 55 municipalities. The governors of provinces are appointed by the president from nominees submitted by the provincial legislatures. The executive branch also may reject all of a provincial legislature's nominees and request it to submit a new list of candidates.
Source: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, April 1989.