by Tim Hannigan
Ernest Hillen, his mother and his brother were interred in Bloemenkamp, a corner of Bandung walled off with bamboo and filled with five thousand women and children from all over West Java. In the early days an air of unreality hung over the civilian camps. Many inmates clung to the forlorn hope that Allied troops would soon come sweeping over the mountains to restore them to their bungalows and their swimming pools. But as 1942 slipped slowly by and the first rainclouds of the coming monsoon gathered over the hills around Bandung, the gulf between their old life and their current, sorry existence yawned ever wider.
Early in 1943, at the wettest, most malarial part of the year, the Hillens were shifted from Bloemenkamp to another section of Bandung. This was the vast Cihapit camp, a wired-off city within the city, packed with 18,000 women and children—almost a third of all the female and juvenile internees in the entire Archipelago. The Hillens shared a house with eleven other families. They had a single toilet between them. Food rations were cut down; the air of oppression thickened, and summary punishments for minor or imaginary transgressions worsened. And as well as the hunger and the oppression, the internees had to face the crushing monotony of prison life. The worst thing, Ernest Hillen would later remember, ‘was not the heat, fear, smells, noise, flies, too many bodies, too little food, scratches that festered and diarrhea—it was the sameness…’
There was little chance of boredom outside the camps. In the first weeks after the Japanese arrived, unrest had erupted in several towns across Java. The cheers that sometimes greeted the invading troops showed all too clearly that resentment of Dutch rule was by no means the preserve of the educated elite. Now, with all restraint gone, there was spontaneous violence. Dutch homes and businesses were looted, and here and there Europeans were attacked and even killed. And, as was almost always the case in times of unrest, the nascent mob also turned its ire against the local Chinese community. The Japanese authorities were not in the business of starting a revolution at this stage, however, and they quickly brought the violence to an end. A blanket curfew descended, and it was not just the Dutchmen, with their rising sun armbands, who were banned from walking the streets after dark.
The fundamental reason for the Japanese invasion, and the essential purpose of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ they hoped to create, was to ensure unfettered access to the raw materials, the markets and the great labour pool of Southeast Asia. Their arrival might have been greeted with hope by many, but ultimately the three-and-a-half years during which Japan controlled Indonesia were far more brutal and oppressive than the three-and-a-half centuries that the Dutch had spent in the Archipelago. But the Japanese occupation also ensured that it would never again be possible for a tiny cabal of Europeans to control the region.
The Japanese divided the former Dutch territories into three administrative blocks: Java and Madura were under the control of the 16th Army; Sumatra was run by the 25th Army; everything else fell to the Navy. Conditions in each of these zones varied, but from Sumatra to Timor there was one unifying theme: the obliteration of all traces of European dominance. Speaking Dutch was banned—even in private homes—and Indonesian was given official status as the language of the Archipelago. Batavia, seat of colonial power since the days of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, was abruptly stripped of its colonial nomenclature. Streets had their Dutch names removed; clubs, halls and hotels were rechristened in Indonesian or Japanese, and the city itself had a change of name. The old moniker Jayakarta, dating from distant Demak days, had never fallen entirely out of local usage. Now it made an official return, slightly modified, and the city was called Jakarta. All over the Archipelago clocks were put forward to tally with Tokyo time.
The old economic structures were roundly wrecked. Agricultural, forestry and mining exports were abruptly directed eastwards, away from Europe, and imports now came almost exclusively from within the Japanese sphere. This sudden skewing of the economy—which, however artificial and inequitable it might have previously been, had nonetheless developed over centuries—led to inevitable problems. Inflation was rampant. Japan was never able to supply all the import needs of the former Dutch territories. They also requisitioned both rice and fuel for the war effort, and hardship swiftly set in. There were famines in Java during the years of occupation, and perhaps as many as 2 million people died. For the first time in two centuries the population of the Archipelago stopped growing.
Earlier generations in the countryside might have known to squat respectfully when a Dutch official or an American tourist came by, but now everyone had to make obeisance to the Japanese. In Surabaya, an official order did the rounds telling cyclists that whenever they spotted a Japanese sentry they had to clamber down from the saddle, remove their hats, and execute a stiff, formal bow. Punishments for transgressors were swift and often brutal. The Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, were more dreaded than any of their Dutch predecessors.
But even as a pall of hunger and oppression was descending, something else was happening, too. Radios were pumping out stridently political messages, and the population was being mobilised. Those nationalist politicians prepared to collaborate with the Japanese found they had a better platform than they could ever have dreamed of under the Dutch.
On the eve of the Japanese invasion Sukarno was still in Bengkulu. Compared to the experiences of his nationalist compatriots digging ditches in the jungles of New Guinea it was a rather benign sort of exile. He lived in a pleasant bungalow in its own garden in the south of the town, built high to catch the transient afternoon breezes off the Indian Ocean. He had books to read, and a bicycle if he wanted to explore.
But for a man who liked to be at the centre of things, Bengkulu was positively purgatorial. There was also a certain amount of domestic tension. Inggit, the Bandung landlady Sukarno had married in his student days, had joined him in exile. But with his older wife now in her fifties, Sukarno’s roving eye had settled firmly on a local teenager named Fatmawati. As a Muslim—albeit a mainly non-practicing one—Sukarno was allowed to take a second wife. But Inggit, a woman with a decidedly forceful character, refused to give her permission.
At the start of 1942, the marital wrangles and boredom came to an abrupt end. In the final weeks before the Japanese invasion the Dutch made a sudden and belated effort to evacuate some of their senior officials to Australia. They also decided to take the most important political exiles with them, rather than let them become tools of the Japanese. Sukarno, Inggit and a small Dutch escort set out north along the coast towards the bigger port of Padang. A lovelorn Fatmawati was left behind in Bengkulu. The journey was a tough one, by truck and on foot, and by the time they reached Padang the last naval convoy had already left for Australia. Looters were rampaging through the town, and the Japanese were closing in. Sukarno’s Dutch escort melted away, and he soon found himself standing before Colonel Fujiyama of the 25th Army, and facing an unenviable choice.
Sukarno’s ultimate decision to collaborate with the Japanese certainly earned him the furious opprobrium of many Dutchmen in the coming years. However, their characterisation of Sukarno as a traitor on a par with the quislings of Vichy France was fundamentally flawed. He might have been a Dutch subject when the Japanese invaded his homeland, but he was not a Dutch citizen. What was more, he had spent his entire adult life campaigning against the colonial regime. He could hardly have been expected to shun the invaders on grounds of Dutch patriotism. On the other hand, for a man with broadly socialist ideals, a fascist regime of any sort—Asian or European—ought to have been thoroughly unpalatable. Many other members of the Indonesian nationalist movement had wrestled with this same challenge in the run-up to the war, and a fair few had already decided against cooperation. Some had even swallowed their decades-old convictions and prepared to stand by the Dutch. Sutan Sjahrir had declared that ‘the Axis was a more dangerous threat to Indonesian freedom than existing Dutch colonialism’.
Sukarno, however, put aside any ideological qualms and decided
to collaborate. With hindsight it was the right move, for it would allow him to play an essential role in the forging of an independent state when the Japanese were ultimately defeated.
Sukarno arrived in Jakarta on 9 July 1942. Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, freed from their New Guinea exile, were already in town and wrestling with the queasy conundrum of possible collaboration. It was almost a decade since the three men had last met. At that time they had been rivals of a sort, tussling over the direction of the independence movement. Now circumstances forced them more closely together. Ultimately Sjahrir decided to stay aloof from the Japanese regime. Not only would this sit far more easily with his conscience; it would also place him in a strong negotiating position with the Allies should they ever return to dominance in Southeast Asia. Sukarno and Hatta, meanwhile, would cooperate with the Japanese.
Over the coming years the two leaders tried to steer the best course for Indonesian nationalism through the stormy waters of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Sometimes their machinations had tangible effects. Sukarno’s lobbying led to the establishment of the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat, the ‘Centre of People’s Power’, known by the acronym Putera, which also happened to mean ‘son’, a boon to a lover of deft wordplay like Sukarno. Putera was intended as a united front for the entire Indonesian political spectrum, and though its official aim was to offer ‘aid and cooperation to Greater Japan’, it allowed Sukarno and Hatta an unprecedented platform from which to mobilise the masses.
Political Islam too, long side-lined in the nationalist movement, was given a Japanese-sanctioned front in Masyumi, the ‘Council of Indonesian Muslim Associations’. Meanwhile, the young men of Java and Sumatra were being drafted into a series of paramilitary volunteer groups. The biggest of these, founded under the auspices of Putera in October 1943, was the Pembela Tanah Air, the ‘Protectors of the Fatherland’, generally known, with the insistent Indonesian love of acronyms, as Peta. By the end of the war some thirty-seven thousand young men from Java, around twenty-thousand Sumatrans, and a further one thousand six hundred in Bali had joined Peta, and as many as two million youths in total had undergone some sort of military training.
But at the same time as all this political activity, conditions for most Indonesians were growing ever grimmer. Food shortages worsened, urban infrastructure crumbled, and the economy slid from depression towards outright collapse. At the end of the second year of the occupation the Japanese ordered the drafting of thousands of romusha, or ‘volunteer labourers’. Some were sent to work in grim conditions alongside Dutch internees and Allied prisoners of war on the Pekanbaru Railway project, an ambitious attempt to drive a train track through some 135 miles (220 kilometres) of Sumatran jungle, which echoed Daendels’ efforts to force the Great Post Road across Java a century and a half earlier. As many as seventy thousand people died before the work was complete. Other romusha were sent overseas, some to work on the notorious Thailand–Burma ‘Death Railway’.
As conditions all over Indonesia worsened, millenarian rumours started doing the rounds. Out in the villages of Java, the old prophecies of Joyoboyo—that twelfth-century Javanese king who had popularised the idea of the Ratu Adil—were common currency. People managed to identify accurate predictions of railways and aeroplanes in Joyoboyo’s works, but the prophecy that got the most attention proclaimed that a three-hundred-year span of rule by ‘white buffalos’ would be ended by the arrival of a race of ‘yellow dwarves’. The yellow dwarves, the prophecy had it, would prevail only for the lifespan of a single maize crop; after that, with glorious inevitability, the Ratu Adil would arrive…
Remarkably, this same prophecy had also gained currency amongst the Dutch prisoners in the camps. In the grim military prison at Cimahi near Bandung, a version in which the departure of the ‘yellow dwarves’ presaged the ‘return of the white buffalo to their stables’, rather than the arrival of the Ratu Adil, was popular.
In the women’s camp at Cihapit conditions had become ever more dire. Ernest Hillen’s brother had been taken away to join the adult men in another camp, and he and his mother had been shifted to the cramped and filthy upper part of Cihapit. Beriberi, neuritis, chronic ulcers and all manner of other ailments were a part of daily life. Once there was the small miracle of a delivery of Red Cross food packages. ‘This was sometime in late 1944’, Hillen later remembered, ‘when cats and dogs had been eaten long ago and it was no use hunting rats any more—with so little to feed off, they had disappeared…’
But for all the disease and deprivation, news was still seeping into the camp, and in early 1945 most of it was of setbacks for the Japanese. In the early days, the inmates had taken heart at stories of American bombs raining down on Tokyo. Now, however, the idea of a Japanese defeat was terrifying, and rumours were soon circulating that in such an event there would be no gentlemanly transfer or power and prisoners; instead, they would all be massacred as the Japanese troops in Java went down in a suicidal last stand.
There were similar rumours in prison camps all over Indonesia, and when, in May 1945, the inmates began to hear whispers that Germany had surrendered and that the war in Europe was over, the fear of an apocalyptic Japanese last stand only intensified. And then, on the night of 6 August, the prisoners in one of the men’s camps in Bandung picked up a crackly news broadcast from Delhi on a hidden radio. The reception was so bad and the message so garbled that they were unable to make full sense of it. However, the gist was clear enough, as one of the prisoners later recalled: ‘in the course of the morning of the day which was now ended, something more like an act of God than of man had been inflicted on Japan at a place called Hiroshima…’
Nine days after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. In Jakarta, Sukarno and Hatta found themselves suddenly marooned by the kind of abrupt tidal fall that precedes a tsunami.
During the previous year, the Japanese had started to make sympathetic noises about Indonesian independence, and at the start of 1945, with defeat looking increasingly inevitable, there had been a sudden forward rush. A ‘Committee for Preparatory Work for Indonesian Independence’ had been formed, and on 1 June Sukarno had given a speech outlining what he called the Pancasila, the ‘five principles’ that were to be the official philosophy of the new nation: belief in a single but non-religiously specific god; nationalism; humanitarianism; social justice; and democracy. The Committee got to work drafting a constitution. The Japanese military, meanwhile, met in Singapore and decided that Java should be granted total independence in September, with the rest of Indonesia being freed shortly afterwards.
But then the bomb fell, the Japanese surrendered and everything came crashing to a halt. Sukarno and Hatta had no idea what to do. As part of their official surrender terms, the Japanese were expected to maintain the status quo in their occupied territories until Allied troops arrived to take control. Clearly that meant there would be no independence celebrations in September, and the Indonesian leaders feared that if they attempted some unilateral move the Japanese might well use force to stop them—as the Allied terms would technically require of them. Faced with such an insurmountable conundrum, they vacillated.
But by 1945 there were other forces at play, not least the Pemuda, the militant youth. The thousands of young revolutionaries who had come through the ranks of Peta and the other paramilitary organisations were all fired up for revolution, and the more politically astute of their number quite rightly suspected that a narrow window of opportunity was sliding shut. They decided to take matters into their own hands. At 4 am on 16 August, a party of young Indonesian revolutionaries roused Sukarno and Hatta from their beds in Jakarta, and telling them that they were acting for their own safety, they proceeded to kidnap them. They drove the two leaders out of the city, and explained to them that they had to stop their prevarications and act. Faced with the insistent Pemuda, Sukarno and Hatta realised that they had no choice but to respond. They returned to the city, and the f
ollowing morning Sukarno read a proclamation to a small gathering in front of his own house:
We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power, etc., will be carried out in a conscientious manner and as speedily as possible.
It was short, it was simple—and it would be more than four years before those ‘matters concerning the transfer of power, etc.’ were finally ironed out.
On 15 September 1945 a British warship, HMS Cumberland, docked at Tanjung Priok, the commercial harbour at the head of Jakarta, and the troops of the Seaforth Highlanders clomped ashore. In 1811, soldiers of the same regiment had landed at this very same spot as part of the invasion that led to Raffles’ British interregnum in Java. Now, in a curious quirk of history, they were back.
When the Japanese surrendered in August there were no Allied troops anywhere near Java or Sumatra. The defeated Japanese were still in place, unmolested and armed to the teeth. The only instruction they had received was to maintain the status quo. The Dutch themselves, despite having been liberated from German occupation at home, were in no position to regain their former colonies immediately. And so the task of taking control of Java and Sumatra fell to Britain, the nation responsible for Southeast Asia Command under Lord Louis Mountbatten. Australia was left with the job of taking over the rest of the Dutch territories in the eastern Archipelago.