Revolution in the Dutch East Indies

Not everyone may know it now, but the Kingdom of the Netherlands was once a major power. After winning independence from Spain (the dominant military power of the day) in a very long war, the Dutch fought off the French, won wars against England and established themselves as a major player in Europe. Long a powerhouse in business and world trade, the Dutch built an empire that stretched from the Americas to South Africa to India and East Asia. It was, however, in Southeast Asia that the crown jewel of the Dutch empire rested, their largest colony by far and the one which was the most productive, contributing a huge percentage of the overall economy of the Netherlands. That colony was, of course, the Dutch East Indies, known today as the Republic of Indonesia, a vast archipelago of thousands of islands that is about as far from one end to the other as the continental United States. For more than three hundred years the Dutch East Indies belonged to the Netherlands, a princely republic and later a very business-minded, Protestant monarchy reigning over a huge territory of disparate Islamic principalities and some of the most abundant natural resources to be found anywhere in the world.

KNIL troops in Java, World War II

There were conflicts, of course, in the establishment of this colony and the occasional unrest but none of it was very serious, certainly nothing that the small but very professional Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) could not handle. An anti-Dutch nationalist movement had been on the rise, but it seemed to be dealt with easily enough and its leader, Sukarno, was captured and incarcerated. Even when World War II erupted in Europe, not much changed in the Dutch East Indies. After an heroic but futile four-day fight the Netherlands was conquered by Germany and the Dutch Royal Family was forced to flee to England. However, the stout-hearted and determined Queen Wilhelmina continued to preside over her government-in-exile and the Dutch East Indies contributed as much as possible to the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. When the United States of America placed sanctions on the Empire of Japan, including an oil embargo when America had been the primary provider of oil to the Japanese, the British Empire did the same. The Dutch government, likewise informed the Japanese that they could expect no oil from the Dutch East Indies. Their homeland was under occupation by Japan’s Nazi ally and the Dutch stressed that all of their resources were needed for their own struggle to liberate the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Japanese troops in the Dutch East Indies

Not long after, in a major offensive kicked off by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese launched an ingenious, multi-stage offensive across Southeast Asia. Despite more heroic but futile resistance, the Dutch naval forces and the Dutch colonial army was defeated and the Dutch East Indies came under Japanese occupation. All White people were immediately placed in concentration camps, as were most of the sizeable minority of mixed-race people and any natives who opposed or were expected to oppose Japanese rule were either killed or confined. The anti-Dutch dissident Sukarno was released from his prison and became a willing collaborator of the Japanese. There was talk of absorbing other surrounding territories, particularly British Malaysia, to create a “Greater Indonesia” but the Japanese had no intention of allowing the Dutch East Indies to become independent. The whole point of the invasion was to secure control for Japan of a source of resources and raw materials that no foreign power could withhold from them. It was then, only after Japan had clearly lost the war and the atomic bomb had already been dropped on Hiroshima, that Japan authorized Sukarno to declare independence. It was a final, parting shot at the hated Europeans to make a restoration of Dutch rule as difficult as possible. In that regard, it more or less worked as planned.

Sukarno

The Dutch had previously always been on friendly terms with Japan. In fact, during the long years of Japanese isolation, the Dutch were the only western power to have any contact with Japan at all. When the war was over, the Dutch asked the Japanese military to remain in place to keep order in the colony until they could return. The Japanese did stay until Allied forces arrived but they gave many of their weapons to the anti-Dutch Indonesian dissidents and thousands of Japanese stayed behind rather than return home to carry on their war against the Whites in Asia. Sukarno had also been busy, trying to set up a government of his own, growing out of a committee the Japanese had allowed him to form during the war. It was this body which declared that the Indonesian Republic would include not only the Dutch East Indies but British North Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and Portuguese Timor as well. It would have a dictatorial president and, although Sukarno wanted a secular and unitary state, he later conceded to the powerful Islamic clerics of the country to state that the new country would be based on submission to Allah and would require all Muslims to obey Shariah law (or syariah law in the local tongue).

Mohammad Hatta

There were divisions, Sukarno wanted a unitary state while his deputy, Mohammad Hatta, favored a federal system. Nonetheless, they were united in what they were against and Sukarno simplified his position and his proposed republic by basing it on five principles; Islam, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy and social justice (as he defined them of course). This, of course, will sound all too familiar to people today. You have a Marxist-socialist revolutionary, making concessions to Islam, talking about democracy which he has no intention of actually enacting, national unity but only for those of his own nationality, humanitarianism while carrying out horrific atrocities and the catch phrase so popular with today’s progressives, “social justice” which, then as now, came down to a war against anything White, western, Christian or traditional. No doubt the “social justice warriors” of today would look on the Indonesian revolutionaries with their coalition of socialists and Islamists as their beloved ideological forefathers. This was though, it must be said, also the start of a struggle within Indonesia between the more secular nationalists and the Islamic fundamentalists which is still going on today.

Queen Wilhelmina

So it was that by the time the Dutch were ready to return to their colony, Indonesia had already declared independence, already had a political platform, a flag and national anthem and even aspirations for territorial conquest. HM Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, certainly had no intention of giving an inch of this. She was extremely determined that any concession would be a betrayal of all they had fought and suffered for during the war. She wanted to fight for the full restoration of the Dutch empire and regarded Sukarno and his regime as traitors who had collaborated with foreign invaders and perpetrators of a race war. However, having just emerged from the ruin of World War II, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was hardly in a condition to make an immediate and robust response to this outbreak of revolution in the colonies. Worse, her Allies were far from united or in agreement as to what their reaction would be. The United States had, under President Roosevelt, taken a very hostile attitude to all colonial empires during the war and while it was certainly in the interests of the British who wished to maintain their own empire, also recently decimated by the Japanese in East Asia, to support the Dutch, they were in hardly better condition to offer much support. The Dutch, with a depleted, bombed-out country of their own and “friends” who were either opposed or indifferent to their reclaiming their lost empire faced a huge territory with a large population full of revolutionary fervor ready to fight them using any tactics necessary.

The Dutch were pressured then, both by the situation and their own allies, to come to some sort of a negotiated peace with the Indonesian republicans. This was not the first choice of the Queen, but it seemed the only option available. While Allied, mostly British Imperial, forces landed to disarm the Japanese and liberated the Europeans being held in concentration camps, the Indonesian revolutionaries prepared to resist them, wrongly fearing that they were determined to restore Dutch rule. In the meantime, republican officials were parceled out among the islands to enact the dictates of the revolutionary government. The local Indonesian princes mostly came under extreme pressure if not outright attack either for having collaborated with the Dutch previously or for collaborating with the Japanese more recently. Young people ran rampant, fired by the revolutionary rhetoric of the republicans, led by Sukarno who blasted the native princes for stunting their country with “feudalism” and thus allowing the Dutch to gain control and rule the islands for the last three centuries. Law and order quickly broke down and chaos ensued as different factions and different ethnic groups pursued different goals.

Flag of the Japanese sponsored PETA

There were Marxist radicals, separatists, Islamic fundamentalists and more moderate leftists all jockeying for position. The revolutionaries were, however, aided by the fact that since the Japanese had first broken Dutch rule, most did not want to see it return. Not everyone was opposed to maintaining some sort of connection with the Netherlands but a reactionary return to the former colonial regime as it was seemed completely beyond the realm of possibility. That this would be a vicious fight was made clear early on when violence broke out in Surabaya in East Java, between Indonesian republicans (along with remnants of the Islamic militia force formed by Japan, PETA) and occupying British forces on October 28, 1945. From November 10-24 this escalated to an all out battle and what would be the bloodiest single fight of the entire revolutionary war. The British won the battle but, in what would become an all too familiar pattern, were horrified by the cost and determined that the Dutch cause was hopeless. Thereafter, rather than stand by their Dutch ally, the British would likewise support the republicans in the United Nations.

The republicans began forming a more formal government, though none tended to last very long and Sukarno remained the real power and driving force of the revolutionary movement. The Dutch were convinced that they would have to come to some sort of agreement and the British brokered the Linggajati Agreement between them and the Indonesians. The agreement went into effect on November 12, 1946 and stipulated that the Dutch government would recognize republican rule over Java and Sumatra while the eastern archipelago would be retained and all would remain under the Dutch Crown. There would be a federal system for the islands with the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (RUSI) including Java and Sumatra of course as well as southern Kalimantan and the “Great East” of Sulawesi, Maluku, the Lesser Sunda Islands and West New Guinea. The revolutionaries did not ratify this agreement until March of 1947 and neither they nor the Dutch were satisfied with it when it was signed on May 25, which of course the British took as proof that it was actually perfectly fair and reasonable. It was, however, destined to fall apart very quickly.

Dutch royal troops of the first police action

Revolutionaries had been fired by radical zeal and a compromise solution was not what they had been prepared for. Within hardly a month the republicans committed numerous violations of the agreement and the Royal Dutch government, frustrated with the whole affair, decided that it would take a taste of battle to set things in order. On July 21, 1947 the Dutch launched a “police action” (“Politionele Acties” as the Dutch called it) named Operation Product. The Royal Netherlands military had to rebuild their colonial forces from scratch since they had been completely dismantled by the Japanese but, nonetheless, they fought with skill and determination. Royal Dutch troops drove the republicans out of Sumatra, then East and West Java, finally confining them to the central Yogyakarta region of the island of Java. The action had been quite successful but rather than congratulations on their victory, the Dutch were denounced by the new international community represented by the United Nations. More negotiations were organized, this time held aboard an American warship, and these resulted in the Renville Agreement, agreed to on January 17, 1948. This agreement recognized Dutch control over the territory taken by their forces but only until a vote could be held to determine whether the populace wished to remain under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands or the Indonesian republic.

Dutch military column, first police action

This time, certainly, the Dutch had more cause for discontent with the agreement than the republicans. They had fought a hard campaign and been immensely successful, only to be told their gains would likely be taken away as soon as it could be organized. Meanwhile, the revolutionaries had been knocked down hard by this defeat and seemed to be coming apart at the seams. In 1948 part of western Java broke away under the leadership of Islamic radicals, declaring itself the Indonesian Islamic State (doesn’t that sound familiar too?) or as it was more commonly known, Darul Islam. This separatist Islamic theocracy would continue to bedevil the Indonesian authorities until its founder was finally captured and promptly executed by the republicans in 1962. There were other divisions too such as one faction led by the throwback anti-colonial dissident of a bygone era Musso of the PKI and a Trotskyite faction led by Tan Malaka. In what was called the Madiun Affair, for its location in East Java, a communist insurgency broke out that called for the people to overthrow the republican government as well as the Dutch. None of these ultimately succeeded, Musso being killed and Tan Malaka later being executed by republican forces in February of 1949. However, it made the United States very nervous about the communists gaining a foothold in Indonesia and increasingly put pressure on the Dutch to make an accommodation with Sukarno who, the Americans were convinced, could be kept on the side of the non-communist western camp.

General Simon Spoor

The Royal Dutch military forces, however, were not about to give up while the work of centuries was falling into chaos. The Queen of the Netherlands was fortunate to have a very tough and talented commander of her forces in the East Indies in the person of General Simon Hendrik Spoor, a World War II veteran who had worked closely with General Douglas MacArthur and rather took the “American Caesar” as his example. Originally a colonel, Spoor was given the temporary rank of lieutenant general when he was given command of the Royal Dutch Army in the East Indies. He was a man of seemingly boundless optimism, for whom no task was too great and his first ‘police action’ against the republicans had been very successful. Many did not know, because of the immense confidence he displayed and the great care he took of his soldiers, just how much stress was heaped on the workaholic general. The only real criticism of General Spoor was his efforts to suppress news of atrocities committed by Dutch forces under his command. Such things did happen, though none were officially sanctioned of course, but these were widely used for propaganda purposes by the revolutionaries and were taken up by communist forces in the international community. They never told, of course, that these were prompted by acts of torture and mutilation carried out by the republicans against the Dutch and Dutch-allied native forces. General Spoor was simply concerned with not providing the enemy with such ammunition and protecting the integrity of the Royal Netherlands Armed Forces.

KNIL forces on parade ground

General Spoor, and the other Dutch authorities, could see the international elites aligning against them, they knew they were in an extremely difficult position but they also knew that success on their ground would counteract more of this pressure than anything else could. As such, the Dutch launched a second ‘police action’ in December of 1948 codenamed “Operation Kraai”. General Spoor had excellent intelligence on the enemy thanks to the breaking of the republicans’ secret code which revealed both their military and diplomatic plans. Once again, the focus was on Java and Sumatra, where the “head” of the revolutionary movement was located. The object was to force the republicans to accept the compromise proposed by the Kingdom of the Netherlands which would preserve the federal system and keep the East Indies under the overall reign of the Dutch Crown. The operation began with a formal announcement by the local Dutch civil authorities that, as the republicans had violated the Renville Agreement, the Netherlands forces were no longer bound by it. General Spoor launched a complex, integrated attack on the leadership centers of the revolutionary movement using land, air and airborne forces.

KNIL troops in the jungle

The republican leadership based at Yogyakarta was the primary target and General Spoor thought that the revolutionaries would throw everything they had into the fight. However, he was surprised by how little resistance they ultimately offered, quickly retreating in the face of the determined Dutch offensive. They would resort to guerilla warfare, something Spoor never wanted to consider. However, once again, the Royal Dutch military operation was well-planned and hugely successful. Yogyakarta was captured on December 19, 1948 and very soon both Sukarno and his deputy Hatta were captured and exiled to northern Sumatra or the island of Bangka. It was the second time Sukarno had been apprehended by Dutch authorities (the first being prior to the Japanese attack in World War II) and the revolutionary republic was effectively decapitated by this victorious operation. The republicans quickly cobbled together an emergency government in western Sumatra but their entire operation was in disarray, their forces were defeated and smashed and the Netherlands forces seemed to have accomplished all of their goals of the operation.

Unfortunately, and to the great frustration of Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch authorities, at this moment of triumph, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was effectively undermined by the international community, including their own allies. The British had already turned against them, recently independent Asian countries such as India aligned against them and finally the United States also condemned the Dutch military action. Needless to say the Soviet Union and Communist countries were always opposed to the Dutch and the continuation of any colonial regime. In January of 1949 the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that the Dutch give up the gains of their victory and allow the reinstatement of the republican government. Pressure was also put on the Dutch to renounce any and all sovereignty over the Indonesian archipelago by July 1, 1950 including the threat of losing Marshall Aid for the Netherlands if they did not. In effect, the UN was coming out against the compromise proposed by the Netherlands and endorsing the Dutch simply handing the Indonesian republicans everything they wanted in spite of having beaten them in the field.

Flag of the Indonesian Republic

The Dutch had little choice, in the face of the opposition of the international community, but to give in. From August 23 to November 2, 1949 talks, known as the “Round Table Conference” were held in The Hague to hammer out the details for the transfer of power between the Indonesian Republic, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Indonesian federal states established by the Dutch in the aftermath of their successful police actions. The Dutch authorities agreed to recognize the independence of the “Republic of the United States of Indonesia”, to withdraw all Dutch military forces and to the holding of elections for an Indonesian Constituent Assembly. West New Guinea, or Netherlands New Guinea, remained under Dutch control although the republicans never relented in claiming it as part of their “Greater Indonesia”. The republicans agreed to pay 4.3 billion guilders of the sizeable debt owed to The Netherlands though this was far from the total amount. On December 27, 1949 the Kingdom of the Netherlands officially transferred sovereignty to the Indonesian republic.

Queen Juliana at her inauguration

This would not, however, be presided over by Queen Wilhelmina who, despite wishing to reign until 1950, had grown increasingly ill and increasingly frustrated at the loss of the Dutch East Indies. The Queen abdicated on September 4, 1948 to be succeeded by her daughter Queen Juliana. It was left to her to formally acknowledge Indonesian independence though the Dutch still hoped to maintain a close relationship with at least the more loyal portions of their former colony. The RUSI, under its constitution at the time of independence, consisted of the Republic of Indonesia plus the fifteen “united states” established by the Dutch and which they were closest with. The Dutch government had ensured that these states would, according to the constitution, have a more equal standing with the much more heavily populated republican territories and thus could influence the new regime in a more friendly direction for the Netherlands or at least for those fifteen states. However, this was not to be as Sukarno quickly made use of his “emergency powers” to dissolve the federal system bit by bit and take control of all of these areas, incorporating them into the Republic of Indonesia as the unitary state he had wanted all along. By May of 1950 the last of these states were gone and the Republic of Indonesia stood alone as one, united, top-down government ruled from Jakarta.

One of the most famous events which led to Sukarno taking emergency authoritarian measures was an attempted coup by Captain Raymond Paul Pierre “The Turk” Westerling, a former Dutch colonial army officer and expert in anti-guerilla warfare in January of 1950. He was backed not only by Dutch loyalists but also by certain powerful Indonesians who wanted to preserve the federal system to maintain greater autonomy for the local authorities, the most notable being Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak, himself also a former officer of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL). One of the last areas of resistance was Ambon where, in April of 1950, the Republic of South Maluku was declared. The Ambonese were a rather unique ethnic group in Indonesia with many Christians and a history of friendship with the Dutch. The Ambonese had formed a large part of the mostly native KNIL. By November the authorities had succeeded in suppressing them after which 12,000 Ambonese soldiers, along with their families, were forced to flee to the Netherlands where they established a relatively short-lived government-in-exile.

Flag of Netherlands New Guinea

The only holdout then was Netherlands New Guinea which remained a Dutch colony and was intended to provide a safe haven for the Christian, pro-Dutch population, particularly the large number of mixed-race Eurasians who faced persecution at the hands of the Islamic nationalist revolutionary republicans, for either their race or, if they were Christians, for their religion. This ‘last stand’ of the Dutch in Indonesia lasted until 1962 when Indonesian military forces began to move in following the announcement that a local government would be established. Once again, although the Dutch and especially the locals in West New Guinea were prepared to defend themselves, the international community closed ranks against the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In the United States, John F. Kennedy was President, a long-time admirer of the socialist Sukarno, and he sent his brother to basically threaten the Dutch with economic catastrophe if they did not immediately surrender and abandon Netherlands New Guinea to Indonesia. The territory was handed over to the UN which duly transferred it to Indonesia. There was a plebiscite, much later, after the authorities had time to consolidate, intimidate and indoctrinate which, of course, showed a result in favor of the Republic of Indonesia. This “Act of Free Choice” was known as the “Act of No Choice” by the locals and was so flagrantly unfair that even the international community had to protest but, of course, nothing was done about it.

British troops at the Battle of Surabaya

What is most remarkable about what is now known as the Indonesian Revolution is just how successful the Dutch were yet they ultimately lost everything because of the pressure of the international community, in particular the United Nations. The whole affair revealed just how disunited the western powers were compared to the communist bloc which, while they often agreed on little between themselves, were certainly in agreement when it came to who they opposed and any western, Christian or colonial power was always to be opposed. The Dutch were sold out by their own allies. The British jumped first, believing after the Battle of Surabaya that the whole affair was hopeless, plus they shifted radically to the left immediately after the end of World War II and were determined to surrender their own empire while the United States displayed a very inconsistent and naïve policy in regard to the Dutch East Indies. They effectively backed a regime led by a man who had collaborated with Japan and the Axis powers in World War II simply because colonialism had become very unfashionable and they thought they could win over Sukarno to the side of the anti-communist countries if they backed him in supporting Indonesian independence. Not for the first time, the American government was proven completely wrong. Once done with the Netherlands, Sukarno immediately turned on his naïve sympathizers, aligned himself with the Soviet Union and became virulently anti-American.

This conflict is also much closer to us today than most realize. A leftist revolutionary and insurgent becomes a world celebrity promising “social justice” while stamping out freedom, radical Islamism makes common cause with secularists against a Christian power, what amounts to ethnic cleansing is carried out but is shrugged off by the world community because the targets are people of European or partial European ancestry. A military campaign is fought and won only to have globalist politicians say they are not allowed to win and must withdraw and allow the defeated enemy to reclaim all they had lost. Western powers back fundamentally anti-western forces because they think these can be won over with kindness only to have them turn on them in the end. Does any of this sound familiar? A better question would be; does any of this NOT sound familiar? The aftershocks are still going on today.

Osama bin Laden, he remembered, others forgot

In 1975 East Timor declared independence from Portugal and the place was immediately invaded by Indonesia. Decades of warfare ensued between the Islamic Indonesians and the mostly Christian population of East Timor. The independence of Catholic East Timor from Muslim Indonesia was cited by Osama bin Laden in his 2001 statement justifying the 9-11 terrorist attack. Often upheld as the “model” Islamic country (and Indonesia is the largest Islamic country by population in the world) the divisions that existed at the time of independence still exist today between the more secular Muslims and the more fundamentalist Muslims. As of 2011, almost half of Indonesian Muslims supported Islamic law being the law of the land in their country and abroad, about 70% believed Muslims were not responsible for the 9-11 attacks. From 2007 to 2013 attacks on religious minorities in Indonesia shot up from 91 to 220. In Aceh, where the Dutch fought a particularly fierce colonial war in the 1870’s, the province adopted total shariah law in 2001. There have been an increasing number of incidents, leaving aside the terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002 and 2005 that killed hundreds of people, showing how Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise, lashing out at Christian converts (such as in West Papua or West New Guinea), insufficiently radical Muslims and those who have been rediscovering the Hindu roots of the country.

What is certain is that life has not been a pleasant succession of improvements for Indonesia since the success of the revolutionary republicans and the end of Dutch rule. Despite being a treasure house of natural resources, most Indonesians live in or near poverty while only the top government officials enrich themselves. The government has been tyrannical more often than not, frequently violent and unstable with numerous rebellions and now a growing trend toward Islamic terrorism. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, on the other hand, with virtually no natural resources, a bombed out ruin of a country in the aftermath of World War II, managed to quickly work its way back to prosperity, despite having a lower GDP than Indonesia, having a much higher standard of living. True, Marshall Aid from the United States helped in the recovery, but Indonesia has also received a huge amount of foreign aid including a huge amount of war reparations from the Japanese which is frankly ridiculous given that the man then ruling Indonesia, Sukarno, had collaborated with the Japanese so any harm they did during their occupation was harmed he helped them to accomplish! In any event, far from the socialist paradise that was promised. The overall event does, however, provide numerous lessons which we should all be able to learn from.

Princely Profile: Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak

During the wave of anti-colonialism that swept the world in the wake of World War II, which had devastated the European colonial powers, native monarchs in these countries found themselves in an almost impossible position, trying to maintain traditional values and authorities against a population that was backed by ideological forces, usually Marxist, fundamentally opposed to all traditional institutions everywhere. Those pushing an anti-European racist narrative, because this was easier for people to understand than the nuances of socialist economic and political theories, had an easier time vilifying such monarchs who stood by the existing, pre-war power structure because they could play on the primitive drives of human nature such as envy, resentment and hatred of the alien, white-skinned Christian people while the monarchs who remained supportive of the colonial system had only reason to reply with, trying to make people understand that these white-skinned Christians had brought important positive advancements to their countries and could be worked with, in the new environment, to enact more beneficial changes than those advocating a total break. One of the monarchs faced with this unenviable situation was His Highness Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak in what is now Indonesia.

The future sultan was born Syarif Abdul Hamid Alkadrie on July 12, 1913 in Pontianak, an important trade port on the northwest coast of the island of Borneo. He had a very cosmopolitan upbringing, being raised until the age of 12 by two ladies of British nationality who taught him fluent English, his Scottish foster-mother Miss Salome Catherine Fox and Miss Edith Maud Curteis. His own ancestry was Malay-Arab and he attended Dutch colonial schools in what was then the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia) before finishing his education at the Dutch military academy in Breda, The Netherlands. Upon graduating he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army, the primary colonial military force of The Netherlands. As the son of the Sultan Syarif Muhammad of Pontianak, of the Hang Dynasty Alkadrie, he was also given instruction by native teachers for the duties he would inherit and there was religious instruction in Sunni Islam, the faith of his family and which he was to adhere to for the entirety of his life.

Prince Hamid returned to the Dutch East Indies to take up his military duties during the reign of Sultan Syarif Thaha. He had good relations with the Dutch, with other Europeans, not surprising considering his upbringing, but also a very clear understanding of the often tumultuous world of East Indies dynastic politics. His foster-mother Miss Fox died in 1933 but he continued to keep in touch with Miss Curteis. The Royal Dutch East Indies Army was mostly concerned with internal security as The Netherlands had no foreign enemies to cause any fear of invasion and the local anti-Dutch independence movement had not been very serious and was relatively easily dealt with. Their most troublesome leader, Sukarno, was arrested and to most the Dutch East Indies seemed the ideal colony, peaceful, orderly and doing a booming business in trade and oil exports. The only trouble in Asia was far to the north in China and European affairs were considered far more serious. However, even after the outbreak of World War II and the German conquest and occupation of The Netherlands, life in the Dutch East Indies largely carried on as it had before, directed by the government-in-exile in England.

All of that changed on December 7, 1941 when the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by the Empire of Japan signaled the start of a huge, very intricate but very well planned Japanese offensive throughout Southeast Asia. The whole area was relatively swiftly conquered and the Dutch East Indies were the primary target due to the vast oil reserves and other natural resources which the archipelago had. The Dutch colonial forces offered heroic but futile resistance but in the early months of 1942 the whole area was seized and occupied by the Japanese. Sukarno was set at liberty along with any other anti-Dutch dissidents to aid in the Japanese occupation and war effort. Local princes who chose to cooperate could expect no harm but the entire white population was put in internment camps. Prince Hamid was also confined to an internment camp, in Java, by the Japanese as they had good reason to expect no cooperation from him. Early in the campaign about 28 relatives of the prince were killed by the Japanese along with his other maternal figure Miss Curteis. His father and two of his brothers were killed, along with other ethnic Malays in the “Pontianak incidents” and this, along with his close relationship with the Dutch and rank in the colonial army ensured that there would be no thought of any collaboration between Prince Hamid and the Japanese.

The Prince remained interned for three years until the Empire of Japan surrendered and Allied forces landed to liberate him and his fellow captives. The Dutch, conscious of what he had endured, partly due to his friendship with them, recognized him with a promotion to the rank of colonel. On October 29, 1945 he succeeded his father as Sultan of Pontianak, taking the name Hamid II. Of course, by this time, political events in the Dutch East Indies were changing rapidly. After maintaining military rule throughout the war, once their cause was lost, the Japanese, on their way out the door as it were, tapped Sukarno to declare Indonesian independence from the Dutch Crown. There was a great deal of chaos and confusion as Indonesian rebels made attacks while Allied forces were in place, the Dutch coming in and the Japanese were still in the process of moving out.

HM Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, throughout World War II, had been adamant about restoring and maintaining the Dutch colonial empire and was not prepared to let the weakness of her country, after years of war, occupation and devastation, be taken advantage of. However, the Queen was also aware of the limitations on her long-suffering people and so was prepared to make compromises. Sultan Hamid II, being an important traditional authority figure and someone who the Dutch trusted, was right in the middle of these events as a delegate for the State of West Kalimantan in the Federal Consultative Assembly or BFO. The Dutch proposal was that the East Indies become a sort of federal republic of monarchies and states, the independent United States of Indonesia but still within the Dutch community and with the Queen of The Netherlands as sovereign. Sultan Hamid II supported this plan, preferring the federal system put forward by the Dutch and which had proven successful in Malaysia as a way to maintain traditional authorities without incessant in-fighting. Sukarno and his faction, a volatile combination of Marxists and Islamists as well as more mundane secular socialists, wanted a unitary state and a republic with no connection to The Netherlands at all and all traces of the Dutch population purged from the country.

Queen Wilhelmina with Sultan Hamid II

Sultan Hamid II, and others like him though he was probably the most prominent, knew enough about local, native, politics to see what was behind the unitary state idea of Sukarno. Rather than a federal state of power-sharing such as is still the case in the Kingdom of Malaysia, Sukarno’s unitary state would mean the domination of all by the Javanese. Sultan Hamid II, therefore, led the locals opposed to Sukarno and his republicans and as well as being the highest ranking native in the colonial army, he was also given the position of “Adjutant in the Extraordinary Service of Her Majesty the Queen of The Netherlands”, effectively the highest level of advisor to the Dutch monarch. When any agreement with Sukarno, and those more radical than him, proved hopeless, the Dutch responded with a number of military operations or “police actions” some of which, in his military capacity, Sultan Hamid II participated in.

The first such operation saw the Dutch royal forces take control of most key areas of the country, the urban centers and major ports. The second of the two largest, Operation Kraai or “Crow” saw a greater further victory with the capture of Sukarno, his deputy Mohammed Hatta and the Indonesian Republican leadership at Yogyakarta where the local Sultan, a sympathizer, had been sheltering them, at the end of 1948. Unlike the republican rebel leadership, who surrendered to the Dutch, their host, Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, remained in his palace throughout the battle and refused all efforts at reconciliation by the Dutch. Sultan Hamid II was brought in to try to mediate with his fellow prince, to win him over, but all such efforts were rebuffed. Unfortunately, for the Dutch and the counter-revolutionary locals, the very success of this operation worked against them as The Netherlands came under pressure from the United Nations to give in to the revolutionaries they had just defeated. Fearing that the Marxists in Sukarno’s coalition would make the country a Soviet satellite, United States President Harry S. Truman (Democrat, Missouri) decided to sell-out a war time ally and threatened to cut off Marshall Aid to The Netherlands if Queen Wilhelmina did not give in to the rebels and accept Indonesian independence.

There was no realistic option other than to comply though Queen Wilhelmina could not stomach such a thing, abdicating in favor of her daughter, Queen Juliana, who was left to preside over the separation of Indonesia from The Netherlands. The independence of Indonesia was de facto recognized on December 27, 1949 in Java and Sumatra and Sultan Hamid II suddenly found himself having to answer to President Sukarno, recently released from captivity yet again. The Sultan was appointed to the cabinet of the new United States of Indonesia though he was given no portfolio, it being a rather symbolic gesture as a token to the native traditional rulers. In any event, the feigned pretense of this federal system would not last long in any event as Sukarno remained committed to his unitary republic.

Capt. Ray Westerling

Sultan Hamid II could see this as well as anyone, perhaps better than most, and understood the local politics behind it. As such, he began to organize with his former fellow comrades of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army, particularly Captain Raymond Westerling, to launch an anti-Republican coup against Sukarno in Bandung and Jakarta. With elements of the old colonial forces, the Royal Netherlands Army, including the Special Forces, Dutch nationals and local counter-revolutionaries, the coup attempt was made in January of 1950 but proved to be a fiasco and fell apart by the following month. In April, Sultan Hamid II was implicated in the plot and soon enough the pretense of federalism was given up as his own state of West Kalimantan was brought under the central control of the increasingly unitary Republic of Indonesia. Sultan Hamid II endured two periods of incarceration for (false) charges of “treason” and had to endure in isolation as, when the trouble began, he had sent his wife, a prominent local lady of mostly Dutch blood but some lofty native ancestry as well, Didie van Delden, given the name and title of Sultana Maharatu Mas Makhota and their two children, a son and daughter to live in The Netherlands, where they remained.

His reign ending in 1950, Hamid II was succeeded by Syarif Abubakar as Sultan of Pontianak, though it meant little in the new regime. Former Sultan Hamid II, when not being hounded by the authorities, lived a quiet life of service and died on March 30, 1978 in Jakarta. His wife died not long ago in 2010 and his son, Pangeran (Prince) Syarif Max Yusuf Alkadrie lives in The Netherlands. The legacy of Sultan Hamid II in Indonesia has been controversial, first being portrayed as a villain and a traitor as is always the case with the opponents of successful revolutions. Benedict Arnold would be an American hero if the British had won the war, as I often point out. However, he does have one lasting legacy even if few people in modern Indonesia know about it which is that it was Sultan Hamid II who designed the “Garuda Pancasila”, the national emblem of Indonesia, based on the early Hindu legends of the islands, which was adopted in 1950.

So, every time a modern Indonesian sees that insignia, they are seeing something designed by a man, no less patriotic than others, but a prince who had a very different view on how the country should have been organized. Today the legacy of the sultan is somewhat more moderate and less unfavorable as the family has worked to get alongside the powers-that-be and historians have come forward with an alternate view of the man as someone who was not opposed to the Revolution really but simply had a different vision for how the independent Indonesia should be organized, federal rather than unitary, friendly with the Dutch rather than hostile and so on. From what I have been able to gather, it seems his reputation is these days improving.

How Indonesia Became a Republic

The fate of modern Indonesia was, like so many countries, decided during the Second World War. Prior to the conflict, Indonesia was a colony of the Kingdom of the Netherlands known as the Dutch East Indies. It had grown in importance under the Dutch Crown, first as a center of trade and later as a major oil producer after the Dutch discovered this vast natural resource and set up the necessary infrastructure to extract and export it around the world. As long as they did not threaten the colonial authorities, the Dutch mostly left the native principalities alone, allowing them to carry on in a cultural capacity and to deal with certain legal issues on a very local level. There had been some anti-colonial agitation, some of it nationalist, some of it Islamic in motivation, but the professional Dutch colonial army had little trouble dealing with it. To most observers the Dutch East Indies seemed like a model colony, as good as or better than most other European colonies around the world at the time. There was even a Volksraad or “People’s Council” made up of Indonesians which was established by the Dutch government in 1918 to provide local political representation. Even when World War II broke out in Europe and the Netherlands fell under German occupation, life in the Dutch East Indies went on much like before under the direction of Queen Wilhelmina and her government-in-exile in England. However, all of that changed in 1941.

President Roosevelt

In order to put pressure on the Empire of Japan, whose forces were engaged in conflict with the Republic of China, the United States placed an oil embargo (along with other vital resources and a freezing of all Japanese assets) on the island nation. Japan had purchased most of its oil from the United States but, so that alternative sources could not be obtained in the Dutch East Indies or Malaysia, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged Great Britain and the Netherlands to join in the embargo as well. Both countries were eager to stay in the good graces of the United States for the assistance the American government was already sending them in their fight against the Germans and in hope that America would join the fight and bring its massive industrial, economic and military strength against Germany, the Churchill government and the Dutch government-in-exile quickly agreed to join in the boycott of Japan. As the Empire of Japan was placed in the position of submitting to American demands for a total withdrawal from China or to fight and take the resources they needed by force, the Dutch East Indies became a target. With its vast natural resources and limited defenses, it was an inviting one. With the homeland under occupation, there would be little the Dutch government-in-exile could do to further defend the East Indies in the event of an attack.

The decision was made in Tokyo to fight and the course of East Asian history was changed forever when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. What followed was a land, sea and air version of “lightning war” done the Japanese way. The Philippines were attacked, the British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore came under immediate attack as well. Operating from bases in French Indochina, the Japanese quickly brought Southeast Asia under their control. The Dutch East Indies also came under immediate attack. As an archipelago, everything depended on the naval battle. The land forces of the Dutch colonial army were tough and determined but without naval mastery they would be isolated and unable to coordinate or keep themselves supplied. Still, they fought the invaders as best they could while another battle waged in the waters surrounding them. The Dutch resisted admirably, their tiny flotilla of submarines actually doing considerable damage to the Japanese fleet but the main fleet engagement proved disastrous. The Allies, hastily assembled, failed to coordinate properly and were soundly defeated by the Imperial Japanese Navy using the classic tactics of Britain’s Admiral Nelson.

General Hitoshi Imamura

After the naval defeat, the total Japanese conquest and occupation of the Dutch East Indies became inevitable and the island chain quickly fell to Japanese control. However, the Japanese had no clear plan about what to do with Indonesia once they had taken it. At first, as in other countries, the Japanese sought out nationalist, anti-European leaders to seek their collaboration. Some of these nationalist forces fought on against the Japanese just as they had the Dutch but others collaborated such as Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta. However, this was a result of the local Japanese commander operating on his own authority rather than based on a clear policy from the government in Tokyo. Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura released Sukarno from prison and, while making no promises regarding Indonesian independence, said that the occupation would go better if the locals learned to speak Japanese. Sukarno went to work at this and began organizing pro-independence forces in cooperation with the Japanese. However, not all Japanese were impressed by the way Imamura was running things and sent complaints up the chain of command. The result was an investigation which showed that Imamura was keeping order with only a minimum force and so advised Prime Minister Tojo and the Chief of Staff to allow him to continue. His policies were allowed to continue and he was even given command of an army group in the hope that he could send assistance to the beleaguered defenders of Guadalcanal.

The fate of Indonesia, however, was certainly not something that had been decided at that point. When Japan hosted the leaders of The Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Manchuria and the pro-Japanese government of China at the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere conference Sukarno was noticeably absent as were any leaders from Indochina where Japan was allowing the French colonial regime (answerable to Vichy) to remain in charge. Kenryo Sato, chief of the Army Affairs Bureau, said this was because Prime Minister Tojo was reluctant to see Japan give up control of the vast resources of Indonesia, saying that the locals were not “quite ready to handle all that treasure”. This would not be surprising given how, particular in the war situation, Japan vitally needed those resources. Even without it, Sukarno was working in collaboration with the Japanese and there was no shortage of talk and speculation about what the future might hold in the event of a Japanese victory. One idea was to merge Malaysia (minus the border territories handed over to Thailand) with the East Indies to create a “Greater Indonesia”. Sukarno, of course, presumed he would be in authority over such an entity.

Indonesian Homeland Defense Volunteer Army

None of this boded well for the cause of monarchy in the East Indies. The Dutch had taken a casual attitude toward the local princes. Coming from a constitutional monarchy themselves, they had no problem with the local princes as long as they caused the Dutch no trouble and stayed out of politics above the most local level. Such a situation could have endured under the Japanese were it not for the person of Sukarno. He detested all things traditionally Indonesian and was a very anti-capitalist, pro-egalitarian socialist. Although he was perfectly willing to make use of religion as a tool against the Dutch (just as he was willing to make use of the Japanese if it could aid his cause) he was himself no devout Muslim but an ardent secularist. He despised the native monarchies of Indonesia, blaming them and what he termed as “feudalism” for allowing Dutch colonial rule to ever take hold in the first place. Any future for Indonesia with him in charge was a future that would have no place for the traditional monarchies of the region.

Sukarno established a militia force allied with Japan and helped organize a huge force of Indonesian laborers to build, to clear land and to gather resources for the Japanese war effort. Not everyone in the Japanese leadership trusted him but he seemed the only option to work with and none could complain about how the occupation was going. As the war dragged on and the situation became increasingly worse for Japan, there was also more talk about independence to keep Indonesia on side. By the end of 1944 Japanese Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso promised Sukarno that independence would come but would not set a definite timeline. The Japanese military authorities began to allow the establishment of an Indonesian government, under Sukarno, but Sukarno himself was not given the green light to declare independence until the summer of 1945. He was actually brought to Tokyo, heaped with praise and honors and told he had the full blessing of Japan to establish an independent Indonesia but this was not until after the first atomic bomb had been dropped and negotiations for surrender were under way. Of course, Sukarno was not told about this at the time and did not learn about it until after he returned to Indonesia and was informed by some of his followers who heard about it from an Allied broadcast on a hidden radio.

Sukarno declaring independence

Sukarno was, given this, rather reluctant to declare independence for feat of how the Allies would react given that they had just won the war. In fact, he had to be practically forced to make the declaration. However, his reluctance was rather pathetic as he had already collaborated as closely as anyone could, even more than some leaders whose countries actually were given their independence by Japan, and so he should have been just as “tainted” as other leaders like the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai, in fact even more so since the Vietnamese Emperor collaborated with the Japanese for only a few months in 1945 between the time that the Japanese removed the French administration and their final surrender. In any event, Sukarno did declare independence and no one at the time paid any attention other than the Japanese authorities. The Dutch actually requested that the Imperial Japanese Army stay in place in Indonesia rather than be surrendered and repatriated to Japan until their own colonial forces could return. The British did something similar in southern Vietnam which is the only reason South Vietnam remained free of communist control post-war. Unfortunately, unlike in Vietnam, the Japanese refused to cooperate and a few thousand even stayed in Indonesia to fight for independence under Sukarno. Of course, the fact that he would have spent the war in prison rather than rising to a position of national leadership thanks to the Japanese, and in spite of the fact that they basically trained the hard core of the army he would lead against the Dutch in the war for independence, Sukarno still had the audacity to demand (and receive) more than a billion dollars in compensation from Japan for all that Indonesia had suffered under their occupation -an occupation he fully endorsed and collaborated with.

However, as it turned out, Sukarno did not need to be too worried about how his collaboration would look to the Allied powers because, ultimately, the only Allied power whose approval mattered was the United States but we will come to that in a moment. The Netherlands certainly did not recognize his declaration of independence and were soon returning to reestablish control of Indonesia. Many Dutch people and certainly Queen Wilhelmina herself, were full of righteous indignation over the whole affair. They viewed the entire invasion, at a time when the homeland was occupied and in a fight for its survival, as a stab in the back and had not forgotten the extreme misery suffered by the Dutch people who had been living in Indonesia with many suffering horrifically at the hands of Sukarno’s followers who took sadistic glee in tormenting their former rulers when the Dutch were helpless and the Indonesians were backed up by the Imperial Japanese Army. For Queen Wilhelmina, there was no debate on the subject; the Dutch Crown would be restored but even after all that had happened, she was willing to grant full self-government to a proposed “United States of Indonesia”. When Sukarno and his party rejected this, the Dutch Queen determined to go to war and deal with the nationalists as both rebels and collaborators.

Queen Wilhelmina

This would not, in most cases, have included the Indonesian principalities. Their suffering came entirely at the hands of Sukarno who was as anti-monarchy as one could be and he made no secret of that with the basis of his government being a sort of pan-Indonesian nationalism, democracy (under his control of course) and Marxist style socialism. When he gained power and where and when he had the ability he carried out a horrific sort of “cultural revolution” all his own. He called this a campaign for “social justice” but it was simply the sort of repression seen in leftist revolutions all over the world with the traditional elites and princes being persecuted or killed off. When the Dutch launched a military campaign to regain control of Indonesia, some of the local princes tried to stay out of it while others tried to join the revolution and so most ended up being punished by one side or the other and some by both. The princely states were wiped out in the course of the conflict or in the immediate aftermath in the usual round of “land reforms” which meant the confiscation of royal estates and princes and aristocrats being punished in show-trials meant to display the egalitarianism of the Sukarno regime.

It must be said, in all fairness, that to an extent the native monarchies made their cause an almost hopeless one because of their lack of unity. There were a large number of them, many had conflicting territorial claims and a great many had disputed successions. In fact, many had succession disputes that went back hundreds of years and which are still around today. Even during World War II and the revolution there were some that were still carrying on private little wars of their own against royal rivals to reclaim a certain state or overthrow some other branch of the royal family in question. Often, third parties, whether the Japanese, Dutch or native republicans, found it all a disorienting mess that it was better to just ignore or sweep away. Sukarno largely swept them away, though some who supported him sufficiently were allowed to survive and eventually some of the princely states were recognized by the Indonesian government in less oppressive times. That the country overall would be a republic was a forgone conclusion, at least so long as Sukarno won his war for independence against the Dutch.

Queen Juliana

What was extremely frustrating to at least some people in the Netherlands, and certainly to Queen Wilhelmina, was that the Dutch practically won the war. Full of understandable anger over all that had happened to the Dutch in Indonesia, they fought the war with zeal and tenacity. In virtually every major engagement the Dutch military forces were victorious, almost every operation was successful and even Sukarno himself was, at one point, taken prisoner by the Dutch. The communists even came out to try to take advantage of the chaos and seize power but they were defeated as well. Unfortunately, at this point of victory, the Netherlands was undercut by its former wartime ally; the United States. The Truman administration basically ordered the Netherlands to give up their victory and threatened to cut off Marshall Aid to the war torn country if the Dutch did not desist in all military operations in Indonesia. This, combined with growing complaints at home by the wealthy elites who opposed the war, forced the Dutch to give in. Queen Wilhelmina, exhausted and embittered, abdicated in favor of her daughter Queen Juliana. The new Queen recognized the independence of the Indonesian Republic the following year. It was an economic disaster for the Netherlands and a social one as well as the entire Dutch population of the archipelago (as well as many Indonesians) were deported back to the Netherlands, many of whom had never even visited the country.

Some of the Dutch and pro-Dutch forces tried to hold on in Eastern New Guinea, declaring it a separate colony as Netherlands New Guinea but the Sukarno regime claimed the territory of course and sent in military forces to seize it. These were defeated by Dutch troops and supportive natives. However, once again, a liberal American administration came to the rescue when President Kennedy (a long-time admirer of Sukarno) sent his brother Robert to the Netherlands to brow-beat the Dutch into abandoning West New Guinea, which took shape after an agreement signed in 1962. In the aftermath, Sukarno became even more vociferous in his anti-western rhetoric, first opposing the British in Malaysia, drawing closer to Communist China and the Soviet Union and then finally becoming more openly anti-American. He even withdrew from the UN for a time when America supported Malaysia taking a seat on the Security Council. About the only monarchy the Republic of Indonesia has remained on consistently good terms with has been Japan. Indonesia has been largest recipient of Japanese investment and charity and has been largely economically dependent on Japan ever since independence.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the aftermath of a failed coup that still managed to see Sukarno removed from power with America backing his successor Suharto who led the country until 1998. Some local monarchies still exist in a ceremonial capacity with their status recognized by the government (though they have no official position) while others have been swept away. Despite being virtually irrelevant in an overall republican system, plenty of the old titles are still being fought over by feuding claimants. Indonesia itself, despite its vast wealth in resources, has remained far from prosperous, peaceful or stable with various minor factions, some driven by political ideology, others by religion, continuing to cause trouble. What would seem to be most in order for the cause of monarchy in Indonesia would be some recognized judicial body to sort out royal claims and a greater political unity amongst the various princely families. Some such organizations already exist but they need to be mobilized for political action. This could then push for a conversion from republicanism to monarchy on a national scale with Malaysia providing an example for a sort of federal system that could work in Indonesia.

Royal Wedding in Indonesia

Jakarta royals tie the knot.