Three personalities: Louis Charles Damais, Claire Holt, Étiennette Bénichou
At the opening of the Konferensi Asia-Afrika, the 18th April 1955 in Bandung, President Soekarno in his opening speech of the conference remembered about a previous meeting:
“Belum selang beberapa puluh tahun yang lampau seringkali kita terpaksa melawat ke negeri lain, bahkan ke benua lain, jika juru-bicara rakyat-rakyat kita hendak bermusyawarah.
Dalam hubungan ini saya mengingatkan kepada konferensi dari “Liga Melawan Imperialisme dan Kolonialisme”, yang diadakan di Brussel hampir tiga puluh tahun yang lalu. Pada konferensi itu banyak di antara anggota delegasi yang terhormat, yang kini hadir di sini, saling bertemu dan mendapat kekuatan baru untuk bekal dalam perjuangan kemerdekaannya.
Tetapi itu adalah tempat pertemuan yang beribu-ribu mil jauhnya, di negeri asing, di benua asing, di antara bangsa asing. Penyelenggaraan di sana itu bukan karena sengaja memilih tempat di sana, melainkan karena terpaksa.”[1]
What happened in Brussel in February 1927, was indeed an historical event as it contributed to create a transnational network of colonized countries and shaped the project of a Third World. Initiated by the German communist party and funded by the Chinese Kuomintang and the Mexican government, the League against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression, brought together two hundred delegates from thirty-seven states or colonized regions, and they represented 134 organizations, mostly Communist and Socialist parties as well as radical nationalist movements.[2] From Indonesia were present : Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta from the Nationalist Party (PNI) while Semaun was the chairman of the Communist Party (PKI), together with Mohamed Barkatullah and Jawaharlal Nehru from India, Hj. Ahmed Messalki from Algeria, Ahmed Assadoff and Mortesa Alawi from Iran, as well as a large delegation from Chinese Kuomintang. The physician Albert Einstein became the patron of the organization together with Romain Rolland, a French writer and Nobel prize and Madame Sun Yat-sen.
The name “League against Imperialism” itself was chosen as a direct attack against the League of Nations (the ancestor of The United Nations) because preservation of imperialism was in its mandate system. This movement called for the right of colonized nations to rule for themselves thus initiating a global movement that Indonesia will start in 1945 as the first Asian country to declare independence soon followed by many.
This paper is intended to bring some light on transnational personalities who have been in some ways showing solidarity toward Indonesia at some crucial historical moments, roughly between the birth of this nation in 1945 until it’s ten years celebration with the Asia Africa Bandung conference. These people were not some kinds of heroes, most of them were studying and producing works about Indonesia from an orientalist perspective through discourses of knowledge and power relations, in Edward Said’s terms[1]. They obviously also benefited from white privilege in post-colonial context but they all have shown in various ways anti-colonial expressions and manifested solidarity in an active way.
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