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Bury the Parties. But it is easier to make a revolution than to guide it toward order and prosperity. A month after independence, a Dutch adventurer named Captain Westerling tried to overthrow the government with a mixed force of European mercenaries and native dissidents. The Darul Islam fanatics, who want to set up a theocratic Moslem state by force of arms, took over most of the mountainous area southwest of Bandung in Java; a separatist republic was established in the South Moluccas; the Amboinese, who had long supplied native soldiers to the Dutch, rose in rebellion; the people of Atjeh in Northern Sumatra, who fight everybody, fought the government.
The nation Sukarno precariously governed was precariously split politically. There are four major and nearly equal parties: 1) the Nationalists, created by Sukarno and sustained by a horde of underpaid government bureaucrats; 2) Masjumi, a Moslem party of small traders and urban businessmen with a pronounced Western outlook; 3) the Orthodox Scholars, a village-based and deeply conservative Moslem group dominated by religious teachers; 4) the Communists.
With no party strong enough to rule, there was a succession of coalition Cabinets. Each Cabinet minister was responsible to his individual party and had to run back to headquarters for voting instructions and policy directives. The years went by, governments came and went, but the total result was inaction. In exasperation, Sukarno once cried: "Let's bury the parties!"
The Colonels. His was not the only voice raised in protest. To the impatient military commanders of the Outer Islands, nothing seemed to come from Djakarta except the sound of falling Cabinets and the noise of futile oratory. These young, vigorously anti-Communist colonels were a new factor in Indonesia's tumbling political confusion. The Outer Islands, and Sumatra in particular, produce nearly 100% of Indonesia's exports, while overpopulated Java has always been a deficit area. The profits earned by their products went to Djakarta and, it seemed to the colonels, never came back. Sukarno believes not in economics, but in people—and Java had most of the people.
In effect, Sukarno spent the Outer Islands' earnings on Java. In early 1955 Colonels Sumual and Warouw in the Celebes began shipping out copra and collecting their own taxes on the trade. Instead of sending the revenue to Djakarta, they used the money for local schools and roads. In Central Sumatra veteran Colonel Ahmad Husein followed their lead, took over the regional administration, soon was exporting rubber to Singapore. Tall, efficient Colonel Simbolon in North Sumatra and scholarly Colonel Barlian in South Sumatra also went into the business of army-managed barter and invested the profits in schools, roads, barracks. The operation was scrupulously honest. When Djakarta challenged Simbolon's operations, he produced bank records to show that he had not diverted a single rupiah to his own use.