Mohammad Hatta

Mohammad Hatta (1902–1980), known to Indonesians as Bung Hatta, was a statesman and economist who, with Sukarno, proclaimed Indonesia's independence on 17 August 1945 and served as the republic's first vice president (1945–1956) and third prime minister (1948–1950). The pairing of Sukarno and Hatta — the dwitunggal, the "duumvirate" — led the national movement from the student politics of the Netherlands to the founding of the republic. He is also remembered as the father of Indonesian cooperatives. ^{1 2}

He was born under the name Athar on 12 August 1902 at Fort de Kock, now Bukittinggi, in the Minangkabau highlands of West Sumatra. His family, of Batuhampar, was prominent and strongly Islamic: his grandfather, Sheikh Abdurrahman, was a respected Naqshbandi-Khalidi scholar, and his father, Haji Mohammad Djamil, died when Hatta was eight months old. The family's religious learning is recorded here as his background; the sources name no school for Hatta himself. ¹

After schooling in Bukittinggi and Batavia he sailed in 1921 to Rotterdam, where he studied commercial science for a decade and became chairman of the Perhimpoenan Indonesia, the Indonesian students' association, turning it into the organisational voice of the independence movement in Europe. Arrested with colleagues in 1927, he was acquitted in The Hague in 1928. Back in the Indies he was arrested again in 1934 and exiled without trial — first to the Boven Digoel camp in New Guinea, then to Banda Neira in the Maluku Islands — until the Japanese occupation freed him in 1942. ^{1 3}

On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender, Hatta stood with Sukarno in Jakarta for the proclamation of Indonesian independence and signed the declaration with him. He became vice president the next day. As prime minister from January 1948 he also held the defence portfolio through the revolution's hardest years, and in December 1948, after the Dutch seized Yogyakarta and captured Sukarno, he was taken into exile again until the transfer of sovereignty in December 1949, which he had negotiated at the Round Table Conference. ¹

Frustrated by the turn to party factionalism and Sukarno's growing dominance, he resigned the vice presidency on 1 December 1956 — a decision contemporaries felt as a national loss. Out of office he taught, wrote on economics and foreign policy, and campaigned for the cooperative movement as the economic form most faithful to the constitution. He died at Jakarta on 14 March 1980 and was buried at Tanah Kusir cemetery; the republic later proclaimed him a national hero, and Jakarta's international airport bears the joint names Soekarno–Hatta. ^{1 2}

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