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By Root 4402 0

’ – ‘Get ready!’: the perpetual call to vigilance and to arms in the towns and villages. It was a time of revolutionary violence in the name of the sovereignty of the people or the defence of the revolution. It manifested itself in attacks on Christians, Japanese and British stragglers, Chinese, Eurasians and in an obsessive search for spies. It also built on local traditions of fighting: as in Malaya, cults of amulets that conferred invulnerability to their wearers flourished, and the figure of the jago – literally ‘fighting cock’ – the martial-arts champion of the village, on whom Javanese tradition conferred legitimacy as a protector figure in times of crisis. Some Western-educated local leaders, who saw their revolution as an extension of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, were deeply shaken by what they witnessed. But in many Indonesian accounts of the time, the violence seemed inevitable, even morally neutral.108 Many of the more organized and politicized pemuda militias made common cause with the underworld of large cities such as Jakarta to draw on the expertise of men experienced in violence.109 The bersiap amounted to social revolution in some areas – in north and east Sumatra the old aristocracies came under bloody attack – but in Java much of the republican leadership fought shy of its implications; here the social revolution remained a feral populism, without programme or direction. In many places it simply meant the struggle for scarce resources or settling of old scores. ‘The Indonesia revolution’, admitted the Islamicist leader Abu Hanifah, ‘was not totally pure.’110

British horror and incomprehension at the violence came to a head at the village of Bekasi, in west Java. The area was notorious for containing what Abu Hanifah, who was based there, termed the ‘lairs of the wild men of the district. They of course had their own leaders, their own heroes and strongmen. In the beginning there was nothing the republic could do about it.’111 On 22 November a military Dakota crashed in its vicinity, and its twenty-three British and Indian crew and passengers were taken prisoner, stripped and hacked to pieces. When patrols disinterred the remains, the bodies of Indian and British soldiers could not be distinguished from each other. There was little exceptional about this incident in the midst of so many. What was exceptional was the swiftness and ferocity of British response. Around 600 houses were burned, including sixty occupied by neutral Chinese that caught light as the flames spread in the wind. The attack engendered lively public debate in Britain. It was perhaps the first occasion when the British people had to confront a crucial dilemma of the end of empire: how far should terror be met with terror? Mountbatten did not defend the action, but justified it on the grounds that ‘we must realise the feeling of our regiments who suffer casualties every day at the hands of these terrorists and who on this particular occasion had to bury the dismembered bodies of their comrades’.112 Already in northern Sumatra a young Dutch officer, Raymond Westerling, was developing a reputation for cold-blooded killing. Raised in Istanbul and known by the sobriquet ‘Turk’, he had been trained by the British in the dark arts of commando warfare. In Sumatra he cultivated an Indonesian fighter’s mystique as ‘The White Tiger’. His memoirs, published in England in 1952, portray northern Sumatra as a ‘convulsed society… in the grip of terror’ and show him abandoning the collective policing methods employed by the British for a very personal kind of war. The ‘method of execution’ was all. In the East, ‘To execute a criminal behind prison walls has absolutely no effect on the population. To execute him in the marketplace does.’ Westerling’s legend and methods were to spread, a grisly omen of the drift towards colonial white terror.113

In the wake of events in Surabaya and elsewhere, the leadership of the republic changed hands. On 14 November Sukarno, whilst remaining president, passed power to a new cabinet headed by Sutan Sjahrir