A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  ‘Indonesia’ was a term that had been kicking around in scientific circles since the middle of the nineteenth century, when an English lawyer in Penang coined it as an alternative to Wallace’s ‘Malay Archipelago’. Now, however, it found potent new form as an alternative to the Dutch East Indies. What was more, if the Archipelago was now ‘Indonesia’, then its people—all the glorious gamut of them, from Koran-toting Acehnese to headhunting Dayaks—would be ‘Indonesians’, and the Malay lingua franca would now be known as Bahasa Indonesia, ‘the Indonesian Language’.

  On 28 October 1928, a group of young men gathered for the closing meeting of a two-day congress at a student boarding house in Batavia, to the southeast of the Koningsplein and the Hotel des Indes. The delegates were mostly students and they came in a curious array of dress styles—from sarongs to tropical suits, and with a batik headdress here and a bowtie there. Earlier in the day, they had met in a cinema to discuss the challenges of education, but here things were a little more radical.

  First, a young songwriter by the name of Supratman took up a violin and played his latest composition, an anthem entitled Indonesia Raya, ‘Indonesia the Great’. Once he was done, the delegates read a three-line declaration. They called it the Sumpah Pemuda, ‘the Youth Pledge’. The word Pemuda, ‘the Youth’, would soon have an enduring potency of its own, a byword for a seething politically literate mass with the power of numbers on their side. The pledge itself, meanwhile, was an unadorned evocation of the new nationalism:

  Firstly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge one motherland, Indonesia.

  Secondly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge one nation, the nation of Indonesia.

  Thirdly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, uphold the language of unity, Indonesian.

  They could not have put it more simply, or more effectively.

  Sukarno, meanwhile, had turned a study club he had founded in Bandung in 1926 into a proper political party, the Perserikat Nasional Indonesia, the ‘Indonesian Nationalist Association’ or PNI. And then he went a step further and formed the PPPKI, the ‘Union of Political Organisations of the Indonesian People’, an umbrella organisation for parties and pressure groups of all stripes. To join the PPPKI, all that was required was a commitment to Indonesian independence. Everyone who was anyone signed up—including the now rather irrelevant Budi Utomo. Even a few Arab and Chinese lobby groups gave their support. A head of steam for independence appeared to be building up.

  And at this point the Dutch authorities decided that the Ethical Policy was dead in the water.

  The first people to feel the heat were the Indonesian students in far-off Holland. While Sukarno had been stirring things up at home, the young Mohammad Hatta had been causing waves of his own in the colonial fatherland. In the years to come, Hatta would be the intellectual anchor of Indonesian nationalism, a stolidly efficient counterpoint to Sukarno’s mercurial antics. He was born in 1902 in the Minangkabau town of Bukittinggi, a cool and misty place in the hills of western Sumatra. Like many Minangkabaus, he was a fairly orthodox Muslim, but he always rejected the idea of Islam as a political force in its own right. Similarly, though he inclined in a distinctly socialist direction, he would never commit entirely to Marxism. He shared Sukarno’s essentially secular nationalist ideology, for all that their personal styles differed.

  Hatta had travelled to Rotterdam to study economics in 1921, and he had soon became embroiled in serious student politics. Back in 1908, a social organisation with a Dutch name, the Indische Vereniging (‘the Indies Association’), had been set up for the first generation of Ethical Policy scholars to study away from home. In 1922, Hatta and other members of the new and more radical generation had hijacked it and, using their new national language, they had changed its name to Perhimpunan Indonesia, the ‘Indonesian Association’, and turned it into a serious political organisation. Before long they ran into trouble with the authorities. In September 1927, Hatta was arrested and charged with fomenting armed resistance to Dutch rule in Indonesia. He spent five months in jail awaiting trial, and once he reached a courtroom in The Hague, he took the opportunity to make a stirring public condemnation of Dutch colonialism. To his own surprise as much as that of the authorities, the court declared him not guilty.

  In the Indies, however, the courts were much less inclined to leniency. By late 1929 Sukarno was an increasingly ubiquitous figure on podiums and in pamphlets. The PPPKI was speaking with an increasingly unified voice, and Sukarno’s own PNI had doubled its membership to ten thousand in less than six months. As a consequence the authorities were growing increasingly nervous, and three days short of the end of the decade Sukarno was arrested in Yogyakarta, where he had gone to make a speech. He was charged with all manner of offences under the general catch-all of ‘disturbing the public order’, and locked in a tiny cell in a Bandung prison. Imprisonment, he later recalled, was a shattering experience:

  I am a man who gratifies his senses. I enjoy fine clothes, exciting foods, love-making, and I could not take the isolation, rigidity, filth, the million little humiliations of the lowest form of prison life.

  But if the authorities had hoped that humiliating interment would break his resolve, they were mistaken. It was almost eight months before the trial got underway, but just like Hatta two years earlier, Sukarno took it as an opportunity for showboating. He was a born orator and the courtroom crackled with the energy of his attack on European colonialism.

  ‘Why do the people always believe in the coming of a Ratu Adil?’ Sukarno demanded. ‘Why are there constant rumours of messianic figures appearing in this or that village?’ The answer, he declared, was simply that ‘the weeping people endlessly, unceasingly, wait and long for the coming of help as a man in darkness endlessly, every hour, every minute, every second, waits and wonders when will the sun rise’.

  They found him guilty and sent him to jail for four years.

  As the 1930s got under way, a pall of gloom descended over the Archipelago. For both those who thought of it as the Dutch East Indies and those who called it Indonesia—and for the many millions who still mainly considered themselves Javanese, Balinese, Sasak, Bugis or whatever it may be—the tumult of the previous decade had unmistakably passed.

  A slow economic tsunami sent out by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had washed up in the tropics by the start of 1931. Sugar prices collapsed, and an era of hardship set in. Average incomes in Java swiftly fell by more than half, and former free-labouring peasants were soon signing up in their droves for the only option available: indentured coolie work on the grim plantations of Sumatra. All this hardship might have primed the populace for revolution, but most people were simply too busy trying to survive to bother with politics. The nationalist movement, meanwhile, had been effectively decapitated, and within months of Sukarno’s imprisonment the PNI had given up the ghost and disbanded, while the PPPKI had lost its way. Meanwhile, there were other clouds gathering on other horizons: in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, and on 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

  Sukarno served less than two years of his first prison term. In his absence, the veterans of the defunct PNI tried to keep the nationalist cause afloat and had founded a new group, Partindo, the ‘Indonesian Party’. Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, meanwhile, had finally graduated from their Dutch universities and returned to Indonesia, where they had set up another new party, Pendidikan Nasional Indonesia, ‘Indonesian National Education’, known as ‘New PNI’ to distinguish itself from Sukarno’s old group. Sukarno sniffed around both organisations for a while, before throwing in his lot with Partindo and swiftly assuming command. Prison had done nothing to strip him of his karisma, and within months the membership had reached twenty thousand.

  But by this stage, there was a thoroughly conservative governor-general at the helm of the Dutch East Indies. Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge was a tall, thin man with a bristling moustache and not an ounce of sympathy for the
nationalist cause. In August 1933 Sukarno was arrested again, on trumped-up charges connecting Partindo to a recent mutiny on a Dutch naval ship off Sumatra. This time there would be no chance for courtroom theatrics: there would be no trial at all. Instead Sukarno was shipped off into indefinite exile—first to Ende, a former pirate haunt in the shadow of a table-topped volcano on Flores, and then to a tiny bungalow in Bengkulu, the one time British backwater on the wild west coast of Sumatra. With the big man gone, Partindo went to pieces almost immediately. Hatta and Sjahrir were arrested too, on the same spurious charges. They were also evicted from Java, but their place of exile was even more obscure. They were sent to the remotest of all Dutch territories—a jungle-fringed prison camp called Boven-Digoel in the malarial depths of West New Guinea.

  By the middle of the 1930s, it looked as if the wind had gone from the nationalist sails. The bright lights of the movement were far away—Sukarno reading books and romancing a local schoolmaster’s daughter in Bengkulu, and Hatta and Sjahrir enduring hard labour and high fever in New Guinea. The only political activity was now in a tame parliament in Batavia.

  Back in 1918, in the heady days of the Ethical Policy, the authorities had set up a Volksraad, a ‘People’s Council’. Its powers were strictly of an advisory nature, but it was at least allowed to speak. Its membership was drawn in unequal parts from the three tiers of colonial society—European, foreign oriental and inlander. Half of them were appointed, and half were elected. There was, however, a considerable degree of smoke-and-mirrors at play in creating this rudimentary vision of democracy: the electorate that voted for the Volksraad members consisted entirely of the conservative municipal councils from the major towns of the Dutch East Indies. Inevitably, then, those elected to the Volksraad were pliant yes-men. As a consequence, no one had paid it much attention during the 1920s, but now it was the only outlet left for the politically inclined. For the rest of the 1930s, the Indonesian members of the Volksraad would periodically press requests on the governor-general—for the official replacement of the term ‘inlander’ with ‘Indonesian’, for example, and for a ten-year plan for Indonesian autonomy. The requests were invariably rejected out of hand, and the councillors could do nothing but meekly comply with the higher decision.

  The colonial authorities might, then, have had reason to congratulate themselves: a potential revolution seemed to have been nipped in the bud. But they had many other problems to deal with—not least the economic challenges of the global Great Depression. At home in Europe the political scene was starting to turn ugly, and in Asia there were difficulties with that nation of ‘honorary Europeans’.

  The ascendant Japanese had long bought huge quantities of raw materials from the Dutch East Indies, and they had shipped plenty of their own cheap consumer goods back in the opposite direction. With the local manufacturing industry now in a parlous state, the Dutch had started to limit Japanese imports. They were also becoming increasingly reluctant to send the Japanese metal ores, oil and the other potential components for a military machine. Recent events in Manchuria had made it clear that Japan was increasingly inclined to use force when it didn’t get what it wanted, and the Dutch authorities were becoming increasingly nervous. Then, on 10 May 1940, Hitler invaded the Netherlands.

  This had all happened before, of course: way back in 1794 when Napoleon conquered the country. Once again, the East Indies were cut adrift from the fatherland. The authorities in Batavia attempted to follow the example set by Daendels 130 years earlier. They ramped up recruitment to the colonial army and set about improving their defences. In Central Java, some of the raw recruits were sent for training to a fort at Gombong, west of Yogyakarta, which was originally built during the Java War against Diponegoro. Amongst their ranks was a nineteen-year-old village boy by the name of Suharto.

  On 8 December 1941, Japan launched aerial attacks on British bases in Hong Kong and Malaya, and strafed American facilities in the Philippines. At the same time, on the other side of the international dateline, 353 Japanese planes descended on the US fleet in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The Netherlands—in the form of an exiled government in London and a colonial administration in Batavia—joined its allies in a declaration of war. They would not have to wait long for the hostilities to begin.

  On 10 January 1942, Japanese troops landed in Dutch-controlled Borneo, Maluku and Sumatra. At the same time they were surging south through the Malay Peninsula. The reputedly impregnable British fortress of Singapore fell in the middle of February, and at the end of the month a final concerted Allied effort to rebuff the Japanese in the Battle of the Java Sea was also a miserable failure. Shortly before midnight on 28 February, a Japanese troop ship dropped anchor in Banten Bay, the very spot where Cornelis de Houtman had hove to in 1596. Within twenty-four hours Japanese troops were closing in on Batavia and Buitenzorg, and by 7 March they were descending from the Priangan highlands towards Bandung, where the Dutch high command was holding out.

  On the morning of 8 March 1942 the Dutch forces in Java surrendered, and later that day the governor-general gave himself up. At eleven o’clock that night Dutch rule ended with a final radio broadcast from their official station: ‘We are closing now. Farewell until better times. Long live the Queen…’ It had taken the Dutch more than three hundred years to achieve supremacy over the entire Archipelago. The Japanese had done it in less than two months.

  CHAPTER 8

  FREEDOM OR DEATH:

  WAR AND REVOLUTION

  The trucks came at first light, when it was still cool and there were thin skeins of mist lying over the hills. The plantation headquarters was a complex of bulky, tin-roofed sheds on the banks of a stony river. Scattered around the site were the stolid bungalows of the Dutch overseers, each surrounded by its own patch of clipped grass. In the middle of the complex there was a swimming pool.

  The plantation lay deep in the Priangan highlands—that hulk of volcanic uplands at the heart of West Java, the place where the worst excesses of the Cultivation System had played out a century earlier. This was still the heartland of the Indies tea trade, and the hillsides were swaddled in a blanket of tea bushes.

  On a normal day the plantation would have been bustling at this hour, workers heading for the hillsides with conical baskets slung across their backs, European managers hurrying between the sheds, and the smells of cooking rising from the bungalows. But this was not a normal day. The eight Dutchmen who had run the place had been taken away by the Japanese weeks ago, and now two trucks had arrived for their wives and children. They had been warned the night before, and were waiting when the trucks arrived: women and children standing stoically beside the mattresses they had been told to bring. Japanese soldiers herded them into the trucks, and with a crunch of gears they rumbled slowly out of the complex, heading for Bandung.

  Amongst the women and children was a seven-year-old boy called Ernest Hillen. He had lived on the plantation with his eleven-year-old brother Jerry, his Dutch father and his Canadian mother. When the convoy stopped at some roadside hamlet for the soldiers to fill the radiators, little Ernest clambered up on to a suitcase and peered over the high side of the truck. Across the road a young Sundanese girl was sitting in the shade beneath a banyan tree, watching the strange scene. For a moment their eyes met, and many years later an adult Hillen would still remember that fleeting connection: ‘She had looked so free’, he wrote. Everything had changed in the Archipelago.

  Many members of the Dutch community struggled to comprehend the disaster that had overwhelmed them. The regime, the structure, the very idea of which they were a part had simply ceased to exist the moment the Japanese arrived on the scene.

  There were some 220,000 Dutch citizens living in the Archipelago, and for most of them the nationalist ferment of the previous decades had seemed like an obscure irrelevance. Here and there a plantation official might have sucked his teeth as he read of Sukarno’s latest shenanigans in the morning papers, but the insistent rhetoric and the talk
of ‘Indonesia’ seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the servants and labourers who accounted for most Dutch experience of ‘the natives’. Young Ernest Hillen, wandering around his plantation and talking to everyone with a child’s cheerful equality, had known the Sundanese locals. They were all poor people, he remembered, who spoke no Dutch and ate with their fingers; he ‘never saw one in the swimming pool except to clean it’. Many Dutch adults had a similar vision of the indigenous people of the Archipelago.

  As for the threat of Japanese invasion, that had seemed like an impossibly distant prospect. Even as they realised that defeat was inevitable, the upper echelons of the colonial regime had failed to grasp the fact that their power was about to be annihilated. When the governor-general and the high command surrendered on 8 March 1942, they had assumed that the Japanese would require them to stay at their posts to run the colony on their behalf. Instead, they found themselves locked up in prison camps. And when Dutchmen saw the Japanese troops rolling into towns across the Archipelago, they were often in for a sudden and sobering shock. On 18 March, a young Dutchman named Frans Ponder saw the invaders marching into Magelang, that pleasant upland township in Central Java where Diponegoro had been seized at the end of the Java War 112 years earlier. Ponder had been born just a few miles away in Ambarawa and he had spent most of his life in Java, so the sight of the column of heavily armed, highly disciplined foreign soldiers thundering between the ranks of Dutch bungalows was disconcerting enough. But there was something still more discomfiting: ‘They were greeted with cheers from the natives’.

  At first, it was only the military and senior Dutch officials who were placed in camps. The rest of the Dutch population, including the thousands of mixed-race Indo-Europeans, were issued with identity cards and placed under house arrest. If they wanted to go outside they had to apply for special permission, and had to wear a special armband, emblazoned with the rising sun of Japan. But even this limited freedom did not last long. As the dry season of 1942 began, all across the Archipelago the Dutch were rounded up and transferred to huge prison camps. Soon there were 170,000 internees locked up, either behind palisades of sharpened bamboo in designated quarters of the cities, or within barbed wire compounds in festering jungle clearings. They would be imprisoned for the rest of the war.