Sutan Sjahrir

Sutan Sjahrir (1909–1966) was an Indonesian statesman and independence leader who served as the first prime minister of Indonesia from 1945 to 1947. An intellectual and an idealist in the eyes of his contemporaries, he organised the underground resistance to the Japanese occupation while Sukarno and Hatta dealt with the occupier above ground, led the young republic's diplomacy, founded the Indonesian Socialist Party, and ended his life in exile after years of imprisonment without trial. ^{1 2}

He was born on 5 March 1909 at Padang Panjang, West Sumatra, into a Minangkabau family from Koto Gadang; his father was a chief public prosecutor at Medan, where the family lived. Schooled at Medan and Bandung, he sailed for the Netherlands in 1929 on a scholarship, studied first at Amsterdam and then law at Leiden, worked in labour unions, and rose in the Indonesian students' association, becoming a close associate of Mohammad Hatta. ^{1 3}

Sent ahead to the Indies in 1931 to help build the new Indonesian National Party, he was arrested with Hatta in 1934 and exiled — to Boven-Digoel in New Guinea, then to Banda, then to Sukabumi. During the Japanese occupation the three leaders divided their work by agreement: Sukarno and Hatta cooperated with the occupier in public while Sjahrir, pleading tuberculosis, went underground to organise the resistance. ¹

In October 1945 he published his pamphlet "Our Struggle", a call for chivalry and against racial hysteria at the revolution's most fevered moment, and in November Sukarno appointed him prime minister. Acceptable to the Dutch because he had never cooperated with Japan, he negotiated the Linggadjati Agreement of 1946 and held office until June 1947. ^{1 4}

In 1948 he founded the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI) to oppose the communists from a democratic-socialist position; small but influential through the calibre of its cadres, it failed at the 1955 elections and was banned by Sukarno in 1960. Sjahrir was arrested in 1962 on conspiracy charges that were never brought to trial; after a stroke in prison cost him his speech, he was allowed in 1965 to travel to Zürich for treatment. ^{1 5}

He died at Zürich on 9 April 1966, and the same day a presidential decree named him a National Hero of Indonesia. The former Dutch prime minister Schermerhorn commemorated him on national radio as a "noble political warrior". The sources read for this record name no religious school for him: his socialism and humanism are treated as political philosophy, historians still debate the place of personal belief in his thought, and this record preserves that debate rather than settling it. ^{1 2}

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