Forgotten Wars (32 page)

The wake of the battle washed across Indonesia. East Java was flooded with refugees from the city. They brought a new level of instability to the villages, and a struggle for food and other resources. The women, in particular, had a terrible time. Tan Malaka had left Jakarta in disgust at the temperance of the republican leadership there. He arrived in Surabaya to witness the desperate resistance and the exodus from the city. The veteran revolutionary was at once inspired and appalled by the undisciplined fury of the fighters: the Indonesians must, he wrote, ‘harness holiness with reins we made ourselves’.
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But the radicals regrouped at Malang and Bung Tumo resumed his broadcasts. Fighting broke out again in Semarang and the British managed to regain control of the city only with the use of air power and Japanese troops. The Gurkhas were forced to abandon the central Javan town of Magelang. The
pemuda
were galvanized to action further afield in Medan and elsewhere in Sumatra. This era in Java was known as the
bersiap
time, from the cry ‘
Siaaap!
’ – ‘Get ready!’: the perpetual call to vigilance and to arms in the towns and villages. It was a time of revolutionary violence in the name of the sovereignty of the people or the defence of the revolution. It manifested itself in attacks on Christians, Japanese and British stragglers, Chinese, Eurasians and in an obsessive search for spies. It also built on local traditions of fighting: as in Malaya, cults of amulets that conferred invulnerability to their wearers flourished, and the figure of the
jago
– literally ‘fighting cock’ – the martial-arts champion of the village, on whom Javanese tradition conferred legitimacy as a protector figure in times of crisis. Some Western-educated local leaders, who saw their revolution as an extension of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, were deeply shaken by what they witnessed. But in many Indonesian accounts of the time, the violence seemed inevitable, even morally neutral.
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Many of the more organized and politicized
pemuda
militias made common cause with the underworld of large cities such as Jakarta to draw on the expertise of men experienced in violence.
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The
bersiap
amounted to social revolution in some areas – in north and east Sumatra the old aristocracies came under bloody attack – but in Java much of the republican leadership fought shy of its implications; here the social revolution remained a feral populism, without programme or direction. In many places it simply meant the struggle for scarce resources or settling of old scores. ‘The Indonesia revolution’, admitted the Islamicist leader Abu Hanifah, ‘was not totally pure.’
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British horror and incomprehension at the violence came to a head at the village of Bekasi, in west Java. The area was notorious for containing what Abu Hanifah, who was based there, termed the ‘lairs of the wild men of the district. They of course had their own leaders, their own heroes and strongmen. In the beginning there was nothing the republic could do about it.’
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On 22 November a military Dakota crashed in its vicinity, and its twenty-three British and Indian crew and passengers were taken prisoner, stripped and hacked to pieces. When patrols disinterred the remains, the bodies of Indian and British soldiers could not be distinguished from each other. There was little exceptional about this incident in the midst of so many. What was exceptional was the swiftness and ferocity of British response. Around 600 houses were burned, including sixty occupied by neutral Chinese that caught light as the flames spread in the wind. The attack engendered lively public debate in Britain. It was perhaps the first occasion when the British people had to confront a crucial dilemma of the end of empire: how far should terror be met with terror? Mountbatten did not defend the action, but justified it on the grounds that ‘we must realise the feeling of our regiments who suffer casualties every day at the hands of these terrorists and who on this particular occasion had to bury the dismembered bodies of their comrades’.
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Already in northern Sumatra a young Dutch officer, Raymond Westerling, was developing a reputation for cold-blooded killing. Raised in Istanbul and known by the sobriquet ‘Turk’, he had been trained by the British in the dark arts of commando warfare. In Sumatra he cultivated an Indonesian fighter’s mystique as ‘The White Tiger’. His memoirs, published in England in 1952, portray northern Sumatra as a ‘convulsed
society… in the grip of terror’ and show him abandoning the collective policing methods employed by the British for a very personal kind of war. The ‘method of execution’ was all. In the East, ‘To execute a criminal behind prison walls has absolutely no effect on the population. To execute him in the marketplace does.’ Westerling’s legend and methods were to spread, a grisly omen of the drift towards colonial white terror.
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In the wake of events in Surabaya and elsewhere, the leadership of the republic changed hands. On 14 November Sukarno, whilst remaining president, passed power to a new cabinet headed by Sutan Sjahrir as prime minister. He was the obvious choice: his opposition to the Japanese enabled him to negotiate with the Dutch; his support amongst the Jakarta
pemuda
gave him the radical credentials the times demanded. Under Sjahrir’s direction, the earlier working committee for independence reconstituted itself as a parliamentary government, and political parties were founded. Sjahrir was also the author of one of the key attempts in 1945 to analyse and direct the revolution, a pamphlet published as he came into power, entitled
Perjuangan Kita
, ‘Our Struggle’. Without naming Sukarno, it attacked the running dogs and henchmen of Japanese. It traced the psychological impact of the war on the young, a tragic legacy of confusion and hatred, and repudiated the millennial fire of battles such as Surabaya: ‘Many of them simply cling to the slogan Freedom or Death. Wherever they sense that freedom is still far from certain, and yet they themselves are not faced with death, they are seized with doubt and hesitation. The remedy for these doubts is generally sought in uninterrupted action.’ Sjahrir instead set the Indonesian revolution firmly in an international context. ‘Indonesia’s fate’, he wrote, ‘ultimately depends on the fate of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism.’ He argued the need for allies, and for the political maturity necessary to gain their respect, a sign of which would be Indonesia’s treatment of its ethnic minorities. There were no fewer than four Christians in Sjahrir’s cabinet.
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It was a bold move, in which Sjahrir repudiated the social revolution that had largely brought him to power, and heralded a long process of diplomacy that would drag on for the rest of the British occupation of Java and Sumatra.

In the wake of the fighting, war reporters began to arrive in
Indonesia. The old scourge of the colonial establishment and ‘whiskyswilling planters’ of pre-war Singapore, Ian Morrison, was an eyewitness to events in Java for
The Times
. Martha Gellhorn reached an even wider audience with her vivid report on the ‘seedy ruin’ of Dutch imperialism and new political style of the ‘adolescent guerrillas’ of the
pemuda
. Like many Western journalists she was drawn into the circle of young dandyish intellectuals that had formed around Sutan Sjahrir. She shared a train journey with a young, delicate, bird-like poet named ‘Johnny’. As they talked she became charmed by ‘the place [the Indonesians] give a boy like Johnny; they know he is good for nothing except to write poetry once in a while but everyone loves him and respects him…’ It seems that ‘Johnny’ was Chairil Anwar, himself a protégé and distant relative of Sjahrir.
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These witnesses did not always understand well what they saw. When the
New York Times
reported the appointment of the new prime minister, it gave him a royal name: ‘Sultan Charir’. In common with many Javanese people, Sukarno had only one name. It was an American journalist who gave the Indonesian president a first name he did not possess: ‘Achmed’. It stuck.
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This revolution of artists and poet-philosophers fascinated Western observers. Some of its camp followers such as ‘Surabaya Sue’, K’tut Tantri, were part of the generation that ‘discovered’ Indonesian art and culture before the war, and it was what Sukarno termed the ‘Romanticism of revolution’ and its primordial energy that cast a spell. But others were drawn more to the rationalist internationalism personified by Sutan Sjahrir. His old friends and acquaintances in Europe mobilized support for the new republic, particularly among the British left. One prominent supporter was Dorothy Woodman, long-time companion of Kingsley Martin, the editor of the
New Statesman and Nation
. A great and well-connected artisan for Asian independence, she was under intense Secret Intelligence Service surveillance at the time as a suspected Soviet agent.
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Another convert to the cause was John Coast: a POW in Thailand, he had fallen in love with Indonesia after hearing the lilting popular music of the
kronchong
played by Dutch fellow prisoners, and he began to learn the Malay language. Repatriated to London, where Indonesian students introduced him to Woodman’s circle, he set up a kind of unofficial
information bureau for the republic. He translated Sjahrir’s
Our struggle
into English, and distributed it to United Nations delegates at their meeting at Westminster Hall. With the patronage of John Maynard Keynes, he also invited a Balinese dance company to perform in London. Coast worked his passage back to Southeast Asia and would serve Sjahrir’s government for several years.
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The republic also had supporters at the heart of the British operation: in December in Jakarta, two British NCOs produced a critical news sheet,
News from Indonesia
, and assisted in the publication of an English-language weekly,
Independent
. The British were conducting their war in an unprecedented glare of publicity. It was no longer possible to suppress colonial subjects in private.

For this reason, both the Dutch and the British governments welcomed the Sjahrir administration, but they remained bitterly divided on how to move forward. To Dening, the Dutch failure to appreciate reality was ‘astonishing’. The Dutch, he told Mountbatten, were ‘mentally sick… one cannot help wondering whether in that condition they are really in a fit state to resume control in this vast area’.
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That said, Dening’s attitude to the Dutch was more conciliatory than Mountbatten’s and he attempted to resign at the end of November in frustration at the supremo’s ‘open advocacy of the Indonesia cause… and his harmful utterances against the Dutch’.
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Christison talked of sending the Dutch on a new Great Trek to the outer islands and the empty interior of New Guinea. This echoed an earlier colonial fantasy of the Dutch themselves; there was in the Netherlands a plan to send Nazi collaborators there.
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Christison was determined to ease the burden on his troops. At the end of November he talked of letting central and eastern Java ‘go to ruin – temporarily’. But the British had obligations, not least a new category of person: IFTU, or ‘Inhabitants Friendly To Us’, the Eurasians, and Chinese – in Surabaya alone, 90,000 of them – and the smaller numbers of Arabs and Indians who were now dependent on British protection. In the exodus from Magelang, many Eurasians who had taken refuge there were abandoned. It was mid 1947 before some of them were released in Dutch-held territory.
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In the event, the cities remained occupied, but the weight of Christison’s forces fell back on to Jakarta and attempted to establish a safe perimeter around the city in which normal government
could resume and negotiations take place. A new kind of pacification mission began to clear the city of armed men by stages: first to the city limits, then to surrounding villages that were centres of
pemuda
violence, and then, finally, to secure the triangle between Jakarta, the hill station of Buitenzorg and the major city of Bandung. There was still heavy loss of life. On 10 December a convoy was attacked and seventeen men were killed and another eighty-eight wounded.
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On 27 December, in the first stage of what was now a counter-insurgency operation, 743 Indonesians were arrested and a cordon placed around Jakarta. However, the situation in the city remained tense. Perhaps the main threat to peace there was the Dutch themselves. Although there were only 2,000 Dutch on SEAC strength, there were five times that number present, mostly embittered men from the internment camps, armed and in makeshift uniforms.
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Even Sjahrir himself was beaten on the streets, and he and Amir Sjarifuddin were the target of Dutch bullets. In the face of this, at the end of 1945, Sukarno and Hatta withdrew by special train with most of the government to Yogyakarta. The republic now had an alternative centre in the spiritual heartland of old Java.

For the British, Jakarta was now a major fortress, a new thoroughfare of empire and a strange enclave of calm and normality in the sea of violence. British officers took over the old centre of the British community, the Box Club; the YMCA turned the once elite Harmonie Club into a centre for other ranks. ‘It was’, recounted the official history of the ‘Fighting Cock’, 23 Indian Division, ‘not uncommon to be dancing in the evening after dodging bullets. There was a plentiful supply of beer, although even this was subject to revolutionary mood, when the Indonesian brewery threatened to withhold it after they learnt that supplies were reaching the Dutch. There were no lack of Dutch and Eurasian dancing partners.’
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They supplied the secretarial staff for a growing establishment, and supplied their country with information on British intentions. Marriages were contracted with Eurasian girls, who, as van den Bogaerde, now ADC to Major General Douglas Hawthorn, described them, ‘had only the vaguest idea of what England or Europe might be like, and who would have to face the grey north, and new habits and customs in places like Swindon, Manchester, Macclesfield or Croydon’. His own general drew comment
about the female entourage he gathered around him in his house in Bandung. The Christmas and New Year of 1945, the Division’s fourth in the field, was celebrated in high style in Jakarta, with the pipes and drums of the Seaforth Highlanders; the Patialas in
tamasha
to honour the maharajah’s birthday, and a soccer match against the Indonesians. At midnight drunken British officers let loose a massive salvo of gunfire into the air: it was answered by a return of fire across the city which took an hour to subside.
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