( Jacobin NL) On Monday 29 May 2023 I stood with my granddaughter and my son-in-law in front of the Proclamation Monument in Jakarta, with the two more than life-size bronze statues of the Indonesians Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, who on 17 August 1945 proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. In between them you can see a sheet of copper representing the note read out that morning by Sukarno, standing on the veranda of his house in Jakarta with Hatta at his side.
Over two weeks after our visit to the monument, on 14 June 2023, the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte stated on behalf of his government that 17 August 1945 will henceforth be acknowledged as the date on which the Republic of Indonesia came into being, and hence as the end of Dutch colonial rule over the archipelago – hereby abandoning the government’s previous position that the republic did not come into being until 27 December 1949, the day on which the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to Indonesia. In the four intervening years the Netherlands had waged a bloody war against the Indonesian inhabitants who were fighting for their country’s independence.
This must be seen as a historic breakthrough in Dutch government thinking. All twenty-nine (!) of the governments that ruled the Netherlands in the past 78 years had insisted that the Republic of Indonesia was not founded until the day when the Netherlands transferred sovereignty; and every one of them had therefore refused to send the Indonesian people their best wishes on 17 August.
Author provided.
In the past twenty years I have returned numerous times to the land of my birth, usually with my partner and always with different children, grandchildren and sons- and daughters-in-law, to show them where I spent the first eleven years of my life; but not once had I visited the Proclamation Monument. Not that I underestimated the importance of the proclamation on 17 August 1945; but somehow I never got round to it. In my publications I did state at length how shameful I found it that the Netherlands so stubbornly refused to acknowledge the date – and how incomprehensible I found it that so many Dutch people had since then swallowed the story that the Netherlands was simply quelling public disorder on its own territory and persisted in dismissing the whole thing as mere ‘policing operations’ (in Dutch, politionele acties).
However, anyone who thinks that the statement on 14 June marked the end of Dutch hypocrisy on the subject is mistaken – for the government added that the acts of violence committed by the Netherlands during the four years of fighting cannot be deemed war crimes ‘in a legal sense’, since this was not a war between two recognised states.
Al Jazeera English: “Indonesia: Dutch sorry for independence war ‘extreme violence’”
Instead of having the courage to admit that the colonial war should never have been fought in the first place, the Dutch government continues to hide behind such evasions. And, in turn, the organisers of the Netherlands’ annual Day of Remembrance on Amsterdam’s Dam Square on 4 May did not have the courage to accept the implications of such trickery. When it was decided to include those killed during the ‘policing operations’ in the number of commemorated deaths, I asked whether this meant the 100,000 Indonesian as well as the 6,000 Dutch dead – since the commemoration concerned people who had died on our own territory. No, I was told, only the Dutch dead were commemorated. But, I said, the Indonesian dead were still Dutch subjects between 1945 and 1949, before Dutch sovereignty was transferred to the Republic of Indonesia? But no, they were not commemorated.
I always felt sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Dutch soldiers who were sent overseas to face the horrors of a colonial war. And how much those of them who helped commit war crimes and had to live with those memories for the rest of their lives must have suffered. But we should not forget that at least four thousand conscripts, including quite a few communists, refused to go – and were then not only sentenced to long periods of imprisonment here in the Netherlands, but in many cases also had great trouble finding work afterwards. These people have still not been rehabilitated.
The fact that I first visited the Proclamation Monument with my granddaughter and son-in-law on 29 May 2023 had nothing to do with the coming Dutch government statement, for I had no idea that it was to be made. But it had everything to do with the research done by my brother Hugo Wertheim in 2016. That was when our family learned that my mother, my sister, my brother and I were within earshot of the proclamation – as prisoners in the ‘ADEK’ Japanese internment camp. During our nostalgic visits to Indonesia we always skipped this last of the three camps we had been in, for we knew that the collection of huts it had consisted of had been demolished and replaced by a housing district. But my brother had compared the map of Batavia (as Jakarta was known under Dutch rule) in 1942 with that of modern Jakarta, and had seen that there was now a Proklamasipark right next to the former site of the ADEK camp; and when he later took his family there, they found the monument in the middle of a park.
On checking the diary our mother had kept throughout our internment, we discovered that she had happened to be on guard duty on the night of 17 August 1945. All the adult women in the camp had to take turns at this, noting any signs of trouble and reporting them to the Japanese camp command. Approaching the camp fence, she had suddenly heard sounds that turned out to come from a loudspeaker just outside the camp. She had gone as close to the fence as she could and tried to catch what was being said, but was unable to. The next day, she wrote in her diary, she had told her fellow inmates that she was sure something unusual had been going on there.
We now know that in the middle of what is now the Proclamation Park was the (later demolished) house where Sukarno had gone to live in 1942 after he was released by the Japanese from his years of imprisonment and exile under the Dutch colonial regime. We also know that the proclamation was made from the veranda of the house, and that a (banned) red-and-white flag had been hurriedly sewn together the night before, then fastened to a length of bamboo and planted in the garden (to this day red and white are the colours of the Indonesian flag). Finally, we know that the event was wildly celebrated by a jubilant crowd of Indonesians.[1]
17 August 1945. Sukarno, with Hatta at his side, reads the Proclamation on the veranda of his house in Jakarta.
In the light of the Dutch government’s recent and embarrassingly belated recognition of the de facto independence of the Indonesian people, let me end here with the words of one of the Netherlands’ greatest writers, Louis Couperus, written around 1900. He had then lived in Java for nine months, had observed at first hand how the Indonesians behaved towards us, their rulers, and had lucidly predicted that their subjugation would not last forever.
Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force (original Dutch title: De Stille Kracht)
The mystique of the visible things on the mysterious island that is Java … Outwardly the docile colony with a dominated race that was no match for the crass merchants who … in their greed and thirst for profit … set foot and planted their flag on the collapsing kingdoms … that trembled as if shaken by a volcanic earthquake.
And yet, in the depths of their souls, undominated, although, with a nobly contemptuous smile, resigning themselves and smoothly adjusting to their fate; in the depths of their souls, freely living a mysterious life of their own, concealed from the Western gaze, however hard it tried to fathom their secrets – as if with a philosophy of ever-smiling preservation of a noble calm, flexibly accepting, seemingly courteous – but, deep within, sacredly convinced of their own opinion, and so remote from any ruler’s idea or culture that there could never be the slightest fraternisation between master and servant….
And then the Westerner, proud of his power, strength, civilisation and humanity, ruling blindly, selfishly, egoistically from on high amid all the complicated machinery of his authority which he operates like a piece of clockwork, controlling every movement, until his domination of the visible things – colonisation of a land alien in both blood and soul – can appear to the stranger, the outsider, as a masterly act of creation.
Yet beneath all this outward display lies the hidden force – beneath all this calm grandeur the menacing rumble of the future, like the subterranean roar of volcanoes, inaudible to the human ear. And it is as if the dominated are aware, and are waiting for the natural surge of things to produce the sacred moment that is bound to come…. For they have grasped the ruler at a single perceptive glance, in his illusions of civilisation and humanity, and know that these are nothing.
Although they give him the respectful title of ‘lord’ and ‘master’, they are deeply aware of his democratic merchant’s nature, and tacitly despise him and judge him with a smile they share with their fellows. Never do they attack the formal features of slavish servitude, and through semba (deference) they pretend to be inferior … yet they know that they are superior, and that what is will not remain so forever – that the present will vanish.
Without uttering a word, they hope that God will restore what has been suppressed, one day, in the distant swellings of the dawning future. But they feel, hope and perceive it in the depths of their souls, which they never reveal to their rulers … who always remain an unreadable book, in the unknown, untranslatable language in which the words are the same but differ in their colouring … And never is there the comprehending harmony; never does the mutual love blossom; and always there is that gulf, that depth, that abyss, that broad distance from which the mystery will one day burst forth like a tempest….
[1] This and much more is described at length in my article that was published on 18 August 2017, seventy years after the proclamation, in the Dutch monthly De Groene Amsterdammer, as well as in the English version on Juan Cole’s Informed comment website https://www.juancole.com/2017/10/colonial-policing-indonesian.html.
Reprinted from ( Jacobin NL with the author’s permission.
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