341. Telegram From the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State1
1859. Personal for the Secretary.2 I know how important for our country is the maintenance of our Atlantic Alliance and how recent events have made it necessary to concentrate a preponderant share of your attention on problems in Europe and the Middle East. But at the year end and with the NATO Conference behind us, I should like to make one final appeal for a new, less negative look at the problems here in Indonesia. My staff and I have thought long and hard over this situation and there is almost complete unity of thought among us, including Army, Naval and Air Attachés, about what our role should be. I honestly believe that the courses of action we have recommended in our various cables are in our own national interest, in the true long term interest of our Dutch friends and that they offer real prospect of stemming, if not at once reversing, the present Indonesian drift toward Communism. I am fast losing faith in Hatta or the Masjumi leadership doing anything effective, either alone or in cooperation with young Colonels in the regions. We therefore only have present government to work with and to keep on our side. I know that is where Djuanda wants to be.
The remainder of this cable was drafted by the acting head of my Political Section,3 an officer whose total previous service up to ten months ago was in Europe. I mention this because I fear there may be a belief that I am anti-Dutch, and have perhaps been too long in the Far East. As I have said before, this is not an anti-Dutch policy we are advocating—it is the only possible way in which they can save anything. (End JMA)
(Begin Political)
Hard unpleasant facts in current Indonesian crisis carry urgent implications for US world position. Failure US to come forward with any proposal, suggestions, gesture of friendship or even hint of understanding nature and depth of Indonesia’s struggle for national identity and international acceptance means that we are rapidly taking ourselves out of any present or potential position of real influence in this huge rich area of the world. With US of course goes also all significant Western influence, since even if changing trade patterns may bring other Western countries (e.g., West Germany) [Page 577] into gap created by turn away from Holland, this would be at best only somewhat transitory and pragmatic arrangement and would not offer basis firm political and psychological orientation. Only the Communist bloc is left to supply that, and the current Asian-African solidarity conference at Cairo4 provides up-to-date evidence of just how ready the USSR is to offer attractive propositions.
We are convinced that the Indonesians want and need American friendship, and, importantly, we feel that such a desire is not based alone on material advantages accruing therefrom. Indonesians who have any education at all have some knowledge, scanty though it be, of the US as a nation founded in opposition to colonial domination and strengthened through the agony of civil war which established national unity and abolished slavery of a colored people. To many here in Indonesia, working quietly despite internal political turmoil to weld a nation under 20th Century pressures out of this scattered collection of islands where prevalent conditions are more nearly akin to those of our 18th Century frontier, America is the guide for development here half way across the world. Despite sincere assertions of an “active, independent foreign policy”, Indonesians turn naturally to America, and what they long for is not just technical or military assistance, but especially the warmth of human understanding.
The long tragic record of history in these islands provides ample reason for Indonesia’s distrust of the colonial powers, and her present actions against the Dutch. These are to be explained not in terms of the last ten years, but of the last 300. (This is most important. JMA.)
Up to now America has not been tarred with same brush in Indonesian thinking, and Indonesians are hurt, disappointed and confused to see us apparently forsaking our own heritage and joining the imperial club which firmly but not very courageously bats [bolts?] the door against the pariahs.
Although both Sukarno and Hatta have been impressed by what they have seen in Communist China, the overwhelming evidence is that they were so impressed because they felt a community of experience and need with the Chinese people and a consequent admiration for their accomplishments. Sukarno is reported to have said following his visit to the US that he had greatly enjoyed and appreciated it all, but that America was so far ahead of Indonesia in its material achievements that he could find little in the American scene that he could usefully take back to help build Indonesia. (Same has been said to me by many returned Indonesian visitors. JMA.) If this is so, [Page 578] we are failing to present America in a way understandable to the aspiring millions of the ex-colonial areas; we are perhaps burying its essence under a mass of gadgets and stifling it in a cacophony of TV. As a result we find ourselves facing the intolerable paradox in which materialistic Communism is able to pose as the champion of the rights of human freedom, while we, true heirs of the declaration of independence, are tempted to forget or ignore the universal scope and practical, powerful appeal of those truths which for 181 years we have held “to be self-evident.”
Our national experience is viewed with much interest by thinking Indonesians with respect to their own struggles. Perhaps [if?] we ourselves review it in the perspective of time and distance, the retrospection may add to our compassion for this new nation half a world away but, like every other country, now sitting on our very doorstep. We too, under much less complicated circumstances, had a period, after the departure of the colonial governors, of strife between and among regions and the weak central government, creating extreme economic and political chaos. We too, counseled by the retiring President Washington, sought a form of “active, independent foreign policy” which we called “no entangling alliances” and 20 years later in a move not totally dissimilar to Indonesia’s recent proclamation of sweeping control over vast territorial waters, President Monroe told the world in effect that the entire Western Hemisphere was off bounds to colonial powers.
We wish to emphasize what seems to us the stark, unhappy fact that by US inaction in the Indonesian crisis we are adding to the “mental isolation” (as the Foreign Minister has put it) of the Indonesian people, and are leaving the scene with no other alternative for the Indonesians than the Communist bloc. Our apparent retreat is, we feel, both unnecessary and unwise. Our national character does not lack initiative, imagination, stamina, courage or compassion. All are required in this situation. Even with them, events may take a turn which we do not wish to see; but without them and without keeping open the opportunity for our presence and our influence here, we will have surrendered needlessly and tragically. The opportunity is still ours, if we but use it promptly.
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, 656.56D13/12–3057. Secret.↩
- Dulles was not in Washington when the telegram was received. A copy of the telegram was probably sent to the Secretary as an attachment to a memorandum of January 2, 1958, from Robertson to Dulles, to which several unspecified telegrams and despatches with Allison’s recommendations were attached. (Ibid., 611.56D/1–258)↩
- Apparently First Secretary of Embassy Mary V. Trent.↩
- The Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, consisting of delegates from a number of Asian and African countries and colonial territories, met at Cairo from December 26, 1957, to January 1, 1958. The text of the declaration issued by the conference on January 1, 1958, is printed in AFP: Current Documents, 1958, pp. 1073–1074.↩