Jatiluhur Dam: The Beginning Of France's Involvement In Indonesia's National Strategic Project

JAKARTA - The purchase of 42 Rafale fighter planes on February 10, 2022 marks a new chapter in bilateral relations between Indonesia and France. Dassault Aviation as the manufacturer of the Rafale for the first time working on a project of the Government of Indonesia. But which French company is the pioneer of the Indonesian National Strategic Project (PSN)?

The Compagnie Francaise d'Entreprise (CFE) was the first French company to work on a national project. In 1957 CFE was awarded the project to build the first dam made by the Government of Indonesia, namely the Jatiluhur Dam in Purwakarta, West Java. President Soekarno started laying the groundwork for this project.

Bearing the official name of the Juanda Dam, Jatiluhur which dams the Citarum River is the largest dam in Indonesia. Jatiluhur Dam produces a reservoir or artificial lake covering an area of 83 km2, with a circumference of 150 km.

CFE, a company that is part of the Suez Group business corporation, was founded in 1956 or a year before getting the Jatiluhur Dam construction project. CFE never completed the construction of the Jatiluhur Dam, and withdrew after the political turmoil in Indonesia in 1965 marked by the fall of President Soekarno.

The Jatiluhur Dam was inaugurated by President Soeharto on August 26, 1967. The total cost spent to build the dam over 10 years was US$230 million, or around Rp. 3.3 trillion according to current exchange rates.

According to Francois Raillon, a French writer who talks a lot about Indonesia, the role of CFE in the construction of the Jatiluhur Dam is the first breakthrough made by a French company in Indonesia.

“Historically, it started in 1960 with the construction of the Jatiluhur Dam in West Java. It was reported to be the French company's first breakthrough. The contract marks a new trend of French big business in Indonesia,” Raillon wrote in an article entitled Communautés Expatriées, Entre France et Indonésie (Community of Expatriates, Between France and Indonesia) published in 1997.

One of the interesting things about the construction of the Jatiluhur Dam by a French company is the recruitment of Javanese people from New Caledonia to become workers in the CFE project. The Javanese, who since the late 1800s have been plantation, mining and household workers in New Caledonia because of the Dutch and French agreements, have had the opportunity to visit their ancestral lands.

After the regime of President Soeharto came to power and French investment increasingly flowed into Indonesia, the Javanese workers from New Caledonia were getting more opportunities. Armed with fluent French, they work in many French companies, consulates, embassies, schools, or the tourism industry that exploded in the early 1970s.

“With knowledge of the French language and mentality, quite a number of them have managed to find work at the Spies-Batignolles company, which has obtained a contract to build the Jatiluhur dam,” writes Jean Luc-Maurer in the article Les Javanais de Nouvelle-Calédonie : Des Affres de l'exil Aux Aléas de l'intégration (New Caledonian Javanese: From the Horror of Exile to the Strangeness of Integration), published 2002.

The newspaper Le Monde, published on June 3, 1974, carried an article about the CFE company. It was stated in the article, that CFE suffered heavy losses and was forced to terminate his employment (PHK). It was not stated whether the layoffs were due to the Jatiluhur Dam construction project which could not be completed.

“The Compagnie Française d'Entreprises will employ just 804 people by the end of 1974 instead of the 3,000 that it had in November 1973,” wrote Le Monde.

The decision was protested by the company's union. They will intervene in the labor inspectorate, and have an audience with the then French Minister of Manpower, Michel Durafour. Still according to the Le Monde report, CFE in the last four years has lost up to 110 million francs, or equivalent to IDR 272 billion today.

After CFE pioneered the path with the Jatiluhur Dam project, in the future many French companies were working on giant projects in Indonesia. Name them: Alcatel which works on the GSM network project, Arianespace with the launch of the Palapa Satellite, Bouygues which works on 11 skyscrapers in Jakarta, Bull which works on the computerization project for the State Civil Service Agency (BKN), France Telecom in collaboration with Astra to build 500 thousand telephone lines. in Sumatra.

There are many more French companies that have big businesses in Indonesia, most of which are invested in the capital-intensive industrial sector. Beginning with the CFE with the Jatiluhur Dam in 1957, now in 2022 Dassault Aviation has successfully dredged 8.1 billion US dollars or around Rp. 116 trillion for the National Strategic Project for the procurement of 42 Rafale fighter aircraft.