Agus Salim
Agus Salim was an Indonesian journalist, diplomat, and statesman. He served as Indonesia's Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1947 and 1949.
Early life
Agus Salim was born Masjhoedoelhaq Salim on 8 October 1884, in the village of Koto Gadang, a suburb of Fort de Kock. His father, Sultan Mohammad Salim, was a colonial prosecutor and judge whose highest rank was chief judge for the indigenous court in Tanjung Pinang. His birth name, which translates into "defender of truth", was changed to Agus Salim early in his childhood.Salim received his elementary education at Europeesche Lagere School; at that time, it was considered a privilege for a non-European child to attend an all-European school. He continued his studies at the Hogere Burgerschool in Batavia and graduated with the highest score in the whole Dutch East Indies. Salim's father had applied for his two sons, Agus and Jacob, to be granted equal status with the Europeans. However, his efforts to secure a government scholarship to study medicine in the Netherlands fell short. Kartini, another European-educated student whose writings on women's rights and emancipation became famous later, offered to defer her scholarship for Salim; this, too, was rejected.
C.S. Hurgronje, a prominent colonial administrator best known for his study of native affairs, took Salim under his wing and arranged for him to leave the Indies in 1905 to work as an interpreter and secretary at the Dutch consulate in Jeddah, where he handled hajj affairs; in some way, it was to distance him from the radical teachings of a close relative, the well-known Shafi'i imam of Masjid al-Haram Ahmad Khatib al-Minangkabawi.
Salim returned to the Indies in 1911 and pursued a career in journalism, contributing pieces for magazines and publications like Hindia Baroe, Fadjar Asia, and Moestika. He would later serve as an editor in Neratja, a newspaper aligned with the Sarekat Islam, where he was also an active member. While in that, he founded a private Hollandsche Indische School in his hometown of Koto Gadang, but left after three years to return to Java.
Political activism
Salim became one of the most vocal advocates of the growing Indonesian nationalist movement, in the period known as the National Awakening. He became a prominent leader in Sarekat Islam and was considered the right-hand man of its leader, Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto. The SI contained many political strains, including communists, business leaders, and Islamically-minded reformers. Having spent time in the Hejaz, Salim was considered to be on the reformist side of the SI and was at odds with the increasingly leftist faction of SI led by Semaun, Tan Malaka, and Darsono; who would eventually break with SI to found the Communist Union of the Indies.Salim was occasionally accused by those leftists of being too close to the Dutch colonial government. First, his newspaper Neratja had been funded in 1917 with government money who wanted a Malay-language forum for perspectives sympathetic to the Dutch Ethical Policy, However, by 1918 Neratja became a harsh critic of the colonial government, regularly printing reports of mistreatment of Muslims in remote regions of the Indies. Nonetheless, allegations continued to surface from the left. The Dutch communist Henk Sneevliet accused Neratja editor Abdul Muis of having advocated for his expulsion from the Indies in 1917. And when Salim's Neratja was the only Malay language newspaper to applaud his expulsion in 1918, its editors were condemned by other newspapers and forced to apologize. Even in the late 1920s, as many communists in the Indies were being sent to concentration camps in Boven Digoel, disputes were still arising over Salim's behavior in 1917. In 1927 Bintang Timoer published allegations that Agus Salim had joined Sarekat Islam and other meetings in the 1910s delivered reports to government officials and then used government money to criticize communists in Neratja. Salim responded that he needed money to continue his activities and that everyone profited from the government in some way or other.
Later, after the breakup of the Sarekat Islam, Salim co-founded the Islamic Union Party, which later became the PSII. After Tjokro died in 1934, Salim became the party's intellectual leader.
In 1921, Salim was appointed to the Volksraad, the Indies' mainly symbolic and advisory quasi-legislature, representing Sarekat Islam. Despite being a proficient speaker of the Dutch language, he insisted on delivering his speeches in Malay, the first member of the council to do so despite hostile reception from other European members. He left the chamber in 1924, frustrated by the chamber's powerlessness, and derided it as a mere komedi omong.
Being an outspoken advocate of social change within the Indonesian Islamic community, Salim was widely known for his unorthodoxy on social issues. At the 1927 convention of the national Islamic organization Jong Islamieten Bond in Surakarta, Salim ripped apart the curtained divider between men's and women's seating area and proceeded to deliver his speech titled De sluiering en afzondering der vrouw.
Another area of activism that Salim was active in was workers' welfare. At the request of the prominent Dutch trade union Nederlands Verbond van Vakverenigingen, he served as an advisor for its delegation to the 1929 and 1930 International Labour Conventions, both held in Geneva, Switzerland.
It was alleged that throughout his early years returning from Jeddah, Salim had been in contact with or possibly working for the Politieke Inlichtingen Dienst, the Dutch East Indies's principal state security and intelligence service. Allan Akbar, a historian, conceded that Salim had been asked for a favour by Datuak Tumangguang, a prominent Minangkabau advisor to the colonial government, to covertly enter Sarekat Islam, especially to investigate the relationship between Tjokroaminoto and the Germans. For six weeks, Salim investigated the Sarekat from within, but in a strange twist of history, decided to join the organization of his own will.
Japanese occupation
During the waning years of Dutch rule and early years of Japanese occupation, Salim retired from active politics and was involved in several trades. Unlike most of the future Republican leaders, Salim was never arrested nor exiled, probably owing to his vast connections with the colonial bureaucracy or his rumored services for the colonial intelligence services.In 1943, the Japanese military government asked Salim, a renowned polyglot who spoke nine languages, to compile a military dictionary for the use of Pembela Tanah Air, the newly formed volunteer militia prepared for an impending invasion of the Allied forces. Salim found his way back to politics, being appointed to advise the Indonesian leaders who are in charge of the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat, an intellectual body set up by Japanese government to mobilize popular support for war efforts.
Indonesian independence
Salim was appointed to the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Independence in March 1945.On 1 June, Salim was appointed to a Committee of Nine tasked to draft the basis of the state. In the committee chaired by Sukarno, Salim was one of the prominent Muslim leaders alongside Wahid Hasyim and Abdul Kahar Muzakir. One of the issues that must be tackled by the committee was to find a compromise between the secular nationalist bloc, which demanded a secular state; with the Islamist bloc, which argued that being a Muslim-majority nation, an independent Indonesia should be based on Islamic principles.
The committee would end up with the Jakarta Charter, which includes Sukarno's proposed Pancasila as official state philosophy and an explicit call for Muslim Indonesians to oblige to the sharia. BPUPK as a whole ratified it on 10 July. On 11 July, Salim was appointed to sit in the Subcommittee for Constitutional Drafting, again chaired by Sukarno. He was highly influential in the early drafting of the Constitution and was seen as a respected mediator during heated confrontations.
On 7 August, the BPUPK was dissolved and replaced with the Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence. For unclear reasons, however, Salim did not sit on the committee; he was also not recorded as being present during the independence proclamation at Sukarno's residence on 17 August.
Government and diplomatic services
Salim did not join the first Indonesian cabinet; Sukarno, now President of the Republic, appointed him to the newly created Supreme Advisory Council. He remained in that position until March 1946, when he was appointed Deputy Foreign Minister under Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir of the Socialist Party. He reprised that role in the third Sjahrir Cabinet before being promoted to Foreign Minister in the first Amir Sjarifuddin Cabinet in July 1947; Amir, like Sjahrir, is a Socialist.File:Indonesia mesir persahabatan 1947.jpg|thumb|200px|Foreign Minister Agus Salim and Egyptian Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha signed a friendship treaty, on 10 June 1947
As Deputy Foreign Minister, Salim led numerous Indonesian diplomatic missions abroad. He led the Indonesian delegation at the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi from March to April 1947. The same month, he led a small party consisting of Abdurrahman Baswedan, Rasjidi, and Nazir Sutan Pamuncak to seek diplomatic recognition from Arab states. A fluent speaker of classical Arabic, Salim met with Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha, the Egyptian prime minister, and Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, the secretary-general of the Arab League. For the next three months, Salim and his delegation successfully gained diplomatic recognition from almost all members of the League.
In August 1947, Salim with Sjahrir traveled to the United States to participate in a United Nations Security Council session in Lake Success, New York. With the help of banker Margono Djojohadikusumo, the two breached the Dutch naval blockade with a plane carrying contraband vanilla to Singapore. Returning home, Salim was part of the Indonesian delegation throughout negotiations aboard USS Renville, which led to an agreement that temporarily reduced tensions after the breaking down of the previous Linggadjati Agreement. During the negotiations, Salim's friendship with the Dutch chief negotiator Abdulkadir Widjojoatmodjo helped to smoothen the process.
Salim remained in charge of foreign affairs in the first Hatta Cabinet, while officially serving ad interim. When Dutch started a military offensive called Operatie Kraai, in December 1948, he was one of the Republican leaders exiled from the capital, Yogyakarta. Alongside Sjahrir and Sukarno, Salim was first exiled to Berastagi in North Sumatera before being transferred to Parapat. With the rest of the leaders, Salim returned to Yogya and reclaimed his duties as foreign minister in the second Hatta Cabinet, having been briefly exercised by Sjafruddin Prawiranegara ex officio with his duties as Chairman of the Emergency Government of the Republic in its only cabinet from December 1948 to July 1949.
One of Salim's final diplomatic services was as part of the Indonesian delegation in the Dutch–Indonesian Round Table Conference in The Hague in late 1949. Hatta's second cabinet was dissolved in December 1949 and the United States of Indonesia was formed. Hatta, the United States' inaugural premier and foreign minister, appointed Salim to be a special advisor on foreign affairs. The United States itself was dissolved in September 1950.