Word: kartosuwirjo
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Dates: during 1953-1953
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Secession. The angry Achinese rallied around Teuku Daud Beureuh, a former military governor of Atjeh. Beureuh was in touch with another Moslem rebel, Kartosuwirjo, who had been defying the government for three years from the wilds of West Java. In September, Beureuh seceded from Indonesia-that is, he proclaimed Atjeh a part of an autonomous Islamic state headed by Kartosuwirjo. At the same time 10,000 of his Achinese warriors, wearing homemade black uniforms and brandishing swords, cutlasses, kukris and even kitchen knives, attacked government police and military posts in eleven Atjeh towns. In most cases the rebels...
Darul Islam's leader is Kartosuwirjo, a 46-year-old mystic, who holds court in the rugged mountain fastnesses of western Java. Against the Dutch, Kartosuwirjo's tactics were simple and effective: kill, rape, loot and burn. His religious concept is medieval: death to unbelievers; his politics uncompromising: Darul Islam wants a Moslem theocracy. When Kartosuwirjo discovered that the leaders of the newly independent Indonesia planned a secular state without him, he turned his 10,000 well-armed fanatics against the republic...
...fertile West Java, Darul Islam set up a rival government, collected taxes, recruited a large army and successfully defied the flabby, frightened Indonesian cabinets that regularly succeeded one another. At first the Jakarta governments laughed off the rebels as "high-spirited young men still excited by events." When Kartosuwirjo's raiders cut railroad lines, ambushed convoys, even looted the suburbs of the capital city of Jakarta, the government finally sent an army to stamp out the revolt. It soon learned that religion is stronger than politics in Moslem Indonesia. The government's Moslem troops balked at fighting their...
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