Slamet Wahyu (1911-1992)
President Slamet Wahyu in 1972
President and
Bapak Bangsa Slamet Wahyu in military uniform in 1990
Slamet Wahyu was born in Surabaya on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies on February 15, 1911. A stubborn and often troublesome child, Wahyu was educated at a Dutch boarding school in rural Java from 1917 to 1929. After reaching adulthood, Wahyu served in the Dutch colonial army from 1929 to 1932. After his military service, Wahyu moved to the colonial capital of Batavia (modern-day Djakarta) to study to become a medical doctor. After four years of study, including sojourns in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and London, Wahyu finally gained his medical doctorate in 1937 at the age of 26. For the next decade, Wahyu settled down and established a moderately successful medical practice in Batavia. A practicing and devout Sunni Muslim throughout his life, Wahyu made his pilgrimage or
hajj to Mecca in 1939.
Throughout the 1940s, the Indonesian independence movement had been growing in earnest. Numerous Indonesian nationalist and regionalist organizations and clubs had sprung up throughout the Dutch East Indies. Throughout the early 1940s, Dr. Wahyu started to become more and more aware of the pro-independence and nationalist organizations in the Dutch East Indies. On May 6, 1943, the day that Wahyu would later state was the day that changed his life forever, the 32-year old Dr. Slamet Wahyu attended a meeting of the Javanese People’s Union in Batavia and was almost instantly inspired by the idea of a free and unified Indonesian nation-state. Over the next few weeks, what he heard and saw at the aforementioned meeting continued to stay in his mind. By the summer of 1943, Dr. Wahyu convinced himself that he would now dedicate his life to the cause of a free and independent Indonesia. In July, 1943, he officially joined the Javanese People’s Union and began to write, edit and disseminate pro-independence and anti-colonial pamphlets, newspapers, books and other propaganda. Over the next few years and while still running his medical practice, Dr. Wahyu continued to do as such. In 1947 however, Dutch colonial authorities raided the headquarters of the Javanese People’s Union and arrested most of its members, Dr. Wahyu included. He then had his medical doctorate revoked and spent the next six years in jail from 1947 to 1953. After being released from prison, Wahyu moved to Tokyo in an effort to cultivate support for the cause of Indonesian independence amongst the corporatist and anti-Western colonialist government of Japan. Wahyu himself was very impressed with Japanese culture and the corporatist government of Japan. While not a corpratist, he sympathized with the efficiency and strength of the Japanese government and saw Japan as a liberator of Asian people from European colonialism and imperialism. Wahyu returned to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies in 1956. He then rejoined the Javanese Peoples Union and then moved to his old hometown of Surabaya, where he continued to remain politically active.
On March 27, 1960, Wahyu, among numerous other Indonesian nationalists, established the Indonesian Congress Party (ICP) in Batavia through the amalgamation of several pro-independence groups. In July, 1960, the Empire of Japan became the first foreign government to formally voice its support for the ICP. Under the charismatic Wahyu, the ICP would become the largest and best organized independence organization in the Dutch East Indies within only a year’s time. The swift and meteoric rise of the ICP worried many Dutch colonial officials that some kind of conflict in the Dutch East Indies was on the horizon.
On the afternoon of July 19, 1962, Dutch colonial soldiers opened fire on pro-independence demonstrators in Batavia, leaving twenty-two dead and over ninety wounded. Two days later, on July 21, 1962, Slamet Wahyu and his Indonesian Congress Party, capitalizing on public outrage over the Batavia massacre, issued a declaration of independence for the Republic of Indonesia. In response, Dutch King William IV (1901-1990) and Prime Minister Manfred Sevriens (1908-1997) quickly requested the deployment of additional troops from both the Dutch East Indies and the Metropolitan Netherlands to suppress the rebellion to which the States-General reluctantly consented. While other European colonial powers such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal largely sided with the Dutch, with Germany even providing military advisors, the Corporatist Empire of Japan immediately recognized Wahyu’s government and began sending supplies and munitions to the ICP. Wahyu himself was still sympathetic to the Japanese government.
After six years of brutal jungle, urban and guerilla warfare, on September 12, 1968, the Dutch government decided to open negotiations with the Indonesian Congress Party. The two parties, including Wahyu, began meeting in the Swiss city of Geneva to negotiate an end to the war. While the ICP and their allied militias had made some gains on Java and Sumatra, disagreement over the fate of Indonesia’s eastern islands prohibited a settlement from being reached, as Wahyu would accept nothing less than a complete Dutch withdrawal from the islands of Indonesia. As such, negations and the war would drag on into the subsequent year, as both sides tried desperately to gain the upper hand. In the Netherlands, public opinion was turning against the war with an increasing amount of anti-war protests, despite an increase of aid from the German Empire. On June 29, 1969, news of the Lahat massacre, a massacre of no less than 724 civilians by Dutch soldiers that took place on June 12, 1969, forced the collapse of Prime Minister Manfred Sevriens’s government leading to the rise of a new ruling collation under the anti-imperialist Christian-Progressive Party under Sylvester Rietveld (1915-2006). After more than seven years of fighting, the war in the Dutch East Indies came to an abrupt end with the signing of the Treaty of Geneva on September 17, 1969. At the negotiations in Geneva it was agreed that the Netherlands would end its centuries of colonialism in the region and cede authority to an interim government following elections in December. The first Indonesian elections were held on December 16, 1969. As was to be expected, the Indonesian Congress Party (ICP) won the elections in a landslide. The next day, on December 17, 1969, the Netherlands officially recognized the independence of the Republic of Indonesia and Wahyu was proclaimed the interim President of Indonesia. With that, 366 years of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia had come to an end. Just a few weeks later, Wahyu has hastily inaugurated as the first President of Indonesia on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1970.
Wahyu's presidency saw the increased industrialization and urbanization of Indonesia, a limited redistribution of wealth and land to the impoverished rural population, the establishment of new trade deals, the restoration of ancient Indonesian ruins and monuments, the establishment of new museums, a renaissance in Indonesian art, cinema and culture, the growth and reformation of the Indonesian military with help from Japanese, Indian, Persian, British and Australian military advisers, the funding of overseas nationalist and pro-independence movements in Malaya, British Borneo, Sri Lanka and Sub-Saharan Africa, among other things. Wahyu also successfully kept his country neutral in the Asia-Pacific War, and in doing so traded with both the Allied and Corpratists powers for the economic benefit of Indonesia. In 1985, he granted himself the title “Father of the Nation” (Bapak Bangsa), a title that no other Indonesian was and is ever allowed to hold.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, President Wahyu’s health began to seriously decline. At an Independence Day rally in 1989, President Wahyu collapsed on stage due to a heart attack and had to be taken to a nearby hospital. Throughout 1990 and 1991, Wahyu made less and less public appearances, much to the consternation of much of the Indonesian populace. Finally, after a long and eventful twenty-two year Presidency, Wahyu died of cardiac arrest on March 31, 1992 at the age of 81. A massive funeral was held just over two weeks later on April 15, 1992. He was then buried in a large, pre-built mausoleum in the heart of Djakarta.
As the founding father and first President of the Republic of Indonesia, Slamet Wahyu left a mixed legacy. Without a doubt, his leadership was pivotal for Indonesia in winning its independence from the Dutch Empire, among the other aforementioned accomplishments. On the other hand, Indonesia under his presidency was far from a perfect democracy, as elections were only held every ten years and Wahyu won in a landslide both the elections of 1979 and 1989. In addition, the Indonesian Congress Party consistently maintained a near complete control over Indonesian politics. The government also supported a number of Javanese-centric policies, which alienated many non-Javanese and emboldened numerous separatist and secessionist movements in Aceh, Bali, Borneo, and Papua, which is ironic considering Indonesian support for nationalist and pro-independence movements abroad. Corruption was also a problem within numerous levels of the government, including within the Indonesian Congress Party. Nevertheless, even to this day, Wahyu is still beloved by the Indonesian people as the father of their nation. His birthday, February 15, is a national holiday in Indonesia.