British reflections on RI's Heroes Day

British reflections on RI's Heroes Day

By David Jardine

JAKARTA (JP): "Happy the land without heroes," said the
philosopher Bertolt Brecht. Maybe, but he would find few, if any,
takers for such a sentiment in Indonesia as the country
celebrated National Heroes Day on Nov. 10.

Trawling recently through the archives of Singapore's The
Straits Times the following reference was found, which amply
demonstrates in its own way just what it was that the risen
people, the Indonesians, were up against and the marrow-of-the-
bone arrogance of the colonialists:

"P.O.W. Reaction to the Java News; Among Hollanders on
Singapore ... several thousand ex-POWs and others believe that
Dr. Soekarno has been given much more prominence than he is worth
in the news from Java in the past few days," read the report of
Oct. 2, 1945.

"This view was voiced by Mr. B.W.M. de Haas, editor of the
well-known Batavia newspaper Java Bode when he came to call at
The Straits Times office."

This was printed without further comment, doubtless reflecting
the same smug colonial hauteur among the freshly returned British
in the Singapore colony.

Two days later the same newspaper reported that "Nats have
taken over the Surabaya airfield". Three planes, one British, one
Dutch, one Japanese, had been forced to abort landings in
Surabaya when confronted with "a huge crowd on the airfield
waving flags and armed with bamboos".

The report, making no reference to de Haas' peremptory
dismissal of the Indonesian cause through denigration of its
leader, then went on to say, "All members of the Japanese Gestapo
(kempeitai) in Surabaya have been arrested by the Indonesians who
have taken possession of six Japanese tanks and a number of
armored cars."

Events in East Java in particular would prove, "There are none
so blind as those that will not see." The colonialists, unable to
imagine the discontents of a colonized people, would, like all
autocrats, soon be made to realize the extent of their mistake.

But what of the role of the British, who had no stake in the
Dutch East Indies? I first became aware of it in 1983 on my first
trip to Indonesia.

A smiling Surabaya taxi driver asked me where I was from. "I'm
British," I replied. His smile took on lighthouse proportions.
"Oh," he said, "we killed a British general here in 1945." That
general was in fact a Brigadier Mallaby, commanding officer of
the Commonwealth troops on the ground and leader of a detachment
of the 2nd Punjab Rifles.

The same Mallaby is today buried in Jakarta's beautifully
maintained Menteng Pulo Commonwealth War Graves Commission
cemetery, along with many other Commonwealth casualties of one of
Britain's forgotten little "wars".

I told the driver I was an anticolonialist, anyway and sat
back to reflect on why I knew nothing of this colonial escapade
of ours. It was easy enough to understand why the British had
returned to Singapore and Malaya, but Indonesia?

There were legitimate reasons for the arrival of the force
called Repatriation of Allied Prisoners of War (RAPWI), but the
disdainful refusal of the British to recognize the new state and
negotiate with it would inevitably lead to confrontation.

This refusal was, of course, rooted in the very same colonial
hauteur that de Haas exemplified and which the Straits Times had
reflected in its reportage of the Mountbatten-led British return
to Singapore in September: " ... a great moment indeed to hear
British bugles sounding again on the padang, scene of so many
historic events in the history (sic!) of Singapore."

RAPWI's mission soon became muddied with an extraneous agenda,
recolonization of Indonesia by the Dutch and however haunting the
images were, and are, of the surviving POWs and the rightness of
securing them, the fact remains that the British got involved in
something which did not concern them.

More, they used surrendered Japanese troops to do their work
for them, as indeed they did in Saigon against Ho Chi Minh's new
Republic of Vietnam.

In all the impassioned debate in the West about the continued
failure of the Japanese to make adequate recompense for the many
crimes committed in their name in the Pacific War, there is very
little acknowledgment of this. Or of what the veteran foreign
correspondent Edward Behr, a serving officer in Sumatra at the
time, spoke of in his memoirs, acts committed by the Commonwealth
force that would today be considered war crimes.

There are other aspects of the British presence here in 1945
to 1946 that await a fuller disclosure, too. Ktut Tantri in her
book Revolt in Paradise talks of a mutiny in Surabaya. The men
involved, she claimed, were soldiers of the West Yorkshire
Regiment.

Certainly, there are men of that regiment buried in Menteng
Pulo who died in late 1945. The youngest British soldier
commemorated here is West Yorkshire Pte Wilfred Shane, whose date
of death was December 26, 1945. British histories of the period
make no reference to such an issue or, like John Keay's recently
published The Last Post, The End of Empire in the Far East, pass
over Ktut Tantri's claim without further ado.

I can thank an anonymous Surabaya taxi driver for giving me an
interest in the period and in the difficult birth of the Republic
of Indonesia. He led me to Menteng Pulo and the discovery of a
corner of "a foreign field forever England" that is also a corner
of my nation's history that should not be forgotten.

The author is a freelancer in Jakarta.