JOHANNA SUNARTI NASUTION remembers a happy childhood. She was fortunate in her youth in the closeness and love of her family, in having a fine education, and in receiving from her parents a strong sense of purpose. When she was born on November 1, 1923, in Surabaya, East Java,
Indonesia was under the rule of the Dutch. Throughout her childhood her
parents worked actively for both the freedom and the welfare of the
Indonesian people. Love for her country and devotion to her countrymen
have been bywords for JOHANNA ever since.
Her father, Raden Panji (title of a lesser prince): Soenario Gondokoesoemo, was a member of the Javanese elite. As a young man he had been exiled to the Netherlands along with other suspected nationalists. There he completed his education in economics and married a Dutch girl, Maria Hendrika Rademaker. Impressed with the young aristocrat's qualifications, the Dutch sent him back to his homeland to work as an executive on the railways. Because of his birth and position he received the same privileges and perquisites as a Dutchman.
In 1927 R.P. Soenario Gondakoesoemo left Dutch government service to become director of the National Bank of Indonesia. Soon thereafter he became a founding member and treasurer of the nationalist political party, Partai Indonesia Raya, known as Parindra. Following independence he was awarded two medals for serving the cause of freedom. In his mind patriotism and civic responsibility were inseparable. "If you are to become a good leader," he told his children, "you must take care of the poor people in your country."
JOHANNA's mother, though Dutch, raised her children to be nationalists and dressed in kain (long wrapped skirt) and kebaya (long-sleeved overblouse), the Indonesian national costume. She was a leader of the Indonesian Girl Scouts until 1937 and was very active in social welfare work. She often took her daughter to help the poor in the urban slums. JOHANNA once wrote a high school paper about these visits and remembers the anger and astonishment she felt when her Dutch teacher returned the composition saying, "This is not your work; it looks very communistic. Please change it."
Although JOHANNA and her two brothers—one older and one younger—reached maturity during World War II and the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, she retains no sense of hardship or bitterness from that period. After leaving primary school in Surabaya in 1937 she attended the Dutch Lyceum (high school) in Bandung, West Java, where her family had moved, until 1942. During those years she joined the Red Cross and received a diploma in nursing. When the Japanese invaded Java and set up their headquarters in Bandung, JOHANNA was sent to Yogyakarta to complete high school. Her goal at the time was to attend premedical school, but she was prevented from doing so because Japanese was not among the seven languages—Dutch, Indonesian, French, German, English, Greek and Latin—that she had studied. Toward the end of the war she went to work in a medical laboratory in Bandung.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945 the Indonesians began their four-year war for independence from the Netherlands. JOHANNA was active from 1945 to 1946 as a Red Cross nurse in the hospitals for Indonesian soldiers. One of the soldiers who claimed her attention was a close family friend, Abdul Haris Nasution.
JOHANNA has first met the soft-spoken military cadet from North Sumatra on the tennis courts in Bandung in 1940. Nasution greatly admired her father, and the two men would spend hours deeply engrossed in discussions of politics and the struggle for independence. JOHANNA herself had no interest in the young man other than as a tennis partner. When she and her two brothers left for Yogyakarta during the Japanese occupation, Nasution came to stay with her parents who were alone in Bandung .He was, she says, "a very good son for my parents." Letter after letter from Bandung told about the young man who worked with her father and talked at length with her mother about his own parents back in Sumatra. It was not surprising that when they met again in 1946 in the Red Cross nursing station, JOHANNA and Nasution fell in love.
The time was not right for marriage, however, and JOHANNA returned to Yogyakarta to enter the Faculty of Law of Gajah Mada, the new nationalist university. In the privileged circles in which she moved it was not unusual for women to attend the university; many of the professional women who help her today were her classmates there or in the lyceum. JOHANNA completed only one year of studies before Nasution asked her to return to Bandung to become his wife; they were married on May 30, 1947.
Three months after their wedding guerrilla warfare against the Dutch began in earnest and both NASUTIONs were participants, he as a guerrilla leader, and she tending the sick and the needy in the villages through which they passed. They spent about eight months in the forests outside Bandung, seeing each other only once every two to four weeks. In early 1948 Colonel Nasution was sent to Yogyakarta as head of the crack Siliwangi Division of the army of the Republic of Indonesia, while his wife stayed in Bandung. It was during this period that the young Ibu (Mrs.) NASUTION's strong sense of social responsibility was first coupled with her impressive organizational talent.
In Indonesia all army wives automatically belong to the Army Wives' Association (Persatuan Isteri Tentara, known as Persit); the wife of the division commander is normally chairman of the division association. In June 1947 Ibu NAS (as Mrs. NASUTION is familiarly known), in recognition of her husband's position as well as of her own special talents, was asked to become chairman of Persit, Siliwangi Division. The Renville Agreement had just been signed by the Dutch and the Indonesians, with the Dutch recognizing the fledgling Republic of Indonesia with its capital in Yogyakarta. The problem facing Persit was to move the families of the nationalist (guerrilla) armies to Yogyakarta to join the men. As chairman of Persit, Ibu NAS founded a committee to deal with the situation—the first of an endless stream of committees into which she was to "gather her contacts." Together with the Red Cross and the Dutch army itself, her committee moved the families of the Siliwangi Division to Yogyakarta. She herself left on the last train out of Bandung.
Ibu NAS often speaks of "collecting people" as her hobby. In 1948 she and her friends collected the wives of all the army divisions in Yogyakarta into a unified Persit. Their object was to take care of widows and wounded soldiers and to help wives send messages to their husbands in the surrounding areas where fighting had flared again. Ibu NAS does not think of her work during this period as remarkable. It was, she says, the way of life in time of war.
In September of that year, Col. Nasution put down a communist rebellion in Madiun on behalf of the Republic of Indonesia; on December 19 his wife was captured and nearly murdered by the remnants of that rebellion. Nasution had taken his troops out of Yogyakarta to prepared guerrilla positions in the districts on December 18, the day before the Dutch entered the city. Ibu NAS was in Solo (Surakarta) not far to the north of Yogyakarta. Finding herself without return transportation because of the Dutch occupation, she set out with her younger brother, his wife and two friends for Yogyakarta by foot. About halfway there they were stopped by soldiers of communist leaning who had them interned under the pretext of their being Dutch spies. Fortunately she was recognized by a non-commissioned officer as the wife of Col. Nasution and released.
Unwilling to let go of their prey, however, the communist sympathizers followed them and the next day, when they were out of the commander's sight, provoked local villagers to turn on them by shouting "death to the Dutch spies!" Once again the small party was in luck. They were recognized by another friendly army officer who vouched for their identity and they were allowed to proceed safely to the city.
But Yogyakarta itself was no longer safe. Two days after her return, Dutch soldiers came to her house at one in the morning and arrested her and her brothers. For five days they interrogated her, and for five days she responded in fluent Dutch, reprimanding them for forgetting their own history and their own struggles for freedom. Eventually they released her unharmed to continue her work of caring for the wives and families left behind. They would, perhaps, have been more careful had they known she would soon become involved in establishing underground communications between her husband's guerrilla forces and the Indonesian delegation in Jakarta. The latter, in turn, transmitted the correspondence to the Indonesian leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, who were under guard in Sumatra.
In August 1949 the NASUTIONs moved to Jakarta where General Nasution became Chief of Staff of the Army of the soon-to-be-recognized independent Indonesia. Ibu NASUTION and her colleagues immediately set about organizing a central Persit to coordinate the division associations from all over the Republic-held islands.
In 1952 Nasution fell out of favor with Sukarno, who had been president of the Republic of Indonesia since 1945, and was dropped as army chief of staff. Earlier in the year Ibu NASUTION had given birth to their first child, a daughter, Hendrianti (Yanti) Sahara. She, therefore, had every reason to resign from the chairmanship of the central Persit—or to be asked to resign—but neither she nor her colleagues saw any reason for her not to continue in the post, regardless of her husband's loss of position; she was reelected chairman in 1953. The vote of confidence she received at that time, and in similar situations since, is due, colleagues agree, to her innate sense of diplomacy even more than to her remarkable organizational ability. Ibu NAS is a tall, handsome woman with commanding presence, yet she insists, with winning charm, that she is a very easygoing person. Although she may receive the homage required by etiquette when her husband's position demands it, in her private activities she never stands on ceremony. Her colleagues, far from feeling threatened, are buoyed up by her easy good humor and warmth.
Under Ibu NASUTION's leadership the central Persit by 1954 had begun a number of projects: 27 kindergartens had been opened as well as a school for kindergarten teachers; three elementary schools, a school for domestic science and a dormitory for young girls. A home had been set up for the handicapped and for orphans and a library and two restaurants established for the benefit of Persit members.
Ibu NAS remained as either chairman or advisor to the central Persit from 1950 to 1963. In 1961 she was asked to form a foundation specifically for fundraising. Although not convinced this was a good idea, and in spite of having given birth in 1960 to a second daughter, Irma Surjani, she agreed to become chairman of the new foundation, Ikrar Bhakti (vow of devotion). Here she was faced, as she has been many times since, with having to start a project with no capital. In this case she solved the problem by convincing Pertamina, the national oil monopoly, to lend the foundation one million rupiahs. By 1963 the foundation owned two printing presses, one confectionery and a fish cannery, the loan was repaid in full and it was using the profits from the business ventures to support the work of Persit.
Meanwhile General Nasution's fortunes had risen again and in 1955 he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Some historians have indicated that tension may have remained between the general and President Sukarno because of "petticoat politics." Sukarno had just taken a second wife, Hartini, without divorcing Fatmawati who was opposed to the marriage. In this he felt himself in compliance with Islamic law which allows a man to have four wives. During the war for independence, however, the women of Indonesia fought—like Fatmawati and Ibu NAS—side by side with the men. In the postwar years they were demanding equal status and, for the most part, getting it. Among other things, they were strongly in favor of monogamy, and in taking a second wife, Sukarno was letting them down. Ibu NASUTION was among the women fighting for a marriage law that would uphold the strict Islamic interpretation of marriage and would prevent a man from taking a second wife unless he had the permission of the first. To register their protest to his action, the NASUTIONs, along with other leading figures of Jakarta, regularly turned down invitations to functions which Hartini was expected to attend. Ibu NAS rejects the notion that she influenced her husband and that the incident caused tension between them and Sukarno. Her husband, she points out, was a strict Muslim from Sumatra, and their opinions on the subject coincided. Furthermore, Sukarno, an old friend of her father's, understood her position, she says, and gave them permission not to attend such affairs.
In 1962 Nasution was relieved from his position as Chief of Staff and appointed Coordinating Minister of Defense and Security—a post that took him further from direct command. His wife retired from Persit. Less than 24 hours later a delegation from the newly formed Coordinating Body for Children's Homes (Badan Kerja Sama Panti Asuhan, BKSPA) came to ask her to become their advisor. Her husband accepted for her. Surprised she asked him, "Do you know what you are saying? You know I can't stop doing the work if it's not really finished." The work has not-been finished yet.
The founding of BKSPA reflected the changing social needs of Indonesia. Social welfare could no longer be handled within the traditional confines of family or village. By 1963 the nation's population was estimated at over 103 million, and the number of people on Java alone had tripled since the; beginning of the century. Furthermore, the political and economic chaos following World War II had caused mass migration to the cities. With the breakup of traditional rural social systems, social welfare was transferred from the villages to professional and religious organizations. There was, consequently, a great proliferation of these associations. "Every ministry," writes Ibu NAS, "all the forces of the army, and every religious group, not counting the special associations for doctors, for engineers, for women graduates and others—in addition to the usual political organizations—all of them have their own social welfare programs, mostly to serve their own members in accordance with their particular interests and inclinations." Her own experience in Persit showed that many of these social organizations gave "no prior thought to the development of infrastructure and funding for the implementation of services."
In 1963 the country was in the throes of a severe economic depression and the fate of many of these little organizations—orphanages in particular—was uncertain. It was at this juncture that the BKSPA was formed. Its aim was to make the 24 associated homes more responsive and reliable, thereby making it easier to obtain the help they so much needed. Ibu NAS took on the task, first as advisor and then as chairman, of organizing and directing BKSPA's activities. This was the first time in Indonesia's history that social welfare activities had been coordinated and handled in such a clear cut manner. The experiment, although successful, was not repeated elsewhere because, Ibu NAS says, "of lack of social awareness, lack of interest and organizational creativity on the part of government and society, and the lack of interest of many provincial governors."
In addition, the political situation was rapidly deteriorating. The communist party, which numbered as many as 2 million members and 11 million self-proclaimed sympathizers throughout the archipelago, was vying for power with the military leadership which supported the constitution. President Sukarno himself leaned more and more heavily toward the communists, thereby making Gen. Nasution's position ever more precarious. The atmosphere in the capital became increasingly tense. Ibu NAS felt this tension with a peculiarly feminine instinct and found herself rehearsing in her mind how she would react if soldiers came for her husband and how she would organize his escape.
Just before dawn on September 30, 1965 the communists made their bid for power. Taking advantage of Sukarno's support, they sent the Palace Guard as an assassination squad to the homes of all key members of the military leadership; by sunrise all but two of the generals were dead. The survivors were Suharto, who was not on the death list and would later succeed Sukarno, and Nasution whose life was saved by his wife's clear thinking.
The NASUTIONS were awakened at 3:30 a.m., Ibu NAS recalls, by a commotion outside. Since their house was heavily guarded, only the door to the bedroom wing of the house was locked; the front door was not. When she opened the bedroom door to investigate she saw a soldier standing not more than one and half meters in front of her. Not stopping to ask questions she slammed the door and locked it, telling her husband to run. He protested that he would speak to the intruders. Still with her back to the door, she opened it for him and a shot rang out. Nasution, with a soldier's instinct, ducked. His wife locked the door as bullets crashed around her, grazing her arms and legs and head.
Within seconds the rest of the family had come from the other bedrooms. Ibu NAS gave her five-year-old daughter, Irma, to Nasution's sister to hold, who, not knowing what had happened, opened the door and was greeted with a volley of shots, one of which pierced the child's lung. Ibu NAS again slammed and locked the door and forced her husband out through the back of the house and over the wall into the safety of the adjoining Iraqi embassy compound. As he was about to spring over the wall, he turned and saw his daughter bleeding in his sister's arms. Furious, he wanted to go back and fight, but his wife pleaded with him: "Please go, save your life and trust me. I will take care of our daughter. They are not looking for your daughter or for me; they are looking for you. Go."
When he was gone she returned to the living room to try to phone the Chief of Staff, but the telephone lines were cut. Standing in the room in her dressing gown, with her wounded daughter in her, she faced five armed soldiers demanding to know where her husband was. "The general is not here," she angrily told them. "He is in Bandung. You came only to murder my daughter!"
The soldiers left, taking with them Nasution's loyal aide and close family friend who was subsequently murdered. Ibu NASUTION took to the army hospital where five days later the child died.
She met the tragedy with stoicism. "I am not the only woman who has lost her child this way," she says. "During the war so many families lost children." Because she is a private person who does not like to expose her feelings, she refused to cry at her daughter's funeral. She carried her child in her arms to the grave, although custom decrees this role to a man. "It was the last time I co time I could carry my own," she says, "so I carried her myself."
People have often asked her whether she immerses herself so energetically in social work in order to forget her personal tragedy. No, she answers, she was already heavily committed to her to her work. Granted, it took time before she was able to plunge into it with the same zeal as before, "but you know," she comments, "the problems are always there. You cannot say, 'Please wait for me.' When you work for the community you have to separate your private problems from the other problems."
Even before the social disorders that wracked the nation after the abortive coup had died down, forces for national renewal emerged. In Jakarta, Governor Ali Sadikin (1971 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Government Service "for innovation, foresight and compassion in design management of a modern administration giving residents of Indonesia's capital a sense of increased well-being in a finer community") laid plans for the revitalization of the capital. Faced with the influx of migrants and a very limited budgeted budget, Sadikin turned to the one person in the city with the proven capability of producing concrete results through the voluntary efforts of private citizens. In 1966 he asked Ibu NAS to increase the scope of her volunteers to cover entire range of social activities in Jakarta. The group thus formed called the Coordinating and Supervising Body for Social Activities, Capital City of Jakarta (Badan Pembina Koordinasi den Pengawasan Kegiatan Sosial, Jakarta). Ibu NAS was elected general chairman and, at insistence of the board, has remained so to this day, despite the increase in the scope of her activities.
There are now 80 projects under the Jakarta Coordinating Body, including the BKSPA. It coordinates institutes for mentally and physically handicapped children, a hospital for the destitute, homes for the aged and an innovative program of care for the aged within their families.
The year after the municipal coordinating body was founded the International Council on Social Welfare, in New York, and the Ministry of Social Welfare of the Netherlands with which Indonesia maintained close relations, suggested that the time was ripe for Indonesia to establish a National Council on Social Welfare. Accordingly, five officials from the Ministry of Social Affairs set up the Dewan Nasional Indonesia untuk Kesejahteraan Sosial (DNIKS), as a nongovernmental institution to coordinate social work on a national level. In 1968 they asked Ibu NAS to join them. She joined but was not initially active because she was too busy with the work of the municipal coordinating body. It was not until 1970 that the new council was able to organize a conference of member associations. At that conference Ibu NASUTION was elected general chairman.
The only results of the conference were to set up the formal structure of the organization and to find an office—the latter was supplied by the city of Jakarta, rent free. Funds were, as usual, non-existent but that is not what worried the new chairman. She was more concerned with finding out what exactly a national council on social welfare was expected to do. Fortunately, in 1971, she was able to join her husband on a tour of eight western countries. In each she conferred with its national welfare council. In the end, however, she found they could not help her, for these organizations had been in operation for at least 25 years and Indonesia was starting from the beginning. There was little in the developed industrial nations that applied to the Indonesian situation.
Ibu NAS claims that the structure and function of the National Council grew, not from an a priori example, but from the problems that presented themselves. First among these was the challenge of coordinating all the national organizations involved in social welfare work. Today the council has a relationship with 23 national nongovernmental associations of various religious and social affiliations. These include the Muhammadiyah and Aisyiyah Muslim organizations, the National Council of Churches and the Bishops' Conference of Indonesia, the Council for Hindu Dharma, the national federations for the Deaf, Blind, Mentally Retarded and Physically Handicapped, the Red Cross and the Planned Parenthood Association. In addition 11 schools with social work facilities are affiliated members, as are the nine departments in the national government whose work is related to social welfare.
Her father, Raden Panji (title of a lesser prince): Soenario Gondokoesoemo, was a member of the Javanese elite. As a young man he had been exiled to the Netherlands along with other suspected nationalists. There he completed his education in economics and married a Dutch girl, Maria Hendrika Rademaker. Impressed with the young aristocrat's qualifications, the Dutch sent him back to his homeland to work as an executive on the railways. Because of his birth and position he received the same privileges and perquisites as a Dutchman.
In 1927 R.P. Soenario Gondakoesoemo left Dutch government service to become director of the National Bank of Indonesia. Soon thereafter he became a founding member and treasurer of the nationalist political party, Partai Indonesia Raya, known as Parindra. Following independence he was awarded two medals for serving the cause of freedom. In his mind patriotism and civic responsibility were inseparable. "If you are to become a good leader," he told his children, "you must take care of the poor people in your country."
JOHANNA's mother, though Dutch, raised her children to be nationalists and dressed in kain (long wrapped skirt) and kebaya (long-sleeved overblouse), the Indonesian national costume. She was a leader of the Indonesian Girl Scouts until 1937 and was very active in social welfare work. She often took her daughter to help the poor in the urban slums. JOHANNA once wrote a high school paper about these visits and remembers the anger and astonishment she felt when her Dutch teacher returned the composition saying, "This is not your work; it looks very communistic. Please change it."
Although JOHANNA and her two brothers—one older and one younger—reached maturity during World War II and the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, she retains no sense of hardship or bitterness from that period. After leaving primary school in Surabaya in 1937 she attended the Dutch Lyceum (high school) in Bandung, West Java, where her family had moved, until 1942. During those years she joined the Red Cross and received a diploma in nursing. When the Japanese invaded Java and set up their headquarters in Bandung, JOHANNA was sent to Yogyakarta to complete high school. Her goal at the time was to attend premedical school, but she was prevented from doing so because Japanese was not among the seven languages—Dutch, Indonesian, French, German, English, Greek and Latin—that she had studied. Toward the end of the war she went to work in a medical laboratory in Bandung.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945 the Indonesians began their four-year war for independence from the Netherlands. JOHANNA was active from 1945 to 1946 as a Red Cross nurse in the hospitals for Indonesian soldiers. One of the soldiers who claimed her attention was a close family friend, Abdul Haris Nasution.
JOHANNA has first met the soft-spoken military cadet from North Sumatra on the tennis courts in Bandung in 1940. Nasution greatly admired her father, and the two men would spend hours deeply engrossed in discussions of politics and the struggle for independence. JOHANNA herself had no interest in the young man other than as a tennis partner. When she and her two brothers left for Yogyakarta during the Japanese occupation, Nasution came to stay with her parents who were alone in Bandung .He was, she says, "a very good son for my parents." Letter after letter from Bandung told about the young man who worked with her father and talked at length with her mother about his own parents back in Sumatra. It was not surprising that when they met again in 1946 in the Red Cross nursing station, JOHANNA and Nasution fell in love.
The time was not right for marriage, however, and JOHANNA returned to Yogyakarta to enter the Faculty of Law of Gajah Mada, the new nationalist university. In the privileged circles in which she moved it was not unusual for women to attend the university; many of the professional women who help her today were her classmates there or in the lyceum. JOHANNA completed only one year of studies before Nasution asked her to return to Bandung to become his wife; they were married on May 30, 1947.
Three months after their wedding guerrilla warfare against the Dutch began in earnest and both NASUTIONs were participants, he as a guerrilla leader, and she tending the sick and the needy in the villages through which they passed. They spent about eight months in the forests outside Bandung, seeing each other only once every two to four weeks. In early 1948 Colonel Nasution was sent to Yogyakarta as head of the crack Siliwangi Division of the army of the Republic of Indonesia, while his wife stayed in Bandung. It was during this period that the young Ibu (Mrs.) NASUTION's strong sense of social responsibility was first coupled with her impressive organizational talent.
In Indonesia all army wives automatically belong to the Army Wives' Association (Persatuan Isteri Tentara, known as Persit); the wife of the division commander is normally chairman of the division association. In June 1947 Ibu NAS (as Mrs. NASUTION is familiarly known), in recognition of her husband's position as well as of her own special talents, was asked to become chairman of Persit, Siliwangi Division. The Renville Agreement had just been signed by the Dutch and the Indonesians, with the Dutch recognizing the fledgling Republic of Indonesia with its capital in Yogyakarta. The problem facing Persit was to move the families of the nationalist (guerrilla) armies to Yogyakarta to join the men. As chairman of Persit, Ibu NAS founded a committee to deal with the situation—the first of an endless stream of committees into which she was to "gather her contacts." Together with the Red Cross and the Dutch army itself, her committee moved the families of the Siliwangi Division to Yogyakarta. She herself left on the last train out of Bandung.
Ibu NAS often speaks of "collecting people" as her hobby. In 1948 she and her friends collected the wives of all the army divisions in Yogyakarta into a unified Persit. Their object was to take care of widows and wounded soldiers and to help wives send messages to their husbands in the surrounding areas where fighting had flared again. Ibu NAS does not think of her work during this period as remarkable. It was, she says, the way of life in time of war.
In September of that year, Col. Nasution put down a communist rebellion in Madiun on behalf of the Republic of Indonesia; on December 19 his wife was captured and nearly murdered by the remnants of that rebellion. Nasution had taken his troops out of Yogyakarta to prepared guerrilla positions in the districts on December 18, the day before the Dutch entered the city. Ibu NAS was in Solo (Surakarta) not far to the north of Yogyakarta. Finding herself without return transportation because of the Dutch occupation, she set out with her younger brother, his wife and two friends for Yogyakarta by foot. About halfway there they were stopped by soldiers of communist leaning who had them interned under the pretext of their being Dutch spies. Fortunately she was recognized by a non-commissioned officer as the wife of Col. Nasution and released.
Unwilling to let go of their prey, however, the communist sympathizers followed them and the next day, when they were out of the commander's sight, provoked local villagers to turn on them by shouting "death to the Dutch spies!" Once again the small party was in luck. They were recognized by another friendly army officer who vouched for their identity and they were allowed to proceed safely to the city.
But Yogyakarta itself was no longer safe. Two days after her return, Dutch soldiers came to her house at one in the morning and arrested her and her brothers. For five days they interrogated her, and for five days she responded in fluent Dutch, reprimanding them for forgetting their own history and their own struggles for freedom. Eventually they released her unharmed to continue her work of caring for the wives and families left behind. They would, perhaps, have been more careful had they known she would soon become involved in establishing underground communications between her husband's guerrilla forces and the Indonesian delegation in Jakarta. The latter, in turn, transmitted the correspondence to the Indonesian leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, who were under guard in Sumatra.
In August 1949 the NASUTIONs moved to Jakarta where General Nasution became Chief of Staff of the Army of the soon-to-be-recognized independent Indonesia. Ibu NASUTION and her colleagues immediately set about organizing a central Persit to coordinate the division associations from all over the Republic-held islands.
In 1952 Nasution fell out of favor with Sukarno, who had been president of the Republic of Indonesia since 1945, and was dropped as army chief of staff. Earlier in the year Ibu NASUTION had given birth to their first child, a daughter, Hendrianti (Yanti) Sahara. She, therefore, had every reason to resign from the chairmanship of the central Persit—or to be asked to resign—but neither she nor her colleagues saw any reason for her not to continue in the post, regardless of her husband's loss of position; she was reelected chairman in 1953. The vote of confidence she received at that time, and in similar situations since, is due, colleagues agree, to her innate sense of diplomacy even more than to her remarkable organizational ability. Ibu NAS is a tall, handsome woman with commanding presence, yet she insists, with winning charm, that she is a very easygoing person. Although she may receive the homage required by etiquette when her husband's position demands it, in her private activities she never stands on ceremony. Her colleagues, far from feeling threatened, are buoyed up by her easy good humor and warmth.
Under Ibu NASUTION's leadership the central Persit by 1954 had begun a number of projects: 27 kindergartens had been opened as well as a school for kindergarten teachers; three elementary schools, a school for domestic science and a dormitory for young girls. A home had been set up for the handicapped and for orphans and a library and two restaurants established for the benefit of Persit members.
Ibu NAS remained as either chairman or advisor to the central Persit from 1950 to 1963. In 1961 she was asked to form a foundation specifically for fundraising. Although not convinced this was a good idea, and in spite of having given birth in 1960 to a second daughter, Irma Surjani, she agreed to become chairman of the new foundation, Ikrar Bhakti (vow of devotion). Here she was faced, as she has been many times since, with having to start a project with no capital. In this case she solved the problem by convincing Pertamina, the national oil monopoly, to lend the foundation one million rupiahs. By 1963 the foundation owned two printing presses, one confectionery and a fish cannery, the loan was repaid in full and it was using the profits from the business ventures to support the work of Persit.
Meanwhile General Nasution's fortunes had risen again and in 1955 he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Some historians have indicated that tension may have remained between the general and President Sukarno because of "petticoat politics." Sukarno had just taken a second wife, Hartini, without divorcing Fatmawati who was opposed to the marriage. In this he felt himself in compliance with Islamic law which allows a man to have four wives. During the war for independence, however, the women of Indonesia fought—like Fatmawati and Ibu NAS—side by side with the men. In the postwar years they were demanding equal status and, for the most part, getting it. Among other things, they were strongly in favor of monogamy, and in taking a second wife, Sukarno was letting them down. Ibu NASUTION was among the women fighting for a marriage law that would uphold the strict Islamic interpretation of marriage and would prevent a man from taking a second wife unless he had the permission of the first. To register their protest to his action, the NASUTIONs, along with other leading figures of Jakarta, regularly turned down invitations to functions which Hartini was expected to attend. Ibu NAS rejects the notion that she influenced her husband and that the incident caused tension between them and Sukarno. Her husband, she points out, was a strict Muslim from Sumatra, and their opinions on the subject coincided. Furthermore, Sukarno, an old friend of her father's, understood her position, she says, and gave them permission not to attend such affairs.
In 1962 Nasution was relieved from his position as Chief of Staff and appointed Coordinating Minister of Defense and Security—a post that took him further from direct command. His wife retired from Persit. Less than 24 hours later a delegation from the newly formed Coordinating Body for Children's Homes (Badan Kerja Sama Panti Asuhan, BKSPA) came to ask her to become their advisor. Her husband accepted for her. Surprised she asked him, "Do you know what you are saying? You know I can't stop doing the work if it's not really finished." The work has not-been finished yet.
The founding of BKSPA reflected the changing social needs of Indonesia. Social welfare could no longer be handled within the traditional confines of family or village. By 1963 the nation's population was estimated at over 103 million, and the number of people on Java alone had tripled since the; beginning of the century. Furthermore, the political and economic chaos following World War II had caused mass migration to the cities. With the breakup of traditional rural social systems, social welfare was transferred from the villages to professional and religious organizations. There was, consequently, a great proliferation of these associations. "Every ministry," writes Ibu NAS, "all the forces of the army, and every religious group, not counting the special associations for doctors, for engineers, for women graduates and others—in addition to the usual political organizations—all of them have their own social welfare programs, mostly to serve their own members in accordance with their particular interests and inclinations." Her own experience in Persit showed that many of these social organizations gave "no prior thought to the development of infrastructure and funding for the implementation of services."
In 1963 the country was in the throes of a severe economic depression and the fate of many of these little organizations—orphanages in particular—was uncertain. It was at this juncture that the BKSPA was formed. Its aim was to make the 24 associated homes more responsive and reliable, thereby making it easier to obtain the help they so much needed. Ibu NAS took on the task, first as advisor and then as chairman, of organizing and directing BKSPA's activities. This was the first time in Indonesia's history that social welfare activities had been coordinated and handled in such a clear cut manner. The experiment, although successful, was not repeated elsewhere because, Ibu NAS says, "of lack of social awareness, lack of interest and organizational creativity on the part of government and society, and the lack of interest of many provincial governors."
In addition, the political situation was rapidly deteriorating. The communist party, which numbered as many as 2 million members and 11 million self-proclaimed sympathizers throughout the archipelago, was vying for power with the military leadership which supported the constitution. President Sukarno himself leaned more and more heavily toward the communists, thereby making Gen. Nasution's position ever more precarious. The atmosphere in the capital became increasingly tense. Ibu NAS felt this tension with a peculiarly feminine instinct and found herself rehearsing in her mind how she would react if soldiers came for her husband and how she would organize his escape.
Just before dawn on September 30, 1965 the communists made their bid for power. Taking advantage of Sukarno's support, they sent the Palace Guard as an assassination squad to the homes of all key members of the military leadership; by sunrise all but two of the generals were dead. The survivors were Suharto, who was not on the death list and would later succeed Sukarno, and Nasution whose life was saved by his wife's clear thinking.
The NASUTIONS were awakened at 3:30 a.m., Ibu NAS recalls, by a commotion outside. Since their house was heavily guarded, only the door to the bedroom wing of the house was locked; the front door was not. When she opened the bedroom door to investigate she saw a soldier standing not more than one and half meters in front of her. Not stopping to ask questions she slammed the door and locked it, telling her husband to run. He protested that he would speak to the intruders. Still with her back to the door, she opened it for him and a shot rang out. Nasution, with a soldier's instinct, ducked. His wife locked the door as bullets crashed around her, grazing her arms and legs and head.
Within seconds the rest of the family had come from the other bedrooms. Ibu NAS gave her five-year-old daughter, Irma, to Nasution's sister to hold, who, not knowing what had happened, opened the door and was greeted with a volley of shots, one of which pierced the child's lung. Ibu NAS again slammed and locked the door and forced her husband out through the back of the house and over the wall into the safety of the adjoining Iraqi embassy compound. As he was about to spring over the wall, he turned and saw his daughter bleeding in his sister's arms. Furious, he wanted to go back and fight, but his wife pleaded with him: "Please go, save your life and trust me. I will take care of our daughter. They are not looking for your daughter or for me; they are looking for you. Go."
When he was gone she returned to the living room to try to phone the Chief of Staff, but the telephone lines were cut. Standing in the room in her dressing gown, with her wounded daughter in her, she faced five armed soldiers demanding to know where her husband was. "The general is not here," she angrily told them. "He is in Bandung. You came only to murder my daughter!"
The soldiers left, taking with them Nasution's loyal aide and close family friend who was subsequently murdered. Ibu NASUTION took to the army hospital where five days later the child died.
She met the tragedy with stoicism. "I am not the only woman who has lost her child this way," she says. "During the war so many families lost children." Because she is a private person who does not like to expose her feelings, she refused to cry at her daughter's funeral. She carried her child in her arms to the grave, although custom decrees this role to a man. "It was the last time I co time I could carry my own," she says, "so I carried her myself."
People have often asked her whether she immerses herself so energetically in social work in order to forget her personal tragedy. No, she answers, she was already heavily committed to her to her work. Granted, it took time before she was able to plunge into it with the same zeal as before, "but you know," she comments, "the problems are always there. You cannot say, 'Please wait for me.' When you work for the community you have to separate your private problems from the other problems."
Even before the social disorders that wracked the nation after the abortive coup had died down, forces for national renewal emerged. In Jakarta, Governor Ali Sadikin (1971 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Government Service "for innovation, foresight and compassion in design management of a modern administration giving residents of Indonesia's capital a sense of increased well-being in a finer community") laid plans for the revitalization of the capital. Faced with the influx of migrants and a very limited budgeted budget, Sadikin turned to the one person in the city with the proven capability of producing concrete results through the voluntary efforts of private citizens. In 1966 he asked Ibu NAS to increase the scope of her volunteers to cover entire range of social activities in Jakarta. The group thus formed called the Coordinating and Supervising Body for Social Activities, Capital City of Jakarta (Badan Pembina Koordinasi den Pengawasan Kegiatan Sosial, Jakarta). Ibu NAS was elected general chairman and, at insistence of the board, has remained so to this day, despite the increase in the scope of her activities.
There are now 80 projects under the Jakarta Coordinating Body, including the BKSPA. It coordinates institutes for mentally and physically handicapped children, a hospital for the destitute, homes for the aged and an innovative program of care for the aged within their families.
The year after the municipal coordinating body was founded the International Council on Social Welfare, in New York, and the Ministry of Social Welfare of the Netherlands with which Indonesia maintained close relations, suggested that the time was ripe for Indonesia to establish a National Council on Social Welfare. Accordingly, five officials from the Ministry of Social Affairs set up the Dewan Nasional Indonesia untuk Kesejahteraan Sosial (DNIKS), as a nongovernmental institution to coordinate social work on a national level. In 1968 they asked Ibu NAS to join them. She joined but was not initially active because she was too busy with the work of the municipal coordinating body. It was not until 1970 that the new council was able to organize a conference of member associations. At that conference Ibu NASUTION was elected general chairman.
The only results of the conference were to set up the formal structure of the organization and to find an office—the latter was supplied by the city of Jakarta, rent free. Funds were, as usual, non-existent but that is not what worried the new chairman. She was more concerned with finding out what exactly a national council on social welfare was expected to do. Fortunately, in 1971, she was able to join her husband on a tour of eight western countries. In each she conferred with its national welfare council. In the end, however, she found they could not help her, for these organizations had been in operation for at least 25 years and Indonesia was starting from the beginning. There was little in the developed industrial nations that applied to the Indonesian situation.
Ibu NAS claims that the structure and function of the National Council grew, not from an a priori example, but from the problems that presented themselves. First among these was the challenge of coordinating all the national organizations involved in social welfare work. Today the council has a relationship with 23 national nongovernmental associations of various religious and social affiliations. These include the Muhammadiyah and Aisyiyah Muslim organizations, the National Council of Churches and the Bishops' Conference of Indonesia, the Council for Hindu Dharma, the national federations for the Deaf, Blind, Mentally Retarded and Physically Handicapped, the Red Cross and the Planned Parenthood Association. In addition 11 schools with social work facilities are affiliated members, as are the nine departments in the national government whose work is related to social welfare.
Sumber : rmaf.org.ph
