'Tell me who your friends are...'

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Luchtmaarschalk Omar Dani

Luchtmaarschalk Omar Dani (met bril) geflankeerd door Guruh Sukarnoputra, en mijn lieveling onder de Sukarno kinderen, Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, de jongste zuster van de huidige president van Indonesië, Megawati Sukarnoputri. De foto werd in 2001 genomen bij de presentatie van mij boek over President Sukarno in Jakarta.

Air Chief Marshall Omar Dani was 39 years old, when he became in 1962 commander-in-chief of the Indonesian Air Force. He joined the auri in 1950 when he was 26. He received his basic training in California. In 1956 he followed an additional course at the Royal Air Force Staff College in Andover, Hampshire, England. With other Indonesian students attending universities in the United-Kingdom, Omar Dani dispatched a

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student delegation to West-Germany in May 1956, when president Sukarno paid a state-visit to that country under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer. I, too, had joined the Indonesian party during that visit and published May 30, 1956 a report about it in Elsevier.

Pak Omar Dani was imprisoned after the 1965 cia coup in Jakarta that aimed at ousting Sukarno and replacing him with a fascist traitor, the mass murderer, general Suharto. He was accused by the Suharto clique of having betrayed his country through close ties with Communist China. He spent 29 years in prison and was finally freed by Suharto's successor, Habibie. After Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers acknowledged that perhaps I was not the person that Joseph Luns and all his successors had said I was, he took me in 1994 on state-visits to South Africa and Indonesia. After 1957, the Dutch had me blacklisted in Indonesia till 1994. They even succeeded to have me evicted in 1992 right under Lubbers' nose, from South Africa, like I was a common criminal, or as if I had done something wrong living in Johannesburg from 1986-1992.

Lubbers probably got a guilty conscience about these machinations by the Dutch government against me. He opened the doors to South-Africa and Indonesia for me again. Jakarta had been closed to me for 37 years. When Pak Omar Dani was released in the late nineties, I finally met and embraced him as a true Indonesian hero, a man, who never betrayed his loyalty to Indonesia and the father of the Indonesian nation. To me, he is one of the most honorable Indonesians alive today. He wrote me as follows for this booklet of friends.

When the student delegation returned in 1956 from West-Germany after meeting Bung Karno there on a state-visit, they told us full of emotion about President Sukarno's impromptu and emotional speech on the reunification of West- and East Germany. He delivered that talk in the German language at Heidelberg University. The students also mention the fact, that a certain Dutchman named Willem Oltmans, who had come to meet Bung Karno already on the earlier state-visit to Italy in Rome, and who had likewise joined him during his journey through West Germany. Oltmans worked in Italy for De Telegraaf. The editor-in-chief had ordered him not to interview the Indonesian President. So, when Oltmans did it anyway, he lost his job.

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The conflict over the sovereignty over Irian Barat (West New Guinea) was poisoning relations between Jakarta and the Hague. This last territory of the former Dutch East Indies was excluded from being transferred to Indonesia during the Round Table Conference in Holland which led on December 30, 1949 to the final legal transfer of the former Dutch Asian empire to Indonesia. West New Guinea remained, however, part of the kingdom of the Netherlands. President Sukarno and the entire Indonesian nation were furious and so was Willem Oltmans!

When we, Indonesian Air Force officers training in the United Kingdom, heard about Wim's attitude as a Dutch citizen towards the policy of his own government at a weekend in London, where we assembled to hear the report of our delegation, we concluded that this Dutch journalist was either a lunatic or an intelligent and brilliant man with a remarkable high degree of courage, humanism and a properly developed sense of justice.

In the mid fifties, following his meeting President Sukarno in Rome and Bonn, Wim spent a year in Indonesia for the nrc newspaper and other publications. He joined president Sukarno on his trips, wherever he went in Indonesia. Later, when he was blocked from returning to Jakarta after 1957, he would meet Bung Karno in many countries including during two trips to the United-States in 1960 and 1961. Wim has written about these experiences in his book Den Vaderland Getrouwe, which I read in prison.

He learned a lot about the President and the way he used to speak directly to the people using the peoples language. One of the gifts Sukarno was provided with the ability to explain problems in simple and easily understandable terms, easily absorbed by both the so-called intellectuals as the man in the street. I am sure, that even Wim, who did not know or speak Behasa Indonesia, could easily grasp the essence of Sukarno's speeches. In 1956-1957 I did not meet Wim as yet, because I was in the United Kingdom.

In 1999, Wim was in Jakarta and was invited by Air Force Marshall A.V.M. Wisnu Djajengminardo (Also a close friend of Indro Noto Suroto and I did meet him and his wife already in 1957) in his Jakarta home to celebrate Wim's 74th birthday. Wim arrived, surprising us all, with his close friend Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, the third daughter

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of our first President. He has a very sharp memory. He was telling us in Wisnu's residence, sitting on the edge of a big sofa about the state-visit of Marshall Kliment Voroshilov, then President of the ussr to Indonesia in 1957. He recalled in great detail how elegantly President Sukarno had solved a problem of a near riot during a mass meeting in Surabaya.

After that story I suddenly said impromptu to him, ‘Wim, as far as I know, you are the only journalist who knew and understood Sukarno from the outside as well as from the inside.’ Hearing me say those words, Wim fell back on the sofa, with outstretched arms and his mouth wide open. After a few moments he regained his posture and looked around the room to his friends four former chiefs of staff of the Air Force and Sukmawati and other guests were present. It was as if he needed their complete attention to witness what he was going to say next.

He said, ‘For all these years I have been waiting for these words. I have been waiting for somebody to make this statement directly to me. And, now, on my 74th birthday, one of my friends, Pak Omar Dani, is exactly saying the words, that I wanted to hear, because they are true. Thank you Pak Omar!

You deserve it, Wim!

(What I also said that evening in Pak and Ibu Wisnu's villa was directed to Bung Karno's daughter, Sukmawati. I asked her to please never to forget Pak Omar Dani's words. Already in the early seventies Sukma and her youngest brother Guruh, who also lived several months in my house in Amsterdam Noord, visited Peter and me, because they wanted to talk about their father. I had known him in many ways more intimately, since the children were still small and the father had not much time to spend time with them, when he was head of state. Later, when he was Suharto's prisoner, he was treated disrespectfully and inhumanely. He was rarely allowed to receive family members with the exception of his second wife, Mrs. Hartini).