Introduction
The Darul Islam movement, established in West Java in 1948 to contrast the Dutch occupation of the area, is well known for its transformation in 1949–50 into an anti-Republic rebellion; furthermore, its legacy of violence in pursuit of an Islamic state of Indonesia endures, albeit in different circumstances and modalities, to this day.Footnote 1 The rebellion raged for nearly 15 years, expanding in the process to other parts of Indonesia – to Central Java, South Kalimantan, South Sulawesi and AcehFootnote 2 – bringing in its wake enormous loss of life and property damage until it was concluded with S.M. Kartosuwiryo's capture and execution in 1962.Footnote 3 The rebellion has usually been interpreted in terms of the long-nurtured and fanatical attempt by its leader, Kartosuwiryo, and his followers to establish Indonesia – or at least West Java – as an Islamic state. But this explanation of just why Kartosuwiryo went into rebellion against the emerging Republic of Indonesia presents a number of problems. For more than two decades, Kartosuwiryo had been a fervent supporter of Indonesian nationalism, and he had played significant roles in the pre-war independence movement, being well known to Sukarno and other major leaders.Footnote 4 He was, moreover, a supporter of the Indonesian Republic proclaimed by Sukarno in August 1945. Why then, did he come so fiercely to contest the legitimacy of the state, the existence of which he had for so long strived?
This article proposes to analyse the development of Kartosuwiryo from nationalist to rebel by reconstructing the chain of events between 1945 and 1949, mostly based on archival sources produced by Dutch as well as Indonesian agencies as the events unfolded. Looking beyond the issue of religious fanaticism, regional separatism, foreign interests in unsettling the delicate balance of the new Republic, we propose to focus on the political and military circumstances that led Kartosuwiryo to not accommodate Sukarno's state and instead make of it the new object of his movement's violence.
In the following pages we will introduce Kartosuwiryo's early career in Sarekat Islam party, focusing on his prioritising the establishment of an independent Islamic state of Indonesia without seeking colonial co-operation, his relation to the Japanese authority, and his rise as regional leader of Masyumi in West Java. It is under this mantle that Kartosuwiryo was able to rally support and transform the local party branch into the Darul Islam-Tentara Islam Indonesia movement (DI/TII) cum army in 1948, and later establish the Islamic State of Indonesia (Negara Islam Indonesia or NII). In answering the question of how did it happen that a committed nationalist turned into rebel, the article analyses the relation between Kartosuwiryo's DI/TII and the Indonesian Republic's state and army between 1948 and 1950, identifying the key events and dynamics which allowed for the consolidation of the Darul Islam vis-à-vis the Republic.
Views of the Darul Islam
As the rebellion stretched in space and time, international scholars and local actors engaged with the dynamics which had led to the formation of the movement, its popular support, and Kartosuwiryo's leadership. As Darul Islam was from the early days of the Republic an element of concern on the domestic politics agenda, and a sensitive topic until the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, academic discussions pursued in the 1970s–1980s differ little in approach from Indonesian official publications from the 1950s–1960s, stressing the separatist intent of the rebellion and occasionally referring to its religiosity as a convenient tool to gather popular support from the Sundanese population of West Java.
In Dutch eyes, in 1948, Darul Islam was ‘an extreme religious movement, which strives for an absolute Islamic state structure in Indonesia’,Footnote 5 but already in late 1949 the press had labelled it as ‘separatist’,Footnote 6 and a few months later Van Nieuwenhuijze, a former colonial administrator, explained the movement in terms of local efforts to revive traditional patterns of authority in the wake of deep social transformations.Footnote 7 According to one official Indonesian government publication, Kartosuwiryo was merely ‘a political adventurer who always dreamed of power just for himself’, receiving support from ‘foreign’ elements, to the extent that Darul Islam was at times also read as ‘Dutch Infiltration’.Footnote 8 The historian Cornelis van Dijk interpreted the rebellion in the Marxist frame of class struggle and economic discontent emerging from badly formulated agrarian reforms, and – like the behaviouralist political scientist Karl Jackson – he argued for Kartosuwiryo's non-orthodoxy and Sufi–mystic approach to Islam as disproof of his dedication to an Islamic state.Footnote 9 In the 1970s, Indonesian army publications saw Kartosuwiryo purely as a political opportunist who took advantage of a weakened Republic in an attempt to realise his long-held dream of an Islamic state.Footnote 10 Some more balanced assessment seemed to emerge from Hiroko Horikoshi's analysis of Kartosuwiryo's leadership as a mixture of popular mysticism and uncompromising advocacy of Islamic ideals;Footnote 11 however, this perspective was not taken up by following scholars.Footnote 12 The reality, as we shall see, is more subtle and complex than these simplified views might indicate.
Kartosuwiryo and the Indonesian nation
The early years: From Dutch education to religious anti-colonialism
Kartosuwiryo's original intellectual and religious moorings were not deeply Islamic. He was the son of a minor Central Java official employed in the government opium service, and Kartosuwiryo enjoyed a protracted and privileged European-style education, eventually in medical studies, before his growing attachment to nationalist politics saw him expelled from those studies.Footnote 13 Inspired by Cokroaminoto, the charismatic leader of the Sarekat Islam movement – with whom he became well acquainted after 1927, as indeed he had been with Sukarno, a few years earlierFootnote 14 – Kartosuwiryo was drawn to engage in Islamic politics, first as a member and Surabaya branch leader of the Jong Islamieten Bond (Association of Young Muslims) and then as member (and later, executive member and party secretary)Footnote 15 of Partai Sarekat Islam (Sarekat Islam Party, later PSII – Partai Sarekat Islam Indonesia). He became Cokroaminoto's private secretary before serious illness saw him move to live with his parents-in-law in the West Java town of Malangbong, a little over 30 kilometres east of Bandung, a PSII stronghold and a region where he chose to reside and where he developed further his Islamist political thinking.Footnote 16
As PSII predominance on the political scene began to fade in the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was a shift of influence from Cokroaminoto's Islamo-socialism to Agus Salim's Islamism — which at times assumed the form of pan-Islamism. These changes were equally reflected in the party's agenda and in Kartosuwiryo's orientation.Footnote 17 For much of the 1930s, the PSII endured deep internal divisions, especially on the questions of its relationship with the more dominant secular stream of nationalism, and of its engagement with the Dutch colonial authorities. But just as the party, in the late 1930s, was beginning to follow a path of reconciliation with mainstream secular parties, Kartosuwiryo, vice-president of the party in 1936, emerged as a significant contrarian. Without formal Islamic schooling, with a poor grasp of Arabic and with little interest in international Islamic scholarship,Footnote 18 Kartosuwiryo prodded PSII towards a more explicitly Islamist and exclusionary manifestation of politics. In his view, the history of Sarekat Islam was a slow development of real Islamic consciousness which was now increasingly felt and expressed: ‘people … began to be aware of their duty, the duty to carry out pious deeds most extensively and most completely with strong conviction and faith. No obstacle will scare them, no obstruction will stop them.’Footnote 19 For Kartosuwiryo, the supreme guide to behaviour was ‘the Book of God and the sound Hadiths’; to procure a truly Islamic environment, what was necessary was ‘complete obeisance to and fulfilment of the commands of God and the Prophet by the Muslims’.Footnote 20 Strongly, if recently, influenced by local West Java religious teachers,Footnote 21 in the view of Emile Gobée, Advisor for Native Affairs, ‘certainly very intelligent’,Footnote 22 a prodigious autodidact (‘Kartosuwiryo had no hobbies apart from reading books and writing’),Footnote 23 partial to mystical and Sufistic religious ideas,Footnote 24 and a man of ascetical lifestyle,Footnote 25 by 1935 Kartosuwiryo was even more forcefully advocating that the establishment of an Islamic state should be the main goal of PSII.Footnote 26
Kartosuwiryo was never one to bend to the prevailing winds. As PSII moved to a more engaged and collaborative practice of politics in 1937, Kartosuwiryo made his position clear: the PSII was ‘a movement which works and strives for the observance of God's laws, in the way of God as God wishes, according to the example given by the prophet. The P.S.I.I. is nothing other than an Islam-party in the true sense of the word: the P.S.I.I. is a party of God.’Footnote 27 Kartosuwiryo's contradiction of the PSII's newly engaged approach to politics, notably its participation with non-Muslim parties in the push for an Indonesian parliament, and perhaps as well his mystical leanings, led to his estrangement from the party and then his expulsion, together with his close associates, in early 1940.Footnote 28 Undeterred, he established on 24 March 1940 an internal splinter group, the Komite Pertahanan Kebenaran PSII (Committee for the Defence of the Truth of the PSII),Footnote 29 with a dozen or so local branches (formerly PSII ones) in West Java, claimed as the true vehicle of the Sarekat Islam movement and the means of leading the party back to the right path to achieve the Darul Islam.Footnote 30 Thereafter he established in 1940 the so-called Suffah Institute in Malangbong, responding in his own way to the mandate given to him by the PSII conference late in 1938 to establish a religious and training centre for party cadres.Footnote 31 In time, some PSII branches in Central and West Java evinced some sympathy for Kartosuwiryo's position,Footnote 32 though his new party, which emphasised the notion of Darul Islam to the exclusion of nationalism (‘the Muslim group which lives in Islamic Society [Darul Islam] does not wish to be devoted to Mother-Indonesia or to anyone else, rather they wish only to be devoted to the one and only God’)Footnote 33 remained isolated and apart from other Muslim political and educational activity,Footnote 34 embracing a vague kind of Muslim socialism.Footnote 35 But his nationalist credentials remained strong; in the late colonial period, Kartosuwiryo's political activities earned him two short spells in prison.Footnote 36
In over a decade of political activism in the Islamic party Kartosuwiryo had become well known for his dedication to the Islamic state ideal and his non-co-operation stand: two elements that pushed him to the margins of nationalist political activities at the turn of the decade. At the eve of the Japanese invasion, then, Kartosuwiryo had lost his prominence in the Sarekat Islam party, and there is no evidence that the Suffah was being in any way influential in the Priangan region as an Islamic educational institute. In the short stint of Japan's occupation, Kartosuwiryo would show his ability to co-operate as the perspective of achieving his aim – an Islamic state – seemed obtainable.
The Japanese occupation and its consequences on Kartosuwiryo's vision of ‘Indonesia’
The Japanese invasion deeply changed the panorama of party politics in the Indies, amidst which transformation Kartosuwiryo seems to have been able to regain an important role.Footnote 37 In May 1943, he was reported to be mayor of Bandung,Footnote 38 his articles – now advocating co-operation with the Japanese authority to achieve a ‘New World’ in Islamic terms – were being published again,Footnote 39 and by June he had been successful in setting up a MIAI-sponsored Bait al-Mal (treasury of the Islamic community),Footnote 40 of which he was appointed secretary.Footnote 41 As MIAI was gaining socio-political success, the Japanese administrators disbanded it on 2 November 1943 in favour of Masyumi.Footnote 42 If we accept Harry J. Benda's suggestion that Kartosuwiryo's Bait al-Mal had a role in Japan's decision to dissolve MIAI,Footnote 43 it is understandable that he found no position within the newly established Masyumi. This turn, however, did not mark his exit from politics; he reappeared in April 1945 as trainer of the secular Barisan Pelopor (Pioneer Corps, established in September 1944 as part of Jawa Hokokai) in Banten, West Java,Footnote 44 which had been infiltrated by a significant number of former PSII members de facto expelled from Masyumi.Footnote 45
Although it is not clear that the Indonesian proclamation of independence on 17 August 1945 fired and served further to develop Kartosuwiryo's hopes for the eventual attainment of an Indonesian Islamic stateFootnote 46 – he is said, probably erroneously, to have proclaimed an Islamic state or at least drafted an independence proclamation independently three days before Sukarno's proclamation on 17 AugustFootnote 47 – he clearly began to involve himself more strongly in politics after that moment. With the development of Masyumi as a political party in early November 1945, Kartosuwiryo was appointed as a member of the central executive body.Footnote 48 In mid-1946, he remained an enthusiastic celebrator of the national independence proclaimed by Sukarno in August 1945: ‘Now, the State and people of Indonesia have been free for almost a whole year,’ he stated in 1946.Footnote 49 While he was a staunch supporter of ‘100% Merdeka [Freedom]’,Footnote 50 he railed at that time against the ‘sickness of “fanaticism” which … can very easily endanger national unity and united struggle’.Footnote 51 While he wished that ‘the Republic of Indonesia becomes a Republic based on Islam’, and despite his conviction that ‘only with Islam in the creation of a world of Islam (Dar-ul-Islam) can Indonesian society in particular and all humanity in general be guaranteed salvation’,Footnote 52 he cautioned that progress towards those goals must be measured and patient. The first step must be to secure the complete independence of the Republic; only then could the social goal of creating an Islamic state and society proceed.Footnote 53 True to his belief in popular sovereignty,Footnote 54 Kartosuwiryo thought that outcome would be the result of a Muslim majority in the People's Consultative Assembly which would ensure that ‘the laws that are made are the Law of Islam’.Footnote 55 That meant, as well, that ‘the Revolution that we hope for is a Revolution which builds (constructive) and not a Revolution that wrecks (destructive), producing “disturbances” or “civil war”’ in our own national circle'.Footnote 56
Notwithstanding the fact that he spent much of his time in West Java,Footnote 57 Kartosuwiryo had become Masyumi delegate for the Komite Nasional Indonesia Pusat (Central Indonesian National Committee – KNIP) in 1946–47, participating at its first gathering in Solo (February–March 1946) and its second in Malang (February–March 1947).Footnote 58 Furthermore, on this second occasion, he was chosen by the KNIP President as one of the 42 members of the Badan Pekerja (Working Committee).Footnote 59 In July 1947, he was offered the post of deputy Minister of Defence in the new cabinet, apparently at the nomination of the PSII which had recently broken from Masyumi.Footnote 60 He declined the position, perhaps because of his distaste at the likelihood of further co-operation with the DutchFootnote 61 and, as well, his fear of the leftist orientation of Amir Syarifuddin's new government, Amir's efforts to eliminate Masyumi influence on government,Footnote 62 and Kartosuwiryo's own loyalty to Masyumi.Footnote 63 An unflinching champion of the notion that the Republic must seize its full independence from the Dutch, and that the exercise of force and violence would be necessary for that end, he strongly supported the training of auxiliary Muslim-oriented fighting bodies, notably the Hizbullah and Sabilillah, already established by Masyumi during the Japanese occupation.Footnote 64 He was, as Adam Malik, then youthful radical and later vice-president, later recalled, ‘a very able revolutionary …. endowed with an unbending radical, and uncompromising nationalist spirit when it came to dealing with the Dutch colonial regime …. [he] was the first amongst the Indonesian freedom fighters who denounced the Linggarjati Agreement’.Footnote 65
Kartosuwiryo in West Java: From Masyumi to Darul Islam
Masyumi
By 1947, Kartosuwiryo's support for Sukarno's Republic began to fade probably due to the persistent thread of diplomacy in government policy,Footnote 66 and despite his previously committed effort to participate in party politics, he once again returned to Malangbong, becoming Masyumi's regional commissioner for West Java.Footnote 67 There he earned the praise of the long-time Muslim nationalist, former PetaFootnote 68 commander and former chair of the KNIP, Kasman Singodimejo, on account of his declaration in September 1947 of a holy war against the Dutch (against ‘all who trample on the sovereignty of the Republic and Islamic religion’)Footnote 69 following their first ‘police action’ against the Republic in July 1947, and his continuing role in the popular resistance to the Dutch; ‘the Government can only give thanks to the Almighty God that the Republic of Indonesia has such courageous and heroic people as S.M. Kartosuwiryo’, noted Kasman. It was necessary ‘that the Government provide moral, but especially material support to our struggle organisations in the areas occupied by the enemy, such as Malangbong’.Footnote 70 One scholar remarked of Darul Islam that ‘the Indonesian government in its initial period at Jogjakarta had no reason to be unfriendly with a movement that excelled in making itself a nuisance to the Dutch’.Footnote 71 Indeed, Kartosuwiryo reportedly made efforts to deepen contacts with Muslim figures in other parts of Java and even claimed late in 1948 to have appointed Darul Islam representatives to the Republican government in Yogyakarta.Footnote 72
But Kartosuwiryo had a larger organisational agenda than simply defending the interests of the Republic in its contest against the Dutch. He sought to capitalise upon the administrative chaos and poor communications between Yogyakarta and the local arena which was a consequence of the rapid Dutch military advance across West Java in July/August 1947 – including, eventually, the capture of Malangbong itselfFootnote 73 – and the Republic's military weakness. Now operating in mobile mode and elaborating his Muslim guerrilla forces from the extensive array of irregular struggle bands and cut-off Republican troops operating in pockets against the Dutch in West Java after the police action,Footnote 74 Kartosuwiryo set in motion a scheme that transformed the existing and extensive Masyumi party organisation in West Java as a vehicle for anti-Dutch activities.Footnote 75 In late 1947, he changed the name of the Masyumi branch at Garut to that of ‘Defence Council of the Islamic Community’ (Dewan Pertahanan Ummat Islam). The renamed body, while it took over many of the old branch's statutes, added a strong emphasis on defence against, and opposition towards, Dutch aggression. About the same time, and similarly without reference either to the central Masyumi leadership in Yogyakarta or to the local Masyumi leadership in the Priangan region, the Masyumi branches in Tasikmalaya and Ciamis were similarly transformed into Defence Councils.Footnote 76 In all cases the local Hizbullah and Sabilillah forces under the leadership of the former local Masyumi figure Raden Oni Qital were incorporated into the new councils.Footnote 77 The local Masyumi leaders, no doubt cowed by Kartosuwiryo's real and assumed local authority – the Dutch spoke of his ‘very capable organisational leadership’Footnote 78 – subsequently found themselves with no alternative but to acquiesce in what had taken place.Footnote 79 Perhaps as a consequence of this organisational invigoration, the Dutch themselves reported high levels of violence in the region by late 1947: ‘murder, kidnapping, arson, and plundering’.Footnote 80
Indeed, between September and December 1947, Islamic militias and regular Siliwangi soldiers often clashed, either in a quest for weaponsFootnote 81 or in reaction to Dutch movements of troops.Footnote 82 In early December, the Chief of Police in Tasikmalaya had reported that Masyumi members in the Priangan were gathering weapons by collecting taxes from villagers and also exchanging food supplies for carbines and guns with starving TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia – Indonesian National Army) soldiers.Footnote 83 These weapons were said to be necessary to the establishment of a ‘New State’ (Negara Baru), because ‘whilst the government is not under Masyumi leadership, there will be no order’;Footnote 84 under the political leadership of Kartosuwiryo, and Oni Qital's command, Sabilillah troops were conducting military and propaganda activities, to the extent that Masyumi in the Priangan increasingly resembled an independent government.Footnote 85
At the end of 1947, Kartosuwiryo's Masyumi branch was openly challenging the authority of the Republic on the political level as well as on the battlefield, arguing that the local population did not recognise its authority anymore, and discrediting regular troops in favour of Sabilillah. It is worth noting, however, that this attitude was also embraced by civilians, who trusted Hizbullah/Sabilillah militias more than TNI troops, and consequently provided them with generous material support in the form of food, shelter, clothing and weapons.Footnote 86 A study conducted by the Ministry of Defence concluded that Masyumi's membership in the Priangan recognised that in this chaotic situation, salvation would come only from a leader who would call for a perang sabil (holy war) to bring Indonesia to independence.Footnote 87
Renville and its consequences
It is difficult to overestimate the demoralising – yet, for Kartosuwiryo's interests, liberating and empowering – effect of the Republic's entering the Renville Agreement with the Dutch, on 17 January 1948. That agreement – so unpopular domestically that it caused the immediate collapse of the Cabinet responsible for itFootnote 88 – required Republic troops to withdraw from West Java across the so-called Van Mook line, the line arbitrarily drawn by the Dutch joining the farthest points of Dutch intrusion into Republican territory during the first police action (which allowed the Dutch to claim the spaces – much of it under effective Republican control – between those points even after the cease-fire).Footnote 89
More seriously, since Renville recognised de facto Dutch control in West Java, the agreement implied that the Republic had effectively surrendered – at least for the time beingFootnote 90 – its claim of sovereignty in that region.Footnote 91 Indeed, Robert Cribb remarks, ‘the Renville Agreement … gave the army in West Java an opportunity to avoid a fight which it was now far from winning’.Footnote 92 That in turn created a sense amongst many fighters in West Java that the Republic had deserted them – ‘that the people of West Java had been unconditionally delivered to the colonial power’Footnote 93 – and raised serious doubts that the Republic that had so lamely surrendered to Dutch demands was the same entity, with the same ideals, as that proclaimed in August 1945. That feeling was magnified by a sense in Muslim quarters that the political left had too much influence within that government.Footnote 94 Up to that time, the common Indonesian interest in resisting the Dutch in ever more desperate times had blurred the ideological differences between different groups of leaders. But now, in fact, a decisive point had been reached — the definitive realisation by Kartosuwiryo and his close followers that they could not expect the current government of the Republic of Indonesia to seize the freedom which was the sine qua non for an eventual attainment of an Islamic state. To that, of course must be added the fact that Kartosuwiryo, as fate would have it, was granted almost a whole year in relative isolation in which there was ‘a very considerable military–political vacuum’Footnote 95 to create the administrative machinery and the means of violence to underpin state-like pretensions, something a stronger Republic would never have countenanced.Footnote 96
Kartosuwiryo, like many other West Java lasykar (irregular) leaders, refused point-blank to withdraw from West Java with the regular TNI troops, with whom in any case there had been some skirmishing and developing mistrust in preceding months, especially over Hizbullah/Sabilillah efforts to seize or obtain weapons from regular TNI troops.Footnote 97 Early in 1948, with his faithful lieutenant Oni, Kartosuwiryo determined that Sabilillah troops under his control would not join the withdrawal – notwithstanding the fact that these Masyumi-aligned groups defied both the Republican government and their party in so doing, sometimes violentlyFootnote 98 – and that those Hizbullah and Sabilillah troops that had agreed to depart would be disarmed before they left, peacefully or otherwise.Footnote 99 Accordingly, around 4,000 locally led Sabilillah and Hizbullah troops in West Java remained in the territory rather than joining in the Siliwangi hijrah to Central Java (the movement was so named, at least in part, in expectation of an eventual victorious return, while the parallel with the prophetic endeavour was probably an attempt to sacramentalise their withdrawal as well).Footnote 100 The refusal of some TNI troops to hand their weapons to Sabilillah forces before their departure for Central Java earned them a certain opprobrium in Sabilillah eyes,Footnote 101 reinforcing the tense relations between Islamic and Republican troops which had been lingering since 1947.
The formation of the Darul Islam
In the face of the threat represented by Renville, on 10–11 February 1948, Kartosuwiryo held a meeting of 160 Muslim groups, organisations, leaders and fighters in Pangwekusan village, Cisayong, near Tasikmalaya, to frame a general Muslim reaction and strategy in the face of the political and military crisis.Footnote 102 There was talk of dismantling the Republic's government if it did not disassociate itself from Renville and creating a new one, based upon Islam. This could, in the words of Kamran, Kartosuwiryo's political comrade of long-standing and senior military commander, ‘save the state’.Footnote 103 There was discussion of the need to secure the region of West Java as the first step in that process, and of the need for strong leadership in contrast to the weak and deceitful Republican government. Kartosuwiryo sought to calm the mood of the meeting by stating that talk of a coup was inappropriate. The meeting determined to create a Majelis Umat Islam (Council of the Islamic Community) as a provisional Islamic government in West Java which was, in retrospect, the first definitive, though not yet wholly conclusive, step in the formation of the Negara Islam Indonesia (NII or Islamic State of Indonesia).Footnote 104 That Council's task was to coordinate the efforts of Muslim groups in West Java. The meeting also froze the Masyumi party in West Java, although it was not until the Cipeundeuy meeting in March (see below) that Kartosuwiryo and Kamran proclaimed ‘the end of Masyumi's role in West Java’.Footnote 105 Kartosuwiryo indicated his desire to transform existing Masyumi branches into local defence councils of the kind he had initiated in late 1947, which were clearly meant to serve as the means of organising his embryonic political system,Footnote 106 indicating that Kartosuwiryo's ambitions were now aimed at something beyond the level of pure party politics.
The meeting also sought to appoint Kartosuwiryo as ‘Imam’ of the Muslim community in West Java, and Oni as the Priangan leader of the ‘Islamic Army of Indonesia’ – purportedly for the defence of the region against the Dutch – authorising the latter to bring together such an army, based around Sabilillah and Hizbullah bands and other Muslim organisations, within three months, with arms collected from villagers.Footnote 107 That modest ‘army’, almost immediately subject to Dutch attack – the first major battle with Dutch troops came just a week later on 17 FebruaryFootnote 108 – eventually began to aggregate itself in the hilly surroundings of Mount Cupu before moving further south as a consequence of such attacks, to which it vigorously responded.Footnote 109 By April, with the failure of Dutch troops to occupy former TNI pockets – and perhaps because of the popular resentment aroused by Dutch attacksFootnote 110 – the Darul Islam movement and its military wing had spread through Garut, Sumedang, Tasikmalaya, Ciamis, Kuningan, Majalengka and even further afield.Footnote 111 By the end of 1948, the regions of Garut, Tasikmalaya and Ciamis were thought by the Dutch to be ‘chiefly ruled by the TNII [Tentara Negara Islam Indonesia – Indonesian Islamic State Army], the army of the Negara Islam Indonesia (Darul Islam)’.Footnote 112 Darul Islam's early successes were to a significant extent a consequence of the ruthlessness with which it sought its ends: ‘sabotage of telephone connections, destruction of bridges, erection of barricades … kampung burnings, murders, kidnappings and intimidations’.Footnote 113
Darul Islam and the Indonesian Republic
A few weeks later, on 1–5 March, a second well-attended meeting at Cipeundeuy in Cirebon recognised a need, given continuing negotiations between the Republic and the Dutch, to ‘continue the struggle in a different manner’, asserted the primacy of the ‘Islamic Community’ throughout West Java,Footnote 114 and called on the Republic to refrain from any negotiations with the Dutch. Failing that, the delegates threatened to recommend the dissolution of the current Republican government and its replacement by a new and more fully democratic one.Footnote 115 In that regard, the meeting resolved to make preparations to create an Islamic state, thought all the more pressing given the threatened creation, as part of the Dutch federal project, of a Dutch-sponsored ‘state’ of Pasundan in West Java, something that eventuated in late April.Footnote 116
Kartosuwiryo was still some distance from a rupture with the Republic. He apparently hoped that his actions could be accommodated by the Republic – not an unthinkable idea in the chaotic and war-torn circumstances – and to that end he contacted the TNI commander Sudirman, demanding that he be appointed as West Java commander of all troops in the region, and that his Negara Islam be recognised as a kind of local experimental state. It may well have been Kartosuwiryo's aim at this point – given the post-Renville negotiations between the Republic and the Dutch and the expected eventual establishment of some kind of federal state – that his Islamic state be accepted by the Republic as a component unit of a larger Indonesian state, without loss of its Islamic identity.Footnote 117 Both demands were rejected, although general Republican support for his opposition to the Dutch remained, as well as the material support of money and weapons.Footnote 118
A third conference in Cijoho, Cirebon, commencing on 1 May 1948, began the preparation of detailed Islamic regulations to govern the regions of the ‘Islamic State’, categorising different territories according to the degree of control exercised by the Islamic State and the extent of the implementation of Islamic law; ‘DI’ was a region wholly controlled by the NII and ruled under sharìa law, DII was a region mostly sympathetic to the NII, but still patrolled by Dutch troops and not yet under NII control, and DIII, controlled by the Dutch, an even more peripheral entity, in which Islamic law had no space.Footnote 119 It discussed in more detail the regime of Islamic law and state administrative architecture that should prevail in the NII. It also created a Majelis (later Dewan) Imamah, or Council of Ministers, to regulate such fields as education, information, finance and defence to be led by Kartosuwiryo as Imam, as well as a Fatwa Council to determine matters of Islamic law.Footnote 120
In a further effort in early July to seek legitimation from the Republic, Kartosuwiryo sought, through his former Masyumi comrades in Yogyakarta, approval for his plans, only vaguely expressed in his message to them, to establish an Islamic state, in the hope that such approval would bring the Republican government to a similar position. He invited those colleagues to come to West Java for discussions on the steps which might follow, apparently hoping that they might attend a meeting of the Dewan Imamah at which the Islamic State would be proclaimed. According to one Dutch intelligence report, based on the interrogation of a captured senior Darul Islam figure, Masyumi leaders in Yogyakarta were aware of Kartosuwiryo's activities and endorsed them. The Masyumi leader Sukiman was said to have remarked that NII territory would have to be returned later to the Republic, while Abikusno Cokrosuyoso was said to be of the view that such an arrangement would be subject to local wishes.Footnote 121 His efforts proved unsuccessful in the end, but demonstrated the importance Kartosuwiryo placed in maintaining some measure of connection with the Republic.Footnote 122 Around the same time, Kartosuwiryo reportedly sent representatives to East and Central Java to seek support for Darul Islam's aims, having earlier sent the head of the NII's Information Office in Tasikmalaya, Abdulhadi Ibrahim, as a representative to the Masyumi congress in Madiun in March.Footnote 123 At this occasion, leading Masyumi members Wali Alfatah and Kiyai Ahmad Sanusi argued in favour of the creation of a Darul Islam ‘as soon as possible’ to conclude the national revolution. Interestingly, although the congress took place after the formation of the DI/TII, neither of these two speakers referred to Kartosuwiryo's endeavours.Footnote 124
By late August 1948, for the first time the ‘Islamic Government of Indonesia’ had proclaimed a total popular mobilisation in the form of a Jihad fi Sabilillah, and, by 27 August, it had drafted the constitution of the Islamic State of Indonesia (Qanun Azasi), although its governance principles were never to be realised to any significant extent.Footnote 125 As we have seen, around mid-1948, even as his political idea was rapidly taking shape, Kartosuwiryo was careful to remain in some sort of contact with the Republic in Yogyakarta, and even to obtain some support from it.Footnote 126 That attitude was ebbing away towards the end of that year. In early November (Proclamation no. 3), NII announced preparations for total war against ‘all enemies of Religion and the State, so that Allah can establish his rule in the midst of the Islamic Community … of the Indonesian nationality’.Footnote 127
In Yogyakarta, meanwhile, the Republican leaders remained both ignorant and unclear about the significance of both what Kartosuwiryo was doing and what his real intentions might be, notwithstanding the fact that communication between Yogyakarta and Kartosuwiryo's organisation remained relatively good.Footnote 128 A Dutch report of September 1948 remarked that ‘there is no sign of Republican support for the Darul Islam movement, nor has any action been undertaken on the Republican side to curb this movement’.Footnote 129 Simatupang, then a senior officer in the TNI, later remarked that ‘prior to the second Dutch attack, we in Jogjakarta had always believed that the people's war in West Java basically supported the Republic, even though its methods did not conform to official policy’.Footnote 130 Others saw the Darul Islam as a Republic-supporting bulwark against the Dutch-inspired Pasundan state.Footnote 131 There was, perhaps, a sense as well that the Republic would be able to bring the movement under control at a later and more suitable time.Footnote 132 The Republic's ignorance was to a substantial degree a consequence of the fact that Kartosuwiryo's communications were intended to be vague, and perhaps even misleading, as he sought to maintain Republic support; in the absence of that clarity it was reasonable to interpret Kartosuwiryo's plans and activities as a means of maintaining his continuing anti-Dutch efforts in the region.Footnote 133 He proclaimed in late October the intention to move to Yogyakarta, and to appoint a representative to the Republican capital, measures which were probably as deceitful as they were vague.Footnote 134 The relation between Kartosuwiryo and the Indonesian Republic is best described by highlighting the ambiguities that marked it from the creation of the Darul Islam until the formation of the unitary state in 1950.Footnote 135 By the beginning of the second part of 1948, in any case, Republican internal political problems were so grave – the government's plans for military rationalisation had struck trouble, and the communist rebellion at Madiun in East Java erupted in September – that Kartosuwiryo's machinations probably seemed inconsequential by comparison.Footnote 136
An important spur to Kartosuwiryo's ambitions, if only in expanding his range of options, was provided by the establishment by the Dutch of the ‘state’ of Pasundan, part of a larger Dutch ‘federal’ strategy to construct local states across the archipelago as counterweights to the Republic. In August/September 1948, Kartosuwiryo reportedly contacted the ailing leader (Wali Negara) of Pasundan, R.A.A. Mocharam Wiranatakusumah, with an offer of co-operation, rejected by the Wali Negara.Footnote 137 Around a year later, with the sense of manic irony that suffuses much of the narrative of the revolutionary period, Wiranatakusumah reportedly sought for his part to gain Kartosuwiryo's support in his own vague political endeavours, which included the construction of an Islamic state and the defence of the newly acquired autonomy of his Sundanese region against the Republic.Footnote 138 Wiranatakusumah, indeed, some time after the initial establishment of the NII, apparently sought a meeting with Kartosuwiryo, presumably to discuss their mutual interests, which did not exclude consideration of the interests of the Dutch as well.Footnote 139 Already in March 1949, Kartosuwiryo had apparently met with a Dutch lieutenant-colonel known as Cassa, at Dutch headquarters in Tasikmalaya to discuss some form of co-operation with the Dutch, which might have included the delivery of weapons from the Dutch to Darul Islam.Footnote 140 Even more confusingly, in October 1949 Kartosuwiryo is alleged to have held discussions with the notorious KNIL captain R.P.P. Westerling in the presence of Wiranatakusumah and Anwar Cokroaminoto, Prime Minister of the State of Pasundan, perhaps to explore the prospect of the union of Darul Islam with Westerling's APRA (Angkatan Perang Ratu Adil or Army of the Just King) in establishing military (and political) supremacy over the TNI and the Republic throughout West Java.Footnote 141
The fall of the Republic and the rise of the Islamic State
Notwithstanding the significant nuisance and disruption to Dutch military activities caused by NII ‘extremists’ in the months following the NII's establishment,Footnote 142 with their numbers estimated by the Dutch at around 5,000 men in early 1948, much of Kartosuwiryo's strategic work might well have been of little consequence or impact – apart from the damage these forces inflicted on local populationsFootnote 143 – but for the decision of the Dutch to abandon any pretence at negotiation and attempt by military means to destroy the Republic. But the second police action, commencing on 19 December 1948, saw Dutch forces overrun the Central Java heartland of the Republic, seize the revolutionary capital of Yogyakarta, and capture the Republic's leaders, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta. Kartosuwiryo was quick to sense the importance of the moment and attempt to turn it to his advantage. The Republican government which had traded so much away to the Dutch was now no more. In response, Kartosuwiryo proclaimed a general holy war against the Dutch on 20 December ‘until the Islamic Revolution is ended and the Islamic State exists completely in the whole of Indonesia’,Footnote 144 and on the following day announced that, with the ‘fall of the Republic as a State’, his NII was now the sole political vehicle for those who supported the Republic of the proclamation — indeed, that the struggle of the NII was ‘the continuation of the struggle for Freedom, according to and mindful of the proclamation of 17 August 1945!’Footnote 145 The Dutch attack and the fall of the Sukarno–Hatta government, indeed, was a ‘Gift from God’ which ‘opens a new field, a field of holy war and the widest possible opportunity to receive again the greater Gift of God (‘Azza wa Jalla), that is, The birth of the Free Islamic State of Indonesia’.Footnote 146 On 23 December, Kartosuwiryo announced that the NII was in a state of war, fighting according to Islamic laws of war; there were only two combatants, the Dutch and their hangers-on and, now, with the fall of the Republic and its disappearance from the struggle, just the ‘Islamic Community of the Indonesian Nation and the Islamic State of Indonesia … all alone in the world’.Footnote 147
The Dutch attack, of course, removed from the Republic any obligation to respect the provisions of Renville.Footnote 148 Accordingly, almost immediately – a Dutch report spoke of ‘very large TNI infiltrations’Footnote 149 – Siliwangi troops began to return to those parts of West Java which they had abandoned in February 1948. As they straggled back in late December 1948 and early January 1949, often with their wives and children in tow,Footnote 150 and knowing ‘nothing of the existence of Daroel Islam until they reached West Java’,Footnote 151 they encountered TII troops who now commanded large swathes of territory, especially in mountainous south-eastern Priangan.Footnote 152 Some early-returning TNI force dispositions found themselves disarmed by TII troops and their weapons confiscated.Footnote 153 Some in Tasikmalaya found themselves apparently enthusiastically welcomed by TII troops, oblivious to the fact that this attitude was simply a ruse to lull them into a false sense of security, an error which cost many of them their weapons and some their lives;Footnote 154 there were allegations in some cases that TII troops had drugged or poisoned TNI troops as means of relieving them of their weapons.Footnote 155 The local fighters, by whom the Siliwangi forces had expected to be welcomed, were hostile and uncooperative, notwithstanding occasional local compromise agreements between sections of the two forces,Footnote 156 and NII efforts to have the TNI acknowledge its authority and merge with it.Footnote 157 Siliwangi troops ‘were completely unprepared for [the] attacks which ensued’,Footnote 158 encountering ‘no little hindrance’ from Kartosuwiryo's men as well as from Dutch forces;Footnote 159 and Siliwangi troops felt that the Darul Islam troops ‘concentrated their attention on opposing the Siliwangi’ rather than the Dutch.Footnote 160 Kahin reported that ‘one entire Siliwangi company was wiped out, while resting with stacked arms, by Daroel Islam troops, the members of the company having thought all Indonesian troops in the area would be friendly’.Footnote 161 A fierce, defining battle between a TII force and returning TNI troops – the latter seeking the return of seized weapons – took place in late January at Antralina, near Malangbong.Footnote 162 In early February, a TNI battalion reportedly lost 100 men and a great deal of equipment in a battle with a 1,000-strong TII force.Footnote 163 By March, the Dutch reported that ‘in West Java increasingly and again and again [there are] murderous conflicts (“moord-partijen”) between the Siliwangi TNI and the TNII’.Footnote 164
The DI/TII attitude was in a substantial sense understandable. In the confusion following the evident and appalling collapse of the Republican government in Yogyakarta there was a vacuum of nationalist power and capacity, as well as the fear that the Dutch would force the captured Republican leadership to enter into an arrangement which would seriously compromise the struggle for freedom. Kartosuwiryo saw his Darul Islam as the single proper continuation – indeed development – of the independent Indonesia proclaimed in August 1945, the leaders of which had been defeated and left behind by history.Footnote 165 It was, the Darul Islam claimed, the only political entity which stood against the Dutch and the states they were busily establishing.Footnote 166 Apart from the view that the returning Siliwangi were an illegitimate force – it was they, after all, who had handed over the region to the Dutch almost a year beforeFootnote 167 – there was a real fear amongst NII leaders and their troops that the returning Siliwangi troops – whom they originally thought of as their ‘guests’ – were in fact runaways, a ‘wild army’ or, worse, communist remnants from the abortive ‘coup’ at Madiun some months earlier.Footnote 168 Kartosuwiryo, indeed, accused the TNI of arbitrary and rapacious treatment of the local people.Footnote 169 There was a strong sense that the TII had won the right to defend the autonomy they had carved out in large tracts of southeastern West Java and, accordingly, ‘to prevent actions contrary to religion’, and to consider that – because of the Siliwangi's attacks on its forces – a state of war between the NII and these troops indeed existed.Footnote 170 It was, consequently, ‘an obligation to use violence in relieving them of their weapons, equipment and possessions for the benefit of the N.I.I.’.Footnote 171 This military proclamation, the NII's first such document, made clear almost from the outset the NII's attitude towards the Republic and its returning troops, even if it also stated that the Republican troops – differently from the Dutch – could only be deprived of their weapons and dispersed, but should not be killed.Footnote 172
The Dutch, the Republic and the Islamic State: Diplomacy and violence
Dutch–Indonesian diplomacy
It soon became clear that the Republic had survived, both in the form of an emergency government established in Sumatra under the leadership of Syafruddin Prawiranegara and especially in the invigorated guerrilla activity of the TNI, especially around Yogyakarta. But in the view of the Darul Islam, the Dutch wished to reduce the Republic to the status of just another of the many puppet states it had created; the Republic's refusal to desist from its compromises with the Dutch strengthened that notion, as well as the Darul Islam's sense that it now represented the single vehicle of true opposition to the Dutch.Footnote 173 On 7 May 1949, discussions between the Dutch and the Republic produced the Rum–Van Royen agreement, which provided for a cease-fire and for the eventual transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch to a Republic of the United States of Indonesia (Republik Indonesia Serikat; RIS) in which the Republic itself would be no more than a component part. That agreement provided new ammunition for Kartosuwiryo's view that the Republic had failed and had sold out its sovereignty to the Dutch, that the proposed Republic of the United States of Indonesia, including the Republic, was a plaything of the Dutch, and that the Round Table Conference was nothing more than a colonial conference. Moreover, he feared that, in the event of a third world war, something he had long awaited, the Dutch would be unable to make good their undertakings.Footnote 174 That view, spread amongst his followers, in turn led to a further rapid growth in his influence and following.
In those parts of West Java where Darul Islam was most active, some sections of the Siliwangi troops – wearied from the Madiun campaign and the strain of ‘fighting by day against the Dutch and by night against the Darul Islam’Footnote 175 – soon arrived at a more-or-less peaceful modus vivendi with Dutch troops.Footnote 176 According to one Dutch report, ‘up to now in this regency [Tasikmalaya] there has been no single case of combat contact between our military and the TNI’.Footnote 177 Indeed, in March TNI units under the leadership of Achmad Wiranatakusumah, son of the Wali Nagara of Pasundan, agreed to co-operate with the Dutch forces connected with the state of Pasundan,Footnote 178 and Major Nasuhi's TNI battalion made a similar, if only temporary, arrangement, partly, the Dutch report went, because ‘the TNI felt itself threatened by the DI’.Footnote 179 Sudarman's battalion also followed suit, for the same reason.Footnote 180
Such willingness to co-operate with Dutch forces prompted Kartosuwiryo to wonder why these TNI units preferred to hand themselves over to the Dutch rather than to the TII.Footnote 181 While the TNI continued to seek some co-operation with the Darul Islam, its efforts proved fruitless.Footnote 182 Indeed, according to the Dutch, ‘the very bad experiences which the TNI has had with the DI in cases that a kind of co-operation has been arrived at have however opened everyone's eyes concerning the impossibility of a compromise’.Footnote 183 As the Dutch–Indonesian negotiations moved apparently ineluctably towards a resolution, a cease-fire came into effect between Dutch and TNI troops and the Dutch even began to pass over territory to the TNI.Footnote 184
The Islamic and Republican states: Diplomacy and conflict
All the while, Kartosuwiryo's influence and reach had spread beyond his core areas of support to take in a significant part of West Java, and ever further afield.Footnote 185 By October 1949 the Dutch estimated the size of the TII at 12,000–15,000 men.Footnote 186 The TII had begun to expand quickly in the absence of TNI troops which had withdrawn to Central Java.Footnote 187 According to Kahin, ‘in late 1948 and early 1949 almost as much of their [the Dutch] West Java puppet state of Pasundan was controlled by Darul Islam as by their own troops’.Footnote 188 Indeed, ‘prior to the … arrival of TNI troops, nearly all of the south Preanger except the Dutch occupied cities and towns was under control of Daroel Islam’.Footnote 189 That fact of local NII supremacy in early 1949, indeed, served to sharpen the sense of contestation between the TII and the TNI. Indeed, while the TII engaged vigorously, continually, and often successfully, with Republican forces – ‘in Majalengka regency the Darul Islam movement is winning important territory at the expense of the TNI’Footnote 190 – TII actions with Dutch forces became ‘few and far between’.Footnote 191 And as opposition mounted between TNI and TII – according to one Dutch report ‘the battles … often take place with large numbers involved and last for hours’Footnote 192 – so did Republican vengefulness and bitterness grow; ‘various Siliwangi battalions … would like nothing better than to join in the struggle against the D.I., as revenge for what they experienced from the D.I. during their return after the second police action to West Java’.Footnote 193 TNI success remained limited; around mid-1949 it was reported that ‘70 per cent of the southeastern part of the Priangan Residency belongs to the domain where the D.I. is lord and master’, and the numerical strength of the movement was estimated at 15,000 men.Footnote 194 ‘Where the DI clashes with the TNI’, remarked one Dutch report, ‘the DI mostly appears to be the strongest [sic]’.Footnote 195 By August 1949, the Dutch calculated that ‘bandits’ outnumbered the TNI by a factor of 7 to 1.Footnote 196 It should be noted, however, that although Darul Islam troops (i.e. Hizbullah and Sabilillah) made up most of the irregular guerrillas in the area, they were not the only ones. As pointed out by Cribb, the lasykar troops were unhappy with the Renville and Rum–Van Royen agreements, to the extent that collaboration with the Republic and TNI was not envisaged, and a similar attitude was assumed by the Bambu Runcing.Footnote 197 One Dutch report in mid-1949 remarked that the Darul Islam's ‘conviction that the Islamic State of Indonesia is the single organisation which has held out and which will continue to hold out against the Dutch and against the puppet-regimes created by the Dutch has had disastrous consequences’.Footnote 198
But there was still no final and definitive break with the Republic. That did not come until August 1949, when it became clear to Kartosuwiryo that the Republic, its captured leaders now freed and politically rehabilitated, and its legitimacy and primacy ever more broadly acknowledged across the archipelago, would take part in the Round Table Conference in The Hague to finalise the details of a transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch. Before that time, there appeared to be some space for a negotiated appropriation of the NII into the fabric of the Republic, but Kartosuwiryo's incrementalist, and essentially reactive/adaptive style of politics, was not fitted to an atmosphere where a creative initiative was desperately needed. Horikoshi notes that ‘it is unlikely that even Kartosuwirjo himself, at least initially, intended to lead the movement as far as it eventually went. He adjusted and altered his plans until finally he was left with no alternative but to pursue his initial goal by means of a civil war against the Republic’.Footnote 199
Its attention fully committed elsewhere and apparently unaware how far things had come, the Republic made only desultory efforts to save the situation, maintaining the climate of ambiguity noted above. But things had gone too far. Hatta wrote to Kartsuwiryo in mid-1949, seeking the end of all hostilities against the TNI, but without eliciting any recognition by Kartosuwiryo of the Republic's authority.Footnote 200 At another time in 1949, Hatta had contacted Kartosuwiryo in writing, in a further attempt at reconciliation. Hatta suggested that if Kartosuwiryo were ready to create a united front against the Dutch, the Republic would offer him a medal, although the letter simply asked Kartosuwiryo whether he would reconsider his position vis-à-vis the Republic after the proclamation of the RIS.Footnote 201 Early in August 1949, Mohammad Natsir was directed by Hatta to seek an end to TII attacks on the Republic's forces; Natsir sought to make contact through the veteran Persis leader, Ahmad Hassan, with Kartosuwiryo and invite him to negotiations. Natsir's letter to Kartosuwiryo, written on hotel notepaper, lacked official weight; and it took three days to reach Kartosuwiryo. Meanwhile, on 6 August, Hatta left for The Hague to take part in the Round Table Conference. In his later response to Natsir's missive, Kartosuwiryo remarked that he had already proclaimed the Islamic State of Indonesia; he could not turn back.Footnote 202 ‘I do not want to swallow my spittle again’, he allegedly remarked.Footnote 203
Proclamation of the Negara Islam Indonesia and the Republic's reaction
On 7 August 1949 in Cisayong, Kartosuwiryo formally proclaimed the Islamic State of Indonesia,Footnote 204 an action, like so many of Kartosuwiryo's actions, determined by others' actions and agendas. The proclamation asserted that ‘The Islamic State of Indonesia grew in a period of war, in the middle of the national Revolution, which then at the end, after the Renville Document and the Islamic Community awoke and arose against the viciousness of colonialism and the slavery perpetrated by the Dutch, changed its nature and became an Islamic Revolution or Holy War’.Footnote 205 A political manifesto published soon after the proclamation branded the Republic as a ‘puppet state’, invited those Republicans ‘who still have the spirit of struggle’ to join with the NII's efforts, condemned the Round Table Conference and the creation of a Republic of the United States of Indonesia and vowed to continue the Islamic struggle.Footnote 206
Even though the break was now definitive – notwithstanding the odd rumour that Kartosuwiryo was on the point of submitting to YogyakartaFootnote 207 – the Republic was reluctant to engage in a violent attempt to destroy the NII. In December 1949, the Minister for Religious Affairs in the new RIS Cabinet, K.H. Masykur, was directed to initiate talks with Kartosuwiryo, but his half-hearted effort failed to bear any fruit and Masykur himself failed to meet with Kartosuwiryo.Footnote 208 Another effort at negotiation six months later was just as unsuccessful.Footnote 209 The Masyumi congress of 1949 promulgated an official request for the Darul Islam to be peacefully dissolved.Footnote 210 In early 1950, a Masyumi-proposed and government-appointed commission failed to develop a credible strategy to end the ‘Darul Islam problem’,Footnote 211 leading the PSII to complain that the military – defying the politicians' request – was taking matters into its own hands.Footnote 212
Only in mid-December 1949 was a formal military operation (Gerakan Operasi Militer V) initiated against the Darul Islam.Footnote 213 That reluctance was partly a consequence of the fact that the Republic had larger and more serious problems to deal with, including the need to assert its primacy, peacefully and otherwise, within the new-born RIS, and partly to avoid arousing broader social sensitivities about the place of Islam in the state.Footnote 214 The attitude of the Masyumi party was also deeply influential in impeding any move to apply unrelenting violence as the single means of destroying the movement. Speakers at the December 1949 Masyumi conference in Yogyakarta were concerned to defend and praise Kartosuwiryo for his role in defending West Java, weakening the Dutch in the process and thus strengthening the Republic's negotiating position. Some delegates wondered why the Republic had been prepared to collaborate with ‘treasonous’ Dutch-sponsored puppet states but not to find some method of compromise with the Darul Islam.Footnote 215 Following on its previous requests, at its December 1950 conference in Yogyakarta, Masyumi called for a ‘Resolution Commission’ ‘to look for the best possible way to settle the problems of Darul Islam and everything related to it’.Footnote 216 In the previous month, prime minister Natsir, describing the Darul Islam situation as ‘a part of the general guerrilla problem’, had called on those who had been disappointed and disillusioned with the results of the independence struggle to integrate themselves anew with the young Republic and seek their aims by peaceful means.Footnote 217 The Republic made little or no effort in the early 1950s to respond to two initiatives from Kartosuwiryo which seemed to offer some form of accommodation with the Republic.Footnote 218 The army, bloodied by its own experiences with Darul Islam and eager to pursue a military solution to the Darul Islam problem, saw this governmental reluctance as dangerously dissembling.Footnote 219
But why did the dispute eventually have to come to this? As one scholar noted, the Islamist ‘aims of the Dar ul-Islam movement are widely shared beyond its formal limits, among the Indonesian Muslim community’.Footnote 220 Indeed, the idea that the Republic of Indonesia was a Muslim country and should eventually come to have Islam as its basis had long been common currency amongst Muslim leaders, teachers and intellectuals; indeed, many saw the attainment of independence as the indispensable means towards that end.Footnote 221 The freedom of Indonesia was seen as a necessary condition for the proper practice of Islam, and resistance to the Dutch an integral component of the struggle.Footnote 222 As early as October 1945, the Yogyakarta branch of Masyumi had declared that ‘the Islamic community of Indonesia must fight on the road of Allah, reject the slander of colonialism and tyranny and uphold the religion of Allah and the freedom of the State of the Republic of Indonesia’.Footnote 223 The 1946 Masyumi conference in Solo had determined ‘to strengthen and perfect the bases of the Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia so as to bring into being an Islamic society and an Islamic State’.Footnote 224 The 1946 urgency programme of Masyumi had called for ‘a State of the Republic of Indonesia based on Islam’.Footnote 225 In March 1948 at the third Masyumi congress in Madiun, chairman Sukiman clearly enunciated the notion that the Republic was the vehicle for the realisation of the Islamic State, a view with which Natsir was in accord.Footnote 226 The progressive Masyumi leader Mohammed Rum, like Natsir himself, saw no necessary contradiction between the 1945 Constitution and an Islamic state; ‘the Pantja Sila are all principles of Islam’.Footnote 227 The noted West Java-based Persis leader, Isa Anshary, while he strove for ‘the freedom and sovereignty of the people of the Indonesian State’, also sought ‘the realisation of the Islam-ideology in state affairs’.Footnote 228 Where these people parted company with Kartosuwiryo (although their criticism of him remained muted) was in the matter of the means chosen for the desired end, and particularly over his employment of apparently indiscriminate violence in pursuit of his political ends.Footnote 229 They could not, therefore, approve of what the Darul Islam had become.Footnote 230 Like his Muslim fellows, Kartosuwiryo had long opposed the abiding tendency of the government of the Republic to engage in diplomatic manoeuvres with the Dutch rather than to seize independence boldly and, if necessary, violently. But his voice was but one of numerous and politically much more weighty voices, both within the Masyumi party and outside it, which frequently made the same cry, which contributed much to the instability of the Republic's government, but which did not go into violent revolts against it.Footnote 231
Concluding remarks
Why, then, did Kartosuwiryo start shooting? The evidence discussed above suggests that his resort to violence was not the inevitable product of a long-gestating ambition to establish an Islamic state, or a frustrated desire to obtain personal power. Rather, it was the consequence of a confluence of highly unusual circumstances and timings which pushed Kartosuwiryo, step by step, to violent revolt in order to create, maintain, then defend, the controlling autonomy he had secured in West Java – with an underlying desire to further expand his influence to the outer islands. He was certainly a man of shuttered vision and unusual energy and intensity, but he shared those qualities with many other leading figures of the revolution who did not resort to violent means to achieve their political ends. In his case, the crucial factors were, first, his capacity, in late 1947 and 1948, to capitalise on the Republican insistence on diplomacy and Dutch readiness to resort to aggression to consolidate his following in rural West Java. Second, the TNI hijrah, both in its timing and its effects, gave him the unparalleled opportunity to build both his military and administrative capacity with a vacuum of local power; similarly, the TNI return to West Java in 1949 exacerbated the tensions between the ‘foreign’, ‘weak’ Republican army and the local, dedicated, Islamic militias. Third, the lamentable collapse of the Republic in December 1948 gave him persuasive grounds to argue that his movement offered the single, last opportunity to oppose Dutch colonial power. Finally, one must look to the extreme state weakness of the Republic at this time. That weakness was certainly of the military kind; indeed, ‘the Republican government was hardly in a position to make a major problem of the Dar ul-Islam movement, the less so since the activities of the latter were directed mainly against the Dutch and were in no way inhibited by Dutch–Indonesian agreements or by the issuance of cease-fire orders’.Footnote 232 But that weakness went also to its capacity to appreciate the real threat that Darul Islam represented, and to make a concerted and purposeful attempt either to domesticate or destroy Kartosuwiryo's movement.
Kartosuwiryo's resort to violence, then, was a function of the repeated interplay of contingency and locally motivated reaction, which Kartosuwiryo – and the Republic – allowed, by default, to direct the action. If at the beginning of the century, during the so-called zaman bergerak – ‘age in motion’ – ideology and reactions to the established authority called the shots, amidst the deep transformations of the 1940s, at the institutional as well as social levels, Islamism escaped the constraining bonds of mainstream nationalism and nationalist discourse, one of the few occasions when such has occurred in the modern history of Indonesia. That it could do so says more about the detailed play of historical contingency than about the putative power of any particular ideological fixation.
