Mohammad Hatta: Indonesian politician

born Aug. 12, 1902, Bukittinggi, Sumatra, Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia] died March 14, l980, Jakarta, Indon.

a leader of the Indonesian independence movement who was prime minister (1948–50) and vice president (1950–56) of Indonesia.

While he studied in The Netherlands from 1922 to 1932, he was president of the Perhimpunan Indonesia (Indonesian Union), a progressive, nationalist political group founded by overseas Indonesian students. Returning to the Dutch East Indies in 1932, Hatta was arrested for his political activities by the Dutch in 1934 and sent to the infamous concentration camp of Boven Digul in West New Guinea. In 1935 he was exiled to the island of Bandanaira, where he remained until the eve of the Japanese invasion in World War II.

In contrast to the Dutch, the Japanese actively promoted Indonesian nationalism. Hatta and Sukarno, the future president of Indonesia, collaborated with them in establishing numerous Indonesian mass organizations; in 1943 they helped to organize the Japanese-sponsored home defense corps Sukarela Tentara Pembela Tanah Air (Peta), the first Indonesian armed force. When it became clear that the Japanese would lose the war, however, many nationalists urged an insurrection and immediate independence, but Hatta advised patience until they were sure that the Japanese would surrender. On Aug. 17, 1945, he and Sukarno were kidnapped by members of the students’ union and persuaded to declare Indonesian independence. Hatta served as vice president in the subsequent revolutionary government. In 1948, when he was prime minister, he played an important part in the suppression of the communist revolt at Madiun in eastern Java, a measure that gained the struggling government many supporters in Western countries. He led the Indonesian delegation at the United Nations-sponsored Hague Conference (Aug. 23–Nov. 2, 1949) that culminated in the recognition by The Netherlands of Indonesia’s complete independence. While serving as prime minister during the first seven months of 1950, he helped to guide the new country through a crucial period of transition from a federal to a unified state.

Hatta served as vice president until December 1956, when he resigned because of increasing disagreement with President Sukarno’s policy of “guided democracy.” Essentially a moderate, administratively oriented leader, Hatta felt that dealing with Indonesia’s grave economic crises was of primary importance and feared that Sukarno’s policies would bankrupt the country. He was also consistently critical of Sukarno’s anti-Western and anti-Malaysian foreign policy. After Sukarno’s downfall, Hatta came out of retirement to serve as special adviser to President Suharto on the problem of government corruption.

One of Indonesia’s leading economists, Hatta is known as the “father of the Indonesian cooperative movement.” His writings include The Co-operative Movement in Indonesia (1957), “Indonesia between the Power Blocs,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 36 (1958), and Past and Future (1960).

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Mohammad Hatta: Indonesia's other hero of independence was a leader of quiet strength

By Emil Salim

Indonesia's struggle for independence is typically identified with one larger-than-life figure: the irrepressible Sukarno—proud, charismatic, a firebrand orator, but also capricious and wont to personal mood shifts that would jostle the country. While Sukarno was the flamboyant face of the fight to liberate Indonesia from Dutch rule, he was only one-half of a tandem that was a study in contrasts. Sukarno's cohort was Mohammad Hatta, studiously humble, deeply Muslim yet open to all faiths, and unfailingly direct. Indonesians may worship Sukarno, Indonesia's first President, but they love his former deputy Hatta, not just for what he did for his country but for what he, rather than Sukarno, still represents. Today, 26 years after his death, Hatta remains a symbol of what Indonesia aspired to become but has yet to fully achieve: an egalitarian and tolerant land with dignity for all.

That was Hatta's goal, and the path to it first required shaking off the colonial yoke. Hatta was born on Sumatra in 1902, but moved to the Netherlands as a student in 1921 and spent more than a decade there. During that period, he created the Indonesian Association in the Netherlands, at a time when just saying the name Indonesia was a radical act (the Dutch called the archipelago Netherlands Indie). He launched a "non-cooperation" campaign in the Netherlands, which drew the attention of nationalists in Indonesia like Sukarno. In 1927, the Dutch imprisoned Hatta for being antigovernment. The charges didn't stick; Hatta was released and went back to his studies in Rotterdam. He returned to Indonesia in 1932, organized a political movement against the Dutch, and spent eight of the next 10 years in jail. When the Japanese ousted the Dutch in 1942, Hatta was freed because the Japanese wanted his and Sukarno's help to run the sprawling archipelago. They went along, all the while putting together a shadow administration for the day the Japanese would themselves surrender. In the run-up to independence in August 1945, Hatta persuaded Islamic leaders to drop their demand that the President had to be Muslim and that shari'a law be enacted for Muslim citizens, and enshrined in the constitution the recognition of other religions and the rights to assembly and expression.

Ten years later, Hatta broke with Sukarno. I was a student leader at the time and he gave me and 11 of my associates the news firsthand on the verandah of his official residence in Jakarta. Hatta opposed Sukarno's increasing authoritarianism and his strategy of playing off nationalists, communists, Islamists and the military against one another—which Hatta believed would bring the nation grief. It did. In 1965, a major-general called Suharto used the chaos created by such intrigue to seize power in a bloody coup—some half a million people died—to prevent an alleged communist takeover.

Hatta went on to teach economics and politics at a university in Yogyakarta, but continued to criticize policies he felt were detrimental to Indonesia, under both Sukarno and Suharto. He spoke out against corruption, poor governance, a weak judiciary, the gap between rich and poor. Today, Indonesia has progressed on all these fronts, but not so far as to be able to do without a Hatta. When he died in 1980 at the age of 77, he was buried not in the Heroes Cemetery in Jakarta but, as he requested, a few kilometers away in a common graveyard. I remember watching as thousands lined up, with tears in their eyes, to pay their respects to the country's first truly democratic leader.

Emil Salim, a former Indonesian cabinet minister, led the team that published the Complete Writings of Bung Hatta

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