As Dutch say sorry for atrocities in postcolonial Indonesia, time for Jakarta to address its own dark past of racial violence, genocide?

A study that shines light on Dutch atrocities after Indonesia’s declaration of independence has shocked the nation and prompted PM Mark Rutte to apologise

It has also stirred debate about Indonesian attacks on racial minorities during that time as well as a later genocide against suspected communists and ethnic Chinese in the 1960s

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Cause/Effect by Rosa Panggabean, a photo examining the aftermath and lingering trauma of one of Indonesia’s darkest eras: the Communist purge of 1965–66 that killed up to three million people.

Published: 9:30am, 24 Feb 2022Updated: 3:30pm, 24 Feb 2022

A recently published study in the Netherlands that revealed the Dutch’s systematic use of extreme violence in Indonesia during the revolutionary war in the 1940s has prompted calls for the country to address its own dark past, including genocide committed against Indonesian residents who were suspected communists and leftists, or from the ethnic Chinese community, in the 1960s.

A team of 115 researchers in the Netherlands and Indonesia last week published the findings of their six-year study, which concluded that the Dutch government and leadership had “deliberately condoned the systematic and widespread use of extreme violence by the Dutch armed forces” during the war, which lasted from 1945 to 1949. Indonesia has dubbed that period as the revolutionary era as it took place shortly after the declaration of independence on August 17, 1945, which ended three and a half centuries of colonisation by the Dutch.

However, the Netherlands refused to acknowledge the arbitrary declaration and returned to Indonesia in 1945, following the defeat of Japan in World War II, driven by “economic and geopolitical motives and by the idea that they still had a mission in the ‘East’ and were indispensable there”, the study said. Japan occupied Indonesia from 1942 to 1945.

According to the study, upon returning to its former colony with the help of Allied forces, the Dutch carried out “extrajudicial executions, ill-treatment and torture, detention under inhumane conditions, the torching of houses and villages, theft and destruction of property and food supplies, disproportionate air raids and artillery shelling, and what were often random mass arrests and mass internment”.

“It was condoned at every level: political, military and legal. The reason for this was that the Netherlands wanted to defeat the Republic of Indonesia – which had declared independence on August 17, 1945 – at any cost, and was prepared to subordinate almost everything to this goal,” said the study, which cost 6.4 million euros (US$7.25 million).

The study’s findings last week caused waves in the Netherlands, more than 50 years after a sensational television interview in 1969 in which the veteran trooper Joop Hueting admitted that he and other soldiers had “committed war crimes” in the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia’s colonial name. The official Dutch line has in the past been that its forces there were involved only in isolated incidents.

The Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Photo: AFP

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