A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  Incredibly, given the vast scale of the place, virtually no meaningful intelligence had emerged from Indonesia during the years of occupation. A few whispers of a nascent nationalist revolution had reached the Allied command, but Charles van der Plas, prewar governor of East Java and one of the first senior Dutch officials to be sent back to Java in 1945, had blithely informed Lord Mountbatten that there was nothing to worry about. ‘The Indonesians’, he had said, ‘are too nice a people to fight really hard…’

  The British found a surreal situation in Jakarta. The Japanese were still on the streets and still in possession of their guns. But there was an unfamiliar flag flying everywhere: a simple, two coloured banner with a strip of crimson at the top and a band of white at the bottom. It was the flag of the Indonesian Republic. The Indonesian flag had originally been concocted by nationalist students two decades earlier, and it was inspired by a banner of Majapahit. Both the Dutch and the Japanese had banned it, but now, fluttering freely in the hot breeze of the late dry season, it was a manifestation not just of an aspiration, but of some sort of reality: the Indonesian Republic actually existed. Sukarno was its president; Hatta was his deputy. They had a constitution and a collection of ministries, and they had even appointed governors for a putative seven provinces spanning the entire breadth of the old Dutch territories—though in practice, outside of Java and Sumatra only the heads of Bali and Sulawesi ever reached their posts.

  There were revolutionary slogans daubed on walls all over the city—some of them in incongruous but cannily considered English. And one word was paramount. Alfred Doulton, an English officer who arrived at the end of September, recalled that ‘A caller lifting up a telephone receiver would be greeted by a bark of “Merdeka” from the exchange, and if he chanced to raise his eyes to the walls of a public building opposite he would find “Merdeka” glaring defiantly at him’.

  Merdeka: it was a word with an old and unusual pedigree. Back in the days of the VOC, the freemen of Batavia—emancipated slaves and ‘Black Portuguese’—had been known by that Sanskrit-derived term Mardijker. Now, stripped of Dutch and Indian accents, it meant ‘freedom’ in Indonesian. It had become the rallying call of the revolution.

  For all van der Plas’ mild predictions, the British forces were faced with an impossible task. At their front they had to deal with an Indonesian Republic that actually existed—even if its writ over the Archipelago beyond Java was mainly a matter of theory. At their back, meanwhile, was a Dutch government absolutely determined to regain control of the Archipelago—for both sensible economic reasons, and as a means to overcome the spectacular humiliation of having lost both homeland and colonies during the course of the war. The British ended up pleasing no one. For the Indonesians, they were imperialist lackeys, come as proxies to do the dirty work of the Dutch; for the Dutch, meanwhile, they were appeasers of ‘extremists’, who at best failed to bring their full force to bear against a mass of traitorous terrorists, and at worst perhaps even deliberately sabotaged Dutch prospects.

  At times the British even had to call on the Japanese to fight alongside them against Indonesian nationalists as they tried to rescue the thousands of inmates, many of who were still marooned in the camps weeks after the end of the war. They succeeded in this, at least: Ernest Hillen was reunited with his father and brother, and the family eventually left for Canada.

  If the British had an unenviable task, Sukarno, Hatta and the other chiefs of the new Republic were in an equally challenging position. As 1945 rolled on and the monsoon clouds gathered over the Priangan highlands, they gnawed over impossible conundrums in the modest suburban houses that had been turned into makeshift ministries. Outside on the streets the British were struggling to keep control of burgeoning lawlessness. At the same time they were trying to do nothing that might provoke a full-scale Indonesian revolt, even while large numbers of increasingly intransigent Dutchmen were arriving on the scene—either from the camps, or from Europe.

  One of the most pressing practical problems was Sukarno himself. For most Dutch officials he was the worst kind of traitor. Many of them regarded his formal interactions with the British as an obscenity: they would have preferred to see him in jail. Even the British were a little queasy about dealing with Sukarno, for he very clearly had been a willing collaborator with the Japanese. Fortunately, however, there was another man with relatively clean hands in the upper echelons of the Republic—the avowed non-collaborator Sutan Sjahrir.

  In October there was some brisk ad hoc tinkering with Indonesia’s working constitution, and a role which had never previously existed was conjured into being: Sjahrir became Indonesia’s first prime minister. Another intellectual with an immaculate record of non-collaboration, the Medan-born Christian convert and socialist Amir Sjarifuddin, became the ‘Minister for People’s Security’—in essence, the Republic’s defence minister. Sukarno and Hatta retained their presidential and vice-presidential roles, but for the moment they became mere figureheads, standing back in the shadows to keep their stains of collaboration out of sight. It was a smart move, and both Dutch and British officials were much more comfortable talking to the new men. But it did nothing to tackle a far bigger and more dangerous problem.

  The leaders of the Republican government were veterans of the anti-Dutch struggle, middle-aged men who had cut their teeth in the 1920s. Outside on the streets, meanwhile, there was a whole new generation, trained in the ranks of Peta and the other paramilitary organisations, filled with revolutionary zeal, and with little interest in sober negotiations with their erstwhile colonial oppressors. It had been the Pemuda who had forced Sukarno and Hatta into their unilateral declaration of independence in August; now they were forging ahead with a revolution on their own terms.

  Sutan Sjahrir at least understood the phenomenon of massed Pemuda action; he recognised its driving energy and he knew just how dangerous it could be: ‘Many of them simply cling to the slogan Freedom or Death’, he wrote:

  Wherever they sense that freedom is still far from certain, and yet they themselves are not faced with death, they are seized with doubt and hesitation. The remedy for these doubts is usually sought in uninterrupted action.

  Violence was self-propagating; it was becoming an end in itself, and there was nothing Sjahrir as prime minister, Sukarno as president or anyone else could do about it.

  Revolutionary Pemuda fervour reached its zenith—and British experiences in Indonesia reached their nadir—in Surabaya in November 1945. The East Java capital was the biggest port in the Dutch East Indies. This had once been the site of the main maritime gateway of Majapahit, but twentieth-century Surabaya was a rough and ready industrial city, far removed from courtly sophistication. It was a polyglot brew of Javanese, Madurese, Chinese, Malays, Arabs and more, and the locals spoke the coarsest of all Javanese dialects.

  Tensions had started to rise in Surabaya in September as Dutchmen, newly released from the camps, started arriving in town and trying to take control of their former homes and businesses. When a small group of Dutch and British officers arrived in the city on 18 September and set up a provisional headquarters in what had once been the smartest hotel in town, things rapidly turned ugly. The following day, a gang of young Indo-Europeans ran a Dutch tricolour up the hotel’s flagpole—to the fury of their watching Indonesian counterparts, who started a riot in response, scaled the hotel roof and tore the blue strip from the bottom of the flag, leaving only the red and white of the Republic. It was a symbolic signal for an outbreak of violence, and by the time the British arrived in force the following month dozens of Dutch citizens had been killed and there were thousands of armed Pemuda at large on the streets.

  Early attempts to broker a ceasefire came to nothing, and high-handed British demands for the Indonesians to disarm on pain of death only inflamed the situation. On 30 October the British commander, Brigadier Mallaby, was shot dead in the north of the city, and a month of vicious street fighting ensued before the British were able to proc
laim a decidedly shabby victory. Surabaya was left a smouldering wreck. At least six hundred Allied troops had died—most of them Indians, on active foreign service on behalf of the British for the last time before Indian independence. There are no truly reliable figures for local casualties, but the British commander in Java, Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison, privately estimated that at least ten thousand Indonesians, many of them civilians, had been killed.

  The so-called Battle of Surabaya was a crucial moment in the Indonesian Revolution—for a revolution, unmistakably, was what was now underway. It proved to the world that Indonesia’s independence movement was much more than a small cabal of over-educated collaborators. And for the revolutionaries themselves it provided a fiery rite of passage, a totemic event to prove that blood would be a crucial component of the struggle.

  As for the British, the experience simply proved that they ought to get out as soon as possible before they were unwillingly sucked into a protracted colonial war. In the event, it took more than a year of near-continuous fighting in Java, and in many parts of Sumatra too, before the British were able to establish stable perimeters around the major cities. By late 1946, however, the Dutch were thoroughly established in Jakarta (which they were now calling Batavia once again), and the Republican government had pulled out to a new base in Yogyakarta where the sultan, Hamengkubuwono IX, had come out in favour of the Republic.

  In mid-November the two sides met in the small resort of Linggajati, perched on the slopes of the mountains south of Cirebon in West Java, to sign a treaty. It guaranteed a ceasefire, acknowledged the existence of the Republic in Java, Madura and Sumatra, and agreed to the establishment, by January 1949, of an independent Indonesian federation, made up of the Republic and some as yet non-existent states in the rest of the Archipelago, and with the Dutch Queen as the symbolic sovereign. It was clearly not what either side wanted, but it allowed the British the chance to depart, which they did with a good deal of bitterness and no great sympathy for either side of the argument.

  As the Seaforth Highlanders clambered wearily aboard their transports at Tanjung Priok in November, finally heading for home almost a year and a half after the official end of World War II, some of the men jeered at their Dutch counterparts on the dockside, raised mocking fists and shouted, ‘Merdeka!’

  The ceasefire brokered at Linggajati did not last long. Its terms appealed to neither side: the Indonesian leaders wanted an Archipelago-wide unitary Republic; the Dutch essentially wanted their old colony back. As the monsoon rains rumbled on and 1946 turned into 1947 violence sparked, flared, and occasionally blazed in isolated spots all over the Archipelago.

  In Bali and Sulawesi, where the Dutch were trying to establish the tame states that would join their proposed federation, there was bitter fighting. The worst violence was in southern Sulawesi, where the British-trained Dutch commando Raymond Westerling led a campaign of uncompromising summary justice against anyone suspected of rebellion. Westerling was born in Istanbul and was known to friends and foes as ‘Turk’. He had cut his counter-insurgency teeth in Sumatra in 1945, where he had specialised in impaling the severed heads of anti-Dutch agitators on spikes. In Sulawesi in late 1946, he and his men—a hardened core of Dutchmen, Indo-Europeans and staunchly pro-Dutch troops from Ambon in Maluku—launched a reign of terror defined by the impromptu public executions of suspected rebels in what soon became known as ‘the Westerling Method’. Local Republican forces were decimated.

  Fighting erupted again in Java in mid-1947, as the Dutch launched what they euphemistically called ‘police actions’. By this stage there were essentially two states functioning in Java and Sumatra. The Dutch occupied the cities and surrounding pockets of pacified territory. From their base at Yogyakarta, meanwhile, the Republicans had notional control of most of the hinterland. They had ministries complete with a civil service, and were doing their best to establish a functioning economy. The police actions were, in all but name, a war between nations.

  Over the first weeks of July 1947, Dutch forces managed to gain uneasy control of all of West Java, Madura, and most of the far east of the island around Malang. In Sumatra, too, Dutch troops forced their way into the jungles around Palembang and Padang. The operation was, militarily, a success. But by this stage the Dutch were finding that international opinion was turning against them.

  At the start of 1948, under considerable international pressure, Dutch and Indonesian officials were coaxed aboard an American warship, the USS Renville, which had dropped anchor off Jakarta, where they signed a new ceasefire agreement. The most important component of the agreement was a line of control based on the most advanced Dutch military positions. It formalised Dutch authority over large swathes of former Republican territory, established a de facto border, and looked to many Indonesians like the most outrageous sop to the colonial aggressors. So furious was the condemnation of the agreement within the Republic that the government of the day—now headed by Amir Sjarifuddin, who had taken over as prime minister while Sutan Sjahrir went off to press the Republican cause at the United Nations—collapsed and Sukarno had to step in and appoint Hatta to the prime minister-ship, in addition to his vice-presidential role.

  But in the eyes of the world, the Indonesians came out of the Renville Agreement in firm possession of the moral high ground. Dutch propagandists were ever eager to proclaim the entire Indonesian independence movement a tissue of terrorism. But now, with film cameras whirring and reporters scribbling, the Indonesians had politely and pragmatically made enormous concessions. The Dutch found themselves looking like anachronistic bullies in a post-colonial world.

  It was not only an outdated imperialist impulse and a need to regain face after the humiliation of wartime defeat that kept the Dutch clinging on. They had spent 350 years in the Archipelago. Generations of Dutchmen had lived out their lives there, and there were plenty of Europeans with a deep emotional commitment to the place. Hubertus van Mook, the lieutenant governor-general in the turbulent post-war years, was an Indies-born Dutchmen. His childhood memories were of Semarang, not Amsterdam, and most of his adult life had been spent in Java. There were thousands like him: men and women who were conditioned to speak of the Netherlands as ‘home’, but whose natural environment consisted of tea plantations or Batavian bungalows.

  For the thousands of Indo-Europeans, the ‘Indos’, their commitment to the Dutch empire was even more pressing. At the start of the Independence movement, some Indos had signed up for the utopian vision of the Indies Party: an independent Archipelago for all, regardless of their origins. But over the subsequent decades they had seen themselves disenfranchised in the nationalist movement. Neither fully Dutch nor fully Indonesian, the Indos had discovered that their only true homeland lay not in a concrete territory, but in an abstract concept—the Dutch East Indies. For many of them its endurance was an existential matter, and as a consequence, by the end of World War II, they were amongst the most vigorous and at times violent proponents of continuing colonialism.

  There were also a good number of Indonesians whose very identity was wrapped up in the Dutch East Indies. From the days of the spice trade, the Christians of Ambon in Maluku had formed the core of the Dutch army in the Archipelago, and colonial military service had become a cornerstone of their culture. Many of the indigenous elite, too—the sultans, the rajas and the regents—owed their status to the colonial state, and saw only uncertainty in a Republican future.

  But as the end of the 1940s loomed, all of these people—Dutchmen, Indos, pro-colonial Ambonese and others—found themselves on the wrong side of history.

  In 1948 the Republic might well have had the moral high ground, but it was also riven with internal tension. From the very outset of the independence movement, there had been arguments about how best to defeat the Dutch and how best to forge a new nation. The most essential debate was between those who favoured a slow and steady progress towards independence with negotiation and conciliation along the way, and t
hose who wanted to drive urgently forward to ‘100 percent merdeka’. In the aftermath of the Renville Agreement in 1948, it was the communists who were carrying the torch of radicalism.

  The communist organisation formed from Sarekat Islam membership by the Surabaya railway worker Semaun way back in the 1920s had endured in various incarnations down the decades. Now, as the Partai Komunis Indonesia, the ‘Indonesian Communist Party’ or PKI, it was at the head of the faction that viewed the Renville Agreement as an unconscionable sop. The bloody revolutionary ideals of Surabaya and the angry slogan of ‘merdeka atau mati’, ‘freedom or death’, still had much popular currency, and in September 1948 a revolution within the revolution broke out. PKI supporters seized the East Java town of Madiun and proclaimed a new government. Sukarno, for all his own socialist sympathies, condemned the rebels, and pro-government army units descended on Madiun. Thousands died in the subsequent fighting, and many senior left-leaning politicians were arrested and subsequently shot—one-time prime minister Amir Sjarifuddin amongst them.

  The Dutch took obvious delight in all this infighting, and on 19 December they launched another offensive of their own, driving far beyond the Renville Agreement’s ceasefire line. They overwhelmed the Republic’s capital at Yogyakarta and arrested Sukarno, Hatta, Sjahrir and most of the other senior politicians. On the face of it, the operation was a triumph. But the Republican army, the Tentara Nasional Indonesia, the ‘Indonesian National Army’ or TNI, was now a proficient, if still somewhat ramshackle, fighting force, officered by veterans of the pre-war colonial army and the most senior Japanese-trained soldiers. They were still in the field, and the Dutch were faced with persistent guerrilla tactics in the same Central Java countryside where the battles of Diponegoro’s Java War had been fought 120 years earlier. What was more, by this stage the Dutch had earned the opprobrium of virtually every significant international power. Australia, India, Britain—all were firmly on the Indonesian side of the argument. Most importantly of all, with the Cold War getting underway the bloody events at Madiun had established the Republic’s anti-communist credentials in the eyes of the United States. The Dutch were fighting a lost cause.