827 Comments on “Dutch War Crimes”

1. Arie Brand says:

   July 12, 2009 at 7:18 pm

   Let me start with a syllogism. Any army engaged in military activity over a longer period commits war crimes. The Dutch army in Indonesia was engaged in military activity over a longer period. This Dutch army has committed war crimes. Period.

   There have been questions of terminology. Were they war crimes or merely “excesses”? This question alternated with another one: were these practices “structural” or merely a matter of “isolated incidents”?

   But I think that there is by now among the better informed a general consensus that things have happened there that couldn’t see the light of day. War crimes in short.

   Didn’t the responsible authorities know of it ? Yes, they did and at a fairly early stage. Why then were there no criminal prosecutions ?

   The best answer I can come up with has to do with these two points: 1.Dutch legal formalism which, as Fasseur said in another context, could drive friend and foe to despair and 2. The development of the conflict with President Soekarno’s Indonesia about Papua.

   About the legal formalism: the Dutch could have done the same thing as the Americans did in the My Lai case and similar ones. Pick on a guy who had the responsibility on the spot and clap him in jail. But the two man committee (Van Rij and Stam) that looked at the end of 1949 at the atrocities committed in South Sulawesi under Captain Raymond Westerling (and drew in its work on an earlier report by Enthoven) recommended criminal prosecution which, in the Dutch view, would imply going right to the top where the real responsibility had to be found: that means ultimately even the ministerial level. The then Dutch cabinet had no great appetite for that. The second point is that post 1950 relations with Indonesia were rapidly deteriorating. The Republic demolished the federal structure it had agreed to a short time before and when, after the “Republik Moluku Selatan” declared independence, Ambon was attacked and subdued in five weeks of heavy fighting the Dutch were appalled. Also it became rapidly clear that Indonesia and the Netherlands would not come to an agreement about Papua any time soon. In that situation
   an open prosecution of war crimes would have meant providing President Soekarno (who was very unpopular in Holland) with extra ammunition in the propaganda war about the matter (see for my take on the conflict about Papua http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=blog/417 ).

   The government hadn’t taken the initiative for an enquiry of its own bat. It was forced into this position by critical and revealing letters from military men serving in Indonesia that were published in left wing papers and journals and resulted in parliamentary questions. One of the more effective letters seems to have been one that was published in the left wing weekly De Groene Amsterdammer of 26th February 1949 which provided shocking details about the behaviour of the Special Forces around Jogyakarta. Prime Minister Drees said in answer to a parliamentary question about it that it was necessary to find out whether these things had really happened and, if so, to make an end to it.

   Sovereignty was transferred at the end of that year and for the reasons I indicated above the matter slumbered –and for a long time. Until 1969 in fact (Papua had long since been transferred to Indonesia and would have its fraudulent ‘plebiscite’ that year).

   A man who had recently received his doctorate, Hueting, had in the theses added to his Ph.D. dissertation (the custom is to add one that has nothing to do with the subject matter) inserted one that referred to these happenings in Indonesia. He had served as an officer there. A journalist who actually came to interview him on the topic of his dissertation picked up on that extra thesis and came back to interview him on that. The result was a full page interview on what Hueting had personally seen in Indonesia. This did originally not create much of a stir. It was only when a television journalist got hold of this and gave Hueting a twenty minute interview in a television program (on 17th January 1969) that the publicity mill started to turn at full speed. In the following weeks ten national papers had 460 articles about it and the Labor Party demanded an inquiry. Cees Fasseur, who later got the Leiden chair in the history of South East Asia but was then still a civil servant, was ordered to embark on that together with a few others and to come up with a report in three months time. It was a fairly hopeless task. Many of the archives were, as Fasseur said, still packed in boxes. His little crew couldn’t do much more than make an inventory of what was there. The task was then given to Dr.M. Boon to tackle these archives and come up with a comprehensive report. After many years this resulted in a voluminous source publication that I haven’t seen but that apparently is strictly limited to the archival sources, which then at any case saw the light of day. This source publication did however not go into the question of guilt.

   Neither did the book that was published in 1970 by the late Professor Jacques van Doorn and Wim Hendrix who also had personal experience in the Dutch army in the Indies. Van Doorn was a distinguished sociologist and approached the matter in this book, entitled ‘Ontsporing van Geweld’ (Derailment of Violence), from a structural point of view. He paid special attention to the reporting links – how come that knowledge of these matters rarely ever reached the top military echelons along the official circuit ?

   The official historian of the realm, Dr.Lou de Jong, who devoted the sharply critical twelfth volume of his history of the Netherlands during the Second World War to Indonesia, finally did come up with a judgment of sorts. He stated that the Dutch government had reacted inadequately when confronted with the information about these excesses.

   So there has been acknowledgement on various levels that war crimes (or “excesses”) have happened, which doesn’t mean of course that there was and is a general consensus about it. Many veterans (170.000 Dutchmen served in Indonesia in those years), of which there were quite a few still alive then, felt embittered. Fasseur has called the whole matter nothing less than a national trauma.

   Odinius said:

   “Of course, the solution is to stop looking at events in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ but in terms of good behavior and bad behavior. Of course, context is important, but justice, as they say, should be blind.”

   I agree and in my view this position is incompatible with that of Ed that somehow the massacre of about one hundred Dutch women and children in that train taking them to Surabaya was justified because they belonged to the occupying party (whatever that may have meant in the case of a group of undernourished and often ill individuals just released from the Japanese camps).

   The Dutch Institute for War Documentation organized in June 2003 an international conference of historians to deal with the “bersiap-period” under the title “Identity and Chaos in Indonesia 1945-1946”. I will translate here a paragraph from a report about it. It deals with some remarks by the Indonesian historian Bambang Purwanto. “He talked about the resistance he gets in his own country at the slightest attempt to deal somewhat objectively with the history of the Revolution. He had already been reproached for not being a real Indonesian. The name ‘bersiap-time’ is not known in Indonesia. It is called the time of chaos there. Purwanto acknowledged fully that horrible things had happened in this period., but he thought that it might make more sense if hence forward more attention would be given to the humanitarian element that emphatically also has played a role in this time.”

   .

2. Arie Brand says:

   July 15, 2009 at 6:16 am

   Several people (though one in particular) have made assertions on this thread about the pre-independence past that are simply false.

   I would like to comment on a few of them:

   Here is Purba Negoro on Sept.16 2008:

   “Do not forget the East Indies were contributing approx 70 % of total Dutch GDP.”

   And here are the facts as best they can be ascertained:

   Dutch income derived from Indonesia 1700 – 1938
   —————————————————————————————————–

   Indonesian surplus as ration of Dutch NDP (in percentages)

   —————————————————————————————————–

   1698 – 1700 1.1

   1778 – 1780 1.7

   1868 – 1872 5.5

   1911 – 1915 8.7

   1926 – 1930 8.9

   1921 – 1938 8.0

   —————————————————————————————————

   Source: Maddison, A. (1989), “Dutch income in and from Indonesia 1700 – 1938” Modern Asian Studies Vol. .23 N.4, p.647 table 3.

3. Arie Brand says:

   July 15, 2009 at 6:58 am

   And here is another treasure:

   “The first university open to Native Indonesians was Gadja Mada built by Sukarno”

   (Purba Negoro 10th Sept.2008)

   This is a particularly odd one because he must have known that Sukarno had the full academic title of Ir. (“Ingenieur” in Dutch,“Insinjur” in Indonesian). Where did he think he got it from ? Sukarno, of course, was a graduate of the Technological University in Bandung which had been founded in 1920 and was fully equivalent to the Dutch Technological University in Delft, Holland. (the Dutch called them then “Hogeschool” but nowadays such institutions are called universities , as indeed the Delft institution now is.)
   There was also a university level Medical School in Jakarta, founded in 1927 (it had been preceded by a junior medical college called STOVIA).

   And furthermore there was a university level School of Law in Jakarta, opened in 1924.

   Purba Negoro did not have to go to Dutch sources to find this out. All he had to do was to go to the web site of the Universitas Indonesia and click there on the word “Sejarah”. He would have found this:

   Universitas Indonesia mengalami banyak sekali perubahan dalam sejarahnya yang relatif panjang. Dari perspektif subtantif, lembaga ini ditetapkan melalui Keputusan Pemerintah Nomor: 22, tanggal 2 Januari 1849 dan selanjutnya pendidikan tersebut dimulai pada bulan Januari 1851 dengan nama, “Sekolah Dokter Jawa” (Dokter java school). Pada akhir abad ke-19, Sekolah Dokter Jawa dikembangkan lebih lanjut menjadi School tot Opleiding Van Inlandsche Artsen (STOVIA) (1898).
   STOVIA ditutup di tahun 1927 pada usianya yang ke-75 tahun. Sebagai penggantinya, didirikan Sekolah Tinggi Kedokteran di tahun 1927 melengkapi kehadiran 4 Sekolah tinggi lainya yang tersebar di beberapa kota. Keempat sekolah tersebut yaitu: Sekolah Tinggi Tehnik di Bandung (1920), Sekolah Tinggi Hukum di Batavia (1924) dan Sekolah Tinggi Sastra dan Budaya di Batavia (1929). Sementara itu, di Bogor dikembangkan Sekolah Tinggi Pertanian. Kelima Sekolah Tinggi tersebut merupakan cikal bakal fakultas-fakultas di bawah naungan Nood Universiteit (Universitas Darurat) yang didirikan pada tahun 1946 di Jakarta, pada masa awal pendudukan Belanda pasca Perang Dunia ke-2.

4. Cukurungan says:

   July 15, 2009 at 7:52 am

   And here is another treasure:

   “The first university open to Native Indonesians was Gadja Mada built by Sukarno”

   (Purba Negoro 10th Sept.2008)

   This is a particularly odd one because he must have known that Sukarno had the full academic title of Ir. (“Ingenieur” in Dutch,“Insinjur” in Indonesian). Where did he think he got it from ? Sukarno, of course, was a graduate of the Technological University in Bandung which had been founded in 1920 and was fully equivalent to the Dutch Technological University in Delft, Holland. (the Dutch called them then “Hogeschool” but nowadays such institutions are called universities , as indeed the Delft institution now is.)
   There was also a university level Medical School in Jakarta, founded in 1927 (it had been preceded by a junior medical college called STOVIA).

   And furthermore there was a university level School of Law in Jakarta, opened in 1924.

   Pak Arie YTH,

   But ITB is not for ordinary Native Rakyat, the native people who allowed to study there was only for “Priyayi Class” the Crony of the Dutch

   Just figure out by your self under Dutch rule:

   1698 – 1938: Dutch just build 2 University for their own people and crony

   While under our own elite rule 1945 – 2009: Indonesia already have more than thousand University for both our elite and rakyat……so please do not cry anymore and
   whatever you said there was nothing change in our mind that Dutch had committed prolonged crime against humanity in here. Therefore 100 or 10,000 Dutch who may killed in here does not mean anything to us compare with 1 of our poor brother you had killed without the reason.

5. Arie Brand says:

   July 15, 2009 at 8:39 am

   Cukurangan wrote:

   “While under our own elite rule 1945 – 2009: Indonesia have more than thousand university…”

   Wikipedia gives the following list of Indonesian universities:

   List of universities in Indonesia
   A
   Atma Jaya University, Yogyakarta
   University of Airlangga
   Andalas University
   Atma Jaya University
   B
   Bandung Institute of Technology
   Bengkulu University
   Bina Nusantara University
   Brawijaya University
   C
   Cenderawasih University
   D
   Diponegoro University
   Duta Wacana Christian University
   G
   Gadjah Mada University
   H
   HKBP Nommensen University
   Haluoleo University
   Hasanuddin University
   I
   Indonesia University of Education
   I cont.
   Institut Teknologi Bandung
   Institut Teknologi Telkom
   University of International Golden Indonesia
   J
   Jakarta Islamic State University
   University of Jambi
   K
   Parahyangan Catholic University
   Universitas Kristen Indonesia
   L
   Lambung Mangkurat University
   Lampung University
   M
   State University of Medan
   Methodist University of Indonesia
   Maranatha Christian University
   Mount Klabat College
   N
   Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta
   P
   Padjadjaran University
   Palangkaraya University
   Petra Christian University
   S
   Sam Ratulangi University
   Satya Wacana Christian University
   State University of Papua
   University of Surabaya
   Swiss German University
   Syiah Kuala University
   T
   Tadulako University
   Tarumanagara University
   Tenth of November Institute of Technology
   Trisakti University
   U
   Universitas Sanata Dharma
   Union of Catholic University Students of the Republic of Indonesia
   Universitas Islam Indonesia
   Universitas Muhammadiyah Makassar
   Universitas Terbuka
   University of Indonesia
   University of Udayana

   Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Universities_in_Indonesia”

   I count 50. It might have missed one or two, here or there, but 50 is a far cry from “more than one thousand”.

6. Arie Brand says:

   July 15, 2009 at 8:56 am

   Cukurungan wrote:

   “But ITB is not for ordinary Native Rakyat, the native people who allowed to study there was only for “Priyayi Class” the Crony of the Dutch”

   Sukarno was a graduate of ITB. He did not belong to the “priyayi’ class, neither was he by any stretch of the imagination a ‘crony’ of the Dutch. Nevertheless he got himself an academic education there..

   I already commented on your “one thousand universities”. I remember that after the Indonesians took over in Papua they , from one day to the other, founded a “University” (Cenderawasih). There was nothing there: no equipment, no library, no really qualified staff, not even buildings. But a “university” there was.

   In that way the Dutch could have stamped any number of universities out of the ground. They never did because they took that kind of institution seriously. It had to be on the same level as the Dutch universities which are again, roughly, equal to each other. There has never been an “ivy league’ in Holland nor something equivalent to the priority of Oxbridge in Britain.

   My own judgment is that Indonesia would have been bettter off if the Dutch hadn’t stuck to that so-called “concordantie” principle (as it was called) so assiduously. I think the reason they did also had to do with the nature of Dutch society as compared, for instance, to that in Britain. Holland was more of a bourgeois society were academic titles were far more important status indicators than was the case in a society with such a strong aristocratic flavour as Britain, where it was more important to have attended the right “public” (read: private) school. The Brits never had a ‘concordantie” principle in British India.

   Also remember this: by the time STOVIA came of the ground Indonesia had just over ten percent of its present population. When there were about five academic institutions it had a quarter of its present population.

   I have elaborated at greater length on these matters in:

   Brand, A. (1969), “Onderwijs in Indonesie” (Education in Indonesia), Internationale Spectator, Vol.23 Iss. 21, pp. 1927 – 1949. (incidentally the abstract of this in Excerpta Indonesica is quite wrong).

   You wrote:

   “whatever you said there was nothing change in our mind” – It doesn’t help to have “more than one thousand” (readf fifty) universities if you are not open to facts..

7. Odinius says:

   July 15, 2009 at 9:33 am

   Arie, you don’t spend much time here, do you? in Jakarta, there’s another university every couple blocks. Most are fly by night operations, and thus not really wiki-worthy. While there may not be quite 1,000, in terms of bulk numbers Cuk is much closer to the mark.

   …and for the record, Sukarno was, in fact, a member of the lower priyayi.

8. Arie Brand says:

   July 15, 2009 at 10:18 am

   Hi Odinius, I might have missed something but I gained the impression that on this thread you apparently didn’t feel called upon to correct the obvious falsehoods Purba Negoro came up with.

   Cukurungan, whom you so familarly call “Cuk” (old boys among each other), spoke about the “priyayi” as “cronies” of the Dutch. In my book these were the “priyayi” who were involved in the administration of Java. Sukarno’s father was a humble primary school teacher .

   Also , if Cukurungan’s comparison of the number of present academic institutions with that in colonial times has ANY validity at all one can hardly include all those fly by night diploma mills. Even taking the “Wiki worthy ones” is stretching it.

   Incidentally, you still owe me an apology for calling me a “troll” in your interpretation of that word. Do you have to defend your “old hand” status so jealously? It is a bit obvious.

9. Arie Brand says:

   July 15, 2009 at 10:48 am

   “You did not know the Catholics like the Jesuit were routinely jailed and tortured for teaching pribumi basic literacy – did you.”

   Purba Negoro Sept. 9 2008

   And you didn’t say anything Odinius …

10. Odinius says:

    July 15, 2009 at 5:02 pm

    Wasn’t posting here at the time, Pak Arie. But Purbo ain’t with us anymore, though, is he…

11. Arie Brand says:

    July 15, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    I haven’t seen ANY corrections of his grotesque misinformation for that matter – so I am performing a late service. I fear that his stuff confirms my view that the Dutch administration has been demonized to make the miserable present halfway acceptable to ordinary Indonesians.

    Here is some more:

    “The only rail-lines the Dutch ever built were from the plantations to the port.”

    Purba Negoro Sept.10 2008

    Compare with:

    “The network was originally built by the Dutch, and few new lines have been built since independence.”

    From: http://www.Javatourism.com

    On “Indonesiatrail” one can find details about the length of the railways in 1930. Altogether the lines had a length of 6458 km (of which about 5500 km in Java). West and East Java were connected through two main lines: a northern one via Semarang and a southern one via Solo and Jogyakarta. All important cities were connected with each other and with Jakarta. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (for insiders: the “classical” edition) mentions in its article “Java” that in 1905 the total length of lines in Java was 2460 miles or about 4000 km. So a considerable part of the railway network was laid fairly early.

    In Sumatra there were three separate railway networks: one in the North around Medan; one in the West around Padang and one in the South from the Lampung districts to Palembang.

    “Java barely had any roads during the Dutch.” Purba Sept.10 2008

    This one takes the cake. One could come up with a modest anthology of pre-war foreign praise for Java’s roads. The great Northern Road (Jalan Raya Pos, Pantura) is sometimes still named “Jalan Daendels” after the Dutch Governor General in Napoleonic times who had it constructed. Who did Purba think Daendels was ? Some “Orde baru” general?

12. Rob says:

    July 15, 2009 at 6:48 pm

    @ Arie…

    It is not really a late service. Those of us who have been around for a while or at least long enough to have had encounters with PN, know to take what he writes with a grain of salt. That said, he did have some supporters here at IM.

    He is no longer with us here on IM. If you want to find him, he is still about and posting his rants and rails at other places. He is not too hard to track down.

    Good luck!

13. Arie Brand says:

    July 16, 2009 at 5:31 am

    @ Rob

    Thanks for the advice.

    I know he got some adverse comment but I couldn’t discover whether these specific points had been made. At any case I will refrain from making a few more (about the allegedly non-existent health service – it was one service the Dutch were proud of – and the three million deaths caused by the cultivation system etc.).

    I don’t envy professional Indonesian historians such as Bambang Purwanto – they are supposed to keep the myths alive. If they don’t they are accused of disloyalty.

    One word more about war crimes. Just as any society has crime but most people don’t have any personal experience with it so it is with war crimes. I think those old soldiers who say that they never saw any can be believed. I think they can also be trusted when they say that in many places they were greeted by waving villagers. There is some evidence on YouTube that bears that out. Does that kind of thing mean much? Difficult to say. Perhaps people were waving because they were scared. But we are talking here about the impressions soldiers got then and veterans are now still talking about.

    One also has to bear in mind that actual large scale military action was very short lived. Most of it was just patrolling in the areas that had been separated from the “Republican” area by the so-called demarcation line (the Dutch were continuously complaining about Indonesian incursions across that line – “in the day they were just walking around like peasants and at night they were placing mines or attacking plantations”).

    I have had my say and will bow out now.

14. Rob says:

    July 16, 2009 at 5:40 am

    @ Arie…

    Mate, the point was not that you bow out. The point was that most people understood that PN had an agenda to push, and that he is no longer on IM.

    My point was not that you do not go tit for tat with current posters on IM. To the contrary, I am guessing that most people are enjoying the to and fro.

15. Cukurungan says:

    July 16, 2009 at 7:44 am

    Pak Arie Brand Yth,

    Let you see by your self how many universities at one province only:
    http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daftar_perguruan_tinggi_swasta_di_Jawa_Barat

    For the rest of Indonesia you can do math by your self.

    I would like to tell you little of my secret, my self and family had no ill feel or bad experience with Dutch unlike Purba Negoro which he claimed that some his family killed and raped by Dutch, in my case, my grand of grand father was a working as security on “Perkebunan Kopi Belanda” when The Dutch leave the country, Dutch gave some part those Perkebunan to my grand of grand father.

    However, when I was on elementary school learn our history and I realized how bad what had been done Dutch toward our rakyat since then my resentment toward the Dutch was growing, if US citizen was only lost life of 3000 people in 9/11 case, US citizen had slogan never forget 9/11 then how come we and our future generation could forget Dutch crime on our land in which had killed more than million our brother and plundering billions of our wealth.

    I think our rakyat already gave the Dutch more than enough time (300 years) to improve their own condition and our rakyat live but Dutch failed to materialize it, even the Dutch abused our rakyat genuine hospitality and generosity so sorry I just want to advice you that your word will never change anything in our mind and we will never change history lesson in our school, it will written forever that Dutch is the Biggest crime against humanity in our land and Dutch never have any intention either for regret and reparation

    Anything Dutch had been built in this country does not mean anything to us because it was build by plundering our wealth and enslaving our people and more over it was built to serve Dutch interest and not our Rakyat Interest.

    Btw, if you want to exchange view with Pak Purba Negoro you can meet him here:
    http://www.topix.com/forum/id/bogor

    Regards,
    Servant of Truth

16. Arie Brand says:

    July 16, 2009 at 9:52 am

    Hello Servant of Truth,

    “your word will never change anything in our mind and we will never change history lesson in our school”

    Well, it rather sounds as if you are a servant of your history lesson.

    But never mind. I have said it before and I will say it again , ordinary Indonesians have just changed overlordship by a foreign exploitative elite for that by a lokal one that, exactly because it is local, feels itself less constrained by law and ethical considerations. Look under the Kopassus thread and read Allan Nairn’s picture of the life of ordinary Indonesians of which I gave an extract. You should google on his other reports about Indonesia. I say that even though I know that he too has been taken in by your “history lesson” as far as the colonial era is concerned.

    I remember that Orwell once said that most people would rather be badly governed by their own than well by strangers. That is also the case here though in the Minahasa there was for a while a “Twapro” movement – an action to become the twelfth province of Holland. Read the book by a British Indonesianist about the region: David Henley (1996), Nationalism and Regionalism in a colonial context: Minahasa in the Dutch East Indies. Henley talks about a “relatively benign” colonial government.

    That is not what by any stretch of the imagination can be said of your folks’ outfit in Papua that you were so eager to “liberate” in order to subsequently enslave it. Have you ever worried about that? And in your “history lessons” you still have the rare cheek to talk about “pembebasan” in this context.

    Some time or other you will have to make a choice: you can be either a servant of truth or of your history lesson, but not of both at once.

17. Lairedion says:

    July 16, 2009 at 2:43 pm

    Great to see my thread back alive again.

    Arie, for your info, PN turned out to be a bule, hiding behind a Javanese character so he can be duly ignored.

    However what he has written down here or some place else may reflect the thoughts of some Indonesians….

18. Arie Brand says:

    July 16, 2009 at 4:25 pm

    That’s quite amazing. May I ask how you found out? I find it hard to conceive of his motivation. If there was genuine concern about Indonesia’s colonial past there he would have taken care to better inform himself. Weird.

19. Odinius says:

    July 16, 2009 at 6:54 pm

    There are many trolls on IM. Some are actually quite clever and help make this place the amusing place it is. Others are just the living embodiment of a clusterf*ck. Purba was the latter (a British bule pretending to be a fanatical xenophobe nationalist…go figure), and one best ignored.

20. timdog says:

    July 16, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    I hadn’t realised that PN was out there in the wider world of the internet to quite such an extent until reading Rob’s comment. Then I googled him. Bloody hell! He’s everywhere; what a lunatic!

    I recall that I once suggested that he must be British – or at very least British-educated/raised. It was pretty obvious from his prose style. Still, I would like to know how he was uncovered. And does anyone have any idea what his motivations were? From the amount of time he obviously spent on wikipedia he was clearly very dedicated…

21. Cukurungan says:

    July 17, 2009 at 7:11 am

    (a British bule pretending to be a fanatical xenophobe nationalist…go figure), and one best ignored

    Purba is not a British bule, He is typical “Orde Baru” ABRI style

    Some time or other you will have to make a choice: you can be either a servant of truth or of your history lesson, but not of both at once.

    I can be both of them because I did not reject “Bersiap Time”, I simple ignore it because it is very sort time and very light accident compared to 300 years abused, oppression and exploitation of our countrymen by Dutch.

22. Oigal says:

    July 17, 2009 at 8:13 am

    I can be both of them because I did not reject “Bersiap Time”, I simple ignore it because it is very sort time and very light accident

    That’s actually a very interesting statement and from one perspective, certainly not something that future generations should be hand-wringing about for just that reason although to ignore it well…………..

    the next bit..

    compared to 300 years abused, oppression and exploitation of our countrymen by Dutch

    I dunno, I would have thought ……….300 years abused, oppression and exploitation of our countrymen by “our very own regents, leaders, local Raja’s and despots allowing half a dozen, pasty skinned, funny looking dudes in wooden shoes and one large black dog to kick our people’s arse for 300 years in exchange for trinkets” would have been a more correct version of history.

    Come to think of of it…what’s changed?

23. Odinius says:

    July 17, 2009 at 8:17 am

    timdog said:

    Still, I would like to know how he was uncovered.

    So would I. It appears Patung is quite the web detective.

24. Odinius says:

    July 17, 2009 at 8:21 am

    Of course a cursory google search reveals, with startling clarity, that he’s a troll. Perhaps Patung conversed with a webmaster who had previously tangled with ‘mr. faux-de baru’

25. Arie Brand says:

    July 17, 2009 at 9:29 am

    Cukurangan wrote:

    “I did not reject “Bersiap Time”, I simple ignore it because it is very sort time and very light accident compared to 300 years abused, oppression and exploitation of our countrymen by Dutch.”

    Oigal already pre-empted part of my comments. The Dutch didn’t come out here to oppress or convert you. They came out here to trade. Only gradually were they drawn into your internal conflicts and that mainly in Java.

    The Dutch grip on the Outer Islands was only solidified in the period of “Empire Builder” Van Heutsz (Governor-General 1904-1909).

    Do you think you would have been any less oppressed by your own worthies if the Dutch hadn’t been here? In fact the whole Multatuli -affair turned around the question whether the European field service (B.B.) offered the people enough protection against rapacious indigenous “regents” (admittedly, the “Cultivation System” with its “kultuurprocenten”, offered the regents and the Dutch field officers incentives to be rapacious but that was for a comaparatively short period).

    You people dealt with Van Heutsz’s post-kolonial reputation by re-baptising the Van Heutsz Boulevard in Jakarta Jalan Tuku Umar (is it still called that ? – you might have lost your enthusiasm for that name after your own spat with the Acehnese in which your killing ratio probably surpassed that of the Dutch). The Van Heutsz monument in Amsterdam was so repeatedly defaced and at one stage half blasted away that the city fathers finally decided to remove any reference to the man and to re-baptise what remained “Monument Indie-Nederland”.

    Can we now look forward to you and your friends blowing up that monument in Jakarta portraying a Papua couple breaking its chains ? It seems to me a fitting task for a “Servant of Truth”.

26. Oigal says:

    July 17, 2009 at 10:25 am

    Oigal already pre-empted part of my comments. The Dutch didn’t come out here to oppress or convert you. They came out here to trade.

    Actaully Ari, not really correct there is no doubt that the Dutch were here for much more than “trade” (which in turn suggests a fair exchange of value between trading partners..I mean seriously??).

    My point was not to deny the Dutch “grab for loot” lets face it that was the way of the world then. My point is the vision of the happy Indonesian, sitting around under the sun as one big happy community utopia until this all powerful wooden shoed, immense tulip army turned up to rape n pillage is just so much wank.

    The fact was Indonesians were sold out time and again by their supposed elite for the sake of a couple of trinkets and an edge on a rival swamp despot. Although for the average serf, it would be debatable who made the better master…Even today the same question could be asked.

    On the other hand, no Dutch certainly no Indonesia as it stands today and the Javanese would starve without the current plunder from the provinces. It is endlessly amusing watching the NEO-NATS in Indonesia complain about colonisation when viewed from today’s Javanese empire perspective.

27. Odinius says:

    July 17, 2009 at 10:35 am

    The Dutch came here to acquire, not trade. Then later they decided to conquer and create more favorable conditions for the inexpensive (and highly exploitative) acquisition of goods they wanted.

    Oigal said:

    My point was not to deny the Dutch “grab for loot” lets face it that was the way of the world then.

    Yes and no. Sure all European powers were into the whole ‘take, take, take’ thing, but the Dutch were more rapacious and less inclined to give anything of lasting value back than the French or the English. Just taking a look at how many things of value the British left in Malaysia, or the French in Vietnam, underscores the fact that, of all the whiteys to be colonized by, the Dutch rank just barely ahead of the Belgians at the absolute bottom of the barrel.

    Doesn’t excuse any post-col neo-col, but also hard to miss the degree to which the luminaries of the Orde Baru consciously copied the Dutch example.

    Generally speaking, I think that while it’s a bit silly to blame the Dutch for today’s ills, without considering the rather serious blame more recent leaders should get, it’s equally silly for some to apologize for or rationalize the excesses of the Dutch period by pointing to the excesses of other periods. They’re all excesses, and not independent of one another.

28. Oigal says:

    July 17, 2009 at 10:44 am

    Sure all European powers were into the whole ‘take, take, take’ thing, but the Dutch were more rapacious and less inclined to give anything of lasting value back than the French or the English

    Conur..actually there could be a debate about who would be best-worst empire builders (for want of a better term). However not really my point this time.. 🙂

    Just pointing out to Ari I ain’t siding with the Dutch anymore than only a loon would subscribe the Cuk “history by ignorance” school of the air.

    Mmm…in fact they would be an interesting topic…league table of colonial (ing) nations from best to worst..would raise some debate I reckon. I am going with the Vikings for the best costume tho, Germans for most technically adept…Current Indonesia for best self denial

29. Arie Brand says:

    July 17, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    Oigal wrote:

    “there is no doubt that the Dutch were here for much more than “trade” (which in turn suggests a fair exchange of value between trading partners..”.

    I have some difficulty with the latter part of this sentence as it would lead us back to scholastic theories about “justum pretium”. I don’t think that in the main stream of economic thought this concept is still taken seriously. There is no doubt, however, that,especially in the initial period, the Dutch used their then existing naval clout to bar competition and to create a monopoly at the disadvantage of their Indonesian trading partners. The Brits did the same where they could. Their 17th century “Act of Navigation”, which was directly aimed at Dutch trade, was a contributory factor in the coming about of one of the three Anglo-Dutch wars of that period.

    British rivalry still finds a faint echo in Odinius’ view that the Dutch were “at the bottom of the barrel” in the colonial enterprise and left fewer things of lasting value in Indonesia than the Brits did in Malaysia or the French in Vietnam.

    How can one establish a thing like that? There is no comparative inventory of cultural and material artefacts, left behind by the various colonizers, nor would it be possible to draw up one.

    The best we can hope for is a contemporary comparative anlysis of an observer with detailed knowledge of, let us say, the British and the Dutch colonial system. As luck would have it there was one. I am referring, of course, to J.S.Furnivall who served for twenty years in the ICS in Burma and came, in a later stage of his life, to study Dutch colonialism to which end he spent, inter alia, two years in Leiden and considerable periods in “Netherlands India” as he called it.

    He left us two classics of colonial literature. One entitled “Netherlands India: A study of Plural Economy” and the other “Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India”.

    Furnivall was not in the business of handing out report cards and, as a Fabian socialist, he was critical of certain aspects of colonialism ( and of the modern state in general) but there is no doubt in my mind that he looks at the Dutch colonial enterprise as he found it in the thirties in a more favorable light than was the case with its British counterpart. Don’t take my word for it.

    I will quote the Cambridge scholar Julie Pham:

    “Furnivall had researched the Dutch colonial system from the
    perspective of a former believer in British efficiency and its ability
    to rationally govern its colonies whose first-hand experience in
    colonial administration turned him into a critic of the British colonial
    machinery, which he personified as the ‘Leviathan’. After leaving the
    ICS in 1923, Furnivall had continued to criticise the British system
    for making it difficult for ‘district officers and people to become
    mutually acquainted. So far as they come into contact they tend
    to see one another in unpleasant aspects; the official mostly sees
    people who want to get something out of him, and the people see
    the official as magistrate and tax-collector’.53 Such social barriers
    between the colonial administrators and those they came to help were
    counterproductive, as it prevented the Burmese from being able to
    ‘probe the secrets of the West’.54 Furnivall’s observations of the Dutch
    system only solidified the shortfalls of the British system, and renewed
    his hope of the possibility of reforming the British Leviathan.
    …
    Furnivall was not trying to transplant a Dutch ideal to the British
    context; nor would this be possible because of their historically
    different traditions of law. Instead, Furnivall adapted the Dutch
    model of social engineer to fit both British Burma and to appeal to
    increasingly dissatisfied colonial peoples ”

    (See Pham, J. (2005), “J.S.Furnivall and Fabianism: Reinterpreting the “Plural Society” in Burma” Modern Asian Studies, 39.2

30. Lairedion says:

    July 17, 2009 at 2:15 pm

    Odinius

    Yes and no. Sure all European powers were into the whole ‘take, take, take’ thing, but the Dutch were more rapacious and less inclined to give anything of lasting value back than the French or the English. Just taking a look at how many things of value the British left in Malaysia, or the French in Vietnam, underscores the fact that, of all the whiteys to be colonized by, the Dutch rank just barely ahead of the Belgians at the absolute bottom of the barrel.

    I would be the first to criticize the Dutch for their poor handling of colonial affairs. But you might want to hold this statement against the indigenous peoples of Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand who are minorities in their own countries serving as tourist attractions.

    Who are really at the bottom of the barrel?