Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
By David Van Reybrouck
Norton, 656 pages, $32.50
'Without bamboo there wouldn't have been an Indonesian revolution," writes David Van Reybrouck -- a sweeping assertion of the type that most present-day historians, overspecialized and unadventurous, would rather die than make.
Bamboo, says Mr. Van Reybrouck, grows in great profusion on the Indonesian archipelago. "The wood combines an incredible range of qualities: it is light as a feather and as strong as iron." It can be used to build houses, transport water and make music. "But you can also use it to commit murder." Sharpen a stem and skewer the human body.
The bamboo spear (or runcing) would become "the mythic weapon" of Indonesia's guerrilla war of independence, waged against the Netherlands in 1945-49.
In "Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World," Mr. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian, gives us an electrifying narrative of that bloody conflict.
More than 100,000 Indonesians were killed, along with roughly 4,000 Dutch soldiers.
It will come as a shock to modern readers that several hundred British troops died, too -- most of them soldiers of the British Indian Army. They had been sent into Indonesia in 1945 to establish order. The Battle of Surabaya, fought late that year between the British and the Indonesian rebels, was the deadliest battle in the entire war, sparked by the shooting dead of a British brigadier-general. And to think that the intended role of Britain in Indonesia had been that of humanitarian peacekeeper.
And yet hardly anyone pays heed to the Indonesian war of independence today outside the countries that fought it. Even in the Netherlands, the author tells us, a staggering proportion of people are unaware of its gory details. These include the widespread commission of war crimes, for which scarcely any Dutch soldiers paid a price.
Mr. Van Reybrouck is right to ask why the war has been forgotten and right, in fact, to be astonished by the near-vanishing from our modern historical consciousness of the "Revolusi." This is the Indonesian word for the "youth revolution," which was carried out by "a whole generation of fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who were willing to die for their freedom." The Revolusi, says Mr. Van Reybrouck, "was once world history" -- that is, "every region of the globe was touched" by it. But as he researched and wrote his book, he found himself pilloried in the Netherlands for his project.
Why was he, "a Belgian, of all people," raking up the past? Indonesians, by contrast, were more receptive; and the strength of Mr. Van Reybrouck's chronicle lies as much in the hundreds of interviews he conducted with very old participants in (and witnesses to) the war as in his impressive command of historical detail. Indonesia is not an ethnic monolith. It is a true archipelago of Babel, and he pursued his interviews not just in Indonesian (the state-mandated lingua franca) but in Javanese, Balinese, Ambonese and Buginese -- to name but a few of the local languages -- as well as in Dutch and Japanese. A native Dutch speaker, he was assisted throughout by linguistic intermediaries. "Translators and interpreters are the quiet heroes of globalisation," Mr. Van Reybrouck writes. (His own book, first published in Dutch, was translated into English by David Colmer and David McKay.)
To most Americans -- and citizens of the wider West -- Indonesia is the elephant that isn't in the room. Is there a country in the world as massive with a profile as low-key? Mr. Van Reybrouck lists the superlatives of Indonesian heft. It has the world's fourth-largest population, with the largest Muslim populace on earth. Its economy is Southeast Asia's biggest, and it is the world's largest insular realm: "Officially, it is made up of 13,466 islands, but it could also be 16,056. Or 18,023. No one knows exactly." Superimposed on a map of Europe, Indonesia would sprawl from Ireland to Kazakhstan.
But of course there is more to the Indonesian CV than geography and demographics. Modern Indonesia was born with a bang. It was the first country to declare its independence after World War II, in a "Proklamasi" -- proclamation -- made on Aug. 17, 1945, two days after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's capitulation. The Proklamasi was made by Sukarno, the storied leader of the independence movement who had 11 wives in his eventful life but used only one name. (He ceded power in 1967 to another one-named strongman, Suharto, who had the backing of the CIA.)
The Japanese had taken Indonesia by force in 1942, meeting no resistance from the Dutch, whose imperium in the Indies had begun in the early 17th century. By the time the Dutch departed for good in 1949, the Netherlands had ruled over Indonesia for more than three immensely profitable centuries. Dutch Indonesia had been a rigorously segregated society, with people from the Netherlands (and other Europeans) on top, on Deck 1; the "Indos" (the mixed-race offspring of Dutch men and native women, seldom vice versa) were on Deck 2; and native Indonesians languished on Deck 3. Mr. Van Reybrouck employs, to great metaphorical effect, this taxonomy of passengers on Dutch-owned steamships, in which the different races were strictly confined to their own decks.
The Japanese had ruled over Indonesia with the cruelty that was their wartime wont. No less than four million Indonesians -- 6% of the population -- died of starvation and deprivation; and 99.7% of the dead, Mr. Van Reybrouck tells us, were civilians. And yet the Japanese also empowered the Indonesians, especially the pemuda, the ideologically driven urban youth, dangling before them the prospect of independence from the Dutch at some date in the future. When the war ended, many Japanese units handed their weapons and munitions not to the Allied victors but the Indonesian rebels, enabling the latter to wage war more effectively against the Dutch, who returned -- with unseemly haste -- to resume their role as colonial overlords.
For four years, a brutal war was fought, the rebels often as callous as the Dutch, especially in their treatment of the Indos and local Chinese minority, both seen as collaborators in colonialism. Remarkably, given the intensity of the fighting and the intransigence of Dutch colonial hardliners, a political process ran in parallel with the war: The Dutch government entered into negotiations and political treaties with Sukarno and his team. The two sides killed and talked to each other at the same time. When the end came, the Dutch departure was incongruously amicable. The new state of Indonesia even agreed to assume all debts of the Dutch East Indies, money that went a long way to pay for the postwar reconstruction of the Netherlands.
Why do we not remember this war more vividly? Mr. Van Reybrouck suggests that one reason may be modern Dutch insignificance. The Netherlands isn't quite the postcolonial demon that Britain is, or France, in the eyes of progressive activists and historians. Indonesia, too, has charted a quieter course in world affairs than have countries of similar size. Indonesians are not a people with bluster. Theirs is not a strutting, showy culture. In this they are, perhaps, more like the modern-day Dutch than they'd like to acknowledge.
---
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]
1. REVIEW --- Summer Books: Asia's Forgotten Revolution. Varadarajan, Tunku. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 25 May 2024: C.8.
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