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By Root 4476 0

in Asia in very limited terms, as an affectation of a small, Westernized elite. As such, it might be easily pacified with concessions. But in Indonesia, and later elsewhere, nationalism was revealed as something more elemental: a profound and dangerous perturbation of spirits. It seemed to be without an ideology. To the British it was ‘extremist’, ‘fanatical’, ‘terrorist’ – all words that would now dominate the vocabulary of empire, but which betrayed a fundamental lack of comprehension. Nor could nationalism in Indonesia be dismissed, yet, as communist conspiracy; ironically it was to the socialist, but quintessentially Westernized, Sutan Sjahrir that the British looked to discipline the movement, and for the salvation of a negotiated withdrawal. They could not understand Sukarno’s continuing and growing hold on his people. British witnesses to Surabaya wrote of Bung Tomo as if he were a wild beast. The British were entirely unprepared to face the full implications of Tan Malaka’s ‘100 per cent Merdeka’. In Indonesia, as in Vietnam, British soldiers had seen the meanest folk articulate their freedom, and fight to the death to defend it, and it had terrified them. So too had the behaviour of the French and the Dutch. It raised the as yet unanswerable question: how far would Britain be willing to go to keep its Asian empire? These dilemmas were now to be confronted closer to home in India, in Burma, in Malaya and in Singapore. The British wars in Vietnam and Indonesia did little to re-establish Britain’s imperial confidence, nor its martial reputation. They disillusioned profoundly many of the British who fought there, and few of them wished to celebrate their achievements. In all, there were 2,136 British and Indian casualties. As the last British troops finally departed from Tanjong Priok docks in Jakarta at the end of November 1946, the Seaforth Highlanders, who had been among the first to arrive, taunted the fresh Dutch conscripts disembarking to face their own colonial war with raised fists, and the cry, ‘Merdeka!’127

5

1946: Freedom without Borders

Colonial Asia was now a connected arc of protest. Everywhere local nationalists borrowed the words and emulated the deeds of neighbours, and the language of the Atlantic Charter and the San Francisco Declaration became a common tongue for all. In early 1946 Indonesia’s struggle was first raised in the United Nations, and this made it a test case for the rights of fledgling nations everywhere. In British Asia, nationalists followed events in Indo-China and Indonesia as if their own future were being decided, which it effectively was. In Malaya the cause of the Indonesian republic captivated not only the Malays, who felt tied to it by kinship and language, but the whole of Malayan society, whose trade unions, youth and women’s movements all took up its slogans. The Chinese population caught up in the fighting in Semarang and Surabaya appealed directly to the community in Malaya, and many fled there as refugees. Harold Laski’s campaigning articles from Reynolds News were immediately translated into the Tamil newspapers in Singapore. They were united in their opposition to the use of Indian troops, stating, ‘We [the British] have no business in Java.’1 This larger ‘we’ was reinforced by the British servicemen in Singapore – corporals mostly, it seems – who wrote polemical articles for publication in the vernacular press. Surabaya was a turning point for everyone: the British argument that force was necessary to bring a large Asian rebel army to heel seemed to be a harbinger of a new Armageddon. ‘Battle for Surabaya’, announced the New Democracy in banner headlines. ‘Cause of a Third World War?’2 Would this, the campaigning Malay newspaper Utusan Melayu speculated, ‘become a strong argument to use the atomic bomb on the Indonesians whose only sin is to attain their independence?’3

The battle of Surabaya was fought in unlikely places. Southeast Asian students in Japan demonstrated on the streets of Tokyo. In a bizarre twist of fate, many of the most hardened veterans of