Indonesia - Wikitravel

LocationFlagQuick FactsCapitalJakartaGovernmentRepublicCurrencyIndonesian Rupiah (IDR)Areatotal: 1,904,569km²water: 93,000km²land: 1,811,569km²Population245,452,739 (2012 est.)LanguageIndonesian (official) and countless regional languages.ReligionMuslim 86.7%, Protestant 7.6%, Roman Catholic 3.12%, Hindu 1.7%, Buddhist 0.8%, other 0.43% (2018)Electricity220V/50Hz (Schuko Euro plug)Country code+62Internet TLD.idTime ZoneGMT+7 through GMT+9

Indonesia straddles the Equator between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.While it has land borders with Malaysia to the north as well as East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the east, it also neighbors Australia to the south, and Palau, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand to the north, India to the northwest.Understand[edit]

With 17,504 islands, 6,000 of them inhabited, Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world. About 240 million people live in this fourth most populous country in the world — after China, India and the USA — and by far the largest country in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia markets itself as Wonderful Indonesia as their Indonesia Tourism project slogan, and the slogan is quite true, although not necessarily always in good ways. Indonesia's tropical forests are the second-largest in the world after Brazil, and are being logged and cut down at the same alarming speed.While the rich shop and party in Jakarta and Bali, decades of economic mismanagement have leftmuch of the population living on less than USD2/day.However, the country is developing rapidly and the World Bank poverty figures have decreased fourfold in the past decade [2][3].Infrastructure in much of the country remains rudimentary, and travelers off the beaten track will need some patience and flexibility.

According to the “Energy Access” Working Group Global Network on Energy for Sustainable Development, in 2001, 53.4% of the Indonesian population had access to electricity and they consumed 345kWh for each person in a year. In the same year the residents of nearby Singapore had 100% access and they consumed 6,641 kWh. A very large percentage of the Indonesian population remain reliant upon wood for a cooking fuel. The central government has in recent years instituted a program of LPG gas access to use as a replacement for the burning of bio-mass sources for cooking.History[edit]

The early, modern history of Indonesia begins in the period from 2500BC to 1500BC with a wave of light brown-skinned Austronesian immigrants, thought to have originated in Taiwan. This Neolithic group of people, skilled in open-ocean maritime travel and agriculture are believed to have quickly supplanted the existing, less-developed population.

From this point onward, dozens of kingdoms and civilizations flourished and faded in different parts of the archipelago.Some notable kingdoms include Srivijaya (7th-14th century) on Sumatra and Majapahit (1293-c.1500), based in eastern Java but the first to unite the main islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Borneo (now Kalimantan) as well as parts of Peninsular Malaysia.

The first Europeans to arrive (after Marco Polo who passed through in the late 1200s) were the Portuguese, who were given permission to erect a godown near present-day Jakarta in 1522.By the end of the century, however, the Dutch had pretty much taken over and the razing of a competing English fort in 1619 secured their hold on Java, leading to 350 years of colonization. The British occupied Java from 1811 to 1816, and as a result Indonesians still drive on the left.In 1824, the Dutch and the British signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty which divided the Malay world into Dutch and British spheres of influence, with the Dutch ceding Malacca to the British, and the British ceding all their colonies on Sumatra to the Dutch. The line of division roughly corresponds to what is now the border between Malaysia and Indonesia, with a small segment becoming the border between Singapore and Indonesia.

Various nationalist groups developed in the early 20th century, and there were several disturbances, quickly put down by the Dutch. Leaders were arrested and exiled. Then during World War II, the Japanese conquered most of the islands. In August 1945 in the post war vacuum following the Japanese surrender to allied forces the Japanese army and navy still controlled the majority of the Indonesian archipelago. The Japanese agreed to return Indonesia to the Netherlands but continued to administer the region as the Dutch were unable to immediately return due to massive destabilisation from the effects of war in Europe.Independence[edit]

On 17 Aug 1945 Sukarno read the Proklamasi or Declaration of Independence and the Panitia Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia (PPKI) moved to form an interim government. A constitution, drafted by the PPKI preparatory committee was announced on 18 August and Sukarno was declared President with Hatta as Vice-President. The PPKI was then remade into the KNIP (Central Indonesian National Committee) and the KNIP became the temporary governing body. The new government was installed on 31 August 1945. Indonesia's founding fathers Sukarno (Soekarno) and Hatta declared the independence of the Republic of Indonesia.

The Dutch mounted a diplomatic and military campaign to reclaim their former colony from the nationalists. Disputations, negotiations, partitioning and armed conflict prevailed between the newly independent Indonesia and the Netherlands. Several nations including the US were highly critical of the Dutch in this immediate post war period and at one stage in late 1949 the US government suspended aid provided to the Dutch under the Marshal plan. The matter was also raised by the newly formed UN. After four years of fighting, the Dutch accepted defeat and on 27 December 1949 they formally transferred sovereignty to "Republik Indonesia Serikat" (Republic of United States of Indonesia). In August 1950 a new constitution was proclaimed and the new Republic of Indonesia was formed from the original but now expanded Republic to include Sumatra Timur and East Indonesia/Negara Indonesia Timur. Jakarta was made the capital of the Republic of Indonesia however the Netherlands and Indonesia remained in a theoretical constitutional union with Indonesia holding the status of a fully independent state.

In September 1950 Natsir and the Masyumi party led the first government of fully independent Indonesia. Sukarno returned again to the role of President and over time came to assert greater power in that role. For a time Indonesia used a provisional constitution modelled upon that of the US which also drew heavily on the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On 26 September 1950 Indonesia was admitted to the newly formed United Nations. The 1950 constitution appears to have been an attempt to set up a liberal democractic system with two chambers of parliament. Later in 1955, still under this provisional constitution, Indonesia held its first free election.

The new government was tasked with finalising a permanent and final version of the constitution but after much wrangling consensus was not reached leading to organised public demonstrations in 1958. In 1959 President Sukarno issued a decree dissolving the then current constitution and restored the 1945 Constitution. Indonesia then entered the era of Guided Democracy with the Head of State assuming stronger presidential powers and also absorbing the previous role of Prime Minister.

From their initial declaration of independence Indonesia claimed West Papua as part of their nation, but the Dutch held onto it into the 1960s, and in the early sixties there was further armed conflict over that region. After a UN-brokered peace deal, and a referendum,West Papua became part of Indonesia and was renamed as Irian Jaya, which apocryphally stands for Ikut (part of) Republic of Indonesia, Anti Netherlands. It's now called simply Papua, but the independence movement smoulders on to this day.

Sukarno's tribute to independence and unity — National Monument, Jakarta