Indonesia, Multatuli and me.

• Author: Sommers, William

Editor's Note:An American development administrator sees parallels in Suharto's Indonesia and the Dutch colonial past and also sees a way to convey his sentiments just as a colonial administrator did in an earlier era. --Ed.

Indonesia is never out of the news. An immense country in every measure of the word: an archipelago of nearly 2 million sq kilometers with over 17,000 islands of which about six thousand are inhabited. About three times the size of Texas it is home to over 240 million people who are mostly Muslim adherents but with significant Christian and Hindu religious practitioners, including, of course, the well-know island of Bali which induces millions of tourists each year ... not to overlook the remarkable Borabador temple to Buddha in Jogjakarta.

Its long history reads as though it were, in part, a universally applicable ironic fiction, replete with a not always happy succession of colonial masters, overrun by the Japanese in WW II, then onto revolution and liberation that spawned an independence movement which while successful in freeing themselves from greedy foreigners found their liberation thwarted by a succession of patriots-turned-dictators.

Indonesia consistently suffers from nature's wrath against an island nation built, in large part, on one of the most unsettling of the earth's tectonic plates. The unbelievable story of Krakatoa was followed by a number a earthquakes and tsunamis, including the 2007 break-up of parts of Sumatra and a smaller, but no less deadly, quake and tsunami in September of this year.

And yet, ironically, Indonesia has a culture and literature that is both remarkable and breathtaking in its scope and effect. Raffles in his History of Java uses twenty-five pages to explain Javanese literature and another seventy pages to elucidate Javanese poetry. In the current era, Indonesia has been represented by many writers, the greatest of whom is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, internationally famous for his remarkable Buru Quartet, which he wrote while being imprisoned by Suharto in the raw jungle island of Buru for 14 years. Though his writings have been translated and published in twenty-three countries, the unhappy irony is that they are still banned in Indonesia. And it is Pramoedya that introduces us into the values of Multatuli when Theodore Friend in his Indonesian Destinies notes that Pramoedya in his imprisonment "... continued to hear the novelistic voice of Multatuli, the great nineteenth-century Dutch critic of Dutch oppression in its Indies: Human Duty Is To Be Human."

Curiously--but understandable in the context of a continuing irony--one of the most tragic yet influential pieces of...