Managing Indonesia's Transformation: An Oral History

An Oral History

Ginandjar Kartasasmita

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9789814405409
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Managing Indonesia's Transformation: An Oral History is an account of Ginandjar Kartasasmita's career in the Indonesian government, both under President Suharto and in the post-Suharto era. Based on all the ministerial positions in which Kartasasmita has served the government, the book provides readers candid insights into the domestic and international political and economic contexts in which decisions were made, and how policies were formulated and implemented in Indonesia.

The book contains many hours of interviews in which the author responds — as frankly as he can — to all sorts of questions from a group of scholars and specialists working on Indonesian politics and political economy, with the understanding that the book is for those who want to understand Indonesian politics, both past and present.

Contents:

• Early Years
• Rising with Sudharmono: 1965–1983
• The Year of 1988
• Toward the MPR in 1998: Indonesia in Crisis
• The Habibie Presidency
• From Habibie to Wahid
• Megawati's Presidency and the 2004 Elections: Towards Consociational Democracy?
• SBY and the Dilemma of a Multiparty Presidential System
• Challenges Ahead, International Footprints, and If …

Readership: Academics, undergraduates and graduates, and policy-makers in Asian politics and international relations.

Chapter 1

Early Years

Family Background

Q: Could you tell us about your family background? We understand you come from Sundanese aristocracy.

GK: Sundanese aristocracy is different from Javanese aristocracy. In Central Java, the Dutch maintained small kingdoms. There were four of them, which were related to each other in the sense that they shared a common ancestry, going back to the first Islamic kingdom in Java, Demak. This of course emerged after the fall of the last Hindu kingdom in East Java, Maj- apahit. In West Java, however, they abolished all the royalties, although in Cirebon some form of aristocracy was allowed to exist by the colonial rulers. But in West Java there were descendants from earlier aristocracies. My mother came from Sumedang and my father from Ciamis, the area where the old Sundanese Kingdom of Galuh was located. Most old families in West Java trace their ancestry back to the Kingdom of Pajajaran, the last Hindu kingdom in West Java, in which Siliwangi was the most famous and most revered king. He was the last Hindu King of Pajajaran.

Although we belong to the so-called priyayi [aristocracy] class, both sides of my family mostly chose the teaching profession. My father and grandfathers were teachers. My mother, Ratjih Natawidjaja, was born in 1917, and she was also a teacher; so was her father. She became the principal of a primary school. Her father established the school for her. It was in Tanjung Sari near Sumedang. My father, Husein Kartasasmita, was born in 1907 in Parigi, Ciamis area. My father was a teacher at a sekolah dagang [trade school], which later became SMEP [Sekolah Menengah Ekonomi Pertama, or Junior Middle School of Economy]. He taught in Tasikmalaya, in a school run by Paguyuban Pasundan. Paguyuban Pasundan was established in 1913, so it is one of the oldest organizations still remaining in Indonesia. Like Muhammadiyah and Taman Siswa in Central Java, Paguyuban Pasundan had from the beginning focused on enlightening the people in West Java through education. And later it became involved in politics, with leaders like Otto Iskandar Dinata and Djuanda. Continuing the legacy of my father, I became Chairman of the Board [Dewan Pangaping] of Paguyuban Pasundan, and I am still teaching a postgraduate class at Pasundan University. Paguyuban Pasundan now runs hundreds of schools from elementary to university level in various parts of West Java and Banten, the two ethnically Sundanese provinces. My grandfather from my father’s side was also a teacher and became a Mantri Guru, some kind of school inspector during the colonial era.

My father married my mother after his first wife died. When he married my mother, he already had three children. Eventually my mother and father got divorced, as they were both very independent. Both of them were very much involved in politics. In the 1955 democratic election, my mother was elected to Jakarta’s City Council. My father also became a Member of Parliament in 1955. But they went their separate ways. After the divorce, my father remarried again. My mother had six children with my father and never remarried. We gained another brother from our stepmother. But my father did not practice polygamy.

My uncle, Pak Didi [Kartasasmita], chose the military profession. My uncle was sent to Breda in Holland to study at the Dutch Military Academy. In those days, to be sent to Breda, you had to qualify for it and you had to have a correct family lineage. Not everybody could go there. He returned home to become an officer in the Dutch [East Indies] army in Indonesia. And when the Japanese came, he just disappeared. He hid himself. Nobody knew his activities, or what he was doing. And then, after the Japanese surrendered, together with other officers he founded an army unit based in West Java, the famous Siliwangi Division [Divisi Siliwangi]. During the war of independence, he was Commander of the Java Regional Military Command [Komandemen Jawa] of the fledgling Indonesian Army. My eldest brother Sabana also studied in Holland in the 1950s. But when our relationship with the Dutch became bad, he moved to Germany and graduated there. He earned a doctorate in economics from Aachen University. That is the university where [future President] Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie also studied. So he went to the same school as Habibie. They were friends there.

My number two sister, Halimah, is an ordinary housewife. My number three sister, Hasanah, also studied in Germany. She later married a prosecutor in the Attorney General’s Office. I was the fourth child, the first son for my mother. The fifth sibling, who is my younger brother, studied engineering in Czechoslovakia. This is Agus Gurlaya. He rose to become one of the Chairmen of KADIN, the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He also served as Chairman of GAPENSI , the Indonesian Contractors Association. He was in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. While I was sent to Japan, he went to Czechoslovakia. My younger sister Resa, number six, also studied in Czechoslovakia. She got her master’s degree in mineral science and later worked for the Ministry of Mines and Energy in the research division. Another sister, number seven, Gunariah, studied in Japan. I think she is also well known among the Japanese. She served as a Member of Parliament for 12 years and speaks fluent Japanese. She went to Japan after I left for home. Another sister, Etna, studied dentistry at the University of Indonesia. Etna also got a master’s degree in dental physiology. My youngest sister, Yayang, is also just an ordinary housewife. And the youngest, my stepbrother, Dadang, was trained as a lawyer. He also graduated from the University of Indonesia. We thank our parents for giving us sufficient education.

Going back to Sabana, my eldest brother, after graduation he joined PT Timah, the Indonesian state-owned tin company, which was very important in those days. He rose to become one of the directors in PT Timah. And then Habibie recruited him to become one of his assistants in the Ministry of Research and Technology. He was later appointed as a member of Dewan Pertimbangan Agung, the Supreme Advisory Council. He also served as the first Secretary General of Indonesia’s Academy of Sciences for five years, with Widjojo [Nitisastro] who served as its first Chairman. Subsequently he was sent as Ambassador to Belgium. He retired as an ambassador, but he was always a scientist at heart. Afterwards he was appointed as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Bank Mandiri, the state bank that was a merger of four state banks.

My cousin Indra, the son of Pak Didi, is very active in PERSADA, the Association of Indonesian Alumni from Japan. He studied at Doshi- sha University, in one of its graduate schools, in Kyoto, and through my father received a scholarship from Pertamina, the Indonesian national oil company. He returned home earlier than me, worked for Pertamina, and rose to become the Director of Shipping. He then met his future wife, and she introduced me to my future wife. Both of them were working as flight attendants with Garuda. We got married in 1966. I was a first lieutenant in the Air Force then. We dated for only nine months, less than a year. She also comes from a nationalist family. Her family is associated with the Bandung aristocracy. Her aunt was married to Male Wiranatakusumah , the son of the Bupati [Regent] of Bandung who would later join Sukarno’s revolutionary government as a minister. He was the last Wiranatakusumah who served as Bupati of Bandung. So my wife is from Bandung, and I am from Sumedang and Ciamis. We are both true-blooded Sundanese, and to be very frank we are very proud of it.

I have four children. The eldest is Gita. She studied in Boston. She got her college degree there, and her husband also studied in Boston. Her husband Riza got a scholarship from Freeport, so after graduation he worked for Freeport. My daughter Gita has her own small enterprises. Her younger brother, Agus Gumiwang, also studied in Boston. He later took his master’s degree at Pasundan University and his doctorate from Padjadjaran University, both located in Bandung. He is a Member of Parliament representing the Bandung District [kabupaten] and one of the Vice Chairmen of Golkar. He is currently the Vice Chairman of Parliamentary Committee I, responsible for foreign affairs, defense, intelligence, and communication. My third son, Galih, also studied in Boston. After graduation he worked for a while for the Bakrie & Brothers company, before joining a group of companies run by his father-in-law mostly involved in resource-based businesses such as coal mining and food industry. Besides that, he is also working on his own environmentally related projects, such as waste disposal and green energy. My family tries to stay away from government projects, because we know how potentially corrupt such businesses are. My fourth child, Gaya, at present is studying at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, in Beppu, Kyushu. She is the only one among my children to have studied in Japan; the others studied in the US. My family uses the letter “G” to denote that we came from Galuh. As I mentioned, Galuh was the name of an old kingdom in the eastern part of West Java. So I am Ginandjar, and my brother and sisters are Gurlaya and Garnasih, Gunariah, Giatna, and Gilang. And my children also have names beginning with “G”: Gita, Gumiwang, Galih, and Gaya. It is a tradition that we maintain. My grandfather’s name was Gurbana.

My mother used to tell me stories about patriotism and idealism. She once told me that when she was young she heard stories about the lady fighter who was exiled to Sumedang. It was Cut Nyak Dien, who was blind and who was exiled by the Dutch to Sumedang from Aceh. She was cared for by my mother’s extended family. She taught Koranic reading. She was buried in the cemetery in Sumedang reserved for local aristocracy and dignitaries. Acehnese people come to visit the place a lot, so our relationship with Acehnese people is quite close. My great-grandfather was also buried there, as were a lot of our other relatives. But the direct family from my mother’s side has their own family cemetery in another part of the city of Sumedang. On my father’s side, we also have a family cemetery in the city of Banjar, which used to be part of the regency of Ciamis, next to the Heroes’ Cemetery [Makam Pahlawan]. My family has always been very political, very idealistic. There is a nationalist strain in us all, but we are also religious in the sense that we practice and value Islam in our daily lives, even though we do not belong to any religious group.

Q: Could you tell us more about the history of your family?

GK: I do not know much about what happened during the Dutch colonial time, except that my grandfather from my mother’s side was barred from teaching because he was accused of imbuing his students with nationalistic ideas. It was regarded as a crime of sedition at that time. Luckily he was not put in jail. But during the Japanese occupation, my father was arrested by the Japanese military police, the much-feared Kempeitai. Three Kempeitai officers came to our house, and ransacked the house to find some secret documents and an illegal radio that my father was accused of keeping. It was a wartime crime carrying capital punishment. I do not remember the incident very clearly because when it happened I was barely three years old. My father was held in prison for almost three years. He was freed five days after Indonesia’s proclamation of independence on August 17, 1945. He was spared from execution thanks to independence.

It was a very difficult time for our family. The Japanese occupation brought hardship to all of Indonesia and Indonesian people, but to our family it was more painful because of my father’s arrest. My mother had to earn a living for herself and her two sons, while taking care of her pregnancy for the third child. She was a tough lady. She survived the three years of hardship on her own. I not only love my mother, but admire and worship her.

After independence, my father and mother were involved in the struggle against the returning Dutch occupation army, supported by the victorious allies. My father worked at the Ministry of Defense as a civilian official. From independence until 1959, the military was under civilian authority. My mother was very much occupied with the Indonesian Red Cross. The Minister of Defense at that time was Aruji Kartawinata, another Sundanese and an old friend of the family. He was also one of the early leading figures in Divisi Siliwangi. We had to move from one place to another during the years of the war of independence. So when the capital of the young Republic moved to Yogyakarta in 1946, our family also moved there. We experienced the Dutch military strikes against Yogyakarta, known as Clash I in 1947 and Clash II in 1948. When the Dutch occupied Yogyakarta, our family had to leave the city together with the Indonesian military units who were ordered to evacuate the city and to wage guerilla warfare from the countryside. On the way out of the city, I watched the Dutch Air Force flying over our sky, bombarding the Maguwo [Yogyakarta] military airfield. At that moment, I decided that I wanted to become an Air Force pilot. My brother Sabana took up arms and joined the students’ paramilitary unit, Tentara Pelajar.

At this juncture, I need to tell you about a painful experience I had to go through. When my father first arrived in Yogyakarta, he had no accommodation for his family, so the children were left behind with his relatives. Because there were six of us, we were split between two families, in Situbatu and Banjar, in the southeastern part of kabupaten [regency] Ciamis. The children from my mother were entrusted to the family in Situbatu. My mother divided her time between us and my father in Yogyakarta. One day, when I was five years old, I broke my leg while playing with other children. It was a serious injury which needed to be addressed properly, and the nearest hospital was in Tasikmalaya, a hub town for that area 60 kilometers away. So I was transported by a horse cart there. You can imagine how long it took for the horse cart to cover the distance. You can also imagine how painful it was. It was during wartime, so everything was in shortage including medical supplies. They had to bore my leg and put pins there and hang my leg up for three whole weeks. And then because I had to continuously lie on my back, it became infected. It was an excruciatingly painful and uncomfortable time. My morale was raised when my mother came from Yogyakarta and stayed with me until I recovered. The accident left a lasting mark on me, a slight limp. Luckily I was still young, so over time my bones corrected themselves. So although I have a limp, and my right leg is shorter than my left leg by about two to three centimeters, it is not that visible. After my father had secured a house in Yogyakarta, we all went to join him there.

While we were in Yogyakarta, the Siliwangi Division from West Java was ordered to leave the province and moved to Yogyakarta, in the famous “long march.” During their stay in the provisional capital city of the Republic, our house became a home away from home for the young men from the Division. Officers and soldiers who had not found accommodation in the city often stayed at our house. I remember names like Mokoginta, Hidayat, Ahmad Sukarmadijaja, and many others who used to be guests in our house. There was a time when there were around 30 people staying at our house. Just imagine the logistics that my mother had to prepare for them. During those days, there were these “public kitchens” [dapur umum] where people provided food for the soldiers. It was an exciting time for me, because I had the chance to hear stories about their exploits on the front line. I was awed by their heroism. These were young men who had to leave their homes because they had been ordered to empty the resistance pockets as part of the ceasefire agreement with the Dutch. They were not happy, but they accepted it as a military order. But actually, their presence in Yogyakarta at that fateful moment was a blessing for the Republic. It was the Siliwangi Division who saved the nation when the communists staged a rebellion in Madiun in 1948. I heard a lot of talk about the atrocities inflicted by the communists on the population and witnessed the move of the Siliwangi troops to quell the rebellion in Madiun.

Eventually, the Siliwangi Division was ordered to return to West Java. Upon arriving at their home province, they had to face a new enemy: the Islamist extremists that had filled the vacuum left by their absence. They had declared the Indonesian Islamic State, Negara Islam Indonesia or Darul Islam [State of Islam], with their own Islamic Army, Tentara Islam Indonesia. Three regions in Indonesia were most inflicted by this rebellion: West Java, South Sulawesi, and Aceh. In West Java, their strongholds were in the mountainous area of East Priangan, which was where our family came from. This conflict affected our family very much. We knew some relatives who belonged to this movement, but most of our family remained loyal to the Republic. Thus began another conflict which would take a long time to resolve and with tremendous loss of lives and property.

In Yogyakarta, I started to attend primary school which was often interrupted by the continuing conflicts. And then, following the Siliwangi Division, we returned to West Java in 1949. Although the war was still going on, it was gradually subsiding, culminating in the Round Table Conference held in the capital city of the Netherlands, The Hague, in December 1949, whereby the Dutch government recognized our independence. We returned to West Java via Semarang, flying on an airplane courtesy of the military. That was the first time I had flown on an airplane. After returning to West Java, we still moved from one place to another before eventually settling down, and my family made permanent residence in Jakarta.

Q: How about your education?

GK: Because my family had to move from place to place, I also had to move from one school to another. Even in Jakarta we moved from a temporary accommodation, a pension — it was like an extended-stay hotel — on Jalan [Street] Majapahit, to a temporary house on Jalan Tamansari in the eastern part of Jakarta, before finally settling down in a more permanent house. As they were already separated, my parents each had their own house — my mother had a house on Jalan Tanah Tinggi and my father on Jalan Telukbetung, in the central Menteng area. So even in Jakarta I still had to move from one school to another before finally finishing my primary education at a Catholic school, Van Lith. And then my parents sent me to another Catholic school for my secondary education. I spent six years in Junior [Sekolah Menengah Pertama (SMP)] and Senior [Sekolah Menengah Atas (SMA)] High School in Canisius College run by the Jesuits. They also had boarding facilities. I spent the first year living in the dormitory.

It was a male-only school. When I entered the school in 1953, it was still managed by Dutch pastors and there were still even some Dutch teachers. Most students, many of them of Chinese origin, spoke Dutch. So in the beginning, I, having just come in from the front line where people were talking about atrocities by the Dutch colonial army...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreward
• Contents
• Introdution
• Chapter 1 Early Years
• Chapter 2 Rising with Sudharmono: 1965-1983
• Chapter 3 The Year of 1988
• Chapter 4 Toward the Mpr in 1998: Indonesia in Crisis
• Chapter 5 The Habibie Presidency
• Chapter 6 From Habibie to Wahid
• Chapter 7 Megawati’s Presidency and the 2004 Elections: Towards Consociational Democracy?
• Chapter 8 Sby and the Dilemma of a Multiparty Presidential System
• Chapter 9 Challenges Ahead, International Footprints, and If …
• Index
• About the Author