Of the more or less 50,000 Gurkhas who served in Indonesia, only a few dozen were still alive. I tried to track them down. Long dusty days following long dirt roads through the mountains. Once, after five hours’ jolting, we arrived in one of those quiet, misty mountain villages. Yes, the old Gurkha was still alive. Yes, he served in the right battalion. ‘Come with us, he’s out in his field.’ And, after a couple of minutes, I heard: ‘But I didn’t go to Java. I stayed behind in India as a trainer at the training centre.’ Oh, well.
Traveling across the world to find veterans of wars from decades back, digging through archival records, understanding the history of nationalist, Islamist, and communist movements – David Van Reybrouck’s “Revolusi” is an incredibly well-researched book that provides an enjoyable and informative history of Indonesia starting from the Dutch colonization and ending with the country gaining independence, along with a brief summary of what existed before the Dutch and what happened after independence.
I particularly liked the focus on oral history and understanding how all the movements and wars impacted people’s lives at an individual level. Reybrouck went out of his way to track down all kinds of people who experienced firsthand the events he discusses: Eurasians who were too European to meet the nationalists’ approval yet too Indonesian to be accepted by the Dutch (and ended up persecuted by both groups), Japanese soldiers who fought in Indonesia and told stories of retreats through the jungle and POWs killed in cold blood, Dutch war criminals who spoke of sexual violence and summary executions, Europeans who suffered in Japanese POW camps during World War 2, Indonesian socialists who led armed uprisings against their own countrymen in internecine fighting, survivors of Dutch war crimes, and Indonesian guerrillas who fought against the Dutch. The wealth of interviews in this book makes it possible to imagine yourself actually in these places and understand what life must have been like amidst all this chaos and violence. Reybrouck excels at descriptive language that captures the terror of ducking for cover during a Dutch massacre, the despair of slowly starving to death in a POW camp, or the quotidian humiliations of Indonesians who attended schools with European students and were treated as inferior. The book imparts knowledge of different kinds. There are, of course, the events, names, places, and dates that are typically in history books, but Reybrouck also imparts knowledge of what life was actually like for people and the many emotions experienced, which is a much harder task.
I was amazed by the resilience of the people interviewed, and repeatedly found myself asking how it’s possible for people to live through such terrible events and still remain human. He spoke to aging Gurkha soldiers who had assisted the British in fighting Indonesian guerrillas in the 1940s:
With the passing of time, several veterans suffered remorse. I spoke to ninety-seven-year-old Champa Singh Thapa above a grocer’s in a roadside village. ‘I’m sickly because I have killed so many people,’ he said while rubbing his temples. ‘Because I have sinned so much, I can’t hear, understand or remember properly any more. I’m like a child again. I don’t have any energy left, no more ideas.’ And then, while looking down at his old, weather-beaten hands, he added: ‘They looked like us, those enemies, they were just like us.’
Old men who had memories of surviving massacres at the age of ten, almost a lifetime ago:
The soldiers surrounded them. They were wearing red scarves. “Bunuh semua orang Baruga!” Kill all the inhabitants of Baruga. But we were all mixed up together. The shooting started immediately from the jeep the three Dutchmen were sitting in, but all of the soldiers were firing. The bullets were like a chain. A lot of people ran for it. I threw myself down and lay in the dirt. A lot of houses were on fire. The rice fields were burning too after the harvest. If you had a lot of wounds afterwards, they finished you off. Some of the wounded were carried home. It grew very quiet. I couldn’t hear any voices any more and thought I was the only survivor. “Are you still alive? Go and start burying them then.” But there were no tools. “If it’s not done, I’ll come back and murder you.” My father said, “Go home. I have to dig.” The bodies were thrown in a drinking pool for water buffalo.’
And Europeans who were imprisoned in POW camps by the Japanese:
‘I was growing weak, I knew I wouldn’t make it. But there were empty shafts, and I saw how to get there. I went there and blew out my carbide lamp.’ And there, in utter darkness, he would remain for hours, waiting in deathly silence until mealtime. He heard scuttling in the dark and knew it was the sound of blind white rats that could no longer tolerate the daylight. He heard dripping and knew there was an underground reservoir, home to blind white fish. Creatures from a different, quieter world. And maybe that is the ultimate image of the Japanese period: waiting in fear, in profound darkness, for it to end, as despair drips from the ceiling and you don’t know if you’ll make it.
The last quote showcases Reybrouck’s ability to make even the most grim situations oddly poetic – his writing is powerful, and his poetic-ish tone brilliantly captures all the complex emotions that people experienced.
The book is also very informative. Reybrouck somehow managed to clearly explain several centuries of history, multiple wars, internecine fighting between Indonesian revolutionaries (the nationalist party clashed with both Islamist and communist rebels), and a complicated colonial game of hot-potato where the Dutch, British, and Americans alternated responsibility for resolving the crisis of Indonesian independence. If you want to read one book to get a deep understanding of the events leading up to the independence of Indonesia, this is the book for you. It’s packed with information yet explained so lucidly that you never feel overwhelmed.
I also liked Reybrouck’s appreciation for complexity; when discussing war crimes, he doesn’t resort to simplistic narratives like ‘evil colonizer antichrist’ and instead focuses on the fundamental causes for military indiscipline: inadequate training, poor leadership and planning, difficult conditions on the ground (food shortages, guerrilla attacks, etc), and a total lack of accountability that allowed soldiers to vent their frustration out on POWs and the civilian population. He is capable of denouncing atrocities against civilians, while at the same time keeping his head and rationally analyzing the underlying reasons for the violence – this is a rare skill.
Speaking of violence against civilians, I was amazed at just how much there was. Some of it, as expected, was Dutch soldiers killing Indonesian civilians. But I was shocked at how many people died as a result of Indonesians slaughtering their own countrymen because they were loosely associated with the much-hated Europeans.
On top of the 4,000 British troops there were now a few thousand Dutch soldiers available. This stirred up so much ill feeling among the young revolutionaries that they cooled their fury on everything that seemed European: the Dutch, the Eurasians, the British and all the soldiers fighting on their side. Even Chinese traders, who had always benefited from the Pax Hollandica, were now sharing the suffering.
Starting in August 1945, Indonesian pemuda (‘youth’) fighters began massacring Europeans, Eurasians, and Chinese across the country, in what is known as the Bersiap (the pemuda’s rallying cry meaning ‘Attention!’).
For fourteen-year-old Nanny Kooymans the first months after the war were ‘much worse than the Japanese period’. As a Eurasian she had belonged to the well-off upper class, but the days of comfort and domestic staff were over. There was robbing, looting and murder. ‘Nobody was in power. The pemuda were wandering around with red headbands. They carried bamboo spears and screamed, “Bersiap!”’
Nanny Kooymans still trembles when she hears people shouting. ’I saw an Indo who was on guard duty shot dead. A pregnant Chinese woman was murdered with a bambu runcing. They cut out the baby. My uncle was missing for a couple of days. A few days later there were bodies in Ciliwung Canal. We were looking down from the bridge. “Look, there’s Uncle Jan!” His chest was cut open. I also saw an Indies Dutch girl’s body floating in the water: naked and nailed to a raft.
The Indies Dutch were again the target of violence. Too dark in the colonial era to pass as ‘real’ Dutch men and women, too light-skinned in the Japanese period to count as ‘real’ Asians, and too European to be spared during the Revolusi. ‘We always got it from both sides,’ Bol Kerrebijn agreed at Bronbeek, the Dutch veterans’ retirement home in Arnhem. ’During the Bersiap everything turned against us. The Dutch were still protected in the camps. I was one of the “stray Indos”. There was no authority. The neighbours had been murdered by marauders.
I couldn’t bring myself to admire the Indonesian revolutionaries. Looking at the casualty estimates on Wikipedia, it seems probable that the Indonesians killed as many of (if not more than) their own countrymen as they did Dutch soldiers. The Bersiap was one of the most shocking and horrifying things I read in this book (and that’s saying something, since a good chunk of the book is about massacres and war crimes).
I was also a bit surprised by the role the Japanese played in fostering the Indonesian independence movement. They established many youth organizations that trained the Indonesians to use bamboo spears (which later became the main weapon used in the Bersiap and also in guerrilla warfare) and drilled anti-European, pan-Asian propaganda into their heads. The Japanese also aided the Indian independence movement through its backing of Subhash Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army, but their role in Indonesia is much different: rather than backing a preexisting nationalist movement with military support, they played a significant role in actually helping stir up nationalist sentiment and contributed mainly through propaganda, fostering a sense of community/oneness, and arms training.
The end of Japanese rule in Indonesia is quite interesting – it’s one of those moments in history where things were so weird and chaotic it’s hard to believe these events really happened (I particularly like this kind of wild/crazy history). As World War 2 came to a close, the Japanese essentially threw up their hands and let the Indonesians declare independence as some kind of twisted ‘welcome back’ present to the Dutch army who had no clue what was awaiting them upon their return and expected the civilian population to eagerly receive the Dutch liberation (the intelligence failure there is rather funny – just imagine all the Dutch soldiers landing in Indonesia, bewildered as to why their subjects don’t seem thrilled to see them again and are actually somewhat murderous).
That evening, 16 August 1945, Sukarno and Hatta went to see Maeda and spoke to several sympathetic Japanese officers. The situation was complex: the capitulation meant that Japan was obliged to maintain the status quo in the territories it occupied. Formally it was impossible for it to quickly grant an enormous country like Indonesia independence at the last moment. The Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence could not do anything either. As an official Japanese organisation it had lost all authority. A spontaneous action, then? A purely Indonesian initiative? No, that wasn’t possible either, said Major General Otoshi Nishimura, chief of the General Affairs Department, at least ‘not as long as he knew about it’. But, he admitted, that implied that it could be done‘without his knowledge’. The defeated military administration would neither grant nor encourage independence, but simply turn a blind eye. This strange compromise allowed the senior Japanese officers to respect the orders from Tokyo to maintain the status quo, yet also accommodate the wishes of the older Indonesian nationalists, while reducing the risk of mass bloodshed by the younger nationalists.
With the greatest possible caution, Indonesian infiltrators were transported to the archipelago from Australia and Ceylon – by parachute, by submarine – but although several attempts were made, none of these clandestine operations lasted long enough for relevant information to be transmitted: most of the spies were murdered fairly soon after landing. The population’s hatred for the occupier had reached the outside world, but the conclusion that was automatically drawn was that they must be longing for the old days. This was the limit of the knowledge that got through. From January 1944 NEFIS was led by Simon Spoor, the future commander of the Dutch troops in Indonesia. He was convinced that the so-called struggle could be put down entirely to Japanese ‘rabble-rousing’. But the fact that very few Indonesians seemed prepared to help his secret agents should have given him pause for thought.
In addition to the ‘we can neither confirm nor deny’ stance on Indonesian independence, another peculiarity of the last days of Japanese military presence in Indonesia is the ‘self-internment’ of Japanese troops who wanted nothing to do with the bloodshed that the pemuda would soon unleash:
The great majority of the pemuda did not hesitate. Only the Japanese could have restrained them – they were still there in large numbers and armed – but they felt little inclination to do so. They were anti-Western themselves and had stoked the young Indonesians’ hatred. And since September they had been engaged in a peculiar process of self-internment. The Kempeitai and several residual infantry units remained in the cities, but large parts of the occupying army withdrew into sparsely populated mountainous regions to avoid falling prey to possible disturbances. While awaiting their definitive repatriation the troops stayed in very large secured camps – 20,000 near Malang, 30,000 on Seram, 40,000 on Halmahera. They mainly left their weapons under guard in depots, but the soldiers charged with guarding these depots were only given five bullets each. This was the state of affairs in Java at the start of October: approximately 4,000 British and approximately 2,000 Dutch soldiers, fewer and fewer Japanese with less and less ammunition, and several hundred thousand rampant youths.
Feels almost surreal to think about – thousands of Japanese sequestering themselves in army camps, locking away their weapons, and calmly observing from afar the chaos they had helped unleash. Despite the Japanese army’s best efforts to avoid the chaos, they ended up reaping some of what they sowed – many were killed when pemuda raided those arms depots to steal guns for use against the Dutch. Also, it’s worth mentioning, death by bamboo spear (‘bambu runcing’) is a particularly nasty death…
Johannes Soewondo knew that the Japanese were very scared of that ‘biological’ weapon. ‘With a gun you’re dead right away, but with a bambu runcing it can take a long time. I saw them writhing on the ground.’ Iskandar remembered that it was ‘easy’ to kill someone that way, but recalled an incident where the spear broke before a fighter had finished the job. ‘The victim lived for a whole day before we shot him.’ The witness accounts were unemotional, dry even. With their years of militarisation, the Japanese had created a monster that had now turned against them. They were, in the words of Sudarpo’s astute summary, ‘destroyed by the ideals of their own propaganda’.
The Japanese were probably hoping the nationalistic mob violence they helped stir up would be directed against Europeans rather than them, but the Japanese made the dumb decision of abandoning their main means of defense (guns) at a time when the pemuda really wanted their guns – unfortunate. The odd and tragicomic reversal of roles is best captured here:
‘It was bizarre,’ said Brigitte Sparwer-Abrams. ‘First we were interned by Japan, then we were liberated by Englishmen and Gurkhas [presumably Sikhs] and in the end we were protected by the Japs!’ The world really had turned upside down. The Japanese, who had barked orders at the Europeans for years, now had to guarantee their safety and prevent the pemuda they had radicalised from entering the camps and killing or injuring them.
Bizarre indeed.
Apart from the main plot line of Indonesia’s journey towards independence, Reybrouck also highlights several other interesting historical subplots, including the German submarines of the Gruppe Monsun that traveled for over three months to supply the Japanese army in Indonesia with aircraft blueprints in exchange for raw materials the Nazis critically needed. One story that stuck in my head is of the eccentric (possibly somewhat admirable?) Japanese commander Hitoshi Imamura who showed some humanity towards the civilian population in Indonesia (at least compared to his colleagues) and was promptly replaced by a more bloodthirsty general – after the end of the war, Imamura was sentenced to ten years of jail because of war crimes his soldiers committed, but he felt so guilty that, after release, he decided his punishment was insufficient and lived out the rest of his life in a DIY replica of his prison cell that he built in his garden. Another fascinating subplot is the story of the last World War 2 Japanese soldier to surrender:
Despite how elated the locals were by the American invasion, there is a statue on Morotai of a soldier from the Japanese army: Teruo Nakamura. What did he do to deserve that? Well, when the Allies landed on Morotai, Nakamura did not surrender but retreated. He was a man from Taiwan enlisted into Japanese military service, and the accepted options – a fight to the bitter end or else suicide with honour – did not appeal to him. He and a few others fled into the primeval forest. One by one, his comrades-in-arms died or disappeared, but Nakamura bravely held out, living in a hut on bananas and root vegetables that he grew himself. He was not found until December 1974, naked and as thin as a stick. Indonesian social workers had approached his hiding place while singing the Japanese national anthem and waving a Japanese flag. He had been in hiding for more than thirty years, in the firm belief that the war was still on. He was the last World War II soldier to surrender.
If I had to identify a ‘moral of the story,’ it’d probably be that almost everyone in this book sucked and there was no one party that could be called ‘the good guys’; that is typically true of history, but in this book, it’s amazing just how much bad stuff almost every side did. The Dutch economically exploited the Indonesians and set up an inhumane racial hierarchy, the Dutch and British armies both committed countless war crimes and massacres, the Japanese killed millions through famine and forced labor and subjected thousands of women to sexual slavery, the Indonesians brutally slaughtered thousands of people with European or Chinese parentage, and the Americans’ diplomacy was more about Cold War politics than humanitarian concerns. Very dark and depressing history, but also chaotic and interesting enough to fit perfectly in the genre of history books I enjoy.
Overall, great book – it was fun to read, and I learned a lot about history as well as life and the remarkable capacity human beings have for violence and cruelty, as well as compassion and resilience. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I recommend reading ‘Revolusi!’