Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [104]
The returning Dutch found a new world, one that now belonged to exultant Indonesians. The red and white flag of the republic flew from public buildings, shops and houses. Graffiti were scoured on walls and banners spanned the streets. They saw everywhere the word Merdeka! and also citations – in English, the language of the Atlantic Charter – from the preamble of the United States Constitution, even of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Many Indonesians fully expected to enlist the support of the Allies behind the revolution. The ex-internees were entirely unprepared for such scenes. Emaciated and in rags, many were treated sympathetically by the Indonesians they met, but refused to abandon the arrogance and swagger they had shown during the pre-war era. Antagonism erupted into violence. Dutch men and women were murdered as they tried to reclaim their businesses and homes. Men of military age were especially vulnerable. Derek van den Boegarde was deeply scarred by the memory of domestic murder in Bandung, where he was stationed with the British forces: Dutch internees had returned to their homes, ‘trying with what remained of their looted belongings to restart their lives, only to lose them in acts of hysterical hatred and violence’.64 Hotels and clubs became battlegrounds. As in French Indo-China, there was an obsession with symbols of sovereignty. In many towns and cities there was a ‘war of the flags’. One incident at the focal point of European community life in Surabaya, the Oranje Hotel, was to assume a much wider significance. On 19 September young Dutch and Eurasians crowded round the hotel, then principally housing journalists and still bearing its Japanese name, the Yamato. In an atmosphere almost of schoolboy rivalry they entered the hotel and raised a Dutch tricolour. Angry Indonesian youths stoned the building, fatally injuring a Eurasian lawyer. They scaled the walls of the hotel and ripped the blue stripe from the flag, leaving the red and white of the republic flying.65 The Eurasians were incensed. In the words of the writer Idrus, an acerbic witness to events in the city: ‘They remembered how things had been three and a half years before, and they remembered their fathers, who had been real Dutchmen. And they felt insulted, as though their own fathers had been stripped naked.’66 A mêlée ensued. In Jakarta, Indonesian medical students responded by electrifying the flag poles.67
The first major British landing was in Jakarta on 15 September, a month after the end of the war, when HMS Cumberland docked in Tanjong Priok harbour. The first regiment ashore was 29 Seaforth Highlanders. The regiment had served in the last British occupation of Java: Thomas Stamford Raffles’s conquest of 1811. Raffles had sought to reform and reverse the corrupting effects of Dutch rule on native society. In 1945 British officers were to invoke his memory. The bulk of 23 Indian Division disembarked on 25 September in an eerie calm. It was not a scene of chaos. ‘The trams ran regularly up Koningsplein, the trains steamed out of the main station to Bandung with innumerable passengers.’68 The tensions rose as Dutch began to arrive in the baggage-train of the British. The first senior official on the scene was Charles van der Plas, the pre-war governor of East Java: the vanguard of the Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs administration. He was met with a poster: Nèr Plasje – Indonesia maoe kaoe tjatoet–Djenggolmoe nanti koe tjaboet! It was a cruel play on his name; loosely translated, it read: ‘Hey piss-puddle – If you try to wipe out Indonesia – I’ll pull your beard!’69 His first broadcasts to the people of the islands were a disaster: he spoke of ruthless retribution for traitors and collaborators, by which he clearly meant Sukarno and Hatta. In his first reports he gave Mountbatten no hint of the difficulties that were to be met: ‘The Indonesians’, he informed the supremo, ‘are too nice a people