Remembering Prof. Mochtar, a good man and a patriot

Ifirst learned about Prof. Dr. Mochtar Kusumaatmadja in 1962 while attending a conference organized by the deans of the schools of law of universities in Indonesia, held in Yogyakarta under the leadership of Prof. Djojodiguno. I was the newly appointed executive secretary of the School of Law in the University of Indonesia (UI). Our dean, Prof. Soejono Hadinoto, could not attend and sent his deputies — Purnadi Purbatjaraka, Padmo Wahyono, Iwan Tirta and myself — to partake on his behalf. The conference resulted in, among other things, messages and a plea to then-president Sukarno, who was visiting Tokyo, not to dismiss Prof. Mochtar as the dean of the School of Law of Padjadjaran University.

Pak Mochtar had been accused of making contra-revolutionary remarks against Manipol-Usdek, president Sukarno’s political creed, brought up by a number of student organizations led by the leftist student group CGMI, thus a personal attack on Sukarno. While the plea was unsuccessful as Pak Mochtar was demoted from his position as dean, I learned that he was a professor who was ideologically correct.

I also learned that he was a top expert on Indonesian maritime law when he was defending Indonesian waters between the islands as an archipelago, which made all the inner seas the territory of Indonesia, enlarging it by three times — twice for water and once more for land.

We finally met when he replaced Prof. Umar Seno Adji as minister of justice in 1973 (Prof. Umar became chief justice of the Supreme Court). We got to know each other better when Pak Mochtar was appointed the foreign minister in 1977, replacing Pak Adam Malik, who held the post of House of Representatives speaker for a short period before becoming the vice president of the Republic of Indonesia.

Pak Mochtar almost immediately got involved in the complex situation and development of the “boat people”, the refugees from Indo China, after the Vietnam War was over in 1975. The human exodus started slowly but grew into a real avalanche of people coming out in old and new boats to Southeast Asia in 1978. Surely, the Southeast Asian countries could not cope with it alone.

Pak Mochtar’s bright idea was — in preparation for the Refugee Conference in Geneva in July 1978 — to invite for the first time foreign ministers of importance to assist ASEAN countries in the case of the refugees, such as the United States, France, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN member states in Bali in early 1978. It was a successful meeting, in which the participating foreign ministers from outside ASEAN wanted to assist ASEAN in addressing the refugee pressures that could bring down some of the governments.

Pak Mochtar’s bright initiative was to have the refugees stay temporarily in ASEAN countries with the promise of processing and sending as many as possible to final-destination countries (nonASEAN countries). Countries like Japan, which due to their domestic politics could not receive foreigners, could donate to take care of the refugees in first-asylum countries. The US, due to the Vietnam War, probably got the most refugees, about half a million people, while France accepted over 30,000 and then Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The UK made Hong Kong a first-asylum country for the refugees.

With these results, the Refugees Conference in Geneva under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was a success. One possible problem was the agreement between then-Malaysian home minister Ghazalie Syafie and Indonesian defense minister Gen. Mohammad Jusuf in the conference on border demarcation between the two countries, in which the latter had seemingly promised to prepare one island to host all the refugees for ASEAN, which will be patrolled together by ASEAN.

Pak Mochtar was very upset, asking who would take care of the refugees if they were left behind by final-destination countries. Only Indonesia would take care of the residual problem. Although they were in first-asylum countries and taken care of by ASEAN countries, the refugees may not automatically secure acceptance in the last-asylum countries. So, the country that hosted them before their final destination would be responsible for them — which is Indonesia. I agreed with Pak Mochtar’s idea to go to president Soeharto about it, who agreed with him to refuse the agreement between Pak Ghazalie and Pak Jusuf.

In Geneva, Pak Ghazalie was planning to propose an Indonesian island as a first-asylum destination for all refugees in Southeast Asia. Pak Mochtar was angry and he asked me to convey his message to Pak Ghazalie that he planned to openly refute the agreement by the Indonesian government in a plenary session if Malaysia continued with its plan.

I was afraid that it would be the first time ASEAN would split in an important international conference on refugees, so I warned Pak Ghazalie that Pak Mochtar was dead serious. I felt lucky to be instrumental in helping to prevent a confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia.

For me, this episode shows that Pak Mochtar was a brave person who was not afraid to shake up the status quo, and to sometimes even differ in some policies.

Another brilliant idea and act of Pak Mochtar was to initiate a Jakarta Informal Meeting (JIM) for Cambodia’s problem due to the invasion of Vietnam. It got the ball rolling for finding a way to get out of the mess. It was held in Bogor, West Java, where the three factions of Cambodia (Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s Funcinpec Party, the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, known as Khmer Rouge, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, or KPNLF) met for the first time in an informal meeting to start finding a way out of the conflict.

This initiative paved the way for a continuation in the second JIM meeting in Jakarta and ended in the Paris Agreement (1991), when the permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, China, Russia, France and the UK) gave their support to the ASEAN-initiated agreement. It was continued by Pak Ali Alatas in JIM II. Again a brilliant idea of Pak Mochtar and with the capacity to implement it till the end, including by his successor Pak Ali Alatas.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies had the honor of supporting all of these initiatives by Pak Mochtar, and also myself personally, because somehow he trusted me in playing an intermediate role with the military, especially with Pak Benny Moerdani. I learned a lot in between and will be forever grateful for his patience with me.

I have missed Pak Mochtar since he retired and especially since the last year that I had not been able to meet him as a friend and admirer.

We have spent a lot of time together, including in a general elections campaign in East Timor. I enjoyed his wit and felt honored to be with him during those hectic days. When we were together, I also learned how to enjoy the Cuban cigars he gave me.

May God receive him well because he was such a good man, brave and a patriot of Indonesia. May his family be given strength to continue his sacrifice to the republic.