Annotation to A day in a Year of Dependence

Bambang Soemarwoto, Leiden, The Netherlands

The essay "A Day in a Year of Dependence" was submitted as an op-ed to The Jakarta Post. Of course, I was disappointed when I received a reply from the editor: “While your op-ed is quite reflective, we have decided not to publish the article as we deem it fails to spark new insights”. It was a moment of "lessons learned", for apparently the message did not get through.

Nevertheless, I think I did succeed to write a coherent message throughout the article. As a whole it proposes a new stance towards various issues. I realized now that it is probably just too ambitious to squeeze it all into 900 words. Moreover, this was done during an afternoon, when I had a chance to take a day off because there was an IT problem that interrupted me working from home. The writing is of course based on the materials that I encountered during the past couple of months.

The word count has become my benchmark, learning from a previous article last year (Ref. 1), also commemorating the 17^th of August, where a large chunk of the article has been left out from the publication. The complete original version, including the speech by the first rector of Technische Hoogeschool Bandoeng (Institut Teknologi Bandung), can be found in Ref. 2.

It would give a sense of an incomplete work if I don’t try to elaborate it by annotating some paragraphs, now with no limitation of word counts, as follows. Please bear with me if you feel like seeing me just unloading my thought here.

A Day in a Year of Dependence

Another year in a journey of independence has passed. We have all the reasons to celebrate it with joy like every year. But, shouldn’t we start a tradition of making it a moment of deep reflection, to contemplate?

While inviting to put more emphasis on a reflection instead of a celebration in these trying times, I had indeed the intention to grab readers' attention to new insights that are loaded into the subsequent paragraphs. This includes a mention for two fairly recently published books. I hope these all would trigger the readers to search further on the internet.

The 17th of August, 1945, was a culmination of a concerted endeavour starting in 1908 to oppose the Dutch colonialism together as a nation. It was a new paradigm that brought a new form of resistance. It did not come out of the blue, as previous forms of resistance had failed with hundreds of thousands of lives lost. In the span of centuries of colonial presence in Indonesia, a chronological overview of resistance, expeditions and wars is presented in a tremendous book “Koloniale oorlogen in Indonesië” written by a Dutch jounalist Piet Hagen, published in 2018.

I can imagine that quite a few of Dutch people doing business with Indonesia, either living in Indonesia or abroad, are regular readers of The Jakarta Post. Considering “Knowledge and awareness of the national past in Dutch society simply does not run deep” (quoted from Ref. 3), this paragraph mentions a book (Ref. 4) written in Dutch by a Dutch journalist in a style that is accessible to the general Dutch public. The listing and description of the events and statistical figures are comprehensive, constituting a new set of knowledge, giving new insights for an average Dutch. The author, a Dutch journalist, presents an Indonesian perspective as reflected by his choice of the subtitle of the book “Five centuries of resistance against foreign domination”. It can be expected that this book would promote mutual understanding and respect between the Dutch and Indonesian people. It would help correct the Dutch perspective towards Indonesia, like I will not hear again such ignorance by a Dutch lady from a highly educated sphere saying “... It's very strange that you keep seeing death notices on newspapers with mentions like born in Jakarta in 1930. It should have been Batavia, Jakarta was not yet existent…”.

The 37-year long struggle from 1908 to 1945 was characterized by intellectual activisms, forbidden by the colonial ruler, but succeeded to garner the young minds across the archipelago towards one goal as one nation. An unexpected turn occurred when the Japanese occupation replaced the Dutch colonialism. While this brought a period of intense suffering of hundreds of thousands of people who were sent out as forced labour for deadly Japanese war efforts, immediately after the Japanese surrendered to the allied forces, a small window of opportunity appeared. The founding fathers proclaimed the independence of the new nation, Indonesia. A goal shared for centuries by peoples of the same destiny of being oppressed by one foreign entity.

Most Dutch people are only aware of two dates from history lessons about Indonesia: 1602 (the foundation of VOC) and 1949 (a formal ceremony of transfer of Indonesia’s sovereignity). Dates which marked important milestones in the struggle towards Indonesia independence, 1908 (The National Awakening) and 1928 (The Youth Pledge), are completely unknown to them. Even some Dutch historians still believe that the spirit of Indonesian national movement had become only notable after the Japanese invasion (Ref. 5).

It marked the beginning of a new era with new hopes for a just and prosperous country. However, the journey of independence has never been without challenges, and some of them were deadly. An immediate challenge was due to the former Dutch colonial ruler, who could not see themselves losing its colony. To reverse the proclamation, they opted the same mode of operation that was used by their predecessors in centuries long of bloody purges of local resistance.

However, this time it was equipped with modern warfare with sophisticated command and control systems like those used by the allied forces against the Germans, allowing far-reaching military operations akin to war crimes. Again, the blessed tropical land must witness hundreds of thousand of deaths attributed to the same actor as in previous centuries.

The Dutch military equipment and outfit during the invasion of Japan were quite different from that when the Dutch invaded the newly born Republic of Indonesia. The following paragraph quoted from Ref. 6 explains: “Washington also tacitly allowed the Netherlands Army in Indonesia to deploy American Lend Lease material, which were thus added to the significant supply of British weapons already in Dutch possession. At an earlier stage, during the autumn of 1945, the State Department issued an order to remove American insignias from the equipment and outfits used by Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command (SEAC) troops charged with the demobilization of Japan’s military in the Indonesian archipelago. In due course, when the Royal Netherlands Army ensconced itself in Java and Sumatra in the spring of 1946, numerous Dutch soldiers could still be seen in US Marine uniforms while driving US Army jeeps. In addition, the Dutch government diverted a 26,000,000 dollar credit granted by the US War Assets Administration (WAA) in October 1947, allocated for the purpose of building up the Netherlands Army in Northern Europe, to purchasing arms and supplies for its military forces in colonial Indonesia. Through the use of clever accounting techniques, the procurement of weapons destined for Southeast Asia was accomplished without publicly stated American objection”.

After all, Indonesia prevailed. The independence was defended, not only with blood and tears, but also with loads of money to buy the Dutch out to drop the illusion of ever coming back to Indonesia as a colonial ruler. Upon such a great sacrifice, the founding generation has taught, “remember but don’t look back, fill the independence, mind your future!”

There are theories as to why this payment (see Ref. 7) has been “hidden” both on the Dutch and Indonesian sides. A popular Dutch theory is that it was hidden in Indonesia as it could moderate the battle heroism of the Indonesian military, which in turn could give the impression that the independence was gained simply by a matter of financial negotiation. From the other side there is a theory saying that it was hidden in The Netherlands because it could nullify the notion of the Dutch development aid/cooperation projects for Indonesia, as the financial resource originated from Indonesia itself. Whichever theory one inclines to hold, it is a great sacrifice on the part of the Indonesian people in addition to the human casualties as a consequence of the Dutch operation refusing the independence of Indonesia.

A new chapter began, but Indonesia found itself in a world divided by the east and west in the cold war era. Fifteen years later in 1965, Indonesia must experience another bloody episode with hundreds of thousands of casualties. In contrast to the war with the Dutch, while the events and victims were real, identifying the actor(s) and accomplices seems to be virtually impossible. It has only become academic studies by historians, analyzing possible roles based on documents declassified by the American CIA, and also by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as cited in a fascinating book “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War” written by Taomo Zhou, published in 2019.

Though already translated into Indonesian (titled “Revolusi, Diplomasi, Diaspora”), this book (Ref. 8) is probably known limited only within the academic circles, and not widely known by the general Indonesian public, while it provides new insights into this period in the history of Indonesia. This book makes use of thousands of pages of CCP documents declassified in the period of 2006-2008 but then remarkably reclassified again in 2013. Inspite of this, it is in my view remarkable that the author carried on publishing her analysis and conclusions based on materials that are deemed secret.

As described above, during the journey of independence in the 20^th century, two large scale human tragedies had occurred in Indonesia, resulting in a number of deaths in the order of hundreds of thousands. What is then the meaning of independence? Indeed, independence is an elusive concept. Nothing in nature can be independent. In a mathematical analysis of natural phenonema, one can identify two zones: (a) zone of dependence and (b) zone of influence.

Whatever state at a point in a given location and time is determined by what has happened in its zone of dependence. In turn, whatever happens at that same point in space and time will determine the state in its zone of influence. Referring to the above human tragedies, in terms of the state of human existence on this planet, apparently Indonesia was very much in the zone of influence of other nations. In other words, our state of existence has been very much dependent on government policies from thousands of miles away.

This is a proposition that humanity is in itself a dynamic system that runs in a space-time domain. There is no such thing as an isolated event. A series of events or non-events in the past determines the outcome at present time. Zooming in events on a place within a specific time period (for example 1945-1949 or 1965-1967) must be done with the awareness that it is just a snapshot neglecting temporal connectivity to beyond the observed period. A Dutch criticism to my essay could be something like what I heard from someone saying like this, "... During my holiday I visited the Fort Vredeburg museum in Yogyakarta. It is so bad how they exhibit the Dutch, as if we were Germans occupying the Netherlands. Look at our legacy! railroads, motorways, plantations, buildings, bridges, irrigation... ".

I was so stunned and speechless that I could not say a word in reply. In a thought afterwards, I could have said “If the Germans had occupied for 75 years long, you would have now a high-speed railway network, factories like BMW, Siemens, Messerschmitt, Fraunhofer Institute of Eindhoven (instead of the present day Eindhoven University of Technology TU/e)… you would not have the Dutch things, you are proud of, which in reality have come into existence after the World War II. Would you be grateful for that?”. Per definition there is no bright side of an occupation or, in a soft term, colonization.

Now in 2021, another human tragedy is unfolding. This month has witnessed a grim milestone: one hundred thousand deaths by Covid. Indonesia is in great need of vaccines, hundreds of millions of doses of them. But Indonesia can only stand in a line behind those nations capable of making vaccines. And déjà vu, Indonesia suddenly found itself again in the midst of the same geopolitical rivalry experienced in 1965. A war of narratives has penetrated deeply into the minds of the Indonesian people through various forms of digital media. The Indonesian government must walk a delicate thin line of vaccine diplomacy to care the best for its people. All this gives an immense sense of dependence.

Most Indonesians are quite socially involved in various media platforms. Anyone can notice that there is a strong polarization in the making, sometimes fiercely along historical, religion and political orientation/admiration lines, other times in a mix of everything amplified by the pandemy. The post-truth era exacerbates the situation, as people would only listen/read what they want to listen/read.

The public is prone to disinformation spread by buzzers, especially those sophisticated ones that appear as if they were scientifically rational. Polarization in newspaper coverage is also visible. A simple search in Google can give an indication which side a newspaper has taken, or otherwise linient and indifferent on a controversial issue. It is also unsettling to see full-page advertorials appearing on a regular basis, presenting narratives from one of the competing parties in a newspaper having financial difficulties due to the pandemy.

Yes, starting this year, we should value every 17th of August as a moment of reflection, to contemplate how we can be less dependent on other nations, to pull Indonesia more into our own zone of influence. There is no quick fix. Quick wins are elusive. It is an endeavour that needs perseverance in decades and centuries to come.

This is an invitation to contemplate what it really means to be “merdeka”. Perhaps we should recalibrate its notion in terms of how nations are (and should be) mutually dependent and influential. What kind of say do we still have in this (natural) relationship?