Forgotten Wars (29 page)

But a vital and enduring legacy of Japanese rule was what one historian has termed its ‘ideological, fanatical romanticism’.
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This created a new sense of the possible for many young Indonesians. In particular, the Japanese led an assault on the Dutch language and in the war years Malay, or more strictly
bahasa Indonesia
, gained credence as a ‘national’ language. By the end of the war a self-proclaimed ‘Generation of 1945’ spearheaded a literary revolution in the service of national struggle. The iconic figure of the time was Chairil Anwar, the Medan-born poet. His urgent, intense language distilled the revolutionary personality, and was fired by a sense of the power of words to shape events, no more so than in the 1943 poem, ‘
Aku
’ – ‘I’:

When my time comes
No one’s going to cry for me,
And you won’t, either
The hell with all those tears!

I’m a wild beast
Driven out of the herd
Bullets may pierce my skin
But I’ll keep coming,
Carrying forward my wounds and my pain
Attacking
Attacking

Until suffering disappears
And I won’t give a damn
I want to live another thousand years.
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Chairil Anwar lived fast and died young, in 1949, of tuberculosis. His influences were diverse, modern, and often European. In the words of the Generation of 1945’s ‘Testimony’: ‘we are heirs of world culture’. But Chairil Anwar also became an archetype of the kind of figures who gave the Indonesian revolution its distinctive character: they were known as
pemuda
, a word which translates as ‘youth’, but conveys much more than this: a spirit that challenged the poised bureaucratic finesse of the older elite generation. It was a claim to lead in troubled, dislocated times, to take responsibility when others had failed. These elements of
pemuda
identity had deep roots in Javanese culture.
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The
permuda
were not a party as such, nor a clear class. They were vague coteries of young, mostly single men who took upon themselves the responsibility for the Indonesian revolution. They were marked by their attire; their simple clothes and long hair, and a semi-military swagger; they chose to speak in a staccato, commanding Indonesian, or a low form of Javanese, ignoring affectations of status: all men were
bung
– brother – or
saudara
– comrade. At times the world of the
pemuda
would overlap with the criminal world of the towns, the social banditry of the countryside, and the anger of the ordinary folk. Their watchword was Merdeka! or Freedom! But again this word had deeper connotations: derived from the term for the free men of early
colonial Java – the
mardijkers
– it evoked freedom from slavery and, after 1945, political independence. But it was also something to be lived: a freedom of the spirit, a freedom from fear of death. The cry
Merdeka!
would be answered with a raised fist and
Bebas!
– Unchained! In the dark days of 1945, it would be answered also by the shout of
Mati!
– Death! By the end of the Japanese occupation, the
pemuda
would drive forward events, goading on the more moderate nationalist leaders. As they were to acknowledge: ‘These long-haired youths, these armed fighters whose names were not known, were the strength of our Revolution.’
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As in India and elsewhere, the Japanese war had divided the older nationalists. Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir were brought out of exile. Back in Jakarta, they adopted complementary strategies. Hatta cooperated with the Japanese regime in the hope of ameliorating some of the effects of occupation. Sutan Sjahrir, a socialist internationalist, was to organize an underground. Sukarno himself saw the war as a contest between empires and was more open to exploiting its political opportunities. He did so by aligning himself with some of the Japanese initiatives and manipulating them for his own national purposes. With a formidable Japanese propaganda machine behind him, Sukarno honed his oratorical skills, and although he was not immune from criticism for his association with unpopular policies, he managed, by subtle shifts in message that were never really translatable to the Japanese, to project his claim to embody the nation. He played to the messianic mood: independence, he said, was a ‘golden bridge’ to a glorious future. Politics became a form of theatre, in which the main actors were the Indonesian auxiliary forces that the Japanese recruited and armed. These took multiple forms and, as in Burma and Malaya, a generation of young men became deeply militarized. By the last months of the war the Japanese were losing control of these forces; at the surrender they were dissolved into a host of local militias. When the Japanese surrendered, they unleashed revolution.
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The initial events were dramatic enough, but, in the light of what was to come, relatively peaceful. In mid 1945 the war effort was at a point where Sukarno and Hatta found the Japanese more receptive to the idea of a declaration of independence for Indonesia. This was hammered out at a meeting in early August between the Indonesians
and Field Marshal Count Terauchi at his headquarters in Dalat in Vietnam. On their return on 12 August, Sukarno and Hatta stopped in Malaya at Taiping airport. There the Malay radical Ibrahim Yaacob met them to try to persuade them to include Malaya within a greater Indonesia: an
Indonesia raya
. The provisional date for the declaration of independence was 7 September, and the first meeting of the planning committee was scheduled for 18 August. But events moved faster than this. The sudden surrender of Japan precipitated a crisis. Sukarno and Hatta well realized that the good will of the Allies was vital to the success of Indonesia’s freedom. But there were other, more radical voices, not least those associated with the socialist underground. On 17 August – in a dramatic foreshadowing of the shape of things to come – Sukarno was kidnapped by his own armed
pemuda
. They were determined that the new nation should not be seen as a Japanese puppet regime. Sukarno was compelled to seize back the initiative. In the courtyard of his house in Jakarta he read out the prosaic formula: ‘We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare Indonesia’s independence.’
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There was no mention of Malaya, or of
Indonesiaraya
, but in the minds of many Malays their destiny still was bound up with that of the new nation.

Such was the force behind this idea that spontaneous declarations for the new republican government, and of loyalty to President Sukarno, were made throughout the islands. But the new government was not universally embraced: many local administrators were suspicious; many local aristocrats feared its levelling rhetoric; others were simply bewildered by the pace of events and uncertain where their loyalties should lie. In many areas it was young partisans who seized the initiative in the republic’s name. In the face of this, Japanese troops as often as not withdrew into their secured perimeters, leaving the streets, key buildings and installations in the hands of the Indonesians. Soon the key royal houses, such as Yogyakarta, and local governors in Java and the outer islands declared for the republic. By September it possessed a relatively stable bureaucracy and, with the assistance of many sympathetic Japanese officers, the core of a well-equipped army. This was a massive shift in initiative, and one that was to reverberate throughout the Malay world. At the same time, however, the Indonesian revolution unleashed all the social frustration and political
anger of decades of colonial rule and Japanese oppression. It was unclear how far this could be controlled by the new political elite in Jakarta.

This first phase of revolution reached a crescendo with a series of massive ‘ocean’ rallies in Indonesia’s major cities. On 19 September a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Ikeda Square in Jakarta under the watchful eyes of a cordon of Japanese troops. Many in the crowd were armed with sharpened bamboo staves. Sukarno, increasingly worried about provoking the Japanese or the Allied armies that were poised to take their place, had tried and failed to prevent the assembly but, in a moment of supreme political theatre, demonstrated his control over the crowd by taking the rostrum, persuading it to disperse peacably. Not everyone was impressed. A silent witness to this event was Tan Malaka. One of the first leaders of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, he had been in exile since 1922, living under a string of pseudonyms, working as an agent of the Comintern, avoiding the colonial police. It was a life that was lived, as the title of his memoirs has it, ‘from jail to jail’. He was perhaps the most travelled Indonesian of his age: a legend, like Lai Teck in Malaya, a figure for the cloak-and-dagger novels of the day, Patjar Merah, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Asian revolution. He had returned to Indonesia only in 1942, incognito, working as a clerk in a Japanese coal mine in Java, a stranger in his own country. In August he revealed his identity to the revolutionary leaders, though not to the public. Such was his mystique that Sukarno even signed a secret document stating that Tan Malaka should assume the leadership of the revolution were Sukarno to be incapacitated. But the veteran revolutionary felt that his time had not yet come. The Ikeda Square demonstration had been his suggestion: a way of testing the will of the revolutionaries. He was disappointed in Sukarno, who had come not to inspire the crowd to action, ‘but to request the masses to “have faith” and “obey” and to order them to go home’.
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He was appalled at the concessions Sukarno was prepared to make to the imperial powers. He bided his time, waiting to reveal himself and seize his moment as had Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Perhaps a more telling comparison would prove to be Subhas Chandra Bose. In 1945 there were to be reports and sightings of various ‘Tan Malakas’ throughout Java and Sumatra. In Malaya, some – including British
intelligence – believed that the mysterious founder of the Malay Nationalist Party, Mokhtaruddin Lasso, was none other than the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’.
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The British and Dutch heard little of events in Java. During the war there had been virtually no intelligence gathered about Indonesia, an information gap which British secret warriors were now tasked to fill. Even as Special Operations Executive was being rapidly wound down in Europe, Mountbatten retained a force of not less than 2,500 for peacetime tasks. The need for information about Indonesia was desperate.
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There were a few Dutch officers at Mountbatten’s HQ at Kandy, but most Dutch who knew anything about Indonesia were either in Japanese prison camps or in Australia, as part of a government-in-exile at Camp Columbia just outside Brisbane, where their shipping – known as ‘Flying Dutchmen’ to port workers – choked the harbour. A formal Anglo-Dutch agreement on civil affairs was signed only on 24 August. It gave authority to a British commander working through a Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs Administration. The British were to take responsibility for Java and Sumatra; the outer islands would be looked after by the Australians. Dutch political planning for the future of its vast Asian empire was founded upon a speech made by Queen Wilhelmina on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor: it reaffirmed the ‘indivisibility of the Kingdom’. As a sop to United States opinion it called for a conference with national leaders, but the proposal was no advance on the last major programme of Dutch colonial reform in 1918; arguably, it promised less. When it was announced in Indonesia, it was met with scorn: ‘ridiculous’, a leader in West Java recalled, ‘as if Hitler and Japan had done nothing to the world of men’.
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The first landings on the isolated Dutch territories of New Guinea gave no foretaste of conditions elsewhere. The first British officers to parachute into Java and Sumatra added little to the picture: they landed on 8 September and reported a reasonably peaceable situation. They met the moderate Indonesian leaders, and not the
pemuda
. In any case, their principal task was to begin to locate the 100,000-odd prisoners of war and civilian internees in Indonesia. They were mostly Dutch, but included British women detained in remote locations after their ships had been sunk in the ‘Dunkirk’-type small-ship exodus
from Singapore a few days before its fall. Their conditions were dire. It was at this point that tensions began to mount. Like their British counterparts, the former Dutch officials in the internment camps fully expected to return to their Indonesian homes and resume their old jobs and, unlike the old Malaya hands, the opportunity was there for them to do so. They were, therefore, bitterly angry on hearing the first broadcast announcements of South East Asia Command ordering them to stay in their camps. Many now hated the Indonesians for what they saw as betrayal. Many defied SEAC and began re-enter the towns to reclaim their old privileges.

The returning Dutch found a new world, one that now belonged to exultant Indonesians. The red and white flag of the republic flew from public buildings, shops and houses. Graffiti were scoured on walls and banners spanned the streets. They saw everywhere the word
Merdeka!
and also citations – in English, the language of the Atlantic Charter – from the preamble of the United States Constitution, even of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Many Indonesians fully expected to enlist the support of the Allies behind the revolution. The ex-internees were entirely unprepared for such scenes. Emaciated and in rags, many were treated sympathetically by the Indonesians they met, but refused to abandon the arrogance and swagger they had shown during the pre-war era. Antagonism erupted into violence. Dutch men and women were murdered as they tried to reclaim their businesses and homes. Men of military age were especially vulnerable. Derek van den Boegarde was deeply scarred by the memory of domestic murder in Bandung, where he was stationed with the British forces: Dutch internees had returned to their homes, ‘trying with what remained of their looted belongings to restart their lives, only to lose them in acts of hysterical hatred and violence’.
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Hotels and clubs became battlegrounds. As in French Indo-China, there was an obsession with symbols of sovereignty. In many towns and cities there was a ‘war of the flags’. One incident at the focal point of European community life in Surabaya, the Oranje Hotel, was to assume a much wider significance. On 19 September young Dutch and Eurasians crowded round the hotel, then principally housing journalists and still bearing its Japanese name, the Yamato. In an atmosphere almost of schoolboy rivalry they entered the hotel and
raised a Dutch tricolour. Angry Indonesian youths stoned the building, fatally injuring a Eurasian lawyer. They scaled the walls of the hotel and ripped the blue stripe from the flag, leaving the red and white of the republic flying.
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The Eurasians were incensed. In the words of the writer Idrus, an acerbic witness to events in the city: ‘They remembered how things had been three and a half years before, and they remembered their fathers, who had been real Dutchmen. And they felt insulted, as though their own fathers had been stripped naked.’
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A mêlée ensued. In Jakarta, Indonesian medical students responded by electrifying the flag poles.
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