A Revolution Delayed: The Indonesian Republic

and the Netherlands Indies, August-November 1945

ROBERT CRIBB

In the continuing debate on the relative importance of diplomacy and armed struggle
in the outcome of the Indonesian national revolution (1945-49), two periods are
acknowledged as crucial. They fall, as one might expect, at the beginning and end of the
revolution. Whereas, however, the protagonists of diplomacy and armed struggle vie over
credit for the Republic's victory in 1949, they tend to seek to avoid blame for the events of
late 1945, for the fact that victory and international recognition did not come along
with or soon after the declaration of independence. For, although the Republic laid its claim
to existence in August 1945, it was not until the middle of November that it began to engage
seriously in diplomatic or military struggle with its principal challenger, the Dutch. The
revolution was fought during the years 1946-49 as a more or less conventional international
conflict, in which both sides employed a mix of diplomacy and armed struggle, but this
was not the case before December 1945; indeed, the early months of the revolution were
striking for the lack of direct contact of any kind between the two main parties to the
dispute. This paper will not address the speculative question of whether the revolution might
have reached a speedier, or a different, conclusion had the Republic adopted different policies
during its first three months. Rather, it will attempt to explain that perplexing delay in the
effective start of the war of independence, a delay which has often given rise to allegations
of lack of will and initiative on the part of the Republic's leaders.
The delay was initially a consequence of the overwhelming weakness of both the
incipient Republic of Indonesia and the renascent Netherlands Indies at the outset of the
revolution, which made not only organized fighting but also serious negotiation an
impossibility. To begin with, the two sides lacked even the technical facilities to contact
each other. The policies, however, which both sides adopted to circumvent the effects of
this weakness tended, paradoxically, to prolong it and thus to postpone the eventual
confrontation. In particular, these policies involved attempting to make use of two outside
forces, the Japanese and the British, whose organization and facilities gave them the
power to influence events. Although building up a capacity to fight and negotiate was
recognized as important by Indonesian and Netherlands Indies leaders, they concentrated
on seeking to manoeuvre first the Japanese and then the British into policies favourable to
their respective causes. While this policy did ensure the survival of the new-born
Republic and the born-again colonial government, it had a cost. That cost was the need to
postpone and limit the building of a state apparatus in order not to appear able to dispense
with the assistance of the greater powers. The delay lasted some months, ending
gradually as it became apparent that neither the Japanese nor the British were willing or
able to fight other people's wars. From approximately mid-November 1945, the revolution
began to be ought as a war between two quasi-states, each controlling large stretches of territory,
commanding its own military, political and administrative structures, and conducting its
own foreign relations. In this form the revolution continued until December 1949, and both
sides came to regret the delays of late 1945.
When Japanese troops conquered the Indonesian archipelago in early 1942, Dutch
colonialists and Indonesian nationalists were united in believing that the ensuing occupaion
would be brief. The Dutch were generally convinced that the force of Allied arms would
soon drive out the invaders and restore the old colonial order, while the nationalists
believed that the Japanese would grant independence to Indonesia, either as a matter of
principle in line with their professed commitment to East Asian solidarity or as a result of
political necessity. Although the occupation lasted considerably longer than most
Indonesians or Dutch had originally expected, the assumptions made by either group in
1942 about how the Japanese occupation would end remained essentially unchanged in mid-
1945 as the war's end approached.
With the Japanese military advance stemmed on all fronts as early as 1943, and with
Allied forces pressing forward from the south, the east and the west, the Netherlands
Indies government-in-exile in Australia formed the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration
(NICA), a militarized administrative contingent attached to Allied forces on the Pacific
front line, with the task of conducting administration in the newly recaptured territories.
As Allied troops entered West New Guinea and other regions of eastern Indonesia, NICA
officers were on the spot to restore Dutch authority and it was planned that the rest of the
country would be reoccupied in a similar fashion.' Over the same period the Japanese,
who had already granted a form of independence to Burma and the Philippines, made a
series of concessions which pointed generally in the direction of Indonesian independence.
These included the appointment of Indonesians to increasingly senior administrative posts
and the formation of an Indonesian armed force, the PETA (Pembela Tanah Air,
Defenders of the Homeland), officered by Indonesians up to battalion level.'- As the Allies
advanced through Burma and the Pacific, concessions towards independence came at a
steadily faster pace, and there seemed little doubt to the nationalists that independence
would reach the country before the Allies did. Thus, in September 1944, the Japanese
prime minister Koiso officially announced that Indonesia would indeed be granted
independence in the near future. Then, in May 1945, the military administration on Java
established the Badan Penyelidik Usaha Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia (Body
to Investigate Measures for the Preparation of Indonesian Independence), or BPKI,
consisting of sixty-two delegates from most parts of the archipelago, though
predominantly from Java. In a series of sessions in May, June and July the BPKI drafted a
constitution for independent Indonesia. Meanwhile, the formal grant of independence was
set for 9 September 1945; then, after the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima,
Sukarno and Hatta were summoned to Dalat in Vietnam to be told on I t August that
independence would be granted on the 24th, only to find soon after their return to Java
that the Japanese had surrendered on 14 August and all preparations for
independence were suspended.'
Although the Japanese had surrendered, both the Indonesians and the Allies
continued to see them as the determining force in the future of the archipelago. The Allies
gave to the Japanese responsibility for maintaining law, order and the political status quo in
the occupied territories and, although there was considerable doubt in Allied circles as to the
Japanese willingness to obey these orders, few doubted their capacity to carry them out.
Allied information on Indonesia was very scanty. During the war the whole of the former
Netherlands Indies, with the exception of Sumatra, had been within MacArthur's South
West Pacific Area (SWPA). As the war drew towards its end, however, MacArthur preferred
to concentrate his troops on the final drive for Japan, and the United States in general
wished to be free of the likely political difficulties involved in occupying former European
colonies in South-east Asia. The Americans were able, therefore, to arrange the transfer of
the remainder of Indonesia, together with Thailand and southern Indochina, to
Mountbatten's largely British South East Asia Command (SEAC). This took place on 15
August, one day after the surrender.'
There were virtually no effective Allied intelligence operations in Indonesia during the
occupation and few of the SWPA files on Indonesia were transferred to SEAC, so that the
British had little inkling of political developments in the archipelago during the war. They
heard radio broadcasts from Indonesia on 17 August announcing that a Republic had
been declared, but Mountbatten apparently assumed that this was the puppet Republic
which the Japanese had been planning before the surrender and he simply radioed
instructions to the Japanese to dissolve it. An Allied reconnaissance team was parachuted into
Jakarta on 8 September 1945, but its radio equipment was damaged in the drop and it was
unable to report to Mountbatten on the situation in the city.' Only from 15 September,
therefore, a month after the declaration of independence, when H.M.S. Cumberland
arrived in Jakarta Bay under the command of Rear-Admiral Patterson with an advance
guard of Seaforth Highlanders to accept the Japanese surrender and begin the official
reoccupation, did reliable information on the situation begin to flow to Nlountbatten's
headquarters in Kandy.'"
In the main, therefore, British policy was guided by the pre-war belief, assiduously
encouraged by the Dutch during the war, that the Indonesians were a peaceful folk wanting
nothing more than the fatherly guidance of Dutch colonial rule.' Mountbatten, thus,
expected neither political difficulties nor serious problems of law and order, and, being short
of men and transport and more interested in any case in re-establishing Britain's authority
in her own colonies and in Thailand, he placed a low priority on occupying Indonesia.
He was aware, on the other hand, that a prolonged interregnum might lead to a breakdown
of law and order even in the most peaceful of colonies, and he was therefore careful not to
allow any partial takeover of authority by the Allies to infringe the legal responsibility of
the Japanese for maintaining law and order in the country in the interim. He instructed all
Allied prisoners-of-war and internees (APWI) in Indonesia to remain in their camps until
formally relieved by Allied troops and he ordered RAPWI (Recovery of Allied
Prisoners-of-War and Internees) teams who parachuted into various parts of Indonesia
to have no more to do with the Japanese than was necessary to assist the prisoners and gather
useful intelligence. Thus Allied policy began with a shying away from administrative
responsibility.
The Indonesian nationalists were of course aware of the Allies as a serious obstacle to
their plans long before the Allies were aware of them. Through Dutch radio broadcasts
from Australia during the war, they not only knew of Dutch ambitions to restore the
colonial order in Indonesia, but had discovered that the Dutch intended, as one of their first
actions on retaking Indonesia, to reckon with those Indonesians who had co-operated with
the Japanese, which amounted in fact to virtually the entire nationalist movement. The
defeat of the Japanese was both a boost to the position of the Allies and a measure of their
strength. On Java, however, the Japanese remained in power and it was they who
represented the most direct obstacle to nationalist action. The problem for the nationalists
was to know how far the Japanese would go in carrying out their instructions to maintain
law, order and the political status quo. Amongst the Japanese there were some officers with
a certain sympathy for Indonesian nationalism, or who at least judged that it was not in the
long-term interests of Japanese troops in Indonesia, especially on Java, if they opposed a
popular uprising. Such officers were prepared to argue that the surrender terms simply
obliged them not to intervene to alter the status quo, or that responsibility for the civil
administration had already been transferred to the Indonesians and what they did with it was
their own affair. 8 No one seriously imagined, however, that the Allies would be happy with
these interpretations and the Allies had made it clear that they would regard failure to
obey the terms of the surrender as a war crime. Therefore, although the nationalists
could count on some room to manoeuvre, it was not clear just how wide or narrow that room
was. In nationalist circles in Jakarta, clandestine debate began immediately over the
possibility of a unilateral declaration of independence, and it was only when a group of
pemuda (youth) convinced Sukarno and Hatta that a revolution would break out whether or
not they were prepared to lead it, and reinforced their point by kidnapping and detaining
the two leaders for a day, that the leaders agreed to move in order to prevent a disorderly
outbreak which would clearly oblige the Japanese to intervene. Independence was
declared in the yard of Sukarno's house in Jakarta on 17 August 1945. 9
It is difficult in retrospect to appreciate the utter powerlessness of the new Republic of
Indonesia. It controlled no territory, it had no army and no administrative corps, and its
leaders, although politically experienced, had only the barest of political organizations to
back them. They expected, moreover, an occupation army of victorious Allies to arrive
within a few days to take over from the defeated though still powerful Japanese. The
declaration of independence, however, was the nationalist movement's first definitive
benchmark for progress; everything which had been achieved before it had depended in
the last instance on the whim and policy of the colonial power. The declaration was a point
of no return, or at least a point from which return could only mean abject and total failure and
the probable political extinction of those most closely involved. The declaration of
independence changed the priorities of the nationalist movement: the preservation of the
Republic, rather than the strengthening of the movement or its ideological purity, became the
principal concern. The fragility of the Republican state meant that emphasis had to be laid on
day-to-day survival rather than on the inevitability of the nationalist victory in the long
term. Flexibility of goals was lost, for what had been claimed could not easily be given
up, but flexibility of tactics had become more important than ever.
Totally lacking the usual technical apparatus of government, the Republic
depended for its immediate survival on manipulating powers greater than it into leaving it
be. This manipulation, however, developed its own momentum and internal logic and in fact
hampered the development of the Republican state apparatus. The first concern of the
Republic was to avoid giving the Japanese any reason to act against it. That the Japanese
were unwilling to take chances was indicated by the fact that they quietly disarmed most
of the FETA units on Java on 19 August. The Republic itself was still not much more than
the handiwork of a small number of nationalist politicians and Jakarta pemuda, and the
Japanese, with two or three battalions of regular soldiers in the city, could readily have
arrested a couple of dozen key figures and issued a military ordinance banning the Republic. 10
An equally serious risk from the point of view of the Republican leaders was that popular
unrest might break out, leading the Japanese to intervene to restore law and order and to
sweep away the Republic in the process. The new Republic's first public announcements,
therefore, stressed the need for peace and order and assured the Indonesian people that the
takeover of power from the Japanese was in good hands. The declaration of
independence itself said soothingly, 'Matters concerning the transfer of power
etc. will be carried out in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time';
Sukarno and his colleagues had vetoed a suggestion from the pemuda that the
declaration say, 'AU existing government organs must be seized by the people from the
foreigners who still occupy them'." On 18 August, Sukarno addressed the Indonesian
people:
It is hereby announced that the setting up of a free Indonesia, which is desired by the whole
people, is now being carefully undertaken. Various groups which have accepted their responsibility
to the people are co-operating in this endeavour. Everything necessary for the establishment of the
Republik Indonesia is being looked after and will he completed shortly. It is hoped that the Indonesian
people at all levels of society will be peaceful, calm and prepared, and will maintain firm discipline.''
It was necessary, however, to manage the Republic in such a way that it did not
impinge on the formal authority of the Japanese. The 'setting up of a free Indonesia' to
which Sukarno referred on 18 August was in fact little more than a shuffling of individuals
and constitutional forms by a small group of nationalist politicians in Jakarta. A
constitution was adopted and Sukarno and Hatta were elected President and Vice-
President on 18 August. The PPKI changed its name to KNI (Kornite National Indonesia,
Indonesian National Committee) and then reappointed itself to an expanded representative
body, the KNIP (KNI Pusat, Central KNI). It approved a division of the country into eight
provinces, distributed responsibilities amongst various yet-to-be-formed ministries and
finally discussed sending Indonesian representatives to the San Francisco Conference."
All this was done without in any way increasing the power of the Republic to govern. The
provinces and ministries formed on 19 August remained without heads, let alone bodies, for
more than two weeks. On 23 August, moreover, in a sweeping act of administrative
decentralization with few parallels in history, the centre abdicated responsibility for
virtually all regional and local affairs to local KNI's, though only the barest of guidelines
was given as to how these KNI's should be formed or how they should operate.i 4 Rather
than taking over government offices, the Republic concentrated on winning the personal
allegiance of government officials while leaving the Japanese in formal control. Even the
cabinet, finally sworn in on 31 August, did not meet for another three weeks. The
Republic was thus developing neither by taking over the apparatus of the Japanese military
administration, nor as a political and administrative structure distinct from it, but rather as a
state of mind within it.
The looming presence of the Allies gave an extra urgency to this distancing from the
Japanese. Although preserving the Republic from destruction at the hands of the Japanese was
the most urgent of the tasks facing Sukarno and his colleagues, in the longer term it was
acceptance or rejection by the Allies which would determine the survival or disappearance of
the Republic. From the Dutch there was no question of acceptance. The Dutch, however,
having been defeated ignominiously in Europe in 1940 and in Indonesia in 1942 and only
recently liberated from German occupation, were seen with some accuracy as a not very
powerful appendage of the Allies, dependent in the short term on the help of other
powers to regain control of their former colony. The Americans on the other hand had laid
considerable emphasis during the war on the idea of self-determination in general and on
the principles of the Atlantic Charter in particular, and it was largely by appealing to these
principles, and by drawing parallels, with the American Revolution, that the Republic hoped
to gain American recognition as the representative of the legitimate national aspirations of
the Indonesian people. The First World War had been followed by a
comprehensive redrawing of the political boundaries of Europe and these revisions had
tended to work in favour of nation states. It was therefore not unreasonable for
Indonesian nationalists to hope that a similar redrawing of boundaries after the
Second World War would be in their favour.
In the second half of 1945, conditions had become less favourable to these hopes, for
the Americans had rid themselves with some agility of their potentially embarrassing
responsibility in Indonesia, while the British who replaced them had no anti-colonial
reputation and were not likely to be impressed by comparisons between Sukarno and
George Washington. Nonetheless, the Republic's strategy remained one of going over the
heads of the Dutch to appeal directly to the Allies for recognition. To make the Republic's
claims credible in the political climate of 1945, it was necessary before all else to
demonstrate freedom from association with Japanese fascism. Given that Sukarno, Plana
and virtually all the Republican leadership had worked with the Japanese right up until
the surrender, this was no easy task, especially since the Japanese were still on the spot to
take offence at any denunciation of their rule. While doing nothing, therefore, to
antagonize the Japanese, the Republican leaders did what they could to distance
themselves from the military administration.
The Republic's policy of not impinging on the formal authority of the Japanese of
course fitted neatly with a policy of distancing itself from them. It emerged most clearly in
the Republic's attitude to the question of military organization. On 19 August, apparently
unaware of the Japanese moves to disarm the PETA, the KNI actually requested the
Japanese to dissolve it, for they expected that it would be irredeemably tainted by Japanese
militarism in the eyes of the Allies. The government then deliberately decided not to form
an army which might be seen by the Allies either as a hostile gesture or as a continuation
of the Japanese army. Instead, it created on 20 August an armed Badan Keamanan
Rakval (People's Security Organization), or BKR, tucked away as a branch of a
charitable organization for war victims. Although a central headquarters existed,
responsibility for BKR activities was quickly devolved to the local KNI's and was
exercised in practice by local commanders." Sukarno's first cabinet, moreover, contained
no ministry of defence or security.
The strongly ideological character of the Republic was not simply a product of the
attempt to accommodate the Japanese and Allies. Sukarno, Hatta and most of the
nationalist leaders had little experience of government administration. Their
organizational experience was derived from the rather different world of the
nationalist movement and the professions, and they felt neither comfortable or especially
capable in that field. Reliance on ideology and rhetoric on the other hand was cheap
politically for Sukarno and his colleagues, being less demanding of time and effort and less
dangerous in terms of the short-term internal strains it might generate within the Republic
than an attempt to build up the state. This strategy was also ideologically attractive, for it
expressed a confidence in the ability of the Indonesian people to govern themselves at
every level, without the persistent and pervasive intervention which had been characteristic
of Dutch rule. It corresponded, moreover, with a belief amongst the population that
independence meant a lifting of the numerous constraints of government. And, to an
important degree, it safeguarded the position of the existing Republican leaders by
denying potential rivals, be they military or bureaucratic, a power base close to the centre.
Ideology, after all, was what the nationalist leaders were good at and while the Republic
remained largely an ideological entity their position was safe from military or
bureaucratic challenge.
The Dutch for their part were in no position to resume their colonial domination of
Indonesia. The NICA was geared to the gradual reoccupation of the archipelago
in the wake of advancing Allied troops and its officials were far too few and too
inexperienced to take over at short notice where the colonial government had left off in
1942. As a matter of official policy, moreover, virtually all the pre-war colonial officials
had stayed on in Indonesia when the Japanese arrived in 1942, and of these somewhere
between one and two thirds failed to survive the internment camps. Many of the survivors
were so weakened physically or mentally by their experiences that they could not be
usefully employed before they had spent time recuperating in the Netherlands or Australia.
The Dutch, moreover, had very few military forces with which to enforce their claim to
sovereignty. Like the civil administration, the former colonial army (KNIL) had suffered
badly during the war. Some men were in a fit state to be formed within weeks of the
surrender into new battalions in Japan and Thailand, where they had been taken as labour,
but even the full strength of the prewar KNIL, which had operated primarily as a
militarized police force, was unlikely to be sufficient to reoccupy all of Indonesia.
Further troops were being trained in the Netherlands to assist, but it took some time to
prepare them for military service in the tropics and to find shipping to bring them to
South-east Asia.''
In the meantime, the Netherlands Indies based its claims to recognition as the
government of the archipelago on documents only a little less flimsy than the Atlantic Charter.
Under the series of Allied agreements reached in preparation for the surrender, notably
the Potsdam Agreement of July 1945, the British were obliged to accept the Japanese
surrender in Indonesia, to take charge of the Japanese armed forces there and prepare
for their repatriation to Japan, to recover and assist the APWI, and to prepare for a
return to civil government. On 24 August 1945, moreover, the British had signed with
the Dutch a Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs Agreement which largely copied an earlier
Dutch-American agreement governing the relationship between Allied military officers and
NICA officials close to the front line. The essence of the Dutch argument was that these
two agreements obliged the British to take the necessary steps to restore Dutch authority
in Indonesia as a final part of the common war effort to which the Dutch had already
contributed.' 7 Like the Republic with its appeal to the Atlantic Charter, the Dutch chose
in time of weakness to stress what they saw as the ideological justice of their case, rather
than their capacity to enforce their rights.
Both the Indonesian Republic and the Netherlands Indies, however, discovered in the
second month after the declaration of independence that ideological
considerations came rather low on the British scale of priorities. Patterson's reports from
Jakarta in mid-September and those from his counterparts in other regions made it clear
to the British that the reoccupation of Indonesia would not only be difficult but was
likely to bring the British into a host of conflicting commitments. The British had faced a
brutal civil war in Greece a few months earlier, precipitated by the landing of British
troops, and this experience haunted their preparations for Indonesia.'' Although
Mountbatten immediately appointed an experienced army officer, Lt.-Gen. Sir Philip
Christison, to take over responsibility for the operation in Indonesia from the elderly
Admiral Patterson, the British were concerned above all to avoid having to fight. Their
original intention had clearly been to restore the Dutch to Indonesia, and most British
civil and military officials wished the Dutch well.' 9 Neither the British government nor
Mountbatten, however, was willing to fight a colonial war on behalf of the Dutch.
Although most parts of Indonesia were still relatively peaceful in mid-September, there
was little doubt of the potential for a ferocious struggle.
In attempting to make their way through this tangle of obligations and difficulties, the
British focused on the issue of law and order. Only if law and order were
maintained could they complete the evacuation of the APWI and Japanese; and if
law and order were maintained, they could legitimately claim to have prepared for a
return to civil government without having openly intervened in Indonesian/Indies internal
affairs. Law and order, moreover, was an issue on which they could reasonably hope to
get the co-operation of all the interested parties, the Indonesians, the Dutch and the
Japanese, which was quite clearly not the case with ideology. The question of Japanese war
crimes and Indonesian collaboration was therefore put on the back burner. Uncomfortably
aware that Japanese troops who believed themselves already doomed by war crimes
tribunals were less likely to co-operate than those who still believed they might redeem
themselves, the British discreetly delayed Allied war crimes investigations and refrained
from suggesting publicly that Indonesians who had worked for the Japanese could be
considered Quislines. 2" Instead, they made it known to Japanese commanders that their
conduct during the post-surrender period would have a major influence on their
subsequent treatment, and their statements to the Indonesian authorities with whom they
came into contact were a constant refrain: the British had not come to Indonesia to
restore Dutch authority but were there simply as representatives of the Allies and the
United Nations (the two were seen as much the same thing) with the task of accepting
the Japanese surrender and repatriating the APWI and Japanese troops. Indonesian
nationalists, therefore, would further their cause best by co-operating with the Allies
in maintaining law and order, thereby demonstrating their capability and responsibility.
Patterson sent a message to the Republican leaders saying that he would not interfere with
them as long as they kept their followers under control. 'They promised,' in Patterson's
words, 'to be good'. On 30 September, two days after the first British troops began
landing in Jakarta, the British began direct negotiations with the Indonesian police in the
city, with the approval of Sukarno, and on 1 October reached an acceptable formula for
policing the city.'
The arrival of the British with their calls for law and order coincided with a
dramatic breakdown in law and order through much of Java and Sumatra. During the
first month or so after the declaration of independence, the deliberate inactivity at the
highest levels of decision-making in the Republic and the Allied forces had been
reflected by a somewhat confused inactivity in the rest of society. On 17 August a group
of pemuda had gained control of the radio station in Jakarta long enough to broadcast
news of the declaration of independence. Few people outside the capital, however, seem to
have taken the declaration seriously at first, partly because the Japanese suppressed news
of the proclamation and of their own surrender for several days, partly because a
declaration of independence under Japanese auspices was expected in any case and that
was not something to be particularly excited about. With instructions from nationalist
leaders in Jakarta, if they were received at all, calling on people to stay calm and do
nothing, that was precisely what most people did. 22 Even the PETA troops at
Rengasdengklok who had disarmed the Japanese there on 16 August allowed themselves
in turn to be disarmed without a struggle on 20-21 August. 23 The European prisoners-of-
war and internees, for their part, scattered in camps throughout Java and Sumatra,
generally obeyed Mountbatten's instructions to stay put and await the formal liberation.
As time passed, however, the puzzlement of the Indonesian and Dutch populations of
the archipelago at the inactivity of their leaders gradually turned to concern, outrage
and a determination to act regardless of official instructions. The internees began to ignore
Mountbatten's instructions and to return to their old homes to begin rebuilding their pre-war
way of life. In many areas, the senior surviving members of the pre-war colonial
administration established provisional local governments to
prepare the ground for the full restoration of colonial authority. In many cases they
were backed up by newly formed irregular groups of former KNIL soldiers, such as the so-
called 10th Battalion in Jakarta and the semi-official police force of Captain R.P.P.
Westerling in Medan. 24 Indonesians for their part began to take over offices and buildings
from the Japanese, who were in any case rapidly withdrawing many of their personnel to
well-supplied assembly camps in preparation for repatriation. All over the country, too,
Indonesians began to form badan perjuangan (struggle organizations), as yet unarmed
clusters of patriots determined to help defend the Republic. Thousands of such bands were
formed, ranging from the quasi-military BKR, which inherited many former members of
the PETA, to small and evanescent groups of young people of both sexes. They grew
typically around existing social nuclei — local bosses, religious leaders, ethnic
associations, semi-skilled labour groups, school groups, neighbourhood associations, and
the many youth groups set up by the Japanese — and they drew on the increased
organizational experience and political mobilization which people had gained during the
Japanese period." Although an attack by pemuda on an internment camp is reported as
early as 24 August', all this activity remained largely non-violent at first, partly because neither
Indonesians nor Dutch had significant stocks of weapons and ammunition, partly because
the growing apprehension with which Indonesians and Dutchmen viewed each other's
activities was tempered by the shared hope that British intervention would be decisive
and favourable.
Britain's initial impact, however, was anything but decisive or unequivocal. The long
delay in despatching British troops to Indonesia and the refusal of the British to commit
themselves clearly to either side led Dutch and Indonesian vigilantes increasingly to take
direct action against each other. Both groups, moreover, had increasing access to weapons.
The Indonesians obtained theirs largely from the Japanese, sometimes in ambushes or
surprise attacks, sometimes by various forms of agreement with local Japanese officers
happy to let nationalists have their arms if it could be made to appear as if the Japanese
had been forced to surrender them. The Dutch vigilantes were generally well supplied with
weapons wherever the Allies had landed for, although the supply of arms to non-
military personnel was theoretically not allowed, there were a multitude of channels
through which Dutch representatives and sympathizers could quietly make weapons
available to the vigilantes. 27 An escalating series of clashes took place in the cities and
countryside of Java and Sumatra, frequently prompted by real or imagined insults to
the sovereignty claimed by either side, such as the tearing down of a flag or the writing up
of slogans. The months October and November became known as the bersiap time, from
the cry `Bersiap!' (`Get ready!') which summoned the badan perjuangan to meet an enemy
threat.28
The violence led the British to redouble their efforts to portray the issue as one of law
and order rather than politics, and they renewed their insistence that the Republican
and Netherlands Indies governments keep their followers under control. Formally obli g ed
under the Civil Affairs Agreement, the Dutch promised co operation, though they did
little notable to demonstrate it. The Republican leaders, clearly less favoured by Britain's
avowed neutrality in the conflict, continued their frequent public calls for peace and calm.
The violence, however, continued. This was of course partly the consequence of each
government's lack of control over its own followers. Both the Republic and the Dutch,
however, also had clear political advantages in disorder and violence as long as they could
avoid being blamed for it. For the Dutch, any agreement between the British and the
Republic, such as the police agreement made in Jakarta on 1 October, amounted to a
dangerous step
towards recognition. It was in Dutch interests, therefore, to destroy any such
rapprochement by provoking clashes which would discredit Indonesian promises to co-
operate and which might draw the British from their studied neutrality to a clear commitment
to the Dutch. The Indonesian leaders for their part were well aware that to discipline their
followers and restore law and order, even if it were possible to do so, would do away with
their usefulness to the British. While it was important that they be seen as a co-operative
force for law and order, it was perhaps even more important that they be unable to control
their followers thoroughly.
Law and order, moreover, had ceased to be as politically neutral as the British once
hoped. Both the Republic and the Dutch were committed to law and order, but each
interpreted it in a particular way. Both sides felt weak and vulnerable politically. The
Indonesians had declared independence under circumstances which suggested Japanese
complicity, and they lacked both an effective government apparatus and the armed forces
with which to defend the Republic. The Dutch, conscious of their humiliating defeat in 1942
and also critically short of administrative forces, were deeply suspicious of what they saw as
attempts to revise the status of the Netherlands Indies at their expense. For both, therefore,
there was a premium on maintaining public inflexibility, on preserving an image of
sovereignty which was not reflected in control on the ground. Ability to maintain law and
order is one of the foremost attributes of sovereignty and was important for this reason
alone, but it was also a means of coping with the gap between the illusion of sovereignty and
the reality of powerlessness. The very existence of a serious challenge to sovereignty could not
be recognized; the existence of a serious challenge to law and order could. Each side needed
to regard the other as a band of lawless troublemakers, against whom armed force was the
only protection. The leaders of either side might be persuaded to appeal for calm and restraint
to placate the British, but the fact remained that, in the idiom of Indonesian-Dutch relations
at the time, the Dutch vigilantes on the one hand and the badan perjuangan on the other
were all that stood between their respective political groups and destruction. Until they
were given some other guarantee of a political future, both sides had little choice but to
continue fighting, not to win but to survive. And as long as the political situation placed this
premium on indiscipline, both sides were hampered in their attempts to build up a
disciplined state structure.
The undisciplined violence of October and November was effective as a means of self
defence for the Republic and the Netherlands Indies, but it was distinctly unsuccessful in
prising the British out of their ambiguous neutrality. This failure was perhaps most clearly
apparent in events in Surabaya in late October and early November. There, at a
convenient distance from Jakarta, a combination of stubborn and open insistence by local
Dutch representatives on exercising authority in the city, equally stubborn resistance by
well-armed and highly suspicious local badan perjuangan, and unpredictable events such
as the apparently accidental dropping of Allied leaflets calling provocatively for the
immediate surrender of all Indonesian weapons, led to a ferocious battle in the city between
British and Indonesian troops during which the local British commander, General Mallaby,
was killed. The battle provided the Republic with an opportunity to demonstrate to the
British the dangers of attempting to subdue it by force of arms, while at the same time
giving Sukarno an opportunity to demonstrate his power and usefulness by twice in the
course of the battle persuading the badan perjuangan to accept a ceasefire which enabled the
British to regroup and consolidate. 29 Yet neither stick nor carrot brought the British any
closer to official recognition of the Republic. For the Dutch point of view, the affair was
equally unproductive, for despite the direct conflict between Indonesian and British forces
the British did not forswear all further co-operation with the
Republic and carry out a full scale war to wipe it from the face of Indonesia, but
rather limited their campaign to the occupation of Surabaya and continued their various
co-operative arrangements with the Indonesians in Jakarta and elsewhere.
Although the violence failed as a political weapon to force the British to choose
between the Republic and the Dutch, it convinced the British of the need to obtain a
political solution to the conflict. Instead of insisting that they were not involved in politics at
all, the British began increasingly to seek the role of mediator between the two sides, putting
pressure on both to accept the idea of a negotiated settlement. 3 ° The British hoped that this
would reduce the level of violence and, just as important, that it would depoliticize
whatever violence continued, enabling the British to take more determined action against it
without compromising their political neutrality.
Aside from the fact that the British wanted negotiations and were still powerful
enough to make life difficult for those who did not co-operate, there were a number of
reasons why both sides were interested in negotiations at this stage. In the first place, now
that it was clear that the British would not support one side against the other, negotiations
promised a breathing space in which both sides would build up their strength for the time
when they would fight their own wars. In the second place, that build-up was already under
way, and both sides could approach the conference table feeling that they had more to
back their positions than the mere force of argument.
On the Republican side, the creation of an army, the TKR (Tentara Keamanan
Rakyat, People's Security Army), to replace the BKR on 5 October was an early indication
of this change, though the appointment of a minister of defence, Supriadi, the following
day demonstrated the importance still attached to ideological acceptability. Supriadi
had led a revolt of PETA troops against the Japanese in Blitar in East Java in February
1945 and his appointment was a clear statement that the TKR, although an army, was
not a continuation of the PETA.IL Supriadi had, however, been missing since the revolt
and was almost certainly dead; even if the Republican leaders still hoped that he might be
alive and in hiding, he was clearly not in a position to take the organization of the army in
hand. It was only with the election by senior TKR officers of Sudirman as army
commander on 12 November and the appointment of Amir Syarifuddin as defence minister
on 14 November that the construction of an effective defence force began, although this
process was fraught with internal conflicts. 32 Alongside this process was a build-up of
the Republic's administrative apparatus by the formal takeover of government offices,
which was soon followed by a general retreat of Republican politicians and
government departments from the occupied coastal cities into the interior of Java and
Sumatra where they created the Republic state which fought the remainder of the
revolution.
A similar process took place on the Dutch side, with the establishment first of a
rudimentary central administration in Jakarta, followed by the consolidation of Dutch
rule in Kalimantan and eastern Indonesia, where Australian troops had been quicker to
arrive and where the Republic consequently had less opportunity to get established and in
any case had a weaker nationalist movement and a smaller population to depend on. 33 By
recruitment in Europe and amongst former prisonersof-war, moreover, the Dutch had also
begun to put together an army of appreciable size. The fact that the British would not allow
it to enter Indonesia on the barely concealed grounds that it could not be relied upon not to
provoke fresh clashes with the Indonesians was extra incentive for the Dutch to defuse the
issue by coming to the conference table.34
Negotiations also appeared inure attractive because each side now saw the
possibility of actually reaching an acceptable agreement with the other. The Dutch were
encouraged especially by the appointment of Sutan Syahrir as the Republic's prime
minister on 14 November. Syahrir was a prominent pre-war nationalist with an
unblemished record of non-co-operation with the Dutch and the Japanese, and he was
becoming widely known and respected amongst the Dutch as the author of Indonesische
Overpeinzingen (Indonesian Reflections), a book of his letters to his wife in Holland."
His rise to power within the Republic was due both to admiration for his politics and to
the more cynical calculation that he was the Republican politician most acceptable to the
Dutch. The Republicans for their part were encouraged by signs that the Dutch would not
insist on a restoration of the pre-war status quo but were prepared to make sienificant
concessions to the demands of Indonesian nationalism. On 6 November 1945, for
instance, van Mook outlined a Dutch proposal which included internal autonomy for
Indonesia, the abolition of racial discrimination, a broad expansion of educational
opportunities for Indonesians and a stimulation of Indonesian involvement in the
economy. 36 The two sides were still nowhere near agreement, but a basis for negotiation
had been laid.
By mid-November 1945, the policy of dependence on outside forces had outlived its
usefulness. The appeal to international opinion remained an important element in the
strategy of either side but the capacity of the Republic and the Netherlands Indies to fight
and negotiate with each other directly was established. From the beginning of 1946, those
who wished, Like Tan Malaka and the Persatuan Perjuangan in the Republic or conservative
colonists in the Netherlands Indies, to change the mix of diplomacy and armed struggle
in favour of armed struggle sought first to change the government, to remove Syahrir or
van Mook, rather than to take matters into their own hands as they had in August-
November 1945.
On both the Republican and Dutch sides, the first three months after the
Indonesian declaration of independence have frequently been seen as a time of missed
opportunities when more forceful or imaginative action by the leaders of the Republic or the
Netherlands Indies might have resolved the crisis quickly and prevented its descent into
four long years of debilitating and divisive military and diplomatic struggle. In fact, the
weakness of both sides in 1945 precluded effective forceful action. Instead, both sides
adopted a careful inactivity intended to manipulate other forces into fighting their battles,
literally and metaphorically. These tactics did not bring victory to either side, but they did
the more basic service of ensuring that both sides survived to fight, and talk, for a
protracted national revolution.
NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the annual conference of the Association for Asian
Studies, Washington, DC, in March 1984. The author has benefited considerably from the discussion which
followed, especially from the comments of Dr Barbara Harvey of the State Department.
1. Netherlands, Staten-Generaal, Enquetecornmissie Regeringsbeleid 1940.-1945, Verslag houdende
Iiiikomsten van het Onderzoek: dee! 84 en B, Militair Beleid 1940-1945: TerugA:eer Naar Nederlandseh-Indie
[Punt P van het Enquetebesluitj: Verstag en Biflagen [hereafter Militair Betel(/' (The Hague, 1956), 573-82.

1. Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance 1944-1946
(Ithaca, 1972), 20; Nugroho Notosusanto, The PETA Army during the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia
(Tokyo, 1979), 92-101.
2. Anderson, Java, 36, 49-69; George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca,
1952), 127; Anthony J.S. Reid, The Indonesian National Revolution 1945-1950 (Hawthorn, 1974), 19-21.
2. For contrasting accounts of the transfer, sec Clifford William Squire, 'Britain and the Transfer of
Power in Indonesia 1945-46' (PhD dissertation, University of London, 1979), 40-43; and Robert. J.
MacMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence,
1945-49 (Ithaca and London, 1981), 78-83.

5. `E' Group South Consolidated Report July-December 1945, papers of Capt. L.M. Godfrey, Imperial War
Museum, London.
5. Ibid.; Report by Wing Commander T.S. Tull OBE on Operation Salex Mastiff Mid-Java 10th
September to 15th December 1945, Batavia, 27th December 1945, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's
College, London, file 'lull 1; Squire, 'Britain and the Transfer of Power', 59-72.
6. See, for example, 'Life and times of General Sir Philip Christison, Bt' (autobiography) (Typescript,
Melrose, Scotland, 1980), 176, file 82/15/1, Imperial War Museum.
7. Interview with former head of logistics section, Japanese army on Java, Tokyo, 29 March 1982.
8. Anderson, Java, 66-84.
6. On Japanese attitudes to the Republic, see W.G.J. Remmelink, 'The Emergence of the New Situation: the
Japanese Army on Java after the Surrender', Kabar Seberang 4 (July 1978), 62-3; Major-General Moichiro
Yamamoto, 'An individual opinion which may interest the Allied powers with regard to the future management of
Indonesia', 23 September 1945, Nishijima Collection (Waseda University), item no. AD 31; interviews with
Japanese occupation officials, Tokyo, March & April 1982.
7. Reid, Indonesian National Revolution, 28.
5. Tjahaja (Bandung), 19 August 1945; see also ibid., 23 August 1945, and Adam Malik, In the Service of
the Republic (Singapore, 1980), 139-40.

8. On these constitutional aspects of the early Republic, see Anderson, Java, 86-93; Kahin, Nationalism and
139-40.
Revolution,

9. 'Verslag betreffende dc Rcpubliek Indonesia, opgesteld aan de hand van gegevens tijdens en na den
interneeringstijd daaromtrent verzaineld uit de Maleische pers', 31 August/1 September 1945, Algemeen
Rijksarchief, Archief Algemene Sccretarie to Batavia, Eerste Zending [hereafter Alg.Sec.1], box I, file 33; John R.W.
Small, Bandung in the Early Revolution, 1945-46: a Studs in the Social History of the Indonesian Revolution
(Ithaca, 1964), 39-44; Anderson, Java, 88-9.
10. On the dissolution of the PETA and the formation of the BKR, see Notosusanto, The PETA Army, 171-
75; Anderson, Java, 99-105; Reminclink 'The Emergence of the New Situation', 60; Entol Chaeruddin, Proklamasi
17 Aguslus 1945 dan Pemindahan Kekuasaan (Jakarta, 1973), 7; Dinas Sejarah Militer Kodam V/Jaya, Sejarah
Perjuangan Rakyal Jakarta, Tanggerang dun Bekasi dalam Menegakkan Kemerdekaan .R.I. (Jakarta, 1975). 27-8.

11. Van Mook, nota voor de ministerraad, 20 December 1945, OfficiNe Bescheiden Betreffende de
Nederlands-lndonesische Betrekkingen 1945-1949 [hereafter OBB], ed. S.L. van der Wal, 11 (The Hague, 1972),
380; E. van Witsen, Krligsgevangenen in de Pacific-Oorlog (1941-1945) (Franeker, 1971), 234-45: H. Kruls, Op
Inspectie (Amsterdam & Brussels, 1947), 42-5.

6. Militair Beleid, 634-6.

13. 'Life and times of General Sir Philip Christison', loc.cit., 176; L.W.G. Hamilton, 'Notes on situation in
Jakarta October 1945-March 1946' (Typescript, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1981).
14. Report by Wing Commander T.S. Tull, loc.cit.
15. Van der Plas, Report of discussions with Lord Louis Mountbatten in Singapore, 2 October 1945, OBB
1, 229-32; Squire, 'Britain and the Transfer of Power', 72 Militair Beleid, 709; A.H. Nasution, Sekitar Pcrang
Kemerdekaan Indonesia, jilid 1: Prokiamasi (Bandung, 1977), 312; Merdeka (Jakarta), 1,4 October 1945;
'Agreement between the chief of police in Batavia, Mr. Soewirdjo [sic) and the British army reached on the first of
October, at Police H.Q.', Alg.Sec.1, box I, file 23; Patterson to CiC-AFNEI, 1 November 1945, FO 371/52779;
confidential sources.
16. Anthony Reid, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern
Sumatra (Kuala Lumpur, 1979), 148; interview with former employee of Jakarta radio station, Jakarta, 30 July
1982.
17. Interview with former shocianchó, Rengasdengklok PETA, Karawang, 1 November 1982.
18. 'E' Group Consolidated Report, loc.cit.; Reid, Blood of the People, 151; J.A.A. van Doom and W.J.
Hendrix, Ontsporing van Geweld: over het Nederlands/Indisch/Indonesisch Conflict (Rotterdam, 1970),
116-20; W.F. Wertheim, Indonesia: van Vorsienrijk tot Neo-kolonie (Amsterdam, 1978), 118; Soeara
Merdeka (Bandung), 16 September 1945; Merdeka, 3 October 1945 and passim. Interviews with senior Netherlands
Indies civil and military officials, The Hague, November 1981.
19. A nder son, J a v a , 230- 31, 264.
20. Van Witsen, Krijgsgevangenen, 235.
21. 'E' Group Consolida te d Re port, loc.c it.
28. Sejarah Perjuangan Rakyat, 33-42, 46-53; A.J.F. Doulton, The Fighting Cock (Aldershot, 1951), 242;
interviews with former members of the Jakarta BKR/TKR, Jakarta, March 1983.
28. On the Battle of Surabaya, sec Doulton, The Fighting
Cock, 249-67; Anderson, Java, 151-66; William Hayward Frederick, 'Indonesian urban society in transition;
Surabaya, 1926-1946' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1978), 659-, 709-27, 748-50.
29. Militair Beleid, 698; reports of the 34th and 35th joint meetings of the Supreme Allied Commander in
South-east Asia, 10, 11 October 1945, OBB I, 300-18; C. Smit, De Liquidatie van een Imperium: Nederland en
Indonesie 1945-1962 (Amsterdam, 1962), 22.
29. Ulf Sundhaussen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics 1945-1967 (Kuala Lumpur, 1982),
7,
30. i b i d . , 8 - 9 , 2 0 - 2 3 .
31. Van Doom and Hendrix, Ontsporing can Geweld, 61-64.
32. Mountbatten to Cabinet Offices, 13, 16 October 1945, India Office Records, L/WS/1/716.
 33. Sjahrazad [pseudonym of Sutan Syahrir], Indonesische Overpeinzingen (Amsterdam, 1945).
34. A. Alberts, Her Einde van een Verhounding: Indone.sie en Nederland tussen 1945 en 1963 (Alphen aan
den Rijn, 1968), 55-8; Yong Mun Cheong, H.J. van Mook and Indonesian Independence: a Study of his Role in
Dutch-Indonesian Relations, 1945-48 (The Hague, 1982), 50-51.