British reflections on RI's Heroes Day<\/p>\n
By David Jardine<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): \"Happy the land without heroes,\" said the
\nphilosopher Bertolt Brecht. Maybe, but he would find few, if any,
\ntakers for such a sentiment in Indonesia as the country
\ncelebrated National Heroes Day on Nov. 10.<\/p>\n
Trawling recently through the archives of Singapore's The
\nStraits Times the following reference was found, which amply
\ndemonstrates in its own way just what it was that the risen
\npeople, the Indonesians, were up against and the marrow-of-the-
\nbone arrogance of the colonialists:<\/p>\n
\"P.O.W. Reaction to the Java News; Among Hollanders on
\nSingapore ... several thousand ex-POWs and others believe that
\nDr. Soekarno has been given much more prominence than he is worth
\nin the news from Java in the past few days,\" read the report of
\nOct. 2, 1945.<\/p>\n
\"This view was voiced by Mr. B.W.M. de Haas, editor of the
\nwell-known Batavia newspaper Java Bode when he came to call at
\nThe Straits Times office.\"<\/p>\n
This was printed without further comment, doubtless reflecting
\nthe same smug colonial hauteur among the freshly returned British
\nin the Singapore colony.<\/p>\n
Two days later the same newspaper reported that \"Nats have
\ntaken over the Surabaya airfield\". Three planes, one British, one
\nDutch, one Japanese, had been forced to abort landings in
\nSurabaya when confronted with \"a huge crowd on the airfield
\nwaving flags and armed with bamboos\".<\/p>\n
The report, making no reference to de Haas' peremptory
\ndismissal of the Indonesian cause through denigration of its
\nleader, then went on to say, \"All members of the Japanese Gestapo
\n(kempeitai) in Surabaya have been arrested by the Indonesians who
\nhave taken possession of six Japanese tanks and a number of
\narmored cars.\"<\/p>\n
Events in East Java in particular would prove, \"There are none
\nso blind as those that will not see.\" The colonialists, unable to
\nimagine the discontents of a colonized people, would, like all
\nautocrats, soon be made to realize the extent of their mistake.<\/p>\n
But what of the role of the British, who had no stake in the
\nDutch East Indies? I first became aware of it in 1983 on my first
\ntrip to Indonesia.<\/p>\n
A smiling Surabaya taxi driver asked me where I was from. \"I'm
\nBritish,\" I replied. His smile took on lighthouse proportions.
\n\"Oh,\" he said, \"we killed a British general here in 1945.\" That
\ngeneral was in fact a Brigadier Mallaby, commanding officer of
\nthe Commonwealth troops on the ground and leader of a detachment
\nof the 2nd Punjab Rifles.<\/p>\n
The same Mallaby is today buried in Jakarta's beautifully
\nmaintained Menteng Pulo Commonwealth War Graves Commission
\ncemetery, along with many other Commonwealth casualties of one of
\nBritain's forgotten little \"wars\".<\/p>\n
I told the driver I was an anticolonialist, anyway and sat
\nback to reflect on why I knew nothing of this colonial escapade
\nof ours. It was easy enough to understand why the British had
\nreturned to Singapore and Malaya, but Indonesia?<\/p>\n
There were legitimate reasons for the arrival of the force
\ncalled Repatriation of Allied Prisoners of War (RAPWI), but the
\ndisdainful refusal of the British to recognize the new state and
\nnegotiate with it would inevitably lead to confrontation.<\/p>\n
This refusal was, of course, rooted in the very same colonial
\nhauteur that de Haas exemplified and which the Straits Times had
\nreflected in its reportage of the Mountbatten-led British return
\nto Singapore in September: \" ... a great moment indeed to hear
\nBritish bugles sounding again on the padang, scene of so many
\nhistoric events in the history (sic!) of Singapore.\"<\/p>\n
RAPWI's mission soon became muddied with an extraneous agenda,
\nrecolonization of Indonesia by the Dutch and however haunting the
\nimages were, and are, of the surviving POWs and the rightness of
\nsecuring them, the fact remains that the British got involved in
\nsomething which did not concern them.<\/p>\n
More, they used surrendered Japanese troops to do their work
\nfor them, as indeed they did in Saigon against Ho Chi Minh's new
\nRepublic of Vietnam.<\/p>\n
In all the impassioned debate in the West about the continued
\nfailure of the Japanese to make adequate recompense for the many
\ncrimes committed in their name in the Pacific War, there is very
\nlittle acknowledgment of this. Or of what the veteran foreign
\ncorrespondent Edward Behr, a serving officer in Sumatra at the
\ntime, spoke of in his memoirs, acts committed by the Commonwealth
\nforce that would today be considered war crimes.<\/p>\n
There are other aspects of the British presence here in 1945
\nto 1946 that await a fuller disclosure, too. Ktut Tantri in her
\nbook Revolt in Paradise talks of a mutiny in Surabaya. The men
\ninvolved, she claimed, were soldiers of the West Yorkshire
\nRegiment.<\/p>\n
Certainly, there are men of that regiment buried in Menteng
\nPulo who died in late 1945. The youngest British soldier
\ncommemorated here is West Yorkshire Pte Wilfred Shane, whose date
\nof death was December 26, 1945. British histories of the period
\nmake no reference to such an issue or, like John Keay's recently
\npublished The Last Post, The End of Empire in the Far East, pass
\nover Ktut Tantri's claim without further ado.<\/p>\n
I can thank an anonymous Surabaya taxi driver for giving me an
\ninterest in the period and in the difficult birth of the Republic
\nof Indonesia. He led me to Menteng Pulo and the discovery of a
\ncorner of \"a foreign field forever England\" that is also a corner
\nof my nation's history that should not be forgotten.<\/p>\n
The author is a freelancer in Jakarta.<\/p>", "url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/british-reflections-on-ris-heroes-day-1447893297", "image": "" }, "sponsor": "Okusi Associates", "sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com" }