Decolonisation, violence and war in Indonesia, 1945-1950
An inquiry by KITLV-NIHM-NIOD
On behalf of the Dutch government, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of
Defence and the State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport informed the House
of Representatives by letter on 2 December 2016 that the government was prepared
to contribute financially to a large-scale inquiry into the decolonisation war that
took place in Indonesia in 1945-1950. The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast
Asian and Caribbean Studies (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde,
KITLV), the Netherlands Institute of Military History (NIMH) and the NIOD Institute
for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies have been advocating this type of broad
inquiry since mid-2012 and are delighted that the government has finally reached
this decision.
In part as a response to this letter to parliament, the KITLV, NIMH and NIOD have
recently re-evaluated their previous joint proposal for such an inquiry, as in recent
years much more has been learned about the war in comparison to four years ago,
a development that has also been recognised by the government. The question
therefore arises as to whether the stance taken by the government in 1969, namely
‘that the armed forces as a whole acted correctly in Indonesia’ can still be defended.
Recent research, such as that in Rémy Limpach’s book De brandende kampongs
van Generaal Spoor (The burning villages of General Spoor), provides compelling
arguments for the hypothesis that Dutch military personnel (including Royal
Netherlands East Indies Army personnel) routinely used transgressive violence
during the decolonisation war. As the government also states, numerous questions
also remain regarding the nature, extent and causes of this transgressive violence
and the broader political, social and international context in which it was able to
take place. For this reason, the three institutes agree entirely with the substantive
conditions for financial support of the inquiry, as set out in the letter to parliament.
This new inquiry will take on a broad perspective, with a keen and watchful eye
focused on the correlation between the events, in the Netherlands and Indonesia, in
the context of post-war national and international relations. This, for instance,
implies that specific attention will be paid in the new inquiry to the chaotic period –
known as the Bersiap – from August 1945 to early 1946, prior to the large-scale
Dutch military deployment, and the knock-on effects this had in later years.
Extensive attention will also be given to the wider national political-administrative
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and international political context during these years, as well as to the political and
social aftermath that continues to the present day.
Taking all this into account, the KITLV, NIMH and NIOD have agreed on the
following agenda for further inquiry:
Synthesis
A brief study (around 300 pages), which will present an amalgamation of
previously published research as well as the recent substudies by the three
institutes. This synthesis will answer the most important questions with regard
to decolonisation policy, violence and war, focusing on the Dutch military action
and how it was justified, and with extensive attention for the historical, political
and international context and the aftermath of the war.
Bersiap
In the Bersiap period, which spanned the last few months of 1945 and the start
of 1946 and which had thus largely elapsed before the return of the Dutch forces
to Indonesia, many thousands of Europeans, Indo-Europeans, as well as Chinese
and Indonesians accused of collaborating with the Dutch colonial rule, became
the victims of widespread and brutal violence, perpetrated by organised and
unorganised Indonesian militant groups. An inquiry into the background to and
the course of this violent period is important in its own right, but it should also
identify the psychological consequences for Dutch military personnel and
civilians and investigate the significance of the Bersiap for the war that followed.
Political-administrative context
This substudy focuses on the political decision-making in The Hague and
Batavia/Jakarta during the war regarding the nature, scale and method of
warfare; the interaction between the government and judicial system; and the
influence of public opinion, the press, moral authorities in the Netherlands and
Indonesia, in particular the churches and home front organisations, on Dutch
military action.
This substudy will also focus on the political responsibility during and in the first
few decades after the war for the distribution of information about the war and
the excessive force in particular: who knew what and when? Was there a
deliberate cover-up of incriminating information and if so, by whom, in what
respect and when? Apart from influencing public information and propaganda,
did these actions also influence the archiving process? What social and political
considerations played a part in this? Consider here, for instance, the position of
the Netherlands in the international arena, concerns about the reputation of the
armed forces and politicians, veteran policy and possible legal consequences.
International political context
The international context requires further consideration, particularly the
international response to and attempts to influence the Dutch and Indonesian
use of force. Research of this kind will be based partly on foreign archives. An
initial step will be to identify and, where useful, further research national and
international collections that were not closely scrutinised previously, focusing in
particular on those in the US, the UK, Japan, Australia and Belgium (countries
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that were directly or indirectly involved in the conflict, the latter as a member of
the Committee of Good Offices (Commissie van Goede Diensten), as well as those
held by the UN and the Red Cross in Switzerland.
Comparative study of decolonisation wars and counterinsurgency
An international comparative study into the specific nature and broader context
of decolonisation wars and counterinsurgency is vital to achieving a better
understanding of the war in Indonesia (1945-1950) and the transgressive
violence that was used. Particular comparisons will be made with French and
British actions in their respective decolonisation wars.
Asymmetric warfare
This refers to a wide range of military and judicial policies and actions. The
analysis will focus heavily on the context within which actions took place. For the
military apparatus, aspects such as force generation, training and instruction of
military personnel, leadership and situational awareness will be considered. In
relation to the judicial apparatus, an overview will be given of such aspects as
the way it was set up, the competences and how they were distributed, as well as
the training and experience of the officials involved. The focus will not be limited
to the actions of Dutch and Dutch East Indian government officials, but will also
be on the possible relationship between war crimes and other types of
widespread transgressive violence. The following aspects will be addressed:
- The role of the Dutch military judicial system – which was leading at the time
because of the state of war and martial law – with regard to excessive force
and particularly the investigation of actions that had already been classed as
disproportionate violence during and shortly after the war. Consideration will
also be given to the institutional and personnel composition of the militaryjudicial organisation of the Royal Netherlands Army, the Royal Netherlands
East Indies Army (KNIL) and the Royal Netherlands Navy, and the links
between this organisation and the military leadership. Furthermore, attention
will be given to the legal frameworks and practices of prevention and
punishment of acts of transgressive violence and, vice versa, the deliberate or
inadvertent malfunction of the judicial apparatus or entire absence thereof.
The treatment of suspects, prisoners and detainees will also be examined. It
goes without saying that these aspects will be assessed in close conjunction
with the political-administrative context project.
- The operation and importance of the Dutch intelligence apparatus as part of
the counterinsurgency: organisation and methods of, and links between,
intelligence and security services, police and the Ministry of the Interior in
this context. This also includes acts of violence by these services and
attention for the treatment of suspects, prisoners, prisoners of war and
detainees.
- Mechanical force by the Dutch. The use of technical weapons (artillery, naval
gunfire, air power) with a relatively high risk of civilian casualties, partly in
the light of the existing legal frameworks at the time.
- Military culture and transgressive violence: the effect of the legacy (and
experiences) of the KNIL, the German and Japanese occupations, as well as
the British interregnum, on the mentality (of force) of the Dutch armed forces.
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In this context, consideration will also be given to the significance of
opponents’ and allies’ experience of transgressive violence.
Regional studies
The interplay between the extreme violence on the Dutch and Indonesian side is
best examined at regional level, which allows an in-depth and comparative
examination of developments that promoted or reduced this type of violence in
different areas. It should be noted that the inquiry will not be limited to the use
of force, but will also look at the efforts of the Ministry of the Interior and the
military to repair the war damage and to restore normality to civilian life. A
number of regions with a widely varying war history will be selected in
consultation with Indonesian historians. Each of these regions will be the subject
of intensive joint research by Indonesian and Dutch historians, in both Indonesia
and the Netherlands (and elsewhere if necessary).
The social aftermath
The starting point for this inquiry will be the return or transfer to and social
integration in the Netherlands of military personnel and other repatriates or
inhabitants of the former colony. On the one hand, the inquiry will focus on the
self-organisation of veterans and the relationship between remembrance culture
and veterans policy, while on the other hand focusing on the experiences of the
hundreds of thousands of people that came to the Netherlands in four great
migration waves between 1945 and 1967 – experiences that at the time and in
later years gave rise to a sense of discontentment about the reception and
support, as well as a sense of sadness and feelings of not being taken seriously.
The social aftermath also includes aspects such as the development of the postwar debate about the war in politics, the media and society, the changing
conceptions about the legitimacy of the war and the method of warfare, as well as
the sentiments about these aspects among communities of veterans, repatriates
and other inhabitants of the former colonies who had relocated to the
Netherlands. This study can build on the extensive literature already available on
this topic. The implications of these processes for bilateral relations with
Indonesia will also be examined.
Witnesses/contemporaries
The Dutch institutes involved will make it possible for witnesses/contemporaries
to give their account of events in a separate project – both civilian (including
victims of the Bersiap) and military/veterans. This project will primarily take the
form of first-hand accounts/an oral history project, resulting in a publicly
accessible ‘living’ audiovisual archive of accounts by veterans and other
individuals involved in the war and its aftermath. In the context of the regional
studies, first-hand accounts and audiovisual testimonies will also be collected in
Indonesia.
This project serves a dual purpose. First, it provides researchers with a different
approach to answering the new research questions for which archive material is
insufficient. Second, a nationally and internationally accessible platform of this
kind can mean that those involved feel that they are being seen and heard. For
this project, cooperation will be sought with the Veterans’ Institute and other
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organisations with existing archives on this subject, for the purpose of creating a
joint portal.
Given the age of many of the individuals involved, the institutes are seeking to
initiate the witness project as soon as possible.
The source material for the research into the previously mentioned areas is
primarily located in the Netherlands, but researchers will also – to a far greater
extent than was previously the case – need to be able to work with sources located
elsewhere (primarily in Indonesia, where more and more sources have become
available in recent years, but also in Australia, the UK, the US, Belgium and
Switzerland). These foreign sources have been underused up to now, while they
may contain unique material. More use can now be made of non-government
sources (e.g. private archives, religious archives, first-hand accounts, etc.). The
three institutes have long had an active policy of tracing and documenting such
collections. The expectation is that the ‘witnesses/contemporaries’ project will give
new impetus to this.
The inquiry will involve intensive cooperation with historians from the countries
concerned, primarily Indonesian historians with whom cooperation is already
taking place. There has been a marked rise in Indonesia’s interest in research into
the decolonisation war, as well as the interest in a joint inquiry. The three institutes
also have various international networks of historians, in which relevant expertise
is available.
Preparation for the inquiry can commence in the spring of 2017, with the actual
start scheduled for 1 September 2017. The inquiry will be conducted over a fouryear period and will be organised and executed as a coherent programme,
analogous to the programmes carried out by the European Research Council (ERC)
or the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Nederlandse Organisatie
voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO). In other words, substudies will be carried
out on the basis of a clearly formulated common framework, and will
simultaneously serve to support a synthetic analysis of the entire domain covered
by the programme. This coherence will be formed by the way the programme is
organised. In addition, an international research group will be set up at the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(NIAS-KNAW) for the purpose of the comparative research.
The programme will result in a series of at least seven publications, i.e., at least one
fully-fledged publication for each substudy (to be completed after three years;
publication may or may not coincide with that of the synthesis), as well as a
synthesis (after four years) that will serve as the ‘authoritative description and
analysis’ as referred to in the KITLV, NIMH and NIOD’s proposal in 2012. The
witness project will commence in the first year and will take the form of, for
example, an interactive website.
The directors of the three institutes involved will have joint responsibility for
managing of the project, with the support of a project coordinator. The director of
the NIOD will act as the day-to-day chairman; he will be the administrative point of
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contact for the government, will be responsible for the budget and the relevant
accountability, and will act as spokesperson. The KITLV will take the role of
secretary for the synthesis and will in that capacity be authorised to, in
consultation with project management and the scientific advisory board, assign
additional research assignments to project staff in order to rectify potential
knowledge shortfalls. The NIMH is responsible for organising quality control of the
publications generated by the project and presented as part of the project. Each
director is responsible for the quality and timely delivery of the substudies
conducted within their respective institutes on the basis of internal allocation.
In order to safeguard the scientific quality of the project, a scientific advisory board
will be established. It will comprise nine members, of whom a maximum of three
professors, including the chairman, are affiliated to the institutes involved. Among
the other six members, there will be at least one other Dutch professor with
relevant expertise, one Indonesian professor, two professors of other nationalities,
as well as two subject matter experts in counterinsurgency operations and/or
diplomacy and International Humanitarian Law. The scientific advisory board will
be supported by a secretary provided by the project organisation.
Furthermore, the inquiry will have a Netherlands societal focus group
(Maatschappelijke Klankboordgroep Nederland), comprising representatives from
various organisations and institutions in the field of remembrance and
commemoration, including the Dutch East Indies Platform (Indisch Platform), the 15
August 1945 Commemoration Foundation (Stichting Herdenking 15 augustus), the
National Committee for 4 and 5 May (Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei), the Veterans’
Platform (Veteranen Platform), the Veterans’ Institute (Veteranen Instituut), the
National Dutch East Indies Monument 1945-1962 Foundation (Stichting Nationaal
Indië Monument 1945-1962) and the Arq Foundation (Stichting Arq). Room will of
course also be created for Indonesian perspectives, in consultation with the
Indonesian project partners.
The budget for the entire project in its original, smaller-scale form of 2012
amounted to EUR 3 million. This budget has been adjusted in the light of the new
requirements set out in the letter to parliament: an extension of the time frame for
the inquiry and the expansion of the subjects to be studied, as well as the addition
of a project for witnesses and contemporaries. This expansion specifically requires a
provision for more research in foreign archives, as well as the establishment of the
oral history project with a public function.
Professor Frank van Vree, NIOD
9 February 2017