Forgotten Wars (33 page)

The dawn of 1946 was marked by another momentous event. On 3 January, at a large ‘people’s congress’ in Purwokerto, central Java, Tan Malaka chose to reveal himself to the public for the first time in twenty-three years. In his speeches, and in writings produced at the time of the struggle in Surabaya, he announced a ‘minimum programme’ for the revolution. It was based on the call for ‘100 per cent
Merdeka
’. Its radicalism was a yardstick for freedom movements in the region, calling for the immediate departure of all foreign troops from Indonesia, the establishment of a people’s government and the people’s ownership of the economy. It was seen as a major challenge to Sjahrir. A battle for the soul of the Indonesian revolution was underway, which pulled its leaders toward different paths of diplomacy and struggle. This was a dilemma that all Asian nationalisms would face. In Indonesia it seemed that the
pemuda
had finally found their leader. But in early 1946 Tan Malaka lacked any organization or power base beyond his own mystique. By mid March, in a bitter struggle for power, he was arrested and imprisoned, and the path of diplomacy took precedence for a time. By the time of the British withdrawal, its prospects were uncertain. One of Britain’s most senior diplomats, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, had arrived in February 1946 to act as an honest broker – he was the first Allied leader to call on Prime Minister Sjahrir at his home – and there were abortive talks in Holland in April and May. The British deadline for an agreement was the end of November 1946, when South East Asia Command would wind up its activities. At the eleventh hour, on 15 November, a first diplomatic understanding was reached between the Dutch and the Indonesians, led by Sukarno and Sjahrir, at the hill resort of Linggajati outside Jakarta, to be ratified in March of the following year. It was an agreement for a ceasefire, it recognized de facto republican authority
in Java and Sumatra and it spoke of co-operation in the creation of a united Indonesia. But it left the vital issue of sovereignty vague – it was a long way from ‘100 per cent
Merdeka
’ – and the agreement did not last. By the end of July 1947 fighting had erupted again, with the first of the savage Dutch ‘police actions’ that would, after much bloodshed, finally lose them their empire.

Mountbatten, Christison and others had expended much effort in pushing the Dutch into talks. They recognized the power of Indonesian nationalism, but they had not won its trust. Most British observers, even the most liberal, still thought of nationalism in Asia in very limited terms, as an affectation of a small, Westernized elite. As such, it might be easily pacified with concessions. But in Indonesia, and later elsewhere, nationalism was revealed as something more elemental: a profound and dangerous perturbation of spirits. It seemed to be without an ideology. To the British it was ‘extremist’, ‘fanatical’, ‘terrorist’ – all words that would now dominate the vocabulary of empire, but which betrayed a fundamental lack of comprehension. Nor could nationalism in Indonesia be dismissed, yet, as communist conspiracy; ironically it was to the socialist, but quintessentially Westernized, Sutan Sjahrir that the British looked to discipline the movement, and for the salvation of a negotiated withdrawal. They could not understand Sukarno’s continuing and growing hold on his people. British witnesses to Surabaya wrote of Bung Tomo as if he were a wild beast. The British were entirely unprepared to face the full implications of Tan Malaka’s ‘100 per cent
Merdeka
’. In Indonesia, as in Vietnam, British soldiers had seen the meanest folk articulate their freedom, and fight to the death to defend it, and it had terrified them. So too had the behaviour of the French and the Dutch. It raised the as yet unanswerable question: how far would Britain be willing to go to keep its Asian empire? These dilemmas were now to be confronted closer to home in India, in Burma, in Malaya and in Singapore. The British wars in Vietnam and Indonesia did little to re-establish Britain’s imperial confidence, nor its martial reputation. They disillusioned profoundly many of the British who fought there, and few of them wished to celebrate their achievements. In all, there were 2,136 British and Indian casualties. As the last British troops finally departed from Tanjong Priok docks in Jakarta at the end of
November 1946, the Seaforth Highlanders, who had been among the first to arrive, taunted the fresh Dutch conscripts disembarking to face their own colonial war with raised fists, and the cry, ‘
Merdeka!
’
¹²⁷

Colonial Asia was now a connected arc of protest. Everywhere local nationalists borrowed the words and emulated the deeds of neighbours, and the language of the Atlantic Charter and the San Francisco Declaration became a common tongue for all. In early 1946 Indonesia’s struggle was first raised in the United Nations, and this made it a test case for the rights of fledgling nations everywhere. In British Asia, nationalists followed events in Indo-China and Indonesia as if their own future were being decided, which it effectively was. In Malaya the cause of the Indonesian republic captivated not only the Malays, who felt tied to it by kinship and language, but the whole of Malayan society, whose trade unions, youth and women’s movements all took up its slogans. The Chinese population caught up in the fighting in Semarang and Surabaya appealed directly to the community in Malaya, and many fled there as refugees. Harold Laski’s campaigning articles from
Reynolds News
were immediately translated into the Tamil newspapers in Singapore. They were united in their opposition to the use of Indian troops, stating, ‘We [the British] have no business in Java.’
¹
This larger ‘we’ was reinforced by the British servicemen in Singapore – corporals mostly, it seems – who wrote polemical articles for publication in the vernacular press. Surabaya was a turning point for everyone: the British argument that force was necessary to bring a large Asian rebel army to heel seemed to be a harbinger of a new Armageddon. ‘Battle for Surabaya’, announced the
New Democracy
in banner headlines. ‘Cause of a Third World War?’
²
Would this, the campaigning Malay newspaper
Utusan Melayu
speculated, ‘become a strong argument to use the atomic bomb on the Indonesians whose only sin is to attain their independence?’
³

The battle of Surabaya was fought in unlikely places. Southeast Asian students in Japan demonstrated on the streets of Tokyo. In a bizarre twist of fate, many of the most hardened veterans of anti-Dutch resistance were to be found in Australia. Japan had failed to occupy the Dutch territories of the island of New Guinea, and in mid 1943, Charles van der Plas, then the senior Dutch official in Australia, secretly moved 507 exiles and their families from the Boven Digul isolation colony to Bowen and Sydney, where they were placed in a guarded camp together with Axis internees. Many were members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, imprisoned after the uprisings of 1926–7, including Sarjono, the party’s former chairman. The Digul families were the first convicts to land in New South Wales for over a century, and when two notes dropped by Indonesians at the quayside and on a train platform were picked up by Australian workers, their plight attracted wide sympathy. The exiles were released and, notwithstanding the ‘white Australia’ policy then in force, were assimilated into the Australian workforce. They included graduates and skilled craftsmen, and such was the Dutch military’s own desperation for personnel that some of them even found employment with the government-in-exile. But biding their time, the Indonesians organized, formed strong links with the Australian left and in 1944 set up their own independence committees. When Japan surrendered there was a wave of strikes by Indonesian seamen who refused to return to pre-war conditions of employment. In six days after 24 September, 1,400 of them came ashore. When Indian workers were drafted in as replacements, they joined the strikers. The Dutch, desperate to ship men and materials to Java, were thrown into panic.
⁴
As ex-detainees began to resign from Dutch service they were arrested as illegal immigrants by the Dutch authorities, who prepared to send them back to Digul camp. This was an extraordinary use of their extra-territorial privileges. By April 1946 820 Indonesian mariners and soldiers were interned in Australian jails.
⁵
The Australian unions joined the protest, declared that ‘everything Dutch is black’ and boycotted Dutch ships. On 11 November at Morton Bay there was a mutiny on a RN auxiliary vessel at Woolloomooloo. The sailors draped slogans on their ship: ‘Food for Britain before troops for Java’. The Australian government’s decision to repatriate some exiles and their families (which now
included some Australian Aboriginal wives) in October 1945 inflamed the controversy. The Dutch were unwilling to have so many seasoned radicals land, and wanted to take them into custody. Mountbatten felt unable to guarantee their safety. But many evaded capture and, in the event, only nineteen ‘extremists’ and eight of their family members were despatched on the
Esperance Bay
and landed at Kupang in Timor. They took with them a large Indonesian flag, embroidered with the words, ‘To Dr Soekarno from Queensland Trade Unionists’.
⁶

The Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions drew upon networks of support across the region. Bangkok was a huge arms bazaar, stocked by supplies from surrendered Japanese garrisons and from SEAC’s airdrops to the Free Thai resistance. ‘Buying arms in Thailand’, the veteran southern Vietnamese revolutionary Tran Van Giau joked, ‘was as easy as buying beer’. The Filipinos and Burmese also offloaded guns onto the Thai market, and Chinese, Swedes, Czechs and Americans – idealists, freebooters and demobbed special forces – all got involved in the trade. Jim Thompson, a Princeton-educated ex-OSS man, invested his profits in a silk business that still bears his name.
⁷
Vietnamese exiles in Singapore tried to recruit fighters from Malaya, and they approached the Malayan Communist Party for 500 guns from its secret stockpile in Johore. It became impossible to ship them by junk to Cochin China, but the contacts were important in other ways: through them, Chin Peng and others began to learn more about the secret lives of Lai Teck.
⁸
Malaya was the armoury of the Indonesian republic. The British dumped as many as 2,000 tons of surplus arms at sea south of Singapore, and they easily found their way into Indonesia through the Riau islands. The first major republican supply operation was orchestrated in September 1946, by a Chinese lawyer, Captain Joe Loh, who had served in Force 136. He used his British connections to acquire – with no advance payment – 1,400 Lee Enfield rifles, six anti-aircraft guns, a field hospital, a field kitchen and army clothing, and ran them past the Dutch navy to the republican forces in Java on a wooden vessel called the
Mariam Bee
. This was enough to equip a battalion: the goods were marked in the log at the Changi naval base as ‘One lot of surplus goods dumped and destroyed.’
⁹
In Pekanbaru, on the Sumatran mainland, some 1,000
republican soldiers paraded in British uniforms. This caused real confusion when they then attacked a nearby Dutch garrison.
¹⁰

Chinese intermediaries dominated the arms trade. In Indonesia, although the community was precariously placed, and often targeted for attack by nationalist mobs, businessmen borrowed the authority of political organizations as a shield, and used it to seize the lucrative import–export trade from European firms. When the Dutch navy intervened to stop this illicit trade, Singapore merchants and trade unions united in their attacks on Dutch ‘piracy’. Tan Kah Kee, who had spent the war hidden in exile in Java, used his influence to strengthen sentiment in favour of the revolution, and this very quickly developed into an attack on local British authority. When, in early 1946, the BMA in Malaya banned the use of sugar in coffee-shops because of shortages, the connection was immediate: ‘Java produces sugar. Let the British armies leave Java and allow it independence then sugar will be plentiful.’
¹¹
Sweeping boycotts of Dutch shipping and trade were launched. Although Overseas Chinese politics never achieved the cohesion and purpose it possessed in the anti-Japanese movement before the war, it still remained a force to be reckoned with.

The cause of Indonesia was kept alive in Malaya by the presence of the 15,000 Dutch soldiers and ex-internees who were based in Singapore by the end of 1945, and some 2,000 more upcountry.
¹²
The refugees were traumatized and bitter: they were the first of some 300,000 lost children of empire who would travel into exile in the Netherlands, and then on to the United States or Australia.
¹³
As SEAC prepared to wind up its operations by the end of November 1946, the Dutch shipped in 75,000 men to keep order in Java and Sumatra, and many of them came through Singapore. Eventually, over 140,000 Dutch were mobilized for
De Grote Oost
–an extraordinary commitment for a nation that had a population of only 1,750,000 men of military age – and there were Dutch camps in Malaya until 1948.
¹⁴
The main civilian settlement in Singapore, Wilhelmina Camp, was a substantial township with its own radio station, cinema and orchestra. But it was adjacent to the Malay settlement of Geylang, and in mid 1946, as Dutch operations intensified in Indonesia, there were Dutch–Malay clashes in the neutral ground between the two areas: the Happy World amusement park. There was fighting in its bars,
cabarets and even at the Bolero Malay Opera. An NCO, his wife and another Dutchman were killed. Tensions between Menadonese and Amboinese troops and local Malays nearly escalated out of control, as the Malays threatened to call in compatriots in the services to ‘stage a real battle’. The violence was usually triggered by soldiers’ improper conduct towards respectable Malay women, although Dutch intelligence suggested that its origins were political, and that it was orchestrated by local Indonesians.
¹⁵
Dutch agents were at work across Malaya; Mustapha Hussain was approached by a European and offered $1,000 a month to spy on ‘pro-Indonesia’ supporters in Perak.
¹⁶