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