Minggu, 23 Desember 2012
LETAK GEOGRAFIS INDONESIA
Letak geografis suatu wilayah adalah keberadaan posisi wilayah tersebut sesuai dengan bentuk dan letaknya di bumi. Untuk melihat letak wilayah Indonesia secara geografis, dapat dilihat pada peta dunia sebagai berikut.
Berdasarkan gambar di atas dapat diketahui bahasa dilihat secara geografis, wilayah Indonesia terletak pada posisi yang strategis dan menguntungkan karena beberapa alasan sebagai berikut:
LETAK ASTRONOMIS INDONESIA
Letak astronomis adalah letak suatu wilayah dipandang dari kedudukan garis lintang dan garis bujur. Letak wilayah Indonesia dari segi astronomis adalah di antara 6ºLU- 11ºLS dan antara 95º BT- 141ºBT. Berdasarkan letak tersebut, Indonesia memiliki iklim tropis. Dengan posisi wilayah Indonesia berada di antara garis lintang dan garis bujur, maka wilayah Indonesia dilewati oleh garis khatulistiwa. Garis khatulistiwa adalah garis khayal keliling bumi, terletak melintang pada nol derajat yang membagi bumi menjadi dua belahan yang sama, yaitu Belahan Bumi Utara dan Belahan Bumi Selatan. Beberapa tempat atau wilayah Indonesia yang dilewati oleh garis khatulistiwa antara lain Bonjol (Sumatra Barat), Pontianak (Kalimantan Barat), Tambu (Sulawesi Tengah), dan Halmahera (Maluku).
Letak geografis suatu wilayah adalah keberadaan posisi wilayah tersebut sesuai dengan bentuk dan letaknya di bumi. Untuk melihat letak wilayah Indonesia secara geografis, dapat dilihat pada peta dunia sebagai berikut.
Berdasarkan gambar di atas dapat diketahui bahasa dilihat secara geografis, wilayah Indonesia terletak pada posisi yang strategis dan menguntungkan karena beberapa alasan sebagai berikut:
- Letak Indonesia di antara Benua Asia dan Benua Australia.
- Letak Indonesia di antara Samudra Pasifik dan Samudra Hindia.
- Indonesia yang terletak di antara dua benua dan dua samudra memungkinkan menjadi persimpangan lalu lintas dunia, baik lalu lintas udara maupun laut.
- Indonesia sebagai titik persilangan kegiatan perekonomian dunia, antara perdagangan negara-negara industri dan negara-negara yang sedang berkembang. Misalnya antara Jepang, Korea, dan RRC dengan negara-negara di Asia, Afrika, dan Eropa.
LETAK ASTRONOMIS INDONESIA
Letak astronomis adalah letak suatu wilayah dipandang dari kedudukan garis lintang dan garis bujur. Letak wilayah Indonesia dari segi astronomis adalah di antara 6ºLU- 11ºLS dan antara 95º BT- 141ºBT. Berdasarkan letak tersebut, Indonesia memiliki iklim tropis. Dengan posisi wilayah Indonesia berada di antara garis lintang dan garis bujur, maka wilayah Indonesia dilewati oleh garis khatulistiwa. Garis khatulistiwa adalah garis khayal keliling bumi, terletak melintang pada nol derajat yang membagi bumi menjadi dua belahan yang sama, yaitu Belahan Bumi Utara dan Belahan Bumi Selatan. Beberapa tempat atau wilayah Indonesia yang dilewati oleh garis khatulistiwa antara lain Bonjol (Sumatra Barat), Pontianak (Kalimantan Barat), Tambu (Sulawesi Tengah), dan Halmahera (Maluku).
Minggu, 25 November 2012
history of INDONESIA
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Prehistory: Archaeological evidence indicates that ancestors of modern humans occupied sites in Central and East Java as early as 1.9 million years ago; presumably, these hominids were widely distributed in other areas. Fossils were found in 2003 of a tiny species of ancient hominid (homo floresiensis) that lived up until at least 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores in the Lesser Sunda Islands. There is evidence of modern humans as early as about 40,000 years ago, but they may have been present much earlier. By about 5,000 years ago, the circulation of peoples within the archipelago and the absorption of influences from outside had begun to create a diverse but related complex of cultures often identified as Austronesian. What is today Indonesia lay at or near the center of this complex, which eventually spread east throughout the Pacific, and west as far as Madagascar.
Early History: Although Indonesian peoples clearly had contact with the outside world at an early date (cloves, found only in Maluku, had made their way to the Middle East as early as 4,000 years ago), physical evidence in the archipelago is much later. Sites containing Indian trade goods now date at about 400 B.C., and the first inscriptions (in eastern Kalimantan and West Java) at about 375–400 B.C. The first formal kingdoms of which we have extensive knowledge are Srivijaya (flourished c. A.D. 550–c. 1050), a Buddhist trading polity whose power was centered in the region of present-day Palembang and reached to coastal areas on the Malaysian peninsula and elsewhere, and Mataram, in Central Java, where magnificent Buddhist and Hindu monuments such as Borobudur and Prambanan were constructed in the eighth and ninth centuries. The greatest of the subsequent Hindu-Buddhist states, the empire of Majapahit centered in East Java, claimed hegemony from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries over a wide trading region stretching from Sumatra to Maluku.
Islam entered the archipelago in about the eleventh century, but significant conversions did not take place for two centuries or more, beginning with Pasai (North Sumatra) at the turn of the fourteenth century and going on to Makasar and Central Java in the seventeenth century. Contacts from China deepened between the tenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of growing trade, but Mongol attempts to control Javanese power (in the late thirteenth century) failed, and early Ming dynasty (1368–1644) efforts to exercise great political and economic influence were fleeting. It was at this time also that Western visitors began appearing, starting with Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century and continuing with the Portuguese and Spanish in the sixteenth century. They were soon followed by the Dutch (1596) and the English (1601). Europeans affected trade and politics in specific places and periods, but for most of the archipelago beyond Java and parts of Maluku, colonial rule did not set in until the mid- or late nineteenth century.
Colonial Period: Dutch power in the archipelago grew very gradually, and colonial rule was not a goal of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which dominated trade from Amsterdam and, after the early seventeenth century, a fortified port called Batavia (now Jakarta) in West Java. But on Java local realities produced, by the mid-eighteenth century, a symbiotic Dutch-Javan relationship that survived the bankruptcy of the VOC in 1799 and soon took the shape of a colonial administration, which grew and consolidated during the late 1800s. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a modern Dutch colonial state extended its control to most of the area we now call Indonesia. Simultaneously, some of the peoples ruled by this state discovered nationalism; the first groups date from the early 1900s, and by the 1920s and 1930s an array of modern political organizations and leaders, including the well-known nationalist figure Sukarno (1901–70), came to the fore. The struggle between the Dutch colonial government and the Indonesian nationalist movement was well under way when the Japanese occupied the Indies in 1942. They remained until the end of World War II in August 1945.
An early 18th century Dutch map from a time when only the north coastal ports of Java were well known to the Dutch.
Independence Period: On August 17, 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independent Republic of Indonesia with Sukarno as president and Hatta as vice president. Allied forces (mostly British and British Indian troops) did not arrive until six weeks later, by which time the republic had begun to establish itself and nationalist pride had burgeoned. The period October-December 1945 was filled with violent conflict in which Indonesians made it clear they would defend their independence with their lifeblood. Forcing the Dutch to negotiate with the republic for an end to hostilities, the British withdrew in late 1946. The republic subsequently survived two Dutch “police actions” and an internal communist rebellion, and on December 27, 1949, The Hague formally recognized the sovereignty of a federated Republic of the United States of Indonesia, which a year later was formed into a unitary Republic of Indonesia.
Despite the holding of democratic elections in 1955, the years following the struggle for independence were characterized by political and economic difficulty: regional dissidence, attempted assassinations and coups d’état, military-civilian conflict, and economic stagnation. A period of Guided Democracy was announced in 1959 by Sukarno, who in September 1963 proclaimed himself president-for-life and presided over a political system in which the civilian nationalist leadership, much of the Islamic leadership, the large Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the army were all at odds. This tense and hostile atmosphere was broken on September 30, 1965, with what appears to have been an attempted PKI coup against the Sukarno government. The precise circumstances remain unclear, but the immediate result was that a “New Order” coalition of students, intellectuals, Muslims, and the army brought about a military-dominated government that removed Sukarno and permitted a broad and deadly assault on communists, especially on Java, Bali, and Sumatra. In late 1965 and early 1966, an estimated 500,000 Indonesian communists and suspected communists were killed and many more arrested.
On March 11, 1966, power was transferred from a seriously ill Sukarno to a high-ranking army officer, Suharto; the PKI was formally banned the following day. Suharto became the acting president on March 12, 1967, and the New Order era began.
The New Order era, which lasted for more than 30 years, has a mixed record. Like Guided Democracy, it was authoritarian, but it was more successful in bringing stability to the nation. Unlike Guided Democracy, its economic achievements were enormous and the well-being of the majority of Indonesians undeniably improved. Average life expectancy, for example, increased from 46 to 65.5 years. On the other hand, the state’s heavy involvement in banking and industry, especially the petroleum and natural gas sectors, worked against competition and encouraged corruption on a large scale. Heavy-handed political control and propagandizing of a national ideology may have aided stability, but also did not prepare the nation for a modern political existence. A modernizing, educated, and better-off middle class grew, but gained little or no political clout; poverty was reduced, but some particularly severe pockets appeared to be intractable. Suharto provided strong leadership, but he did not provide for a wise transition and, in his last years, clung to power and favored family and friends. East Timor, which had been forcibly annexed to Indonesia in 1976, saw bitter conflict between the Indonesian military and local independence movements. When the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997–98, the New Order lost the economic justification that had guaranteed much of its public support, and there was a widespread call for Suharto to step down. He resigned on May 21, 1998, little more than two months after being selected for his seventh term as president.
Suharto was succeeded by Bucharuddin Jusuf Habibie, who sought first to resolve the East Timor situation and begin a new and more open electoral process. In 1999, following Indonesia’s first freely contested parliamentary elections since 1955, Abdurrahman Wahid, well-known as both a progressive intellectual and as leader of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization (Nahdlatul Ulama, NU) became president. His quirky and often uncompromising leadership style, and questions about both his competency and his health, brought him increasing opposition and eventually serious threats of impeachment. He was dismissed from office in July 2001 in favor of Megawati Sukarnoputri, his vice president and head of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). Megawati, Sukarno’s eldest daughter, was decisively defeated in the September 2004 presidential runoff election by the Democratic Party candidate, retired army general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Yudhoyono was sworn in as president in October 2004.
Prehistory: Archaeological evidence indicates that ancestors of modern humans occupied sites in Central and East Java as early as 1.9 million years ago; presumably, these hominids were widely distributed in other areas. Fossils were found in 2003 of a tiny species of ancient hominid (homo floresiensis) that lived up until at least 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores in the Lesser Sunda Islands. There is evidence of modern humans as early as about 40,000 years ago, but they may have been present much earlier. By about 5,000 years ago, the circulation of peoples within the archipelago and the absorption of influences from outside had begun to create a diverse but related complex of cultures often identified as Austronesian. What is today Indonesia lay at or near the center of this complex, which eventually spread east throughout the Pacific, and west as far as Madagascar.
Early History: Although Indonesian peoples clearly had contact with the outside world at an early date (cloves, found only in Maluku, had made their way to the Middle East as early as 4,000 years ago), physical evidence in the archipelago is much later. Sites containing Indian trade goods now date at about 400 B.C., and the first inscriptions (in eastern Kalimantan and West Java) at about 375–400 B.C. The first formal kingdoms of which we have extensive knowledge are Srivijaya (flourished c. A.D. 550–c. 1050), a Buddhist trading polity whose power was centered in the region of present-day Palembang and reached to coastal areas on the Malaysian peninsula and elsewhere, and Mataram, in Central Java, where magnificent Buddhist and Hindu monuments such as Borobudur and Prambanan were constructed in the eighth and ninth centuries. The greatest of the subsequent Hindu-Buddhist states, the empire of Majapahit centered in East Java, claimed hegemony from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries over a wide trading region stretching from Sumatra to Maluku.
Islam entered the archipelago in about the eleventh century, but significant conversions did not take place for two centuries or more, beginning with Pasai (North Sumatra) at the turn of the fourteenth century and going on to Makasar and Central Java in the seventeenth century. Contacts from China deepened between the tenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of growing trade, but Mongol attempts to control Javanese power (in the late thirteenth century) failed, and early Ming dynasty (1368–1644) efforts to exercise great political and economic influence were fleeting. It was at this time also that Western visitors began appearing, starting with Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century and continuing with the Portuguese and Spanish in the sixteenth century. They were soon followed by the Dutch (1596) and the English (1601). Europeans affected trade and politics in specific places and periods, but for most of the archipelago beyond Java and parts of Maluku, colonial rule did not set in until the mid- or late nineteenth century.
Colonial Period: Dutch power in the archipelago grew very gradually, and colonial rule was not a goal of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which dominated trade from Amsterdam and, after the early seventeenth century, a fortified port called Batavia (now Jakarta) in West Java. But on Java local realities produced, by the mid-eighteenth century, a symbiotic Dutch-Javan relationship that survived the bankruptcy of the VOC in 1799 and soon took the shape of a colonial administration, which grew and consolidated during the late 1800s. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a modern Dutch colonial state extended its control to most of the area we now call Indonesia. Simultaneously, some of the peoples ruled by this state discovered nationalism; the first groups date from the early 1900s, and by the 1920s and 1930s an array of modern political organizations and leaders, including the well-known nationalist figure Sukarno (1901–70), came to the fore. The struggle between the Dutch colonial government and the Indonesian nationalist movement was well under way when the Japanese occupied the Indies in 1942. They remained until the end of World War II in August 1945.
An early 18th century Dutch map from a time when only the north coastal ports of Java were well known to the Dutch.
Independence Period: On August 17, 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independent Republic of Indonesia with Sukarno as president and Hatta as vice president. Allied forces (mostly British and British Indian troops) did not arrive until six weeks later, by which time the republic had begun to establish itself and nationalist pride had burgeoned. The period October-December 1945 was filled with violent conflict in which Indonesians made it clear they would defend their independence with their lifeblood. Forcing the Dutch to negotiate with the republic for an end to hostilities, the British withdrew in late 1946. The republic subsequently survived two Dutch “police actions” and an internal communist rebellion, and on December 27, 1949, The Hague formally recognized the sovereignty of a federated Republic of the United States of Indonesia, which a year later was formed into a unitary Republic of Indonesia.
Despite the holding of democratic elections in 1955, the years following the struggle for independence were characterized by political and economic difficulty: regional dissidence, attempted assassinations and coups d’état, military-civilian conflict, and economic stagnation. A period of Guided Democracy was announced in 1959 by Sukarno, who in September 1963 proclaimed himself president-for-life and presided over a political system in which the civilian nationalist leadership, much of the Islamic leadership, the large Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the army were all at odds. This tense and hostile atmosphere was broken on September 30, 1965, with what appears to have been an attempted PKI coup against the Sukarno government. The precise circumstances remain unclear, but the immediate result was that a “New Order” coalition of students, intellectuals, Muslims, and the army brought about a military-dominated government that removed Sukarno and permitted a broad and deadly assault on communists, especially on Java, Bali, and Sumatra. In late 1965 and early 1966, an estimated 500,000 Indonesian communists and suspected communists were killed and many more arrested.
 |
| General Suharto was the second President of Indonesia, holding the office from 1967 to 1998. |
The New Order era, which lasted for more than 30 years, has a mixed record. Like Guided Democracy, it was authoritarian, but it was more successful in bringing stability to the nation. Unlike Guided Democracy, its economic achievements were enormous and the well-being of the majority of Indonesians undeniably improved. Average life expectancy, for example, increased from 46 to 65.5 years. On the other hand, the state’s heavy involvement in banking and industry, especially the petroleum and natural gas sectors, worked against competition and encouraged corruption on a large scale. Heavy-handed political control and propagandizing of a national ideology may have aided stability, but also did not prepare the nation for a modern political existence. A modernizing, educated, and better-off middle class grew, but gained little or no political clout; poverty was reduced, but some particularly severe pockets appeared to be intractable. Suharto provided strong leadership, but he did not provide for a wise transition and, in his last years, clung to power and favored family and friends. East Timor, which had been forcibly annexed to Indonesia in 1976, saw bitter conflict between the Indonesian military and local independence movements. When the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997–98, the New Order lost the economic justification that had guaranteed much of its public support, and there was a widespread call for Suharto to step down. He resigned on May 21, 1998, little more than two months after being selected for his seventh term as president.
Suharto was succeeded by Bucharuddin Jusuf Habibie, who sought first to resolve the East Timor situation and begin a new and more open electoral process. In 1999, following Indonesia’s first freely contested parliamentary elections since 1955, Abdurrahman Wahid, well-known as both a progressive intellectual and as leader of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization (Nahdlatul Ulama, NU) became president. His quirky and often uncompromising leadership style, and questions about both his competency and his health, brought him increasing opposition and eventually serious threats of impeachment. He was dismissed from office in July 2001 in favor of Megawati Sukarnoputri, his vice president and head of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). Megawati, Sukarno’s eldest daughter, was decisively defeated in the September 2004 presidential runoff election by the Democratic Party candidate, retired army general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Yudhoyono was sworn in as president in October 2004.
Sabtu, 24 November 2012
indonesia
The first known hominid inhabitant of Indonesia was the so-called "Java Man", or Homo erectus, who lived here half a million years ago. Some 60,000 years ago, the ancestors of the present-day Papuans move eastward through these islands, eventually reaching New Guinea and Australia some 30-40,000 years ago. Much later, in about the fourth millennium B.C., they were followed by the ancestors of the modern-day Malays, Javanese and other Malayo-Polynesian groups who now make up the bulk of Indonesia's population.
Trade contracts with India, China and the mainland of Southeast Asia brought outside cultural and religious influences to Indonesia. One of the first Indianized empires, known to us now as Sriwijaya, was located on the coast of Sumatra around the strategic straits of Malacca, serving as the hub of a trading network that reached to many parts of the archipelago more than a thousand years ago.
On neighboring Java, large kingdoms of the interior of the island erected scores of exquisite of religious monuments, such as Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument in the world. The last and most powerful of these early Hindu-Javanese kingdoms, the 14th century Majapahit Empire, once controlled and influenced much of what is now known as Indonesia, maintaining contacts with trading outposts as far away as the west coast of Papua New Guinea.
Indian Muslim traders began spreading Islam in Indonesia in the eighth and ninth centuries. By the time Marco Polo visited North Sumatra at the end of the 13th century, the first Islamic states were already established there. Soon afterwards, rulers on Java's north coast adopted the new creed and conquered the Hindu-based Majapahit Empire in the Javanese hinterland. The faith gradually spread throughout archipelago, and Indonesia is today the world's largest Islamic nation.
Indonesia's abundant spices first brought Portuguese merchants to the key trading port of Malacca in 1511. Prized for their flavor, spices such as cloves, nutmeg and mace were also believed to cure everything from the plague to venereal disease, and were literally worth their weight in gold. The Dutch eventually wrested control of the spice trade from Portuguese, and the tenacious Dutch East India Company (known by initials VOC) established a spice monopoly which lasted well into the 18th century. During the 19th century, the Dutch began sugar and coffee cultivation on Java, which was soon providing three-fourths of the world supply of coffee.
By the turn of the 20th century, nationalist stirring, brought about by nearly three centuries of oppressive colonial rule, began to challenge the Dutch presence in Indonesia. A four-year guerilla war led by nationalists against the Dutch on Java after World War II, along with successful diplomatic maneuverings abroad, helped bring about independence. The Republic of Indonesia, officially proclaimed on August 17th, 1945, gained sovereignty four years later.
During the first two decades of independence, the republic was dominated by the charismatic figure of Sukarno, one of the early nationalists who had been imprisoned by the Dutch. General (ret.) Soeharto eased Sukarno from power in 1967. Indonesia's economy was sustained throughout the 1970's, almost exclusively by oil export.
The Asian financial crisis, which broke out in mid-1997, paralyzed the Indonesian economy with the rupiah losing 80% of its value against the US dollar at the peak of the turmoil.
Trade contracts with India, China and the mainland of Southeast Asia brought outside cultural and religious influences to Indonesia. One of the first Indianized empires, known to us now as Sriwijaya, was located on the coast of Sumatra around the strategic straits of Malacca, serving as the hub of a trading network that reached to many parts of the archipelago more than a thousand years ago.
On neighboring Java, large kingdoms of the interior of the island erected scores of exquisite of religious monuments, such as Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument in the world. The last and most powerful of these early Hindu-Javanese kingdoms, the 14th century Majapahit Empire, once controlled and influenced much of what is now known as Indonesia, maintaining contacts with trading outposts as far away as the west coast of Papua New Guinea.
Indian Muslim traders began spreading Islam in Indonesia in the eighth and ninth centuries. By the time Marco Polo visited North Sumatra at the end of the 13th century, the first Islamic states were already established there. Soon afterwards, rulers on Java's north coast adopted the new creed and conquered the Hindu-based Majapahit Empire in the Javanese hinterland. The faith gradually spread throughout archipelago, and Indonesia is today the world's largest Islamic nation.
Indonesia's abundant spices first brought Portuguese merchants to the key trading port of Malacca in 1511. Prized for their flavor, spices such as cloves, nutmeg and mace were also believed to cure everything from the plague to venereal disease, and were literally worth their weight in gold. The Dutch eventually wrested control of the spice trade from Portuguese, and the tenacious Dutch East India Company (known by initials VOC) established a spice monopoly which lasted well into the 18th century. During the 19th century, the Dutch began sugar and coffee cultivation on Java, which was soon providing three-fourths of the world supply of coffee.
By the turn of the 20th century, nationalist stirring, brought about by nearly three centuries of oppressive colonial rule, began to challenge the Dutch presence in Indonesia. A four-year guerilla war led by nationalists against the Dutch on Java after World War II, along with successful diplomatic maneuverings abroad, helped bring about independence. The Republic of Indonesia, officially proclaimed on August 17th, 1945, gained sovereignty four years later.
During the first two decades of independence, the republic was dominated by the charismatic figure of Sukarno, one of the early nationalists who had been imprisoned by the Dutch. General (ret.) Soeharto eased Sukarno from power in 1967. Indonesia's economy was sustained throughout the 1970's, almost exclusively by oil export.
The Asian financial crisis, which broke out in mid-1997, paralyzed the Indonesian economy with the rupiah losing 80% of its value against the US dollar at the peak of the turmoil.
On May 21, 1998, Soeharto resigned after 32 years in power and was replaced by B.J. Habibie following bloody violence and riots. Indonesia held its first democratic election in October 1999, which put Abdurrahman 'Gus Dur' Wahid in the role of president.
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