TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Will we see decolonizing of Dutch decolonization war?
The Netherlands administration is now ready to review its perspective of the role of the Dutch in Indonesia’s independence war.
Change Size
Known as the symbol of the capital city, Heroes Monument (Tugu Pahlawan) is dedicated to all soldiers who passed away during the Battle of Surabaya on November 10, 1945. (Shutterstock/File)
D
utch academics have just started a huge history project. While the United States calls its most traumatic colonial war the “Vietnam War” and the French “Guerre d’Alger,” the Dutch strangely dubbed their colonial war that ended in their big political loss, not the “Indonesia war” — but politionele actie — the police operation.
The truth, of course, is that it’s about two military aggressions and the occupation of Indonesia following her declaration of independence on Aug. 17, 1945.
The Dutch term is significant. It unambiguously points to the Dutch determination at the end of WW II to revive her colonial power, which was disrupted by the Japanese occupation, through a brutal war to recover rust en order (order and tranquility) in Indonesia.
The reality behind this narrative, however, was that a newly independent country was ready to fight for freedom with a bloody guerilla war. The politionele actie is a hypocritical term to deny a popular, nationalistic people’s movement.
Seventy-two years after that war, the concept of politionele actie is still part of the Dutch DNA. It has become part and parcel of Dutch political thinking, media and public discourse — although it has never been part of their high school education. Now Dutch historians want to review it.
On Sept. 14, I attended the official kick off of the big research project titled “Decolonization, violence and war in Indonesia 1945-1950” in Amsterdam.
Three famous institutions — the Royal Institute (KITLV), the War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) and the Institute for Military History (NIMH), which is part of the Netherlands’ Defense Ministry — are involved.
