By AM Hendropriyono*
KILAT.COM - When the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire, which was centered in East Java, was sovereign throughout Southeast Asia and held hegemony in the vast sea between the Indian Ocean and the Arafura Sea in the north of Australia (1293-1527), European capitalists were still busy searching for India’s located, and their explorer, Christopher Columbus, had only discovered America, which they thought was India, on August 14, 1498.
On that account, they announced to the international world that the people they found there as Indians. Other groups of European capitalists, who entered the Indonesian archipelago in turn, were the Portuguese led by Alfonso de Albuquerque in 1511, a Spanish group in Tidore in 1521 and the Dutch led by Cornelis de Houtman to Banten on June 27, 1596.
From the outset, these explorers who came with armed troops to seek Gold, Glory and the spread Christianity (Gospel), joined the traitors of our people, implementing the Devide et Empera (divide and conquer) strategy, playing Hindu-Buddhist believers off against Muslims, a religion which first arrived in Indonesia in the 13th century according to research done by historian WF Stutterheim.
Armed capitalists from Europe arrived in increasingly larger numbers, saying they wanted to engage in the spice trade. As a result of that collaboration, the Majapahit kingdom, which had been the largest empire in Southeast Asia for 234 years, began to falter and finally collapsed, leaving nearly no trace behind.
Dutch capitalists was dominated by the private multinational company VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) which violently seized control over trade throughout the archipelago. But after experiencing bankruptcy on December 31, 1799, gradually, politically and by armed force, the Dutch government took over the control formerly possessed by the VOC and implemented colonialism in Indonesia.
They abolished the existence of castes in Indonesian Hindu society in accordance with the principle of equality in liberalism, but ironically the lower and lowest castes, namely the Sudras and Pariahs, had already been portrayed in international media as a barbaric slave society.
Through agitation and propaganda in order to raise the social status of the Indonesian people to become what they considered to be civilized, the British and Dutch governments in turns obtained global justification for implementing colonialism in our country (1596-1942) which suddenly changed when it was briefly replaced by Japan (1942-1945) after the Second World War.
In 1848, Dutch colonialists had divided Indonesian society into Europeans and indigenous people. This discrimination developed into a social division among Europeans, foreign Eastern nations (namely Arabs, Chinese, and Indians who came to trade in Indonesia since 1920), and the native population, which the Dutch East Indies gave the derogatory title of inlander.
The indigenous people or inlander, who are now known as Indonesians, consists of the indigenous tribes, starting from the westernmost people, namely the Acehnese, to the easternmost people, the Papuan ethnic group. This runs from the northernmost tribe, the Miangas, Minahasa, to the southernmost tribe, the Rote ethnic group in East Nusa Tenggara.
In those days these indigenous Indonesian tribes had very limited rights, such as the Indian natives in America, the Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and the Maori people in New Zealand.
Even in Indonesia, indigenous Indonesian ethnic groups were greatly insulted, reflected in the many signs in public spaces that read: Verboden voor honden en inlander, which means “Forbidden for dogs and natives.”
In the world and even local media, there was always news and photos about the Indonesian people being destitute and appearing backwards, as was shown in the Bintang Hindia magazine newspaper published in 1905. These foreigners want to disenfranchise the indigenous Indonesian people and replace it with their own people as the dominant population in Indonesia.
History proves that the Americans, Australians and New Zealanders we know today are actually people of foreign descent who migrated during several periods. Wave after wave o foreign peoples came to Indonesia as immigrants with different social behavior, such as the Hadramaut Arabs, who came from Yemen in the 19th century. After that came a third wave of Arab immigrants.