The spare parts are technically owned by the U.S., but are kept in storage at Woensdrecht Air Base.

The news site quotes Judge Bas Boele as saying, “It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

NL Times adds that the court said, “Israel does not take sufficient account of the consequences of its attacks for the civilian population. Israel’s attacks on Gaza have resulted in a disproportionate number of civilian casualties, including thousands of children.”

The court noted that the Netherlands is signatory to treaties and instruments that make it unlawful under Dutch law to pursue such exports “if a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law exists.”

An Oxfam spokesman expressed his hope to Aljazeera that the ruling would have an impact on other European exporters of military weaponry to Israel. Oxfam is providing aid in Gaza and its workers report that the situation there is dire.

F-35s need three hours of maintenance for every one hour of flying, and constantly need spare parts to keep flying. They are used both for surveillance and for bombing runs.

Although these stories do not say so, it seems clear that the ruling of the International Court of Justice on January 26 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, in which it issued a preliminary injunction against Tel Aviv, played a central role in shaping the views of the judges in The Hague.

The ICJ had written, “The Court considers that the civilian population in the Gaza Strip remains extremely vulnerable. It recalls that the military operation conducted by Israel after 7 October 2023 has resulted, inter alia, in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries and the destruction of homes, schools, medical facilities and other vital infrastructure, as well as displacement on a massive scale . . . The Court notes that the operation is ongoing and that the Prime Minister of Israel announced on 18 January 2024 that the war “will take many more long months”. At present, many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have no access to the most basic foodstuffs, potable water, electricity, essential medicines or heating.”

Even President Joe Biden has referred to Israeli bombing as “indiscriminate,” which is a war crime. Biden, however, has not lifted a finger to stop that bombing, which makes him complicit in the war crime. Israel could not continue to thumb its nose at the International Court of Justice unless the US resupplied it with weapons and ammunition on a daily, real-time basis.

A lower court had rejected the case just last month, and this reversal points to the impact of the ICJ decision.

Aljazeera English Video: “Dutch government to appeal court order to halt export of F-35 jet parts to Israel”

According to Dutch News, Liesbeth Zegveld, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said, “We are extremely relieved,” at a news conference held after the ruling.

The case was brought by Oxfam Novib, Pax Nederland and The Rights Forum.

The government had said last fall that it knew there were potential human rights issues with the export to Israel of the military spare parts, but did not actually do anything about it. It says it will appeal.

The court, however, says that the exports must cease during the appeal process.

NL Times reports that outgoing center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Ministry of General Affairs asked the Legal Affairs Directorate at Foreign Affairs: “What can we say so that it appears as if Israel is not committing war crimes?” Rutte played down the report on the grounds that asking questions is normal.

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.

So the turn of the Netherlands to solar power in a big way is instructive, since it is a small country a little larger than Maryland, with limited land for solar farms.

Even so, solar power now generates 14% of Dutch electricity, making it the “unquestionable solar energy leader in Europe,” as Kira Taylor and Sofia Stuart Leeson at Euractiv put it. Moreover, on a per capita basis the Netherlands has more solar power than any other European country. If we were going by total electricity output from solar in absolute terms, Germany is the leader with 68.17 GW of installed solar capacity.

The Netherlands produced 20% more renewable power in 2022 than it had the previous year.

These are astonishing statistics. I like the Netherlands a lot, and have visited on many occasions. It doesn’t strike me, however, as among the sunnier countries. That Spain only gets 12% of its electricity from solar, while the proportion is higher in the Netherlands, is crazy. But it speaks well of the Dutch government and people, who have obviously invested heavily in this technology. As recently as 2015, the country only got 1% of its electricity from solar.

According to Charlotte Elton at Euronews, consumers there put in 1.8 gigawatts of rooftop solar in 2022, spurred on by the high fossil gas prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That is the nameplate capacity of two small nuclear plants, and it is just from people’s roofs.

So where else are the Dutch putting all those panels? They’ve been ingenious. They put panels over landfill sites. They put panels over carports. They put panels over lakes. They put panels over strawberry fields. They find that panels sheltering agricultural fields allow the use of less water for crops.

They have put 500,000 floating panels on the country’s lakes and reservoirs, which cover 20% of the Netherlands. Only China, Euronews points out, has more floating panels. The Netherlands is also planning 3 gigawatts from offshore floating solar farms by 2030. Panels on land have a tendency to overheat in the sun, reducing their electricity generation. By putting them on water, one cools them down, substantially increasing their electricity production.

Some 33% of the Netherlands’ electricity is produced from renewable sources. In the US, that percentage is only 25%. A lot of the renewables in the Netherlands, though, are biomass, the greenness of which is in my view in doubt. Still, the country is adding gigawatts of new wind and solar every year, and has big plans for wind power in particular by 2030, hoping to increase offshore wind to 21 gigawatts. The US goal is only a little bigger, at 30 GW by 2030, but the Netherlands has a population of 17 million versus 330 mn for the US.

This summer, some 43% of Netherlands electricity was generated by wind and solar, but solar is not as productive in the grey winter months. The Netherlands has the most solar panels per capita in Europe. In July, they generated 29% of the country’s electricity. Wind was responsible for over 14% of the country’s electricity in July.

So let’s talk innovation. Take, for instance, The Zeewolde onshore wind farm, which has just come online and will supply low-carbon electricity to 300,000 households. What makes this wind farm unique is that it is locally-owned, such that some 200 farmers and other residents are the owners of the 83 wind turbines. It is the largest wind farm cooperative in the world. Sometimes onshore wind faces opposition from residents, but for these locals, it is a cash cow. They have contracted to sell their electricity for the next 15 years to the Swedish Vattenfall company.

Reuters reports another unusual experiment involving Vattenfall. In this case, the company won a bid in 2018 to build a 1.5 gigawatt offshore wind farm at Hollandse Kust Zuid, but without any government subsidies. Residential electricity in the Netherlands is expensive, at $0.32 per kilowatt hour. Offshore wind is less than a third of that, hence there is no real need for a subsidy. Though, obviously, subsidies help overcome the problem of sunk costs. That is, the coal and gas plants already exist and were built years ago, so that is a sunk cost. They may generate electricity more expensively than wind, but with wind you have to build a whole new farm full of turbines, which is an up front cost. That’s what the government subsidies cover, but in the case of Hollandse Kust Zuid, obviously Vattenfall feels they can make money anyway.

Reuters also reports on Oceans of Energy’s offshore floating solar array. Solar panels are bulky and take up a lot of space, which is at a premium in a densely populated country such as the Netherlands. Putting the panels offshore resolves that problem, since the Netherlands has plenty of sea coast. The Oceans of Energy program deployed a floating solar array in rough waters and high winds in 2020, and it has functioned fine. They have plans gradually to expand it to a megawatt this year, and then 15 megawatts in 2023.

The European Union set a goal for member states of collectively investing $314 billion in the green energy transition by 2030, with two-thirds of that to be spent in just the next 5 years, by 2027. This commitment is on top of the plans the 27 member states already had.

The new goal is to get 45% of Europe’s electricity from renewables by 2030, up from a previous goal of 40%.

In addition, the Energy ministers of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark issued a manifesto of energy independence from Russian methane gas on Wednesday, pledging themselves to create massive new wind farms in the North Sea off their coasts that will have a capacity of 65 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 and 130 GW by 2050. The European Union only has about 16 gigawatts of offshore wind installed at the moment, so they are planning to increase that by almost ten times by 2050.

The Biden adminstration’s goal for offshore wind by 2030 is only 30 gigawatts, so these four countries are aiming higher than the entire US.

Denmark and Germany already had big plans for expanding offshore wind but they are now increasing their goals. The four states are also innovating in making plans for multiple connections so that the wind farms will supply a common four-country grid. In fact, they say they want to work toward a pan-Europe grid.

They also want to innovate: “We will monitor the development of technology for solar photovoltaic within offshore wind farms.” Wind turbine/ PV solar hybrid installations produce energy more efficiently and more inexpensively.

Denmark has an artificial wind energy island on the drawing board, but now Belgium will also construct one. Indeed, all four countries will “begin planning for multiple energy hubs and islands.”

The four countries also pledged to speed up permitting, a major bottleneck for wind farms in Europe. The ministers insist, “renewable energy should be considered as being in the overriding public interest and serving public safety.”

Nikolaus J. Kurmayer at Euractiv.com quotes European commission President Ursula von der Leyen as saying, “Nowadays we have permitting times between six and nine years.” She said that these would be reduce to one year in certain “go-to” areas, i.e. high-priority green zones, including the country of Denmark.

If these plans are implemented, they will likely have unforeseen side effects, such as impelling technological innovation by European scientists and companies in the green energy space, and increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of wind and solar.

( China Dialogue ) – Both countries have their work cut out to reach emissions-reduction goals, but China is already learning from Dutch expertise in offshore wind.

With half of its territory below sea level, the Netherlands is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The country is a pioneer in offshore wind, which is often seen as an obvious contender for joint Dutch–Chinese projects to advance both climate protection and Dutch business interests. For its part, China seems keen to profit from Dutch expertise.

For many Dutch people, when they think about China in relation to environmental issues, the first thing that comes to mind is Chinese cityscapes shrouded in a thick haze of air pollution. “I think many people in the Netherlands view China as a polluter. In their head they have images of big cities with a lot of smog,” said Detlef van Vuuren, a researcher at the government’s Environmental Assessment Agency. But he points out that this view is one-sided. “From my perspective, China is both an innovator – they are currently the biggest investor in renewables – as well as a polluter, since they still heavily invest in coal technology as well.”

Earlier this year, China surprised many, including the Netherlands, with its pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. “The Netherlands welcomes the announcement of [President] Xi Jinping that China is tightening its climate ambitions, and looks forward to the further translation of these ambitions into concrete plans,” said Nicolette Stoel, spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Louise van Schaik, senior research fellow at international affairs think-tank Clingendael, said the announcement has opened new opportunities for cooperation between the two countries. She explained that the Netherlands looks critically at China on issues such as human rights, “but climate is seen as an exception”. “It’s almost a mantra: ‘at least the Chinese are doing well on climate!’ The question is: is it possible in international politics to work together on one topic and not others?”

This juggling act between cooperation on the one hand and protecting the Dutch economy and values on the other characterises the Dutch government’s China strategy published in 2018, which aptly includes “a new balance” in its title. Given China’s huge market, the Netherlands is eager to cooperate and trade, but it is also wary of China’s growing influence, and has concerns about security and human rights. This was made clear by Stef Blok, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, in a letter introducing the strategy: “The government wants to cooperate with China on the basis of shared interests, while keeping an eye on ideological differences.”

Whether this is possible is not a question the Netherlands can answer alone. As the European Union’s sixth largest economy, the country often prefers to defer to Brussels when it comes to big topics such as climate change and relations with China. This is simply because “the EU is a much bigger player”, explained van Schaik of Clingendael. The same is true for issues relating to the global energy transition. “We also don’t have that much to bring to the table when it comes to renewables, because we are ourselves lagging behind quite a bit,” said van Schaik.

Installing offshore wind turbines is our strong suit.

Arjen Schutten, head of the export association Holland Home of Wind Energy

In 2019, the Netherlands finalised its national climate agreement, which included the goal of reaching the targets set during the 2015 Paris Agreement. According to the document, the country’s aim is to reduce emissions by 49% by 2030 compared to 1990. But EU leaders have recently agreed to raise the bloc’s 2030 emission-reduction target to at least 55%, so the Netherlands will likely have to up its target too. But in 2019, emissions were only down 18% compared to 1990. “We have become a lot more ambitious since the [2019] climate agreement, but our story is peanuts in comparison to the German Energiewende [energy transition], for example”, said van Schaik.

The Netherlands may have a lot to catch up on when it comes to reducing emissions, but it also has leading technological knowledge and innovations to offer. In particular, offshore wind power is often cited as a prime sector for Chinese–Dutch cooperation. “The Netherlands is very good at the installation of offshore wind turbines, that is really our strong suit,” explained Arjen Schutten, head of the export association Holland Home of Wind Energy. “There are several big Dutch companies that install turbines or provide hardware for the installation, and the Dutch research institute TNO delivers a lot of knowledge about wind energy to China,” he said.

One recent example is a project in the South China Sea about 26 kilometres from the city of Yangjiang, where Dutch company SPT Offshore is laying the foundations for a 300 megawatt windfarm.

Schutten believes the Chinese are mostly interested in innovative solutions and acquiring as much knowledge as possible. In his experience, “the Dutch companies that are successful in China are the ones that are constantly innovating, so they are always one step ahead of the Chinese.” China will take all the knowledge they can from foreign companies, he said, so they can eventually do everything themselves. “The Chinese dream is developing a prosperous state that is no longer dependent on other countries.”

In January, the Netherlands will host the Climate Adaptation Summit 2021, where leaders from 23 countries, including China, will meet to discuss strategies for adapting to the effects of climate change, such as droughts, heatwaves and sea-level rise.

“The Netherlands hopes that China will participate at the highest level to strengthen global leadership on adaptation,” said Stoel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Charlotte Nijhuis is Junior Correspondent at Clean Energy Wire, where she reports on the energy transition in Germany and beyond. Before she moved to Berlin she worked as a freelance journalist for various Dutch media. She has an MA in Journalism from the University of Amsterdam and a BA in Political Science from Amsterdam University College.

Via China Dialogue

Creative Commons License.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Netherlands Innovation Network: “A basic introduction to hydrogen in China – Where do Chinese needs and Dutch knowledge meet”

The Hague (AFP) – Dutch MPs unveiled ambitious new climate legislation Wednesday aimed at reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero by 2050, while introducing an annual review to ensure targets are met.

The proposed new law, which has the backing of the vast majority of political parties in the 150-seat lower house of parliament, “sets clear greenhouse reduction targets,” the ecologist-left GroenLinks party said.

GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File / JOE RAEDLE.

It also “introduces an innovative mechanism of annual review to ensure that these targets are met by the Dutch government,” it added in a statement.

Greenhouse gas reduction targets are set at 49 percent by 2030, and then down to 95 percent by 2050, according to the law put up by GroenLinks and the Labour Party (PvdA).

The country must also have “100 percent carbon-neutral electricity in 2050,” it says.

In order to ensure that targets are met, future Dutch governments will have to report emission figures once a year which will be debated in parliament at a so-called “Climate Day”.

Every five years the climate plan will be updated. It does not specify how the targets should be met.

The bill will now be debated by MPs in the lower house for approval and then needs to pass in the Senate, the upper house, before it becomes law hopefully as soon as next year, GroenLinks said.

Should it pass, the Netherlands will become the seventh European country to intoduce such legislation with Britain, Denmark, Finland, France,Norway and Sweden, the party said.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

VCA Spaces: “Renewable Developments In The Netherlands”

“Pete Hoekstra, US Ambassador to the Netherlands, repeatedly gets called out and stumped by Dutch reporters who demand answers on his claims about “no-go zones” and Dutch politicians getting set on fire.”

(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.