Title : The Indonesian Tragedy (xvii+438p)
Author : Brian May
Publisher : Graham Brash
Year Published: 1978
After four years as Agence-Presse correspondent in Indonesia, Brian May became convinced that the nation’s social and economic progress was blocked, perhaps permanently, by a strong cultural barrier. Although he details Western-aided despotism, with its thousand of political prisoners, its murders, and its general acts of repression, he does not consider the suffering of the people to be the main ‘tragedy’ of Indonesia. For him, it lies in the ruling Junta’s blind attempt to force a Western economic model on a backward and superstitious people, whose culture and psychology are unsuited to it.
The concept of ‘developing’ countries is dismissed as a cruelly misleading euphemism. The much talked of economic ‘take-off’ cannot take place in countries like Indonesia, where a bazaar mentality dominates commerce. Her population of about 135 million 135 million in 1977 is likely to rise by the year 2000 to 280 million by which time she will be unable to feed herself. Optimistic theories of development, and facile blaming of Dutch imperialism, hide the reality of chronic socio-economic stagnation. These will have to be discarded if the problem of Indonesia is to be understood, let alone solved.
The author demonstrates the ‘Indonesian Tragedy’ not so much by argument, as by depicting the country as he experiences it from day to day. In developing his conclusion, he draws on history, and the works of sociologist, some of whom he disagrees with. In this way he sheds light on the predicament of Indonesia and helps to illuminate a problem common to much of the Third World
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