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defence of a major thesis, students were admitted to the full sarjana degree. Although in theory this was a five-year program, in practice most students took much longer to complete their studies. There was also a significant number who never reached the final stage of thesis work and who never qualified for the full

Pessimism and a crisis of confidence

Yet below the surface, he seems to have found the first months of student life deeply troubling. During his reflective moments Soe's private thoughts were clouded by anxiety and confusion, while his mood was one of grow ing pessim ism as he contem plated the world around him. A num ber of prom inent themes recur in the occasional diary entries written during these months, some of them reflections upon problem s that had been troubling him since his Canisius years. There is a repeated rejection of any belief in a God in the conventional sense and a strong hostility towards organised religion, Christianity in particular, which he regarded as a total distortion of C hrist's teaching.10 His own kernel of belief centred around a firm com m itm ent to certain essential human values:

For me there is something that is of the utmost value and reality in life: 'the capacity to love, to be compassionate, to feel sorrow'. Without all of that, we would be nothing more than inanimate objects. Fortunate is the person who still possesses feelings of love, who has not yet lost this thing of supreme value. If we lose that, then our lives become absurd.)^

In addition, Soe remained perplexed and troubled by several fundamental problems . of human existence. To what extent, he wondered, are men and women capable of controlling their own destinies - or is everything guided and controlled by some greater power beyond human experience? His thoughts on this dilemma were compounded by a deep sense of pessimism about the meaning and purpose of life.12

These inner doubts and confusion and his overriding pessimism are evident in one long diary entry written at the end of March 1962, and prompted by a conversation with a fellow student and Catholic activist, Harimurti:

According to Professor Beerling, a person can only live as long as he still has hope. But now I'm wondering how far anyone can remain genuine when he doesn't get anything. Anyone is prepared to make a sacrifice for something, say ideas, religion,

10 SHG Diary, 10 and 16 December 1961 11 SHG Diary, 16 December 1961

12 Futility, emptiness, misery, suffering, treachery, tragedy: these are the words that are prominent in the intense and often confused diary entries Soe wrote during these months as he attempted to grapple with his own gloom and apparent despair. There are also several reflections upon death. SHG Diary, 5,

politics or a lover. But can they make a sacrifice for nothing? I'm now in the midst of thinking about this. Extremely pessimistic and hoping fo r nothing. I don't have any faith in the integrity of prevailing ideas, I don't believe in God in the sense of religion as such. But I want to live. I don't know what motive lies in my own unconscious mind. My rather gloomy opinions, in fact this scepticism, Harimurti calls destructive. He says that in the past he was influenced by Berdjajev nihilism but now he possesses something positive (Catholicism perhaps). But what if life is one debacle after another? Must we ignore these facts? I think not. As far as I'm concerned a religious person doesn't face up to this. Yes, why must we ignore it? Harimurti also says, so that as a history student I look for something [that] lies in our future, but what if there is nothing there. The more I study history, the more pessimistic I am, the more critical and sceptical I am about anything. But surely there is some reason why I'm like this. It seems as though I have already accepted life fo r nothing as a fact. Perhaps there is some other motive behind it. Maybe I want to make a sacrifice or feel like a hero ... [illegible] is understood. Who knows? Will peace of mind be achieved if I make a sacrifice? For instance, always burdening myself in situations that people find most disagreeable. If this really is to be the basis of my outlook on life, the situation will be rather peculiar. I've never done anything just for show. A moral perspective only feels content with the happiness of all. Now it seems too soon to analyse myself. Moreover in the past I always ridiculed older people who talked about and believed in destiny. The more I read the more I realise that there is some supernatural force, irrational and unable to be understood, that is controlling the whole of society and all individuals. It's as if human beings are unable to prevent it. Is the sense of betrayal an absolute force? I don't know. But I think it is. Several months ago I believed history was a locomotive created by human beings, but humans themselves are unable to control it. Now I'm more inclined to say that human beings are commanded to create such a locomotive, that cannot be restrained or resisted by its own circumstances and humanity is unaware of this. Why did inventing the wheel unconsciously change small groups of contented people in the past, creating a hell within society? Harimurti also says that we (he means the intelligentsia) are the makers of society. But are we able to plan something? If I become part of the making or shaping [of] the society it would be a very peculiar situation. Man in the past had to read a magic formula to awaken Dracula but he himself was unable to restrain him and dies. Histoire se repete is more and more logical for me. Who can forget the saying of Herodotus (or Thucydides) The king that had been is that shall be. I add to be human is to be destroyed. ^ ^

This and other diary entries written during these months reveal a very serious and intense young man struggling to come to grips with some of the deep and abiding dilemmas posed by human existence. His own reading of history appears to have concentrated his attention on such issues, but in any case it would be astonishing, in view of his already declared opinions while still a schoolboy, if the conditions of his own society and the direction of Indonesian politics during the early 1960s were not contributing both to his own gloom and sense of foreboding and also to his thoughts about what active role he himself might play in the near future.

1 SHG Diary, 30 March 1962. Professor Beerling was a philosopher who taught at the University of Indonesia. Harimurti was chairman of the Catholic university students' association (Perhimpunan Mahasiswa Katolik Republik Indonesia, PMKRI).

Resistance to Sukarno's ideology

As is clear from the discussion in the preceding chapter, the figure of President Sukarno and his Guided Democracy ideology and political rhetoric had already begun to have an enormous influence on intellectual life, both depressing to orthodox PSI-type liberals and exhilarating to PNI and more radical elements. Consequently, the academic world was also affected to an increasing degree after 1959. The Faculty of Letters at Rawamangun was not immune to this influence. Soe saw this predominantly as a corrupting process. Two incidents in particular stand out in his diary.

On 27 January 1962 in a public lecture delivered at the University of Indonesia on the occasion of his promotion as a full Professor (Guru Besar), the recently appointed Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Sutjipto Wirjosuparto, launched an extraordinarily personal attack on several of his fellow academic colleagues, in particular Dr G.J. Resink, a professor of international law in the University of Indonesia's Faculty of Law. Resink had rejected as myth the widely held claim that the Indonesian region had been colonised for 350 years.14 In his public lecture, Sutjipto took issue with Resink's views and sought to undermine them with a variety of historical evidence. However, to the alarm of many of his listeners, including Soe Hok-gie, he went further, claiming that Resink and his supporters held views which were out of step with the opinions of Indonesia's own president and the central ideological tenets of the state. Soe's response was unusually independent for an Indonesian student at that time:

But Sutjipto's method was extremely naive and constituted a debasement of scholarship. He claimed that they were not Manipol-USDEK, not in accordance with Pancasila and so forth. This is a political issue and it was improper in such circumstances to accuse a person of being anti-USDEK. USDEK is a trauma and anyone who is branded non- USDEK is placed in a dangerous position. And he said ’In other words Resink has claimed that 350 years of colonial rule is incorrect, whereas His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Indonesia, Sukarno has acknowledged this in such and such, page so and so, etc, etc.' Heaven knows how many dozen times he quoted and cited Sukarno as the justication for his theories. Sukarno is an inadequate human being

but Sutjipto treated him like a prophet and the source of truth. This is the tone of a bootlicker.

Such a performance by a senior member of his own academic community shocked and appalled him, for it seemed to him no different from attempts elsewhere in the world to defend totalitarianism by stigmatising independent thought and dissident opinions as 'anti-Party' or 'anti-national'.

Two months later Soe was himself directly on the receiving end of exactly the same kind of treatment when he became embroiled in an unpleasant and protracted argument with a group of fellow students about the nature of Indonesian politics and society. He quickly found himself isolated and attacked for his opinions:

I said that I didn't believe that Bung Karno was a socialist, considering the situation in Indonesia at the present time.... One of their number, Adam Batubara, said that we could only accept matters passively without criticism. We only have duties and have no rights whatsoever. According to him, Guided Democracy is nothing more than dictatorship. And humanitarianism (I had said that I placed emphasis on that aspect) was something that has to be tossed aside during the process of development. We have to be ready to shoot 10 million for the sake of the other 80 million. Look at Bung Amir [Sjarifuddin], shot because he committed treason. Basically, in the person of Batubara, we encounter the elements of a dictator. I argued with these views by keeping right away from the present political situation. He had already threatened to report me because I had 'insulted' Bung Kamo (not believing that he was a socialist). I don't want to get involved in this but if I have to face jail because of my convictions I wouldn't be too upsetJ ^

The discussion then switched to the question of the ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Indonesia. Soe immediately found himself confronted by blind prejudice and racist stereotypes, for his opponents, insisting that all Sino-Indonesians were materialistic and treacherous, refused to accept his counter arguments about the changing nature of national identity:

How hard and difficult the struggle for truth is. How persistently pseudo-scientific thinking endures. And how we must fight against it. We act correctly adopting the side of reason and intuition, while they only inflame opinions and then leave just like that. How antagonistic Batubara is towards the Chinese. And his group have not yet been able to learn from Hitler and the experience of history. Now I can understand how the scapegoats of society (in Indonesia = the Chinese) are so easily victimised. Yes, and we must clear a path struggling to eradicate the roots of prejudice which are deep

15 SHG Diary, 27 January 1962. Sutjipto also included in his attack Dr Mohammad Ali (Head of the National Archives in Jakarta), the prominent PSI intellectual Soedjatmoko, and Dick Hartoko, a Catholic teacher and writer in Yogyakarta.

inside the unconscious realm. The weeds of prejudice grow easily while the trees of truth are so difficult.17

Soe's reaction to both these incidents was a clear indication of those unique personal qualities that were to contribute to his stature as a political activist in the years to come, in particular his social conscience and his concern for his responsibilities as an intellectual. Both of these aspects of his personality were reinforced by his evident intelligence and the breadth of his own reading and knowledge.

Yet exposure to hostile anti-Chinese sentiments was clearly a troubling experience. Such an episode undoubtedly contributed to his decision to join a group of like-minded individuals a few months later as they set about establishing an organisation to promote the idea of assimilation as the solution to the problems facing Indonesia's ethnic Chinese community.

The assim ilation ists

Soe Hok-gie's participation in the political manoeuvring within Indonesia's ethnic Chinese community in the early 1960s was prompted initially by his friendship with two fellow students in the Faculty of Letters, Onghokham and Tan H ong-gie.18 W hen Soe first met them in late 1961, both Ong and Tan had already been involved for some time in the continuing public debate about the problems facing the Chinese in Indonesia.

Throughout the 1950s the position of Indonesia's Chinese inhabitants had been called into question on two fronts. Firstly, there was the confused issue of their legal and civil status in the new Republic, centring on the problem of deciding who already legitimately held Indonesian citizenship and who should be entitled to claim it in the near

17 SHG Diary, 12 April 1962

18 Onghokham was born in Surabaya in 1933, and came from an old peranakan family. After completing high school in Bandung, he arrived in Jakarta in 1956, initially to study law at the University of Indonesia. However, after a period working as a research assistant for the American scholar, William Skinner, he abandoned his law course in favour of history, beginning in the Faculty of Letters in 1960. Tan Hong-gie had worked as a journalist for Star Weekly during the 1950s before enrolling as a student in the Department of Archaeology in 1960. Interviews with Onghokham, 5 February 1982; and Siswadhi (Tan Hong-gie), September 1978

future.19 These questions also required complex and protracted negotiations with the Peoples' Republic of China over the issue of dual nationality. Secondly, there were the problems surrounding the Chinese penetration of all sections of the Indonesian economy. Chinese economic activity aroused considerable antagonism in many quarters, especially from the smaller and less successful indigenous or pribumi Indonesian business class. This was most clearly in evidence during the Assaat movement of 1956 (an attempt by a group of pribumi businessmen to pressure the government into providing stronger support for their cause), and the moves to ban aliens from conducting retail trade in rural areas that came into effect with the PP10 regulations in late 1959.20 Towards the end of the 1950s, the heightened tension and emotional trauma surrounding these events contributed to a growing sense of insecurity on the part of the Sino-Indonesian community. As public expressions of hostility and anti-Chinese sentiments became more commonplace, a new debate developed within the Chinese community on proposals for Chinese to become more assimilated to indigenous Indonesians.

Star Weekly, a popular magazine widely read by the peranakan Chinese throughout Indonesia, was one of the forums where this new approach was canvassed.21 Towards the end of 1959 and again in early 1960, the magazine published a series of articles by Onghokham that attempted to address some of the serious problems facing Indonesia's ethnic Chinese community. In the last of these articles, Ong suggested that the only way for the Chinese to overcome the prejudice and discrimination that were so widespread in Indonesia was for the members of the minority Chinese community to 'assimilate' themselves into the majority indigenous community.22

19 On the citizenship issue, see Somers 1965: 224-50.

2,9 On the Assaat movement, see Feith 1968: 481-7; and Somers 1965: 154-7. On the retail trade ban, see Mackie 1976a: 82-97; and Somers 1965: 194-223.

21 Star Weekly, edited by Auwjong Peng Koen (P.K. Ojong, 1920-80), was published by the same company that produced the Jakarta daily Keng Po. Both Star Weekly and Keng Po were forced to cease publication during 1960 after contravening martial law press regulations.

A month later, in March 1960, a group of ten prominent Sino-Indonesians signed a manifesto advocating voluntary assimilation as the solution to the Chinese community's problems.23 During the months that followed, the correspondence columns of Star Weekly were filled with letters by supporters and opponents of the assimilation concept. The strongest criticism came from spokesmen representing Baperki (B adan Permusjaxvaratan Kewarganegaraan Indonesia, the Consultative Body for Indonesian Citizenship), the organisation that had been founded in 1954 to promote Indonesian citizenship for ethnic Chinese and combat all forms of discrimination.24

Baperki had come into existence as a broadly-based and ideologically non-aligned body with the quite specific mandate of representing the interests of the ethnic Chinese. However, as politics became more strongly polarised in the 1956-58 period it had moved to a left position, partly because of the close personal relations between its chairman Siauw Giok Tjhan and President Sukarno. Consequently, a number of prominent figures with links to the PSI and others who were Catholics and Protestants had resigned their membership. Nevertheless, Baperki retained firm support within the Chinese community since it continued to provide a strong public defence of Indonesia's Chinese against all forces of discrimination.25

The critics of assimilation claimed that any such policy would be a fundamental infringement of individual human rights, arguing instead for the acceptance and integration of the Chinese within the Indonesian nation as a separate and distinct ethnic minority (or suku bangsa) retaining its own social and cultural identity.26 The

23 Star Weekly, 26 March 1960. The signatories included Onghokham, Auwjong Peng Koen and Injo Beng Goat, the editor-in-chief of Keng Po. The remainder were prominent peranakan academic and professional identities. A key participant was Drs Lauw Chuan Tho, an economist educated at the