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.

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.

Sun Cable‘s plans for an enormous 20 gigawatt (GW) solar farm outside Darwin, Australia, along with 42 GW of battery storage, which will generate electricity for Singapore over a 3,000-mile-long undersea cable, exemplifies the innovative thinking required for this transformation. Indonesia has given permission for the undersea cables to be laid in its territorial waters. The project would also help power Darwin, Australia, with a population near 150,000, which is the provincial capital.

Australia has lots of wilderness (the center of the continent is virtually uninhabited) and lots of sunshine, so it is an ideal producer of solar energy.

The planned facility, in the Northern Territory, will consisted of 28 million solar panels on nearly 30,000 acres of land, according to Peter Hannam.

Australia, 5 October 2011, Own work This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Adobe Illustrator. Author: TUBS. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Sun Cable has raised some $250 million for the $30 billion project so far, according to Hannam at The Guardian. Billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest, have recently invested the bulk of the money so far raised. .

h/t Sun Cable.

The island city-state of Singapore is the major beneficiary of the project.

Solar panels have plummeted in price and are increasingly the best source of electricity. But they are relatively bulky and solar farms require some wide open spaces, spaces that Singapore lacks.

Singapore. © Juan Cole.

Although it only has about 6 million people, Singapore’s gross domestic product is around $400 billion per year, more than much large countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, and nearly as big as major countries like South Africa and Egypt. Singapore is an important container port. It doesn’t have petroleum of its own, but it refines crude into gasoline. It produces semiconductors and other high tech products, and provides financial services. But at 281 sq mi., it is less than half the size of the US Virgin Islands and about half the size of Guam, two of the smallest territories in the United States.

Singapore. © Juan Cole.

The Newcastle Waters solar project would provide 15% of Singapore’s electricity. The company is hoping to complete it by 2028, only six years from now. Right now Singapore depends almost entirely on methane gas for its electricity generation and if this project comes in on time, it will allow the country to attain its 2030 carbon dioxide reduction goals in accord with the Paris Climate Treaty.

The Indo-Pacific region, which includes 24 nations and stretches from Australia to Japan and from India to the U.S. west coast, is home to both the largest concentration of humanity and the greatest source of global emissions. In 2020, the region produced 16.75 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the consumption of oil, gas and coal — more than all other regions worldwide combined.

Success in the global effort to keep global warming below 2 C and stop catastrophic climate change depends on the region to move away from coal and other fossil fuels. Yet at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, China and India proposed countries agree to “phase down” coal instead of “phase out.”

Insufficient financing and the need to increase total energy availability — especially as more sectors become electrified — remain among the structural challenges to energy transitions around the world. China, however, is currently in a better position than the West to assist the Indo-Pacific due to geography, trade dynamics and its own clean tech sector. This could reorient economic networks and shift the balance of power in the region.

As a researcher in the field of green-industrial strategy, I am worried that the democratic world is increasingly losing ground to China in this emerging geo-economic arena. Unless the West provides an alternate network to help the region meet its energy transition needs, it risks ceding the economic alignment of the Indo-Pacific region to China’s government.

Decarbonization

A recent Bloomberg report demonstrated that many Indo-Pacific states can’t meet their 2050 energy transition needs from domestic onshore solar and wind generation. Energy imports have long been a feature of regional politics, but the economics of the energy transition change existing dynamics, favouring fixed-grid integration over more flexible liquid energy imports.

It costs less, in many cases, to build large grids that deliver energy as electrons compared to the added costs of using an energy carrier like hydrogen, which might need to be imported, to meet clean energy needs. Already the Indo-Pacific is moving in the direction of being “wired up,” as demonstrated by the proposed 3,800-kilometre-long “sun cable” to connect Australian solar resources with energy markets in Singapore.

The most efficient course of decarbonization for many East Asian states is to expand their grid connections to their neighbour’s, but this is marred by geo-security risks. Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam, for example, might be less willing to stand up to Beijing if most of their electricity ran through China. And does Japan really want to meet its renewable energy needs by routing power through Russian grid connections?

In addition, much of the industrial capacity for key green technologies and resources required for Indo-Pacific countries to tap their own renewable resources is based in China. A whopping 70 per cent of global lithium cell manufacturing capacity is found in China, and Chinese firms are responsible for the production of 71 per cent of photovoltaic panels (through a supply chain riddled with the usage of Uyghur slave labour).

Meanwhile, a recent White House report put Chinese firm ownership of global cobalt and lithium processing infrastructure at 72 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively.

Export polluting industries

China’s dominance in the production of clean energy technologies is also bolstered by the success of the nation’s trade networks. China is already the largest source of trade for most countries in the region, and through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is increasingly providing financing for regional infrastructure.

The nature of Chinese infrastructure investments through the initiative has, so far, been damaging to global efforts to combat climate change. China had been the largest financier globally of coal plants, following a development pattern established by wealthier countries (western and non-western), of exporting polluting industries to poorer nations.

However, President Xi Jinping, in keeping with his endorsed vision of ecological civilization, has made improving the sustainability of China’s trade networks a priority. China’s established trade networks within the region provide a foundation for an increasingly Sino-centric economic orbit, and will likely be flipped to distribute clean energy infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.

Energy transitions

It’s important the West develop its own green foreign investment strategy to provide Indo-Pacific states a choice of infrastructure as they transition their economies. Giving Indo-Pacific countries, especially energy-poor South and East Asian states, the option to purchase low-carbon technology and resources from a variety of sources will alleviate pressure to concede to Chinese foreign-policy.

Over the long term, the West must focus on developing supply chains in solar and and lithium-ion batteries to balance out Chinese capacity in these markets. However, there are a range of energy transition technologies that western states hold a competitive advantage in, and that could be the focus of a development strategy for the region — starting right now. Investments should, for instance, immediately focus on lowering the costs of exporting green hydrogen by maritime routes.

Australia and Canada both have favourable renewable energy resources to produce green hydrogen, with Canada a leader in the development of hydrogen fuel cells.

Many Indo-Pacific countries have opportunities to generate power from sources beyond wind and solar, with Indonesia and the Philippines already market leaders for geothermal. When it comes to wind, U.S. and European wind turbine manufacturers share about 60 per cent of the market.

In June, G7 leaders announced the Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership, which aims to use their financing potential to help low- and middle-income countries meet an estimated US$40 trillion in infrastructure needs.

It is too early to speculate on the success of the B3W, but its visible actions have been limited to scoping tours in Latin America and West Africa, with another planned for South East Asia.

However, the B3W could look to the recent financing deal between the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom to aid South Africa’s transition from coal power for inspiration. The first B3W funded projects are slated to be announced in early 2022.

Decision-makers in China know that in the short term they are uncertain to come out on top in a hard power competition with the U.S., and have identified economic dominance as another front of strategic competition. Subsequently, if the West doesn’t want to further cede the economic orientation of the Indo-Pacific towards China, it must increase its efforts to provide the region’s states with a strategic choice in how they meet their energy transition infrastructure needs.

Jonas Goldman, Reserach Associate, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Bloomberg: “Why China’s Electric Car Lead Has Been a Long Time Coming”

(This essay irst appeared in Dutch in De Groene Amsterdammer)

Inexplicable sounds entered our internment camp

Seventy years ago this year the Netherlands began its first so-called ‘policing operation’ – an attempt to bring down the Indonesian republic by force. As is clear from Wim Wertheim and Hetty Wertheim-Gijse Weenink’s memoirs, negotiations on a peaceful transition had mainly failed because the Dutch underestimated the extent of support for the nationalists.

Wim and Hetty Wertheim at their first posting in south Sumatra (1931)

15 August 1945
Couldn’t sleep. I now realise that hunger can drive you mad. In the middle of the night Sarah comes to our kollong (plank bed) and says “The war’s over!” “Come on, don’t be so silly” – we’ve heard it all so often before.

17 August 1945

Suddenly double portions of everything. Incredible! There’s something in the air. In the evening a tremendous amount of noise outside the camp – like a fairground. And all the loud voices over the loudspeakers. What’s going on? “Oh, it’s just some native festival”, say the other inmates. But no, native festivals as we know them are generally very quiet. I want to hear what’s being said. In the evening I go to the gedèk (fence) and stood listening for a long time – but it’s too far away, I can’t make it out. Yet I’m sure something unusual is going on.’

These are fragments from my mother’s diary from the ADEK camp where she lived with me, my sister and my younger brother. The camp had originally been built for ‘coolies’, labourers recruited for the tobacco plantations in Sumatra. We had been imprisoned there, 2,500 women and children, a hundred to a room. Everyone was allocated an 18-inch-wide section of the plank bed along the wall. The last months in ADEK were very hard. On 31 July 1945 we were forced to stand in the tropical sun because Indonesian guards had escaped in our fellow inmates’ clothing. The Japanese beat the captured Indonesians bloody before our eyes to find out which of us they had swapped clothes with for food – and they eventually succeeded. If only we’d known that our liberation was so close at hand…

What my mother describes in her diary is intriguing. She could understand, speak and write Indonesian very well, but couldn’t make out what was being said over the loudspeakers. Yet she instinctively felt that something historic was taking place: at ten o’clock that morning, 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Soekarno and Hatta were standing with a small group of supporters on the veranda of the house where Soekarno had come to live after his years of imprisonment and exile, very close to the ADEK camp. Planted in the front garden was a stick of bamboo with a red-and-white flag – the forbidden symbol of independence – that had been hurriedly sewn together the night before. With Hatta at his side, Soekarno read a brief statement from a piece of paper. The festivities would last well into the evening.

A Landraad, Court for Indonesians in session around 1910

Our mother’s diary continues:

22 August 1945

We hear we have to stay in the camps for a while longer. Our Dutch commander wanted to raise the Dutch flag, but she wasn’t allowed to. “The population aren’t to be trusted,” we’re told. Best to keep as quiet as possible. Is this peace? And where are our husbands? Are they still alive?

30 August 1945

At last reports from the Red Cross. Thank God, Wim’s alive! But Ans’s husband is dead, and so is Mia’s, and so is Judith’s. Oh, how awful it all is … How can we celebrate now? And we have to stay in the camp. Protected by the Japanese … from enemies they’ve suddenly become protectors and friends.

31 August 1945

We read in an Indonesian-language newspaper, which has finally come in, that Soekarno and Hatta proclaimed an Indonesian republic on 17 August. Most of us are just angry at this “ridiculous to-do”, or else make fun of it. “Our men will soon put an end to it,” they say. So that was the voice over the loudspeakers on the evening of 17 August. That was the “native festival” no-one paid any attention to!’

My parents had gone to the East Indies in the 1930s for economic reasons. The economic crisis in the Netherlands had made the colony one of the few places where recently graduated young men could find a job. Their memoirs and diaries reveal that at first they took colonialism for granted. Although in the Netherlands they moved in progressive circles – for instance, they played music together to mark the golden jubilee of Aletta Jacobs’s doctorate in 1929[1] – even there it was considered reasonable for whites to rule over coloured peoples.

Thus, as inexperienced newcomers on the boat to the Netherlands Indies they were an easy prey for the indoctrination of those returning from leave, who knew what they were talking about when they described thieving Indonesian servants and the need to maintain their distance. When on arrival in Batavia’s[2] Tanjung Priok harbour they were welcomed by an old uncle who had married a Eurasian woman there, my mother caught herself briefly hoping that their new shipboard friends had not noticed the group of coloured cousins.

But at their first posting in South Sumatra their open-minded attitude to the Indonesians and Eurasians soon led to painful collisions with the walls between the races, and their doubts grew. My father worked for the Landraad, the Court where Indonesians were tried and discovered that they provided much less guarantees for fair trial compared to the Court where Europeans were tried. He discussed with my mother, who had also studied law, his increasing disturbance at these differences. Their eyes were further opened when my father became a professor at Batavia’s University of Law in 1936. They came into contact with Indonesian intellectuals who sympathised with the independence movement. Every two weeks they received a dozen Indonesian students at our home, and my father told my mother ‘Nearly all the good students are nationalists!’

My mother joined the Hutspotclub (‘Hotchpotch Club’, from the name of a Dutch dish of potatoes mashed with carrots and onions), a women’s club that organised communal meals. On the board the three ‘races’ – Indonesian, Chinese and European – were equally represented and the seating of the members at the meals was also a ‘hotchpotch’: as racially mixed as possible. At first the European women took it for granted that the evenings should be chaired by a Dutchwoman; but when a request came ‘from the eastern side’ to take it in turns, this was finally accepted.

In 1941 my father was appointed to the Visman Committee, whose seven members – three Dutch, three Indonesian and one Chinese – had been asked to study constitutional reforms in the distant future, after the mother country back in Europe had been liberated. ‘The Indonesian members are manageable,’ he quotes the conclusions of the final report in his memoirs, ‘otherwise they would not have been appointed to the committee. Every one of them is competent, but they are not people who take firm stances on things. They’ve learned that in the colonial bureaucracy.’ The final report lists the wishes within the various population groups about Indonesia’s future constitutional arrangements. All their wishes? No, the idea of ‘the East Indies separated from the Netherlands’ was not mentioned. After the war my father was to write ‘The critic in 1946 thinks back with shame to a signature in 1941.’

Only in the camps – as they always emphasised – did my parents separately conclude that the Indonesian people were entitled to independence. Their own experiences of humiliation, racism, injustice and hunger in the Japanese camps played a primary part in this. They did not want to do the same thing to others. The camps also sharpened their minds. They read books that prisoners had brought into the camp and were swapped among them, and had discussions with the other inmates. My father above all learned a lot from the socialists Bernard van Tijn and Jaap de Haas, who both supported Indonesian independence (Van Tijn had been the secretary of the Visman Committee, and De Haas had done important work for health care in the East Indies as a paediatrician).

My father also spoke to the then still left-wing Jacques de Kadt, who was convinced that Indonesia would become independent when the war was over. My father’s doubts about whether Indonesians were already capable of running their own country were self-confidently dismissed by De Kadt: ‘Oh, maybe they won’t make such a good job of it, but so what? In South America there are plenty of republics where things aren’t going too well – but they’re still independent states.’

Distributing food, drawing made in the camp by Marijke and Anne-Ruth Wertheim

In mid-September 1945 my father and his good friend Jaap de Haas concluded ‘The Dutch are firmly convinced that the Indonesian republic is nothing but a Japanese invention to annoy the Allies, and especially us Dutch. But we are both convinced that the situation is much more complicated than that. At the urging of a group of young nationalists, the republic had been proclaimed by Soekarno and Hatta just a few days after the surrender, precisely in order to prevent the Allies from assuming that Japanese machinations were involved. However, a number of high-ranking Japanese officers who did sympathize with the Indonesian struggle for independence gave some clandestine support to the proclamation – but this does not mean the republic was a Japanese creation!’

On 30 August 1945 my father and a friend walked out of their camp near Bandung and caught a train to Batavia. Later he always said grinning that such things are not at all difficult in times of confusion – they had simply walked out through the gate without the Japanese being able to do anything about it. They hastily set up the Batavian Red Cross and found out where their wives and children were. On 9 September I suddenly saw him arriving at ADEK on a ramshackle bicycle – you could hear the pedals creaking. He was wearing shorts, what you would now call a T-shirt and sandals on his bare feet, and we recognised each other at once. We children and my mother were soon allowed to spend the weekend with him in turns in the house of the Chinese friends who had hospitably given him shelter in their garage. Not long afterwards my father found a temporary place for our family to live in Java Street. Our own home had been stripped bare, down to the electric wiring. Meanwhile contact had been made with our family back in the Netherlands, who of course were overjoyed that we had survived the war.

In his memoirs my father writes of his first impressions of Batavia ‘The appearance of Batavia had changed considerably in the three and a half years that I had been imprisoned. But most striking in the first weeks of September were the anticolonial slogans on walls and trams, usually in English. These were clearly meant to make clear to landing Allied troops that the Indonesian people did not want colonialism to be restored.’

Where we slept, drawing made in the camp by Marijke and Anne-Ruth Wertheim

In mid-November 1945 my father had a discussion with the personal envoy of the Dutch minister for overseas territories, in which he called for contact to be made with the Republic of Indonesia’s prime minister-designate Soetan Sjahrir. ‘I explain that with the coming into power by the Sjahrir cabinet a few days ago a unique opportunity has arisen for negotiations, and that the Netherlands should seize this opportunity with both hands,’ he writes in his memoirs. ‘I argue why de facto recognition of the Republic is in my view politically inevitable. I urge that Sjahrir should be offered far-reaching political concessions before his government is confronted next Sunday (25 November) with the republican representative body, in order to strengthen his position against terrorists and extremists. This will not prove easy, for personal contacts between the Dutch and the Indonesians have become almost impossible this November.’ My father was instructed to try and make contact with Sjahrir.

One hot November afternoon I was playing with my sister and my little brother behind our house in Jakarta. The soil was warm and damp, and perfect for building a big castle. We made stones that represented knights running back and forth, and were shouting loudly at each other. Suddenly our mother ran out of the house. She whispered to us that an Indonesian was coming to visit, and because no-one was supposed to know about it he would park his car in the back garden. Bewildered, we sat on the edge of the veranda, wondering if our castle would be spared. A black car hurtled into the drive, turned sharply left into the back garden and stopped… just in front of our castle. Soetan Sjahrir got out and was quickly led inside.

The non-conformist intellectual Sjahrir had broad support among young people. He was a left-wing socialist and anti-fascist who had always refused to work with the Japanese, and so the Dutch authorities saw him as the only acceptable representative of the nationalists. He had briefly studied Law in the Netherlands in the beginning of the thirties, where he had made friends with socialists such as Jef Last, Sal Tas and Jacques de Kadt, who despised the social-democratic SDAP party’s ‘champagne-drinking hypocrites’. Sjahrir and Tas’s wife Maria fell in love, and in 1932 she followed him out to the Netherlands Indies, where they married in the Islamic religion. They walked hand in hand through the city of Medan in Sumatra, both dressed in traditional garb. This was more than the Dutch whites could stand, and five weeks later Maria was shipped back to the Netherlands. The couple would not see each other again until after the Second World War.

Shortly afterwards, because of his nationalistic speeches, Sjahrir was interned without any form of trial, in the notorious Boven-Digoel prison camp in New Guinea – deliberately built in the midst of the impenetrable jungle, which was ridden with malaria mosquitoes – and then exiled for years to the remote Banda islands, from where he wrote long, literary letters to Maria. As early as 21 February 1936 one of these revealed his prescience:

‘Of one thing I am sure: that this colonial government and, still more, the colonising Dutch will one day regret never having pursued a wide-ranging, far-sighted policy adapted to the modern, changing structure of the world – that they have never ever, not for one moment, thought about a deliberate cultural policy for the Indonesian population! As for me, I am convinced that this short-sightedness, this famous Dutch degelijkheid [“soundness”] and lack of imagination and boldness will henceforth start to take its toll … Eventually, of course, they will have to move in that direction; but by then it will be too late. As an exile I can only say: we shall see.’

Sjahrir was also critical of the independence movement itself. He felt that the pure nationalists had a lack of ‘open-mindedness and must rid themselves of suspicion, hatred and their inferiority complex’. Only then could there be equality. He soon saw the rise of fascism as the greatest threat to world peace.

In 1938 he stated in an open letter from his place of exile that ‘once the war in the Pacific comes, the popular movement must help defend the country’. To achieve this, the Dutch authorities would have to transfer some of its power to the popular movement. They would have to treat it as an equal partner.

Sjahrir and my father had several mutual friends and acquaintances, and the conversation proceeded smoothly.

My father writes about this visit: ‘We move on into my study. The statesman, now the prime minister, proves highly interested in what I have to tell him. Of course, he cannot give final answers to any of the questions without consulting his cabinet. But his reaction is not negative from the outset, and he does not dismiss a priori the possibility of negotiations. The conversation, which lasts over an hour, gets round to terror, which I come into close contact with through my Red Cross work. Sjahrir is horrified by what I tell him – had no idea of the scale of it all. My contact with Sjahrir was not without its dangers, especially for him. As recently as 21 November a former student of mine and member of Sjahrir’s staff, Moh. Roem, had been attacked, perhaps by extremist elements opposed to negotiations with the Dutch; Roem narrowly escaped death. ’

But then comes the disappointment. He writes: ‘Early the next morning I climb onto my bicycle and ride to the palace to make my report. I am expected to reproduce the contents of an hour-long conversation in just a few words. Rather disconcerted, I comply with the request; but I no longer have much faith in my mission.’ After the Dutch authorities show even more signs of indifference, my disillusioned father concludes that they evidently no longer need his assistance in carrying out their policy. ‘Thus ended my first and last political mission.’ In early 1946 we returned to the Netherlands.

The Proklamasi (‘Proclamation’) monument in 2016 © Bregje Wertheim

Yet contact has been established between Sjahrir and the Dutch authorities. Difficult talks and negotiations follow. In the leaflet my father wrote early in 1946 Nederland op den Tweesprong (‘The Netherlands at the crossroads’) he sighs ‘And so the government keeps making it almost impossible for Sjahrir to make clear to his opposition that there is still some point in negotiating with the Dutch. Are people in certain circles still wary of the socialist Sjahrir? Do they still not realise that, if he goes, there will be no-one left in Indonesian society for the Dutch to do business with?’

On 15 November 1946 talks eventually led to the Linggadjati agreement, in which the Netherlands undertook to acknowledge the republic’s authority over Java, Madoera and Sumatra; the republic would become part of the United States of Indonesia, which would become part of the Dutch-Indonesian Union, headed by the Dutch monarch. From the outset this compromise was controversial on both sides, and on 20 July 1947 the Netherlands withdrew from the agreement. One day later the first so-called ‘policing operation’ began – and Indonesia’s secession thus finally degenerated into colonial war.

Consulted literature

– Wim Wertheim and Hetty Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, Vier wendingen in ons bestaan, Indië verloren, Indonesië geboren (‘Four turning-points in our lives: the East Indies lost, Indonesia born’), 1991

– W. F. Wertheim, Nederland op den Tweesprong: tragedie van den aan traditie gebonden mensch (‘The Netherlands at the crossroads: the tragedy of people bound to tradition’), 1946

– W. F. Wertheim, Indonesië, van vorstenrijk tot neo-kolonie (‘Indonesia: from princedom to neo-colony’), 1978

– Sutan Sjahrir, Indonesische Overpeinzingen (‘Indonesian reflections’), 1966

– Rudolf Mrázek, Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia, 1994

– Anne-Ruth Wertheim, the childrens’ drawings in this article are published in: De Gans eet het brood van de eenden op, mijn kindertijd in een Jappenkamp op Java (published in English as ‘The Goose snatches the bread from the ducks: my childhood in a Japanese internment camp on the isle of Java’), 1994

[1] A nineteenth-century physician and feminist who was the first Dutchwoman to be awarded a university doctorate, in 1879.

[2] Before independence the Indonesian capital Jakarta was known as Batavia.