Reckoning With Colonialism and Independence in Indonesia

In late 1949, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled to the Dutch East Indies to document the dawn of Indonesian independence. The trip produced a remarkable photographic record of the final days of Dutch rule and exuberance of the new republic’s first days. His restless shutter captured images of Sukarno being sworn in as Indonesia’s first president, and the Indonesian army parading at the kraton in Yogyakarta.

One particularly striking series of images, taken on the eve of the transfer of power, shows Indonesian workers carrying the official portraits of Dutch officials down the front steps of the governor’s palace and into the languid heat. The heavy gilt frames of the paintings, and the hirsute, stiffly dressed governors within, offer a stark contrast with the slight frames of the barefoot Indonesian porters, clad in baggy white tunics and dark songkok caps.

There have been few more fitting visual representations of the end of empire.

Despite the clean transfer of power, the legacy of Dutch rule has continued to shadow independent Indonesia. The issue once against surfaced in the news last month when Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced that the Netherlands “recognizes fully and without reservation” that Indonesia gained independence on August 17, 1945, when Indonesian revolutionaries declared independence from Dutch colonial rule. 

Until then, the Netherlands had recognized Indonesia’s independence as taking place on December 27, 1949, when the official transfer of sovereignty took place, and the old Dutch governors were evicted from the palace. The announcement is not yet legally binding, and Rutte said he would consult with Indonesian President Joko Widodo to reach a mutual understanding on the matter. 

But the gesture carries symbolic weight. Amsterdam’s recognition of the 1949 date both obscured the legitimacy of the independence fight, and elided the four-year war that the Netherlands waged in the wake of World War II to restore colonial rule over what it then called the Dutch East Indies. Over more than four years of grinding combat and counterinsurgency operations, the Dutch war killed an estimated 100,000 Indonesians, compared with about 5,300 fighting on the Dutch side. Ultimately, the Netherlands was forced to give up the Dutch East Indies.

The legacies of Netherlands’ 350-year rule over the Indonesian archipelago have been a subject of increasing attention in Dutch politics in recent years. The nation first issued a general apology for the mass killings carried out by its troops in Indonesia in 2013. Four years later, the government funded research into the Netherlands’ conduct during the independence war, which was conducted by two dozen academics and experts from both Indonesia and the Netherlands.

Indeed, Rutte’s announcement came as the Dutch parliament last month debated the findings of the report, which found that the Dutch state condoned the systematic use of extrajudicial executions and torture during the war of independence. The publication of the report in January of last year prompted Rutte, who has served as prime minister since 2010, to apologize to Indonesia for the “excessive violence” employed by the Dutch during their attempted reconquest of the archipelago.

“We have to accept the shameful facts,” Rutte said at a news conference at the time. “I make a deep apology to the people of Indonesia today for the systematic and widespread extreme violence by the Dutch side in those years and the consistent looking away by previous cabinets.”

In September 2020, the Netherlands announced that it would pay compensation to the children of Indonesian men summarily executed during a bloody counterinsurgency campaign in South Sulawesi. The announcement came after a court ruling that nine elderly women living Indonesia were widows “of men unlawfully executed under the responsibility of the Dutch state” and were thus entitled to damages. In 2011, a court made a similar finding in another episode of Dutch wartime violence.

Rutte’s recognition of August 17, 1945, as the date of Indonesian independence has prompted some in Indonesia to call for more substantial reparations for the atrocities committed between 1945 and 1949. In a report by BenarNews on Rutte’s announcement, Chandra Halim, a professor Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta, told the publication that “when a country is guilty of war crimes, they should pay more than just compensation.” He said that the two countries should hold talks on how to address the damage inflicted on Indonesia, “both materially and morally,” by Dutch wartime actions.

In an interesting twist, however, the Dutch recognition of August 17, 1945, has been opposed by some in the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia, many of whom fought for the Dutch and expected to be granted an independent state after their departure. In a reminder of the complex, tangled legacies of colonialism, these nationalists view the 1949 date as the more significant, given its closer association with the abortive Republik Maluku Selatan, or Republic of the South Moluccas, which was declared in April 1950 but never recognized.

Large-scale reparations are probably unlikely. One of the reasons for the increasingly open discussion of past atrocities is the simple fact that most Dutch army veterans and ex-colonists, who have been most inclined to defend their nation’s colonial legacy, have now passed away. Still, the official contrition of the Rutte administration has encountered pushback from some right-wing Dutch politicians, who criticized the government-funded report into the independence war as “one-sided.” It remains to be seen how far the Dutch government – and the public at large – will be willing to extend the logic of redress and reparation.