Agus Salim

Haji Agus Salim ([ˈaɡʊs ˈsalɪm]; 8 October 1884 – 4 November 1954) was an Indonesian journalist, diplomat, and statesman. He served as Indonesia's Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1947 and 1949.

Agus Salim was born Masjhoedoelhaq Salim on 8 October 1884, in the village of Koto Gadang, a suburb of Fort de Kock. His father, Sultan Mohammad Salim, was a colonial prosecutor and judge whose highest rank was chief judge for the indigenous court in Tanjung Pinang. His birth name, which translates into "defender of truth", was changed to Agus Salim early in his childhood.

Salim received his elementary education at Europeesche Lagere School; at that time, it was considered a privilege for a non-European child to attend an all-European school. He continued his studies at the Hogere Burgerschool in Batavia and graduated with the highest score in the whole Dutch East Indies. Salim's father had applied (and was granted) for his two sons, Agus and Jacob, to be granted equal status with the Europeans. However, his efforts to secure a government scholarship to study medicine in the Netherlands fell short. Kartini, another European-educated student whose writings on women's rights and emancipation became famous later, offered to defer her scholarship for Salim; this, too, was rejected.

C.S. Hurgronje, a prominent colonial administrator best known for his study of native affairs, took Salim under his wing and arranged for him to leave the Indies in 1905 to work as an interpreter and secretary at the Dutch consulate in Jeddah, where he handled hajj affairs; in some way, it was to distance him from the radical teachings of a close relative, the well-known Shafi'i imam of Masjid al-Haram Ahmad Khatib al-Minangkabawi.

Salim returned to the Indies in 1911 and pursued a career in journalism, contributing pieces for magazines and publications like Hindia Baroe, Fadjar Asia, and Moestika. He would later serve as an editor in Neratja, a newspaper aligned with the Sarekat Islam, where he was also an active member. While in that, he founded a private Hollandsche Indische School in his hometown of Koto Gadang, but left after three years to return to Java.

Salim became one of the most vocal advocates of the growing Indonesian nationalist movement, in the period known as the National Awakening. He became a prominent leader in Sarekat Islam and was considered the right-hand man of its leader, Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto. The SI contained many political strains, including communists, business leaders, and Islamically-minded reformers. Having spent time in the Hejaz, Salim was considered to be on the reformist side of the SI and was at odds with the increasingly leftist faction of SI led by Semaun, Tan Malaka, and Darsono; who would eventually break with SI to found the Communist Union of the Indies.

Salim was occasionally accused by those leftists of being too close to the Dutch colonial government. First, his newspaper Neratja had been funded in 1917 with government money (under the direction of Governor-General Johan Paul van Limburg Stirum) who wanted a Malay-language forum for perspectives sympathetic to the Dutch Ethical Policy, However, by 1918 Neratja became a harsh critic of the colonial government, regularly printing reports of mistreatment of Muslims in remote regions of the Indies. Nonetheless, allegations continued to surface from the left. The Dutch communist Henk Sneevliet accused Neratja editor Abdul Muis of having advocated for his expulsion from the Indies in 1917. And when Salim's Neratja was the only Malay language newspaper to applaud his expulsion in 1918, its editors were condemned by other newspapers and forced to apologize. Even in the late 1920s, as many communists in the Indies were being sent to concentration camps in Boven Digoel, disputes were still arising over Salim's behavior in 1917. In 1927 Bintang Timoer published allegations that Agus Salim had joined Sarekat Islam and other meetings in the 1910s delivered reports to government officials and then used government money to criticize communists in Neratja. Salim responded that he needed money to continue his activities and that everyone profited from the government in some way or other.

Later, after the breakup of the Sarekat Islam, Salim (along with Tjokroaminoto) co-founded the Islamic Union Party (Partai Serikat Islam, PSI), which later became the PSII. After Tjokro died in 1934, Salim became the party's intellectual leader.