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ov. 10 is Heroes’ Day and will remain so. For some, however, the days surrounding that date in 1945 are a nightmare. What made them such a horror was the Bersiap — the violent attacks of Indonesian independent guerilla fighters killing hundreds of allegedly pro-Dutch Indo-Europeans, Chinese, Ambonese and Manadonese.

Bersiap was the word used by the Japanese-trained militia, the PETA, to order its members to be “ready” for action. During the event, it presumably became a code word for the pemoeda, the youth, to call their fellow countrymen to fight the “colonialists.” Decades later, for many in the Netherlands that simple word has become a vivid reminder of the brutality of that time.

 The atrocities in Surabaya began late October as the young militia acquired Japanese weapons amid the confusion when Dutch officers joined the Allied forces assigned to take over control from the defeated Japanese.

In the Simpang and Gubeng areas of Surabaya, also in Central Java’s Ambarawa and in Jakarta, many innocent civilians, including women and children, were killed and thousands went missing.

The events acquired renewed significance very recently, as the Netherlands’ ruling liberal-conservative political party VVD demanded that the violence should be revealed in a big academic research project on the war of decolonization (See “Will we see decolonizing of Dutch decolonization war?” by this writer, The Jakarta Post, Sept. 27, 2017).

 While some academics argue that the Bersiap could possibly be viewed as genocide, others argue that it has too often been viewed as isolated events. Nevertheless, violence breeds violence. The Dutch colonial history and Indonesia’s independence war are good cases to view violence from a long-term perspective.

Although it began as robbery along the Maluku islands and the northern coast of Java, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) has taught us the impacts of power games and violence for local societies through two-and-a-half centuries.

Centuries of war, alliances and domination have strengthened the perceptions of political games and dominance between and among the VOC and the past kingdoms of today’s Indonesia.

The historian MC Ricklef’s study of 18th-century Mataram reminds us of the intricacies of Javanese rulers’ relationship with the VOC and its successors. In a cultural sense, the two are often far from being in separate categories, as they came to develop parallel perspectives over the centuries of what state dominance should be.

Rule, domination and regional hegemony could only be built over time once stability was achieved and properly and carefully maintained.

And stability is precisely the prerequisite of what historian Soemarsaid Moertono saw as the most legitimate and pivotal role of the Javanese ideal of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled (kawula-gusti).

Indeed it was their later successors, the Netherlands-Hindia state and Indonesia’s New Order, that learned much about the same power idioms. To oppose the state is to become the enemy that must eventually be annihilated. In reproducing their respective patterns of state dominance, these rulers were merely good students of the VOC and the Javanese rulers of the past.

They created, in effect, what anthropologist J. Pemberton describes in his On the Subject of Java as “the legitimate posturing of power,” such that it would appear to be taken for granted.

Thus, the prevailing slogans of Dutch colonial rule, Rust en Orde (tranquility and order) and that of the New Order, kamtibnas (keamanan & ketertiban nasional, or national order and security) became the common essence of their doctrines to divide and rule. And violence is definitely no stranger to such doctrines.

When the Dutch, joining the British, returned to Java in 1945 — claiming to have come to restore the sacred “tranquility and order” — they provoked the local people to respond violently, in exactly the way they used to respond. But, in a time of revolt and revolution, the contradictions couldn’t be harsher.

Local movements, of which the Bersiap events were a part, responded to the Dutch aggression. They were not exactly organized, but the brutalities were of a similar magnitude as the violence that occurred in the series of local movements concurrent with the Bersiap period — 1945-1946.

In terms of spirit, they were profoundly similar to the events known as the Peristiwa Tiga Daerah, the affair of three regencies, in which left-wing units revolted along Java’s northern coast; the social revolution in Surakarta, Central Java, against the local aristocrats who were the new administrators of the crumbling colonial rule; and the Cumbok War against the Acehnese aristocrats, or the uleebalang ruling class.

These were peoples’ movements against the colonial domination built by the Dutch and the local aristocracy.

As with elsewhere at the time, as former Sukarno aide Roeslan Abdulgani has reminded us, the Bersiap, too, was preceded by weeks of British bombing during the holy month of Ramadhan in 1945.

Alas, today, some Dutch perspectives, precisely because they were victims and the losers, tend to view the Bersiap as a special case, quite separate from the local uprisings against colonial domination and aggression. In Indonesia, the Bersiap is less known as an episode of violence, because it was seen as patriotism and heroism on the part of the victors.

Therefore, in response to the views, mainly in the Netherlands, that the incidents of Bersiap were “the mother of all violence,” I recall the words of my friend, the late PP van Lelyveld, who as a child suffered in the Japanese camps and in the Bersiap violence: “Well, that was a time of revolution.”
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The author is a journalist in Amsterdam.