implementing diverse national programs, and rotating civilian and military officials across the sprawling archipelago with ease. These achievements had
lasting effects on Indonesians’ sense of connectedness and shared experience
with their fellow countrymen.55
Given the regime’s close alliance with the United States, Jakarta was able
to consolidate and extend Indonesian national sovereignty without the complications and compromises suffered by Rangoon. By the late 1960s, the United
Nations’ transitional stewardship in West Papua gave way to incorporation of
“Irian Jaya” into Indonesia through a dubious “viva voce” referendum accepted
in Washington, D.C. and at UN headquarters in New York.56 When in late 1975
the national liberation movement Fretilin (Frente Revolucionária de TimorLeste Independente) declared independence in the former Portuguese colony
of East Timor, Indonesia invaded and forcibly occupied the country, imposing
harsh direct military rule until 1999. Here too, despite egregious human rights
abuses and sustained violation of international law, Indonesia enjoyed effective
U.S. support against the threat of the left-wing Fretilin. As in West Papua and
Aceh (where a separatist movement developed in the late 1970s), popular
armed struggle for independence was confronted by a highly militarized Indonesian state whose oil wealth, sustained industrial growth, and foreign support
made it much stronger than its Burmese counterpart.57
As in Burma, then, the early post-independence era witnessed the inexorable reconstitution and reassertion of state power in national terms and the “fossilization” and forced encapsulation of the diverse energies and social forces
mobilized in the Revolusi, but these processes were followed by three
decades of sustained industrialization and accompanying social and political
transformations that led a different fate for Indonesian nationalism by the
end of the century.58 Under Suharto, Indonesians of Chinese ancestry suffered
stigmatization, discrimination in state employment and education, extortion,
harassment, and occasional attacks.59 Yet unlike Indians in Burma, ethnicChinese Indonesians had contributed to the nationalist struggle, and instead
of expropriation and expulsion, they were afforded greater opportunities for