Part 3- Role of colonial powers and the UN in Indonesia by Radha Rajan

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Part 3- Role of colonial powers and the UN in Indonesia by Radha

Rajan

This is the third part. Those who want to read the ENTIRE write-up, may

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JAPAN The Japanese occupied the archipelago in order, like their

Portuguese and Dutch predecessors, to secure its rich natural resources.

Japan's invasion of North China, which had begun in July 1937, by the

end of the decade had become bogged down in the face of stubborn Chinese

resistance. To feed Japan's war machine, large amounts of petroleum,

scrap iron, and other raw materials had to be imported from foreign

sources. Most oil--about 55 percent--came from the United States, but

Indonesia supplied a critical 25 percent.

 

When World War II broke out in Europe and spread to the Pacific, the

Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies in March 1942. The Dutch

colonial army surrendered to the Japanese after the fall of Hong Kong,

Manila and Singapore.

 

The Japanese experienced spectacular early victories in the Southeast

Asian war. Singapore, Britain's fortress in the east, fell on February

15, 1941, despite British numerical superiority and the strength of its

seaward defenses. The Battle of the Java Sea resulted in the Japanese

defeat of a combined British, Dutch, Australian, and United States

fleet. On March 9, 1942, the Netherlands Indies government surrendered

without offering resistance on land.

 

The Japanese divided the Indies into three jurisdictions: Java and

Madura were placed under the control of the Sixteenth Army; Sumatra, for

a time, joined with Malaya under the Twenty-fifth Army; and the eastern

archipelago was placed under naval command. In Sumatra and the east, the

overriding concern of the occupiers was maintenance of law and order and

extraction of needed resources. Java's economic value with respect to

the war effort lay in its huge labor force and relatively developed

infrastructure. The Sixteenth Army was tolerant, within limits, of

political activities carried out by nationalists and Muslims. This

tolerance grew as the momentum of Japanese expansion was halted in

mid-1942 and the Allies began counteroffensives. In the closing months

of the war, Japanese commanders promoted the independence movement as a

means of frustrating an Allied reoccupation.

 

In April 1945, American forces landed in Okinawa. On August 6 and 9,

1945, the US dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 14,

Japan surrendered to the Allies.

 

INDONESIAN INDEPENDENCE

Unlike Burma and the Philippines, Indonesia was not granted formal

independence by the Japanese in 1943. No Indonesian representative was

sent to the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo in November 1943. But

as the war became more desperate, Japan announced in September 1944 that

not only Java but the entire archipelago would become independent. In

March 1945, the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for

Indonesian Independence (BPUPKI) was organized, and delegates came not

only from Java but also from Sumatra and the eastern archipelago to

decide the constitution of the new state. The committee wanted the new

nation's territory to include not only the Netherlands Indies but also

Portuguese Timor and British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. Thus

the basis for a postwar Greater Indonesia (Indonesia Raya) policy,

pursued by Sukarno in the 1950s and 1960s, was established. The policy

also provided for a strong presidency.

 

August 15, 1945, Japan formally surrendered to the Allies. The

Indonesian leadership moved quickly. With the cooperation of individual

Japanese navy and army officers (others feared reprisals from the Allies

or were not sympathetic to the Indonesian cause), Sukarno and Hatta

formally declared the nation's independence on August 17 at the former's

residence in Jakarta, raised the red and white national flag, and sang

the new nation's national anthem, Indonesia Raya (Greater Indonesia).

The following day a new constitution was promulgated.

 

This was the beginning of Indonesia's troubles. The Dutch,

determined to reoccupy their colony, castigated Sukarno and Hatta as

collaborators with the Japanese and the Republic of Indonesia as a

creation of Japanese fascism. But the Netherlands, devastated by the

Nazi occupation, lacked the resources to reassert its authority. The

archipelago came under the jurisdiction of Admiral Earl Louis

Mountbatten, the supreme Allied commander in Southeast Asia. Because of

Indonesia's distance from the main theaters of war, Allied troops,

mostly from the British Commonwealth of Nations, did not land on Java

until late September.

THE BRITISH IN INDONESIA AS TRADERS

 

The British acknowledged that Indonesia was to the Netherlands what

India was to the British – a status symbol, the golden goose and the

ultimate product of military might. The British were therefore never

very serious about colonising Indonesia or retaining it as a colony even

on the one or two occasions when their presence was mandated in the

archipelago by turn of events in their own history. In 1579 Sir Francis

Drake arrives in Ternate after raiding Spanish ships and ports in

America. The choice of Ternate as his point of visit is significant

because Ternate was an important Portuguese trading post. The Sultan of

Ternate and his people were hostile in the extreme to the Portuguese

particularly after the small-pox pandemic in Ternate in 1558. The

Portuguese are supposed to have poisoned and killed the Sultan of

Ternate in 1570 and his successor, Sultan Babullah not only expels the

Portuguese from Ternate, forcing the Portuguese to build a fort in

Tidore but the Sultan of Ternate keeps the Portuguese under siege in

their fort in Tidore for five years until 1575 with no help for the

Portuguese coming either from Melaka or Goa.

 

Within a year of Drake's visit to Ternate in 1579, Portugal falls

under Spanish crown. In 1585, the Sultan of Aceh sends a letter to Queen

Elizabeth I of England and in 1587 Sir Thomas Cavendish visits Java.

This is the beginning of British interest in the Indonesian archipelago.

On December 31, 1599, Queen Elizabeth charters the English East India

Company. In 1602, Sir James Lancaster leads an expedition to the

archipelago and the East India Company sets up a trading post in Aceh.

By 1611, the English have set up posts in Jepara, Jambi and Makassar.

British economic interests in Indonesia is centered in the Malay

province – in Melaka (which the British acquired from the Dutch in

return for Bencoolen in Sumatra), in Peneng where the British set up a

trading post to guard its trade route en route to China, and in North

Borneo – Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei. British economic interest in the

rest of Indonesia wanes gradually through the seventeenth century and by

towards the end of the seventeenth century, except for the Malay

province, the British have left the field clear for the Dutch VOC in

Indonesia. (To be continued)