A Revolution Delayed: The

Indonesian Republic and the

Netherlands Indies, August-
November 1945
ROBERT CRIBB

In the continuing debate on the relative importance of diplomacy and armed struggle
in the outcome of the Indonesian national revolution (1945-49), two periods are
acknowledged as crucial. They fall, as one might expect, at the beginning and end
of the revolution. Whereas, however, the protagonists of diplomacy and armed
struggle vie over credit for the Republic’s victory in 1949, they tend to seek to avoid
blame for the events of late 1945, for the fact that victory and international
recognition did not come along with or soon after the declaration of independence.
For, although the Republic laid its claim to existence in August 1945, it was riot until
the middle of November that it began to engage seriously in diplomatic or military
struggle with its principal challenger, the Dutch. The revolution was fought during
the years 1946-49 as a more or less conventional international conflict, in which both
sides employed a mix of diplomacy and armed struggle, but this was not the case
before December 1945; indeed, the early months of the revolution were striking for
the lack of direct contact of any kind between the two main parties to the dispute.
This paper will not address the speculative question of whether the revolution might
have reached a speedier, or a different, conclusion had the Republic adopted different
policies during its first three months. Rather, it will attempt to explain that perplexing
delay in the effective start of the war of independence, a delay which has often given
rise to allegations of lack of will and initiative on the part of the Republic’s leaders.
The delay was initially a consequence of the overwhelming weakness of both the
incipient Republic of Indonesia and the renascent Netherlands Indies at the outset
of the revolution, which made not only organized fighting but also serious negotiation
an impossibility. To begin with, the two sides lacked even the technical facilities to
contact each other. The policies, however, which both sides adopted to circumvent
the effects of this weakness tended, paradoxically, to prolong it and thus to postpone
the eventual confrontation. In particular, these policies involved attempting to make
use of two outside forces, the Japanese and the British, whose organization and
facilities gave them the power to influence events. Although building up a capacity
to fight and negotiate was recognized as important by Indonesian and Netherlands
Indies leaders, they concentrated on seeking to manoeuvre first the Japanese and
then the British into policies favourable to their respective causes. While this policy
did ensure the survival of the new-born Republic and the born-again colonial
government, it had a cost. That cost was the need to postpone and limit the building
of a state apparatus in order not to appear able to dispense with the assistance of the
greater powers. The delay lasted some months, ending gradually as it became
apparent that neither the Japanese nor the British were willing or able to fight other
people’s wars. From approximately mid-November 1945, the revolution began to be
A Revolution Delayed 73

fought as a war between two quasi-states, each controlling large stretches of territory,
commanding its own military, political an$ administrative structures, and conducting
its own foreign relations. In this form the revolution continued until December 1949,
and both sides came to regret the delays of late 1945.
When Japanese troops conquered the Indonesian archipelago in early 1942, Dutch
colonialists and Indonesian nationalists were united in believing that the ensuing
occupaion would be brief. The Dutch were generally convinced that the force of
Allied arms would soon drive out the invaders and restore the old colonial order,
while the nationalists believed that the Japanese would grant independence to
Indonesia, either as a matter of principle in line with their professed commitment to
East Asian solidarity or as a result of political necessity. Although the occupation
lasted considerably longer than most Indonesians or Dutch had originally expected,
the assumptions made by either group in 1942 about how the Japanese occupation
would end remained essentially unchanged in mid-1945 as the war's end approached.
With the Japanese military advance stemmed on all fronts as early as 1943, and
with Allied forces pressing forward from the south, the east and the west, the
Netherlands Indies government-in-exile in Australia formed the Netherlands Indies
Civil Administration (NICA), a militarized administrative contingent attached to
Allied forces on the Pacific front line, with the task of conducting administration in
the newly recaptured territories. As Allied troops entered West New Guinea and
other regions of eastern Indonesia, NICA officers were on the spot to restore Dutch
authority and it was planned that the rest of the country would be reoccupied in a
similar fashion.' Over the same period the Japanese, who had already granted a
form of independence to Burma and the Philippines, made a series of concessions
which pointed generally in the direction of Indonesian independence. These included
the appointment of Indonesians to increasingly senior administrative posts and the
formation of an Indonesian armed force, the PETA (Pembela Tanah Air, Defenders
of the Homeland), officered by Indonesians up to battalion As the Allies
advanced through Burma and the Pacific, concessions towards independence came
at a steadily faster pace, and there seemed little doubt to the nationalists that
independence would reach the country before the Allies did. Thus, in September
1944, the Japanese prime minister Koiso officially announced that Indonesia would
indeed be granted independence in the near future. Then, in May 1945, the military
administration on Java established the Badan Penyeiidik Usaha Persiapan
Kemerdekaan Indonesia (Body to Investigate Measures for the Preparation of
Indonesian Independence), or BPKI, consisting of sixty-two delegates from most
parts of the archipelago, though predominantly from Java. In a series of sessions in
May, June and July the BPKI drafted a constitution for independent Indonesia.
Meanwhile, the formal grant of independence was set for 9 September 1945; then,
after the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Sukarno and Hatta were
summoned to Dalat in Vietnam to be told on 11 August that independence would be
granted on the 24th, only to find soon after their return to Java that the Japanese
had surrendered on 14 August and all preparations for independence were
~uspended.~
Although the Japanese had surrendered, both the Indonesians and the Allies
continued to see them as the determining force in the future of the archipelago. The
Allies gave to the Japanese responsibility for maintaining law, order and the political
status quo in the occupied territories and, although there was considerable doubt in
Allied circles as to the Japanese willingness to obey these orders, few doubted their
capacity to carry them out. Allied information on Indonesia was very scanty. During
the war the whole of the former Netherlands Indies, with the exception of Sumatra,
74 Robert Cribb

had been within MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area (SWPA). As the war drew
towards its end, however, MacArthur preferred to concentrate his troops on the final
drive for Japan, and the United States in general wished to be free of the likely
political difficulties involved in occupying former European colonies in South-east
Asia. The Americans were able, therefore, to arrange the transfer of the remainder
of Indonesia, together with Thailand and southern Indochina, to Mountbatten’s
largely British South East Asia Command (SEAC). This took place on 15 August,
one day after the s ~ r r e n d e r . ~
There were virtually no effective Allied intelligence operations in Indonesia during
the occupation and few of the SWPA files on Indonesia were transferred to SEAC,
so that the British had little inkling of political developments in the archipelago during
the war. They heard radio broadcasts from Indonesia on 17 August announcing that
a Republic had been declared, but Mountbatten apparently assumed that this was
the puppet Republic which the Japanese had been planning before the surrender and
he simply radioed instructions to the Japanese to dissolve it. An Allied reconnaissance
team was parachuted into .Jakarta on 8 September 1945, but its radio equipment was
damaged in the drop and it was unable to report to Mountbatten on the situation in
the Only from 15 September, therefore, a month after the declaration of
independence, when H.M.S. Cumberland arrived in Jakarta Bay under the command
of Rear-Admiral Patterson with an advance guard of Seaforth Highlanders to accept
the Japanese surrender and begin the official reoccupation, did reIiable information
on the situation begin to flow to Mountbatten’s headquarters in Kandy.6
In the main, therefore, British policy was guided by the pre-war belief, assiduously
encouraged by the Dutch during the war, that the Indonesians were a peaceful folk
wanting nothing more than the fatherly guidance of Dutch colonial rule.’
Mountbatten, thus, expected neither political difficulties nor serious problems of law
and order, and, being short of men and transport and more interested in any case in
re-establishing Britain’s authority in her own colonies and in Thailand, he placed a
low priority on occupying Indonesia. He was aware, on the other hand, that a
prolonged interregnum might lead to a breakdown of law and order even in the most
peaceful of colonies, and he was therefore careful not to allow any partial takeover
of authority by the Allies to infringe the legal responsibility of the Japanese for
maintaining law and order in the country in the interim. He instructed all Allied
prisoners-of-war and internees (APWI) in Indonesia to remain in their camps until
formally relieved by Allied troops and he ordered RAPWI (Recovery of Allied
Prisoners-of-War and Internees) teams who parachuted into various parts of
Indonesia to have no more to do with the Japanese than was necessary to assist the
prisoners and gather useful intelligence. Thus Allied policy began with a shying away
from administrative responsibility.
The Indonesian nationalists were of course aware of the Allies as a serious obstacle
to their plans long before the Allies were aware of them. Through Dutch radio
broadcasts from Australia during the war, they not only knew of Dutch ambitions
to restore the colonial order in Indonesia, but had discovered that the Dutch intended,
as one of their first actions on retaking Indonesia, to reckon with those Indonesians
who had co-operated with the Japanese, which amounted in fact to virtually the
entire nationalist movement. The defeat of the Japanese was both a boost to the
position of the Allies and a measure of their strength. On Java, however, the Japanese
remained in power and it was they who represented the most direct obstacle to
nationalist action. The problem for the nationalists was to know how far the Japanese
would go in carrying out their instructions to maintain law, order and the political
status quo. Amongst the Japanese there were some officers with a certain sympathy
A Revolution Delayed 75

for Indonesian nationalism, or who at least judged that it was not in the long-term
interests of Japanese troops in Indonesia, especially on Java, if they opposed a
popular uprising. Such officers were prepared to argue that the surrender terms
simply obliged them not to intervene to alter the status quo, or that responsibility
for the civil administration had already been transferred to the Indonesians and what
they did with it was their own affair.* No one seriously imagined, however, that the
Allies would be happy with these interpretations and the Allies had made it clear that
they would regard failure to obey the terms of the surrender as a war crime.
Therefore, although the nationalists could count on some room to manoeuvre, it was
not clear just how wide or narrow that room was. In nationalist circles in Jakarta,
clandestine debate began immediately over the possibility of a unilateral declaration
of independence, and it was only when a group of pemuda (youth) convinced Sukarno
and Hatta that a revolution would break out whether or not they were prepared to
lead it, and reinforced their point by kidnapping and detaining the two leaders for a
day, that the leaders agreed to move in order to prevent a disorderly outbreak which
would clearly oblige the Japanese to intervene. Independence was declared in the
yard of Sukarno’s house in Jakarta on 17 August 1945.’
I t is difficult in retrospect to appreciate the utter powerlessness of the new Republic
of Indonesia. It controlled no territory, it had no army and no administrative corps,
and its leaders, although politically experienced, had only the barest of political
organizations to back them. They expected, moreover, an occupation army of
victorious Allies to arrive within a few days to take over from the defeated though
still powerful Japanese. The declaration of independence, however, was the
nationalist movement’s first definitive benchmark for progress; everything which
had been achieved before it had depended in the last instance on the whim and policy
of the colonial power. The declaration was a point of no return, or at least a point
from which return could only mean abject and total failure and the probable political
extinction of those most closely involved. The declaration of independence changed
the priorities of the nationalist movement: the preservation of the Republic, rather
than the strengthening of the movement or its ideological purity, became the principal
concern. The fragility of the Republican state meant that emphasis had to be laid on
day-to-day survival rather than on the inevitability of the nationalist victory in the
long term. Flexibility of goals was lost, for what had been claimed could not easily
be given up, but flexibility of tactics had become more important than ever.
Totally lacking the usual technical apparatus of government, the Republic
depended for its immediate survival on manipulating powers greater than it into
leaving it be. This manipulation, however, developed its own momentum and internal
logic and in fact hampered the development of the Republican state apparatus. The
first concern of the Republic was to avoid giving the Japanese any reason t o act
against it. That the Japanese were unwilling to take chances was indicated by the
fact that they quietly disarmed most of the PETA units on Java on 19 August. The
Republic itself was still not much more than the handiwork of a small number of
nationalist politicians and Jakarta pemuda, and the Japanese, with two or three
battalions of regular soldiers in the city, could readily have arrested a couple of dozen
key figures and issued a military ordinance banning the Republic.Io An equally serious
risk from the point of view of the Republican leaders was that popular unrest might
break out, leading the Japanese to intervene to restore law and order and to sweep
away the Republic in the process. The new Republic’s first public announcements,
therefore, stressed the need for peace and order and assured the Indonesian people
that the takeover of power from the Japanese was in good hands. The declaration
of independence itself said soothingly, ‘Matters concerning the transfer of power
76 Robert Cribb

etc. will be carried out in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time’;
Sukarno and his colleagues had vetoed a suggestion from the pemuda that the
declaration say, ‘All existing government organs must be seized by the people from
the foreigners who still occupy them’.” On 18 August, Sukarno addressed the
Indonesian people:
I t is hereby announced that the setting up of a free Indonesia, which is desired by the whole
people, is now being carefully undertaken. Various groups which have accepted their
responsibility to the people are co-operating in this endeavour. Everything necessary for
the establishment of the Republik Indonesia is being looked after and will be completed
shortly. It is hoped that the Indonesian people at all levels of society will be peaceful, calm
and prepared, and will maintain firm discipline.12
It was necessary, however, to manage the Republic in such a way that it did not
impinge on the formal authority of the Japanese. The ‘setting up of a free Indonesia’
to which Sukarno referred on 18 August was in fact little more than a shuffling of
individuals and constitutional forms by a small group of nationalist politicians in
Jakarta. A constitution was adopted and Sukarno and Hatta were elected President
and Vice-president on 18 August. The PPKI changed its name to KNI (Kornite
National Indonesia, Indonesian National Committee) and then reappointed itself to
an expanded representative body, the KNIP (KNZ Pusat, Central KNI). It approved
a division of the country into eight provinces, distributed responsibilities amongst
various yet-to-be-formed ministries and finally discussed sending Indonesian
representatives to the San Francisco Conference.I3 All this was done without in any
way increasing the power of the Republic to govern. The provinces and ministries
formed on 19 August remained without heads, let alone bodies, for more than two
weeks. On 23 August, moreover, in a sweeping act of administrative decentralization
with few parallels in history, the centre abdicated responsibility for virtually all
regional and local affairs to local KNI’s, though only the barest of guidelines was
given as to how these KNI’s should be formed or how they should 0 p e ~ a t e . IRather
~
than taking over government offices, the Republic concentrated on winning the
personal allegiance of government officials while leaving the Japanese in formal
control. Even the cabinet, finally sworn in on 31 August, did not meet for another
three weeks. The Republic was thus developing neither by taking over the apparatus
of the Japanese military administration, nor as a political and administrative structure
distinct from it, but rather as a state of mind within it.
The looming presence of the Allies gave an extra urgency to this distancing from
the Japanese. Although preserving the Republic from destruction at the hands of the
Japanese was the most urgent of the tasks facing Sukarno and his colleagues, in the
longer term it was acceptance or rejection by the Allies which would determine the
survival or disappearance of the Republic. From the Dutch there was no question of
acceptance. The Dutch, however, having been defeated ignominiously in Europe in
1940 and in Indonesia in 1942 and only recently liberated from German occupation,
were seen with some accuracy as a not very powerful appendage of the Allies,
dependent in the short term on the help of other powers to regain control of their
former colony. The Americans on the other hand had laid considerable emphasis
during the war on the idea of self-determination in general and on the principles of
the Atlantic Charter in particular, and it was largely by appealing to these principles,
and by drawing parallels, with the American Revolution, that the Republic hoped to
gain American recognition as the representative of the legitimate national aspirations
of the Indonesian people. The First World War had been followed by a
comprehensive redrawing of the political boundaries of Europe and these re\ isioris
had tended to work in favour of nation states. It was therefore not unreasonable for
A Revolution Delayed 77

Indonesian nationalists to hope that a similar redrawing of boundaries after the

Second World War would be in their favour.
In the second half of 1945, conditions had become less favourable to these hopes,
for the Americans had rid themselves with some agility of their potentially
embarrassing responsibility in Indonesia, while the British who replaced them had
no anti-colonial reputation and were not likely to be impressed by comparisons
between Sukarno and George Washington. Nonetheless, the Republic’s strategy
remained one of going over the heads of the Dutch to appeal directly to the Allies
for recognition. To make the Republic’s claims credible in the political climate of
1945, it was necessary before all else to demonstrate freedom from association with
Japanese fascism. Given that Sukarno, Hatta and virtually all the Republican
leadership had worked with the Japanese right up until the surrender, this was no
easy task, especially since the Japanese were still on the spot to take offence at any
denunciation of their rule. While doing nothing, therefore, to antagonize the
Japanese, the Republican leaders did what they could to distance themselves from
the military administration.
The Republic’s policy of not impinging on the formal authority of the Japanese
of course fitted neatly with a policy of distancing itself from them. It emerged most
clearly in the Republic’s attitude to the question of military organization. On 19
August, apparently unaware of the Japanese moves to disarm the PETA, the KNI
actually requested the Japanese to dissolve it, for they expected that it would be
irredeemably tainted by Japanese militarism in the eyes of the Allies. The government
then deliberately decided not to form an army which might be seen by the Allies
either as a hostile gesture or as a continuation of the Japanese army. Instead, it
created on 20 August an armed Badan Keamanan Rakyat (People’s Security
Organization), or BKR, tucked away as a branch of a charitable organization for
war victims. Although a central headquarters existed, responsibility for BKR activities
was quickly devolved to the local KNI’s and was exercised in practice by local
commanders.I5 Sukarno’s first cabinet, moreover, contained no ministry of defence
or security.
The strongly ideological character of the Republic was not simply a product of the
attcrnpt to accommodate the Japanese and Allies. Sukarno, Hatta and most of the
nationalist leaders had little experience of government administration. Their
organizational experience was derived from the rather different world of the
nationalist movement and the professions, and they felt neither comfortable or
especially capable in that field. Reliance on ideology and rhetoric on the other hand
was cheap politically for Sukarno and his colleagues, being less demanding of time
and effort and less dangerous in terms of the short-term internal strains it might
generate within the Republic than an attempt to build up the state. This strategy was
also ideologically attractive, for it expressed a confidence in the ability of the
Indonesian people to govern themselves at every level, without the persistent and
pervasive intervention which had been characteristic of Dutch rule. It corresponded,
moreover, with a belief amongst the population that independence meant a lifting
of the numerous constraints of government. And, to an important degree, it
safeguarded the position of the existing Republican leaders by denying potential
rivals, be they military or bureaucratic, a power base close to the centre. Ideology,
after all, was what the nationalist leaders were good at and while the Republic
remained largely an ideological entity their position was safe from military or
bureaucratic challenge.
The Dutch for their part were in no position to resume their colonial domination
of Indonesia. The NICA was geared to the gradual reoccupation of the archipelago
78 Robert Cribb

in the wake of advancing Allied troops and its officials were far too few and too
inexperienced to take over at short notice where the colonial government had left off
in 1942. As a matter of official policy, moreover, virtually all the pre-war colonial
officials had stayed on in Indonesia when the Japanese arrived in 1942, and of these
somewhere between one and two thirds failed to survive the internment camps. Many
of the survivors were so weakened physically or mentally by their experiences that
they could not be usefully employed before they had spent time recuperating in the
Netherlands or Australia. The Dutch, moreover, had very few military forces with
which to enforce their claim to sovereignty. Like the civil administration, the former
colonial army (KNIL) had suffered badly during the war. Some men were in a fit
state to be formed within weeks of the surrender into new battalions in Japan and
Thailand, where they had been taken as labour, but even the full strength of the pre-
war KNIL, which had operated primarily as a militarized police force, was unlikely
to be sufficient to reoccupy all of Indonesia. Further troops were being trained in
the Netherlands to assist, but it took some time to prepare them for military service
in the tropics and to find shipping to bring them to South-east Asia.I6
In the meantime, the Netherlands Indies based its claims to recognition as the
government of the archipelago on documents only a little less flimsy than the Atlantic
Charter. Under the series of Allied agreements reached in preparation for the
surrender, notably the Potsdam Agreement of July 1945, the British were obliged to
accept the Japanese surrender in Indonesia, to take charge of the Japanese armed
forces there and prepare for their repatriation to Japan, to recover and assist the
APWI, and to prepare for a return to civil government. On 24 August 1945,
moreover, the British had signed with the Dutch a Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs
Agreement which largely copied an earlier Dutch-American agreement governing the
relationship between Allied military officers and NICA officials close to the front
line. The essence of the Dutch argument was that these two agreements obliged the
British to take the necessary steps to restore Dutch authority in Indonesia as a final
part of the common war effort to which the Dutch had already contributed.'' Like
the Republic with its appeal to the Atlantic Charter, the Dutch chose in time of
weakness to stress what they saw as the ideological justice of their case, rather than
their capacity to enforce their rights.
Both the Indonesian Republic and the Netherlands Indies, however, discovered in
the second month after the declaration of independence that ideological
considerations came rather low on the British scale of priorities. Patterson's reports
from Jakarta in mid-September and those from his counterparts in other regions
made it clear to the British that the reoccupation of Indonesia would not only be
difficult but was likely to bring the British into a host of conflicting commitments.
The British had faced a brutal civil war in Greece a few months earlier, precipitated
by the landing of British troops, and this experience haunted their preparations for
Indonesia.'* Although Mountbatten immediately appointed an experienced army
officer, Lt.-Gen. Sir Philip Christison, to take over responsibility for the operation
in Indonesia from the elderly Admiral Patterson, the British were concerned above
all to avoid having to fight. Their original intention had clearly been to restore the
Dutch to Indonesia, and most British civil and military officials wished the Dutch
we11.I9 Neither the British government nor Mountbatten, however, was willing to
fight a colonial war on behalf of the Dutch. Although most parts of Indonesia were
still relatively peaceful in mid-September, there was little doubt of the potential for
a ferocious struggle,
In attempting to make their way through this tangle of obligations and difficulties,
the British focused on the issue of law and order. Only if law and order were
A Revolution Delayed 79

maintained could they complete the evacuation of the APWl and Japanese; and if
law and order were maintained, they could legitimately claim to have prepared for
a return to civil government without having openly intervened in Indonesian/Indies
internal affairs. Law and order, moreover, was an issue on which they could
reasonably hope to get the co-operation of all the interested parties, the Indonesians,
the Dutch and the Japanese, which was quite clearly not the case with ideology. The
question of Japanese war crimes and Indonesian collaboration was therefore put on
the back burner. Uncomfortably aware that Japanese troops who believed themselves
already doomed by war crimes tribunals were less likely to co-operate than those
who still believed they might redeem themselves, the British discreetly delayed Allied
war crimes investigations and refrained from suggesting publicly that Indonesians
who had worked for the Japanese could be considered Quislings.*O Instead, they
made it known to Japanese commanders that their conduct during the post-surrender
period would have a major influence on their subsequent treatment, and their
statements to the Indonesian authorities with whom they came into contact were a
constant refrain: the British had not come to Indonesia to restore Dutch authority
but were there simply as representatives of the Allies and the United Nations (the
two were seen as much the same thing) with the task of accepting the Japanese
wrrender and repatriating the APWl and Japanese troops. Indonesian nationalists,
therefore, would further their cause best by co-operating with the Allies in
maintaining law and order, thereby demonstrating their capability and responsibility.
Patterson sent a message to the Republican leaders saying that he would not interfere
with them as long as they kept their followers under control. ‘They promised,’ in
Patterson’s words, ‘to be good’. On 30 September, two days after the first British
troops began landing in Jakarta, the British began direct negotiations with the
Indonesian police in the city, with the approval of Sukarno, and on 1 October reached
an acceptable formula for policing the city.2’
The arrival of the British with their calls for law and order coincided with a
dramatic breakdown in law and order through much of Java and Sumatra. During
the first month or so after the declaration of independence, the deliberate inactivity
at the highest levels of decision-making in the Republic and the Allied forces had
been reflected by a somewhat confused inactivity in the rest of society. On 17 August
a group of pemuda had gained control of the radio station in Jakarta long enough
to broadcast news of the declaration of independence. Few people outside the capital,
however, seem to have taken the declaration seriously at first, partly because the
Japanese suppressed news of the proclamation and of their own surrender for several
days, partly because a declaration of independence under Japanese auspices was
expected in any case and that was not something to be particularly excited about.
With instructions from nationalist leaders in Jakarta, if they were received at all,
calling on people to stay calm and d o nothing, that was precisely what most people
did.22Even the PETA troops at Rengasdengklok who had disarmed the Japanese
there on 16 August allowed themselves in turn to be disarmed without a struggle on
20-21 August.Z3 The European prisoners-of-war and internees, for their part,
scattered in camps throughout Java and Sumatra, generally obeyed Mountbatten’s
instructions to stay put and await the formal liberation.
As time passed, however, the puzzlement of the Indonesian and Dutch populations
of the archipelago at the inactivity of their leaders gradually turned to concern,
outrage and a determination to act regardless of official instructions. The internees
began to ignore Mountbatten’s instructions and to return to their old homes to begin
rebuilding their pre-war way of life. In many areas, the senior surviving members
of the pre-war colonial administration established provisional local governments to
80 Robert Cribb

prepare the ground for the full restoration of colonial authority. In many cases they
were backed up by newly formed irregular groups of former KNIL soldiers, such as
the so-called 10th Battalion in Jakarta and the semi-official police force of Captain
R.P.P. Westerling in M e d a r ~Indonesians
.~~ for their part began to take over offices
and buildings from the Japanese, who were in any case rapidly withdrawing many
of their personnel to well-supplied assembly camps in preparation for repatriation.
All over the country, too, Indonesians began to form badan perjuangan (struggle
organizations), as yet unarmed clusters of patriots determined to help defend the
Republic. Thousands of such bands were formed, ranging from the quasi-military
BKR, which inherited many former members of the PETA, to small and evanescent
groups of young people of both sexes. They grew typically around existing social
nuclei - local bosses, religious leaders, ethnic associations, semi-skilled labour
groups, school groups, neighbourhood associations, and the many youth groups set
up by the Japanese - and they drew on the increased organizational experience and
political mobilization which people had gained during the Japanese period.2s
Although an attack by pemuda on an internment camp is reported as early as 24
Augustz6,all this activity remained largely non-violent at first, partly because neither
Indonesians nor Dutch had significant stocks of weapons and ammunition, partly
because the growing apprehension with which Indonesians and Dutchmen viewed
each other’s activities was tempered by the shared hope that British intervention
would be decisive and favourable.
Britain’s initial impact, however, was anything but decisive or unequivocal. The
long delay in despatching British troops to Indonesia and the refusal of the British
to commit themselves clearly to either side led Dutch and Indonesian vigilantes
increasingly to take direct action against each other. Both groups, moreover, had
increasing access to weapons. The Indonesians obtained theirs largely from the
Japanese, sometimes in ambushes or surprise attacks, sometimes by various forms
of agreement with local Japanese officers happy to let nationalists have their arms
if it could be made to appear as if the Japanese had been forced to surrender them.
The Dutch vigilantes were generally well supplied with weapons wherever the Allies
had landed for, although the supply of arms to non-military personnel was
theoretically not allowed, there were a multitude of channels through which Dutch
representatives and sympathizers could quietly make weapons available to the
vigilante^.^^ An escalating series of clashes took place in the cities and countryside
of Java and Sumatra, frequently prompted by real or imagined insults to the
sovereignty claimed by either side, such as the tearing down of a flag or the writing
up of slogans. The months October and November became known as the bersiap
time, from the cry ‘Bersiap!’ (‘Get ready!’) which summoned the badan perjuangan
to meet an enemy threat.zs
The violence led the British to redouble their efforts to portray the issue as one of
law and order rather than politics, and they renewed their insistence that the
Republican and Netherlands Indies governments keep their followers under control.
Formally obliged under the Civil Affairs Agreement, the Dutch promised co-
operation, though they did little notable to demonstrate it. The Republican leaders,
clearly less favoured by Britain’s avowed neutrality in the conflict, continued their
frequent public calls for peace and calm, The violence, however, continued. This
was of course partly the consequence of each government’s lack of control over its
own followers. Both the Republic and the Dutch, however, also had clear political
advantages in disorder and violence as long as they could avoid being blamed for it.
For the Dutch, any agreement between the British and the Republic, such as the
police agreement made in Jakarta on 1 October, amounted to a dangerous step
A Revolution Delayed 81

towards recognition. It was in Dutch interests, therefore, to destroy any such

rapprochement by provoking clashes which would discredit Indonesian promises to
co-operate and which might draw the British from their studied neutrality to a clear
commitment to the Dutch. The Indonesian leaders for their part were well aware that
to discipline their followers and restore law and order, even if it were possible to do
so, would do away with their usefulness to the British. While it was important that
they be seen as a co-operative force for law and order, it was perhaps even more
important that they be unable to control their followers thoroughly.
Law and order, moreover, had ceased to be as politically neutral as the British
once hoped. Both the Republic and the Dutch were committed to law and order, but
each interpreted it in a particular way. Both sides felt weak and vulnerable politically.
The Indonesians had declared independence under circumstances which suggested
Japanese complicity, and they lacked both an effective government apparatus and
the armed forces with which to defend the Republic. The Dutch, conscious of their
humiliating defeat in 1942 and also critically short of administrative forces, were
deeply suspicious of what they saw as attempts to revise the status of the Netherlands
Indies at their expense. For both, therefore, there was a premium on maintaining
public inflexibility, on preserving an image of sovereignty which was not reflected in
control on the ground. Ability to maintain law and order is one of the foremost
attributes of sovereignty and was important for this reason alone, but it was also a
means of coping with the gap between the illusion of sovereignty and the reality of
powerlessness. The very existence of a serious challenge to sovereignty could not be
recognized; the existence of a serious challenge to law and order could. Each side
needed to regard the other as a band of lawless troublemakers, against whom armed
force was the only protection. The leaders of either side might be persuaded to appeal
for calm and restraint to placate the British, but the fact remained that, in the idiom
of Indonesian-Dutch relations at the time, the Dutch vigilantes on the one hand and
the badan perjuangan on the other were all that stood between their respective
political groups and destruction. Until they were given some other guarantee of a
political future, both sides had little choice but to continue fighting, not to win but
LOsurvive. And as long as the political situation placed this premium on indiscipline,
both sides were hampered in their attempts to build up a disciplined state structure.
The undisciplined violence of October and November was effective as a means of
self defence for the Republic and the Netherlands Indies, but it was distinctly
unsuccessful in prising the British out of their ambiguous neutrality. This failure was
perhaps most clearly apparent in events in Surabaya in late October and early
November. There, at a convenient distance from Jakarta, a combination of stubborn
and open insistence by local Dutch representatives on exercising authority in the city,
equally stubborn resistance by well-armed and highly suspicious local badan
perjuangan, and unpredictable events such as the apparently accidental dropping of
Allied leaflets calling provocatively for the immediate surrender of all Indonesian
weapons, led to a ferocious battle in the city between British and Indonesian troops
during which the local British commander, General Mallaby, was killed. The battle
provided the Republic with an opportunity to demonstrate to the British the dangers
of attempting to subdue it by force of arms, while at the same time giving Sukarno
an opportunity to demonstrate his power and usefulness by twice in the course of
the battle persuading the badan perjuangan to accept a ceasefire which enabled the
British to regroup and c ~ n s o l i d a t eYet
. ~ ~neither stick nor carrot brought the British
any closer to official recognition of the Republic. For the Dutch point of view, the
affair was equally unproductive, for despite the direct conflict between Indonesian
and British forces the British did not torswear all further co-operation wlth the
82 Robert Cribb

Republic and carry out a fu11 scale war to wipe it from the face of Indonesia, but
rather limited their campaign to the occupation of Surabaya and continued their
various co-operative arrangements with the Indonesians in Jakarta and elsewhere.
Although the violence failed as a political weapon to force the British to choose
between the Republic and the Dutch, it convinced the British of the need to obtain
a political solution to the conflict. Instead of insisting that they were not involved in
politics at all, the British began increasingly to seek the role of mediator between the
two sides, putting pressure on both to accept the idea of a negotiated settlement.’0
The British hoped that this would reduce the level of violence and, just as important,
that it would depoliticize whatever violence continued, enabling the British to take
more determined action against it without compromising their political neutrality.
Aside from the fact that the British wanted negotiations and were still powerful
enough to make life difficult for those who did not co-operate, there were a number
of reasons why both sides were interested in negotiations at this stage. In the first
place, now that it was clear that the British would not support one side against the
other, negotiations promised a breathing space in which both sides would build up
their strength for the time when they would fight their own wars. In the second place,
that build-up was already under way, and both sides could approach the conference
table feeling that they had more to back their positions than the mere force of
argument.
On the Republican side, the creation of a n army, the TKR (Teniara Keamanan
Rakyai, People’s Security Army), to replace the BKR on 5 October was an early
indication of this change, though the appointment of a minister of defence, Supriadi,
the following day demonstrated the importance still attached to ideological
acceptability. Supriadi had led a revolt of PETA troops against the Japanese in Blitar
in East Java in February 1945 and his appointment was a clear statement that the
TKR, although an army, was not a continuation of the PETA.31 Supriadi had,
however, been missing since the revolt and was almost certainly dead; even if the
Republican leaders still hoped that he might be alive and in hiding, he was clearly
not in a position to take the organization of the army in hand. It was only with the
election by senior TKR officers of Sudirman as army commander on 12 November
and the appointment of Amir Syarifuddin as defence minister on 14 November that
the construction of an effective defence force began, although this process was
fraught with internal Alongside this process was a build-up of the
Republic’s administrative apparatus by the formal takeover of government offices,
which was soon followed by a general retreat of Republican politicians and
government departments from the occupied coastal cities into the interior of Java
and Sumatra where they created the Republic state which fought the remainder of
the revolution.
A similar process took place on the Dutch side, with the establishment first of a
rudimentary central administration in Jakarta, followed by the consolidation of
Dutch rule in Kalimantan and eastern Indonesia, where Australian troops had been
quicker to arrive and where the Republic consequently had less opportunity to get
established and in any case had a weaker nationalist movement and a smaller
population to depend on.33By recruitment in Europe and amongst former prisoners-
of-war, moreover, the Dutch had also begun to put together an army of appreciable
size. The fact that the British would not allow it to enter Indonesia on the barely
concealed grounds that it could not be relied upon not to provoke fresh clashes with
the Indonesians was extra incentive for the Dutch to defuse the issue by coming to
the conference table.34
Negotiations also appeared more attractive because each side now saw the
A Revolution Delayed 83

possibility of actually reaching an acceptable agreement with the other. The Dutch
were encouraged especially by the appointment of Sutan Syahrir as the Republic’s
prime minister on 14 November. Syahrir was a prominent pre-war nationalist with
an unblemished record of non-co-operation with the Dutch and the Japanese, and
he was becoming widely known and respected amongst the Dutch as the author of
Indonesische Overpeinzingen (Indonesian Reflections), a book of his letters to his
wife in Holland.” His rise to power within the Republic was due both to admiration
for his politics and to the more cynical calculation that he was the Republican
politician most acceptable to the Dutch. The Republicans for their part were
encouraged by signs that the Dutch would not insist on a restoration of the pre-war
status quo but were prepared to make significant concessions to the demands of
Indonesian nationalism. On 6 November 1945, for instance, van Mook outlined a
Dutch proposal which included internal autonomy for Indonesia, the abolition of
racial discrimination, a broad expansion of educational opportunities for Indonesians
and a stimulation of Indonesian involvement in the economy.36The two sides were
still nowhere near agreement, but a basis for negotiation had been laid.
By mid-November 1945, the policy of dependence on outside forces had outlived
its usefulness. The appeal to international opinion remained an important element
in the strategy of either side but the capacity of the Republic and the Netherlands
Indies to fight and negotiate with each other directly was established. From the
beginning of 1946, those who wished, like Tan Malaka and the Persatuan Perjuangan
in the Republic or conservative colonists in the Netherlands Indies, to change the
mix of diplomacy and armed struggle in favour of armed struggle sought first to
change the government, to remove Syahrir or van Mook, rather than to take matters
into their own hands as they had in August-November 1945.
On both the Republican and Dutch sides, the first three months after the
Indonesian declaration of independence have frequently been seen as a time of missed
opportunities when more forceful or imaginative action by the leaders of the Republic
or the Netherlands Indies might have resolved the crisis quickly and prevented its
descent into four long years’ of debilitating and divisive military and diplomatic
struggle. In fact, the weakness of both sides in 1945 precluded effective forceful
action. Instead, both sides adopted a careful inactivity intended to manipulate other
forces into fighting their battles, literally and metaphorically. These tactics did not
bring victory to either side, but they did the more basic service of ensuring that both
sides survived to fight, and talk, for a protracted national revolution.

NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the annual conference of the Association for Asian
Studies, Washington, DC, in March 1984. The author has benefited considerably from the discussion
which followed, especially from the comment3 of Dr Barbara Harvey of the State Department.
I. Netherlands, Staten-Generaal, EnquEtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940-1945, Verslag houdende de
Uitkomsten van her Onderzoek: deel 8A en B, Militair Beleid 1940-1945: Terugkeer Naar
Nederlandsch-Indie [PunfP van het EnquCtebesluil]: Verslag en Bijlagen [hereafter Militair Beleidl
(The Hague, 1956), 573-82.
2. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Java in a Time ofRevolulion: Occupation and Resistance 1944-1946
(Ithaca, 1972), 20; Nugroho Notosusanto, The PETA Army during the Jupanese Occupation of
Indonesia (Tokyo, 1979), 92-101.
3. Anderson, Java, 36, 49-69; George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonmia
(Ithaca, 1952), 127; Anthony J .S. Reid, The Indonesian National Revolution 1945-1950 (Hawthorn,
1974), 19-21.
4. For contrasting accounts of the transfer, see Clifford William Squire, ‘Britain and the Transfer of
84 Robert Cribb

Power in Indonesia 1945-46’ (PhD dissertation, University of London, 1979), 40-43; and Robert J .
MacMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle f o r Indonesian
Independence, 1945-49 (Ithaca and London, 1981), 78-83.
5. ‘E’ Group South Consolidated Report July-December 1945, papers of Capt. L.M. Godfrey, Imperial
War Museum, London.
6. Ibid.; Report by Wing Commander T.S. Tull OBE on Operation Salex Mastiff Mid-Java 10th
September to 15th December 1945, Bata_via, 27th December 1945, Liddell Hart Centre for Military
Archives, King’s College, London, file Tull 1; Squire, ‘Britain and the Transfer of Power’, 59-72.
7. See, for example, ‘Life and times of General Sir Philip Christison, Bt’ (autobiography) (Typescript,
Melrose, Scotland, 1980). 176, file 82/15/1, Imperial War Museum.
8. Interview with former head of logistics section, Japanese army on Java, Tokyo, 29 March 1982.
9. Anderson, Java, 66-84.
10. On Japanese attitudes to the Republic, see W.G.J. Remmelink, ‘The Emergence of the New Situation:
the Japanese Army on Java after the Surrender’, Kabar Seberang 4 (July 1978), 62-3; Major-General
Moichiro Yamamoto, ‘An individual opinion which may interest the Allied powers with regard to
the future management of Indonesia’, 23 September 1945, Nishijima Collection (Waseda University).
item no. AD 31; interviews with Japanese occupation officials, Tokyo, March & April 1982.
11. Reid, Indonesian National Revolution, 28.
12. Tjahaja (Bandung), 19 August 1945; see also ibid., 23 August 1945, and Adam Malik, In the Service
of the Republic (Singapore, 1980), 139-40.
13. On these constitutional aspects of the early Republic, see Anderson, Java, 86-93; Kahin, Naf~onafism
and Revolution, 139-40.
14. ‘Verslag betreffende de Republiek Indonesia, opgesteld aan de hand van gegevens tijdens en na den
interneeringstijd daaromtrent verzameld uit de Maleische pers’, 31 August/ 1 September 1945,
Algemeen Rijksarchief, Archief Algemene Secretarie te Batavia, Eerste Zending [hereafter Alg.Sec.4,
box I, file 33; John R.W. Smail, Bandung in the Early Revolution, 1945-46: a Study in the Social
History of the Indonesian Revolution (Ithaca, 1964), 39-44; Anderson, Java, 88-9.
15. On the dissolution of the PETA and the formation of the BKR, see Notosusanto, The PETA Army,
171-75; Anderson, Java, 99-105; Remmelink ‘The Emergence of the New Situation’, 60; Entol
Chaeruddin, Proklamasi I7 Agustus I945 dan Pemindahan Kekuasaan (Jakarta, 1973), 7; Dinas
Sejarah Militer Kodam V/Jaya, Sejarah Perjuangan Rakyat Jakarta, Tanggerang dun Bekasi dalam
Menegakkan Kemerdekaan R.I. (Jakarta, 1975), 27-8.
16. Van Mook, nota voor de ministerraad, 20 December 1945, Officiele Bescheiden Betreffende de
Nederlands-Indonesische Betrekkingen 1945-1949 [hereafter OBB],ed. S.L. van der Wal, I1 (The
Hague, 1972), 380; E. van Witsen, Krijgsgevangenen in de Pacific-Oorlog (I941-1945) (Franeker,
1971), 234-45: H. Kruls, Op Inspectie (Amsterdam & Brussels, 1947), 42-5.
17. Militair Beleid, 634-6.
18. On the question of Britain’s responsib es to the Dutch, see Squire, ‘Britain and the Transfer of
Power’, 61-9. On the situation which the British faced in Greece, see John 0. Iatrides, Revolt in
Athens: the Greek Communist ‘Second Round’ 1944-1945 (Princeton, 1972), 200-55.
19. ‘Life and times of General Sir Philip Christison’, loc.cit., 176; L.W.G. Hamilton, ‘Notes on situation
in Jakarta October 1945-March 1946’ (Typescript, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1981).
20. Report by Wing Commander T.S. Tull, 1oc.cit.
21. Van der Plas, Report of discussions with Lord Louis Mountbatten in Singapore, 2 October 1945,
OBB 1,229-32; Squire, ‘Britain and the Transfer of Power’, 72 Militair Beleid, 709; A.H. Nasution,
Sekitar Perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia, jilid 1: Proklamasi (Bandung, 1977), 3 12; Merdeka
(Jakarta), 1 , 4 October 1945; ‘Agreement between the chief of police in Batavia, Mr. Soewirdjo [sic]
and the British army reached on the first of October, at Police H.Q.’, Alg.Sec.I, box 1, file 23;
Patterson to CiC-AFNEI. 1 November 1945, FO 371/52779; confidential sources.
22. Anthony Reid, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern
Sumatra (Kuala Lumpur, 1979), 148; interview with former employee of Jakarta radio station,
Jakarta, 30 July 1982.
23. Interview with former shodancha, Rengasdengklok PETA, Karawang, 1 November 1982.
24. ‘E’ Group Consolidated Report, 1oc.cit.; Reid, Blood of the People, 151; J.A.A. van Doom and
W. J. Hendrix, Ontsporing van Geweld: over hef Nederlands/fndisch/indonesisrh Conflict
(Rotterdam, 1970), 116-20; W.F. Wertheim, Indonesie: van Vorstenrbk tot Neo-kolonze
(Amsterdam, 1978). 118; Soeara Merdeka (Bandung), 16 September 1945; Merdeka, 3 October 1945
and passim. Interviews with senior Netherlands Indies civil and military officials, The Hague,
November 1981.
25. Anderson, Java, 230-31,264.
26. Van Witsen, Krijgsgevangenen, 235.
27. ‘E’ Group Consolidated Report, loc.cit.
A Revolution Delayed 85

28. Sejarah Perjuangan Rakyat, 33-42, 46-53; A.J.F. Doulton, The Fighting Cock (Aldershot, 1951).
242; interviews with former members of the Jakarta BKR/TKR, Jakarta, March 1983.
29. On the Battle of Surabaya, see Doulton, The Fighting Cock, 249-67; Anderson, Java, 151-66;
William Hayward Frederick, ‘Indonesian urban society in transition; Surabaya, 1926-1946’ (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1978), 659- , 709-27, 748-50.
30. Militair Beleid, 698; reports of the 34th and 35th joint meetings of the Supreme Allied Commander
in South-east Asia, 10, 11 October 1945, OBB I, 300-18; C. Smit, De Liquidutie van ern Imperium:
Nederland en Indonesie 1945-1962 (Amsterdam, 1962), 22.
3 1 . Ulf Sundhaussen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics 1945-1967 (Kuala Lurnpur,
1982), 7.
32. Ibid., 8-9, 20-23.
33. Van Doorn and Hendrix, Ontsporing van Geweld, 61-64.
34. Mountbatten to Cabinet Offices, 13, 16 October 1945, India Office Records, L/WS/1/716.
35. Sjahrazad [pseudonym of Sutan Syahrir], Indonesische Overpeinzingen (Amsterdam, 1945).
36. A. Alberts, Her Einde van een Verhounding: Indonesie en Nederland tussen 1945 en 1963 (Alphen
aan den Rijn, 1968), 55-8; Yong Mun Cheong, H.J. van Mook and Indonesian Independence: a
Study of his Role in Dutch-Indonesian Relations, 1945-48 (The Hague, 1982). 50-51.