Status: 02/18/2022 03:10 a.m
The Dutch wrestle with their colonial past in Indonesia. A study of the struggle for independence between 1945 and 49 proves that the Dutch army systematically used violence.
In December 1949, the Dutch newsreel looked towards Batavia, today’s Jakarta. The red and white flag of Indonesia flies proudly above the palace on Königsplatz. The Netherlands had recently recognized the country’s independence – after a four-year war that was played down in The Hague as a series of “police actions”.
For decades, the government claimed that there were only exceptional cases of excess violence. This reading is no longer tenable, says Gert Oostindie from the Institute for Ethnology. Today we know “that this extreme violence did not happen every now and then, but was part of the way the Dutch army fought this war.”
“It’s really about brute force.”
The historian, together with other researchers, has presented a study on the struggle for independence between 1945 and 49. It shows that the Dutch army systematically used violence against Indonesian military and citizens.
Think torture or ill-treatment while someone is being interrogated, think arbitrary executions of captured military and civilians, looting, whole villages being burned down, so it’s really gross violence.
What was then East India was a Dutch colony for around 350 years, until the Japanese occupied the island kingdom in 1942. After Japan’s surrender, The Hague made every effort to regain control of Indonesia. Even with violence. Around 100,000 Indonesians and 5,000 Dutch soldiers lost their lives.
Self-image of the victim nation
According to historian Oostindie, the government not only knew about the war crimes, it also tolerated it all.
When there was talk of extreme violence, no one did anything about it. And if nobody does anything, there is no prevention. There were the high military, the judiciary, and finally politics. But if no one says: ‘That’s not possible’, then everyone does what they want, and that’s the worst that happened here.
After the war, the self-image of the victim nation, which had put up brave resistance against the German occupiers underground, prevailed in the Netherlands. The own colonial past was faded out. The critical examination of this only began at the end of the 1990s.
Critics of the study are already speaking out
The study on the subject that is now being presented is the most comprehensive of its kind. And it had not yet been published when the first critics spoke up. Among them Hans van Griensven from the Dutch Veterans Association.
The picture that is drawn here is one-sidedly focused on Dutch violence – without putting it in context and taking into account everything that has happened there in four years. A small part of the soldiers are guilty – that’s true. You can also say that, but you have to prove it with facts and sources. But you mustn’t give the impression that everyone who stood up for the Netherlands there was some kind of war criminal. That is not true.
However, for the Association of Victims of Dutch Colonialism, the study does not go far enough. By explicitly naming war crimes committed by Indonesian troops, the guilt of the Dutch perpetrators is put into perspective, according to a spokesman for the foundation. During a state visit to Indonesia two years ago, King Willem Alexander apologized for the violence committed by the Dutch during the war of independence.
Dutch violence in Indonesia was systematic
Ludger Kazmierczak, ARD The Hague, February 18, 2022 12:59 a.m