Looking back at how the British press covered Indonesia in 1945-1946

David Jardine, Carlisle, UK

In late September 1945 a British force arrived in Batavai; mission, to find and secure Allied POW and internees held by the Japanese in Java and Sumatra and to demobilize the Imperial Japanese forces.

In their wake came a small number of British reporters. The British press was about to enter a situation as unknown to them as it was to the British military. They had an equal unfamiliarity with the land and its people; major shocks awaited them.

It is historically instructive to look back at the way the British papers covered the "Indonesia crisis of 1945-1946". Reporters, few of them with any Malay language skills and none of them with Javanese or Sundanese, were pitched into the world's first post-World War II liberation struggle.

Their coverage was to reflect the same fundamental weaknesses as the military's; lack of knowledge of the nationalist ideology and the folklore that underpinned it such as the Javanese Djoyoboyo legend that had predicted the defeat of their white- skinned conquerors (the Dutch) by a yellow-skinned people from the north (the Japanese) and the appearance in the sky of jamur payung, umbrella mushrooms, to wit the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; no feeling for the real anti-colonial sentiments of the people.

Much poorly informed wishful thinking appeared in the British papers at the time. The most egregious coverage was that of the conservative Daily Telegraph but even the liberal Manchester Guardian echoed much of this. The latter, however, was forceful in its condemnation of what its correspondent perceived as the "lawlessness" of Dutch "native" troops, especially the Ambonese, in Batavia; it might have done more to emphasize the same anarchic behaviour amongst former Royal Netherlands East Indies Army men who had returned from the camps.

This is not to say that the lawlessness was all one-sided, far from it. As the situation degenerated with the British refusal to recognize the republic of Indonesia and to negotiate with it so the nationalists resorted to infamous acts of their own including attacks on POW camps and convoys.

The British papers showed an immediate tendency to interpret Indonesian nationalism simply as a function of wartime Japanese propaganda. This mis-reading of the situation would lead them to repeat the Dutch line that President Sukarno and Vice President Mohammad Hatta were simply "quislings" of the Japanese. The inappropriateness of the language used reached rock bottom when Arthur Mathers of the Telegraph described Jogjakarta as "the Nuremberg of the Nazis".

Nuremberg, it will be remembered, was where Hitler held his chilling pre-war Nazi rallies, a fact etched into the consciousness of the many British newspaper readers who would have seen the newsreel. Mathers did not cover himself in glory when he further accused the Indonesian nationalists of taking "another leaf from the Nazi book" by using a player-piano to serenade British troops with "home, Sweet Home". This seems about as far from the evils of Nazism as one could possibly imagine!

Constant use was made by the British press of inverted commas to refer to "the Republic", "the President (Soekarno)" and "the Prime Minister (Sutan Sjahrir)". This seems to have been purely dismissive of the nationalist cause as if it was entirely fictitious or a figment of the imagination. As late as July 1946, by which time the resolve of the nationalist movement had been well and truly tested, the London Observer was still referring to Soekarno in the approved Dutch fashion as a "quisling". Youth groups (pemuda) were invariably referred to as "wild and unruly elements", though this may have been far nearer the truth as it was such groups involved in such acts as the shelling of the POW camp at Ambarawa in Central Java.

The Times, still at that time one of the world's most- consulted papers (how the mighty have fallen), reported on Oct. 24, 1945, "After a few days here I feel that no more than 3 percent of the 70 million or more souls has a real nationalist or political consciousness..." Just how their correspondent had arrived at this conclusion is hard to fathom; it was extremely unsafe for Europeans outside Batavia and he probably did not have the appropriate language skills, besides which he would have been totally unfamiliar with a real Javanese tendency to give a questioner whatever answer they think he or she wants to hear. "The politically inert masses," the paper continued," are puzzled by the whole affair and want a return to peace and stability."

The very same "politically inert masses" would within a week of the report have claimed the life of the British commanding officer in Surabaya, Brigadier Auberin Mallaby. Occurring during a stand-off between Indian troops of the 6th Mahratta Regiment and the nationalists, Mallaby's death was to go down in the folklore of the independence struggle. When the British responded with extreme force, the "politically inert masses" took to the streets of the East Java capital in their tens of thousands and died in large numbers in the fight.

Would the media coverage be any different today? A moot point. Would the British insist on embedding reporters and TV crews? Certainly at one point the foreign press corps was moved to protest British military censorship of "the most vicious kind". There are enterprising reporters today who might have been prepared to take great risks to get a deeper story but that too is debatable.

Perhaps more to the point: Do the two very different publics, the Indonesians and the British really know much at all about this period? If not, why not?

The author is a freelance writer and can be reached at djardine72@yahoo.co.uk .