Opposition to the Van Heutsz monument is also not new. Despite such protests, many politicians still continue to glorify or excuse the colonial era. Such attitudes reflect widely held views in the Netherlands. For example, according to a survey , 50 percent of Dutch citizens viewed Dutch colonialism as a source of pride. Furthermore, alarmingly, over half of the individuals surveyed viewed Dutch colonisation as beneficial or benign for those in Dutch colonies.
Many Dutch have long preferred to see themselves as simply victims , rather than perpetrators, of historical violence. There have been a few apologies. This war, which was an unsuccessful attempt by the Dutch to regain control of Indonesia following its proclamation of independence in , resulted in 5, Dutch deaths, , Indonesian deaths and involved Dutch forces raping, torturing, and executing thousands of Indonesian civilians.
Despite these apologies, no Dutch government has ever apologized for violence perpetrated by Coen, Heutsz, and their forces, or any cases of colonial violence committed in Indonesia prior to Similarly, no Dutch government has apologized for the colonization of Indonesia. During his rule, Congolese served as forced labourers on rubber plantations and locals who failed to meet the assigned rubber quotas were mutilated or killed.
Similarly, authorities in the Belgian city of Ghent recently removed a bust of Leopold in response to it being sprayed with graffiti multiple times. According to a recent survey , more than 80 percent of Dutch citizens are opposed to the removal of colonial-era statues. Olivia Tasevski is an international relations tutor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She specializes in human rights issues in Indonesia alongside Indonesian politics and history.
Twitter: OliviaTasevski. That is really as far as our collective memory takes us. We are celebrating an ahistorical independence anniversary. What about those years from the time the Netherlands started to impose control over global spice supplies from Indonesia by violent means? We know of the killings of almost the entire population of 14, people on Banda Island. But we know little of the intervening years between that massacre and the war for independence in We hardly get any picture of life under Dutch colonialism from writers in the Balai Pustaka generation from onward.
As good as their writings are — considered classic Indonesian literature — they take the colonial system as given, understandably because of the censorship. We get some ideas from the writings of Sukarno and friends, but they are clouded with rhetoric for independence.
We get far more from Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who had not lived through the era but was able to recreate the atmosphere vividly around Minke, the main character of his Buru Quartet novels.
Dutch literature of the 17th, 18th and 19th century is filled with glorification of how their tiny country ruled the world to become the wealthiest nation on earth. Grossly absent is the cruelty and brutality as the Netherlands seized control of the spice trade and the transatlantic slave trade. These are not in their collective memory. In the United States, we get glimpses of the horrors that African slaves went through, and some of these stories have turned into bestseller books and home box office films.
It is heartening to see a handful of Dutch and Indonesian historians launching Histori Bersama Shared History at historibersama. Launched in , Histori Bersama casts doubts on the credibility of an ongoing research project commissioned by the Dutch government to look into claims of war crimes committed when Dutch soldiers were sent to Indonesia to reimpose colonial rule after World War II.
Dutch consciousness and understanding of their colonial history is for them to deal with. If they have not come to terms with their ugly past, it is their problem. This Dutch Ethical Policy implied one profound and far-reaching side effect. Its educational component contributed significantly to the awakening of Pan-Indonesian nationalism by providing Indonesians the intellectual tools to organize and articulate their objections to colonial rule.
The Ethical Policy provided a small Indonesian elite with Western political ideas of freedom and democracy. For the first time the native people of the Archipelago began to develop a national consciousness as 'Indonesians'.
In students in Batavia founded the association Budi Utomo, the first native political society. This event is often regarded as the birth of Indonesian nationalism. It established a political tradition in which cooperation between the young Indonesian elite and the Dutch colonial authorities was expected to lead to acquiring some degree of independence.
The next chapter in the development of Indonesian nationalism was the founding of the first mass-based political party, the Sarekat Islam Islamic Union in Initially, it was formed to support the indigenous entrepreneurs against the dominating Chinese in the local economy but it expanded its scope and developed a popular political consciousness with subversive tendencies. Other important movements that led to the unfolding of indigenous political thinking in the Dutch-Indies were the Muhammadiyah, an Islamic reformist socio-religious movement founded in and the Indonesian Association of Social Democrats, a communist movement founded in that spread Marxist ideas through the Dutch Indies.
Initially, the Dutch colonial authorities permitted the establishment of indigenous political movements but when Indonesian ideologies radicalized in the s as seen in the communist uprisings in West Java and West Sumatra in and the Dutch authorities changed course.
A relative tolerant regime was replaced with a repressive one in which every suspected act of subversive behaviour was suppressed. This repressive regime in fact only worsened the situation by radicalizing the entire Indonesian nationalist movement.
Its goal was full independence for Indonesia. Another important occasion for Indonesian nationalism was the declaration of the Youth Pledge in At this congress of youth organizations three ideals were proclaimed, to wit: one motherland, one nation, and one language.
The main aim of this congress was to stimulate a feeling of unity between the young Indonesians. On this congress the future national anthem Indonesia Raya was played and the future national flag merah-putih was shown for the first time. The colonial authorities reacted with another act of suppression. Young national leaders, such as Soekarno who would become Indonesia's first president in and Mohammad Hatta Indonesia's first vice president were arrested and exiled.
The Dutch were powerful enough to curb Indonesian nationalism by arresting its leaders and suppressing the nationalist organizations. But never were they able to eliminate nationalist sentiment among the Indonesian people. The Indonesians, on the other hand, did not have the power to combat the colonial rulers and therefore needed outside help to eliminate the colonial system. In March the Japanese, fueled by their desire for oil, provided such help by occupying the Dutch Indies.
Although initially welcomed as liberators by the Indonesian population, Indonesians would soon experience the hardship of the Japanese rule: scarcity of food, clothing and medicines as well as forced labour under harsh conditions.
The scarcity of food was mainly caused by administrative incompetence, turning Java into an island of hunger. Indonesians working as forced labourers called romusha were stationed to work on labour-intensive construction projects on Java.
When the Japanese took over, Dutch officials were thrown in internment camps and were replaced by Indonesians to administer government tasks. The Japanese educated, trained and armed many young Indonesians and gave their nationalist leaders a political voice. This enabled the nationalists to prepare for a future independent Indonesian nation.
In the final months before Japan's surrender, effectively ending World War II, the Japanese gave full support to the Indonesian nationalist movement. Political, economic and social dismantling of the Dutch colonial state meant that a new era was about to emerge.
On 17 August Soekarno and Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, eight days after the Nagasaki atomic bombing and two days after Japan lost the war. Click here to read an overview of Soekarno's Old Order. There basically exist three "histories", or more accurately, three versions of Indonesia's colonial period:.
It should be emphasized, however, that within each of these three groups - Indonesians, the Dutch, and academics in this case mainly historians , - there exists plenty of variety. But we can discern three broad versions. Well, the overview of Indonesia's colonial period that is presented above is a synopsis of the academic version.
However, it is interesting to provide some information about the Indonesian and Dutch versions. With these versions we mean the general consensus and views that are shared by the people this includes the ordinary people but also government officials, and those who wrote the history books for the younger generations, etc.
Obviously, the Indonesian and Dutch versions have a lot in common. However, due to both sides' involvement in this colonial history there exist some differences that can be attributed to sentiments and political interests.
What is wrong with this statement? First of all, it supposes that Indonesia already was a unified nation in the late s or early s. However, in reality the country we now know as Indonesia was a patchwork of independent indigenous kingdoms that lacked a feeling of brotherhood or nationalist sentiment or any other sense of unity.
In fact, wars between these kingdoms - either inter or intra island - were the rule rather than the exception. Secondly, the whole area we now know as Indonesia was not conquered by the Dutch around the same time and then possessed for 3.
0コメント