1962: Kartosuwirio, Darul Islam leader

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Javanese Islamist rebel Soekarmadji Maridjan Kartosuwiryo (alternatively, Kartosuwirjo or Kartosuwirio) was executed on this date in 1962.

A onetime student of the Islamic trade unionist Tjokroaminoto, who also taught Indonesia’s first president Sukarno,* Kartosuwirio abandoned medical studies to follow a path in religion and politics.

By the late 1930s he led a movement within what was then still a Dutch colony aiming for an independent Indonesia under Islamic law. Japanese occupation during World War II led him to create a resistance militia, Darul Islam, and it was this force that enabled him to establish an embryonic (so he hoped) Islamic state in West Java after the war. Allied movements in Aceh (northernmost tip of the island of Sumatra) and South Sulawesi rallied to his banner, and for some years in the 1950s these guerrillas dominated the countrysides of these territories.

The aforementioned former student Sukarno was riding the tiger in these years, governing a fractious independent Indonesia that forever looked in danger of spinning apart — due not only to Islamic discontent but regional, ethnic, and ideological hostilities.

Sukarno’s solution to this rolling crisis was, by 1957, to implement “Guided Democracy” in order to tamp down the dangerous centrifugal tendencies enabled by the previous, less-guided version.

While this innovation did not hold long-term, it did provide Sukarno with the tools to come to grips with movements like Darul Islam, which was hunted to ground in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kartosuwirio was captured in early 1962, and made to broadcast a stand-down order to his dwindling ranks of comrades. He was then given over to a court-martial and shot.

Although Darul Islam went to the grave with him, its influence lives on. Veterans of Darul Islam later helped establish the still-extant regional militant network Jemaah Islamiyah, and founded a 1970s-1980s terrorist outfit, Komando Jihad. A regional insurgency also continued in Aceh until around 2005, again peopled by numerous folks who had once fought for Kartosuwirio.

* Sukarno’s first wife was Tjokroaminoto’s daughter. They divorced after a couple of years, with the consequences you would imagine for the Sukarno-Tjokroaminoto relationship.

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