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Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia. By RUDOLF MRAZEK. Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994. x, 526 pp. $24.25 (paper).
Sutan Sjahrir was and remains one of the great enigmatic figures of modern Indonesian history. Born in West Sumatra in 1909, he was one of a group of Minangkabau nationalist leaders and politicians who was to play major roles in Indonesian politics in the two or three decades around the Second World War. He studied law in the Netherlands, was active in the nationalist movement in Indonesia on his return, and for his troubles was exiled by the Dutch to the notorious prison camp at Boven Digul in what was then Netherlands New Guinea, and then to the island of Banda Neira. During the Japanese occupation, almost alone of the nationalist leaders, he stood outside the occupation administration, leading the closest thing that Indonesia had to a resistance movement. The central figure in George Kahin's Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, he seemed to many liberal western scholars in the early 1950s to have emerged from the 194549 revolution as a powerful political leader and one who was likely to lead Indonesia in the direction of democracy and stability. His supporters in the Socialist Party of Indonesia (PSI) were amongst...