Year Zero (16 page)

Malays decided to strike back at the Chinese. The leading figure was a fierce-looking former gangster boss in a turban, named Kiyai Salleh. He emerged after the war as the chieftain of a group named the Red Bands of the Sabilillah (Holy War). Their goal was to protect the Muslim faith against Chinese heathens and to avenge the Malays whom the Chinese had humiliated and killed after the Japanese defeat. Although the jihad against the Chinese was ostensibly Islamic—Koranic texts were read, Sufi saints invoked—Salleh modeled himself after Malay mystics, claiming to be invulnerable to harm: “He cannot be killed by bullets; he can walk dry-shod across rivers; he can burst any bonds that are put on him; his voice can paralyze his assailants.”
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His followers believed that they were blessed with similar powers, after pricking themselves with golden needles and drinking potions blessed by the holy warrior chief.

The Red Bands' favorite method of killing was by machete, or the Malay dagger called
kris,
a weapon imbued, like the warriors themselves, with mystical powers. In one typical incident, on November 6, a band of Malay jihadis swooped down on a Chinese village at Padang Lebar and hacked five men and thirty-five women and children to death with their daggers and machetes. The corpses of the children were thrown down a
well. Malay politicians did not exactly support this kind of thing, but they did little to stop it. According to a British military intelligence report, “there appears to be an appreciable concern among educated Malays regarding the future status of Malays in Malaya and there is a fairly widespread belief that the Chinese are securing an economic grip of the country, which, if unchecked, may eventually lead to political control.”
⁵⁵

This same fear haunted Indonesians, so it was not by chance that the Malay chieftain's three main lieutenants were Indonesian nationalists from the Dutch East Indies, where the situation in the autumn of 1945 was a good deal worse than in Malaya.

G. F. Jacobs, a South African major in His Majesty's Royal Marines, was one of the first Allied soldiers to be parachuted into Sumatra in August 1945. His task was to establish contact with the Japanese military authorities and prepare the way for their surrender and Allied troops to land. Jacobs was also one of the first to see the state of Japanese POW camps holding thousands of diseased, emaciated, beaten, and starved civilians. Dutch prisoners couldn't understand why Jacobs would not let them exact rough justice: “Why did you stop us . . . can't you see we want to fix these little yellow bastards?”
⁵⁶

The reason why Major Jacobs had to stop the POWs from lynching their guards was his fear of a far greater threat. Indonesians were roaming the country with guns, daggers, and pointed spears, screaming “
bunuh Belanda!
,” “Death to the white man!” Japanese were needed to guard their former prisoners.

On the morning of August 17, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno read a short, typed declaration to a smallish crowd in Batavia (Jakarta): “We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power etc., will be carried out in a conscientious manner and as speedily as possible.”

The declaration had been drafted by Sukarno, self-appointed president of the new Republic of Indonesia, and his vice president, Mohammed Hatta, in close consultation with the Japanese army and navy
commanders. When defeat looked inevitable in the summer of 1945, the Japanese decided that an independent, anti-Western Indonesia would be their best option. Most Japanese, after all, took the slogan “Asia for the Asians” seriously, even if they had hoped to rule over other Asians as the superior race. Many Indonesians, tired of violence, brutalized by the Japanese, hungry and vulnerable to diseases brought back by survivors of forced labor on the Thailand–Burma Railway and other hellish Japanese projects, were not sure yet what to think. There was little hostility to Dutch civilians in the first weeks after the Japanese surrender. Sukarno, Hatta, and other leaders such as Sutan Syahrir, a Dutch-educated socialist who had never cooperated with the Japanese, did their best to contain potential violence in an archipelago over which they did not yet have much control.

The new Indonesian leaders certainly had little sway over the large numbers of young toughs, who had been radicalized and trained as auxiliaries in the Japanese army. These boys were in a mood to fight. Weapons were acquired from sympathetic Japanese officers, sometimes bought, sometimes stolen from Japanese depots. In one estimate, the fighters obtained more than fifty thousand rifles, three thousand light and heavy machine guns, and a hundred million rounds of ammunition.
⁵⁷
What the Dutch should have done, and were encouraged to do by their Western allies, was to negotiate with Sukarno and the other Indonesian leaders who had no interest in revolutionary violence. In Mountbatten's wishful words: “Our only idea is to get the Dutch and the Indonesians to kiss and make friends and then pull out.”
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Instead, the Dutch petitioned the British Foreign Office, comparing the “so-called Sukarno government” to the pro-Nazi Quisling regime, and the young Indonesian fighters for independence to the Hitler Youth and the SS. Sukarno's proclamation of independence was portrayed as a Japanese plot to continue a fascist regime in the Dutch East Indies.
⁵⁹

About Sukarno's collaboration with the Japanese there can be no doubt. He had spent much of the 1930s in Dutch colonial prisons, or in exile on a remote island. The Japanese had treated him with more respect
than the Dutch had done. It was in any case not unreasonable for Sukarno to see Japan as the quickest route to national liberation. “For the first time in all my life,” he said, in 1942, “I saw myself in the mirror of Asia.”
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But Sukarno's collaboration went too far even for many Indonesians. His support of Indonesian forced labor for the Japanese war effort tarnished his reputation, and the young radicals were angry that he had involved the Japanese in the declaration of independence. They wanted nothing to do with the Japanese. But no one disputed Sukarno's credentials as an Indonesian nationalist.

Rather than deal directly with Sukarno, however, the Dutch issued vague promises of Indonesian autonomy in a Dutch-led commonwealth. Meanwhile, starting in September, veterans of the Dutch East Indies Army swaggered around Indonesian villages and neighborhoods, shooting their guns, tearing down red and white Indonesian flags, and threatening people, all in the way of showing who was boss. The most notorious vigilantes were a group called Battalion X, led by Dutch and Eurasian commanders, but mostly manned by dark-skinned Ambonese Christians, Medanese, and other minorities, who were more afraid of being dominated by other Indonesians than by the Dutch, and who had been loyal servants of the colonial system. When news came of the arrival of Dutch and British battleships carrying Allied troops, mostly Indians, and agents of the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA), bent on restoring the old order, the scene was set for the bloodiest violence in Southeast Asia, violence that was part revolution, part vengeance, and part criminality, the same lethal brew that exploded in central Europe earlier in the year.

The bands of armed extremists that unleashed the wave of terror in October and November 1945, a wave known as
bersiap
(“Get ready!”), consisted mostly of former members of Japanese-led militias and street toughs, often teenagers recruited from gangs in Jakarta, Surabaya, or other cities. But the youth groups, or
pemuda
, also included students, factory workers, and villagers. Some of their leaders were gangster bosses, whose reasons for robbing and killing the rich and powerful had less to do with
politics than with greed. Some were charismatic figures, such as the bandit chief named Father Tiger, who sold amulets to his men for invulnerability. The mixture of Javanese mysticism and Japanese indoctrination about the warrior spirit imbued young fighters with a reckless sense of heroism: “
Merdeka atan mati!
” (“Freedom or death!”). There were instances of youths battling tanks with nothing but machetes and bamboo spears.

The main victims of revolutionary vengeance were the Chinese, associated with business and suspected of treachery, and the Eurasians, or “Indos,” as well as other minorities who had often sided with the Dutch. Then there were those often imaginary creatures called NICA spies. The definition of a NICA spy could be quite arbitrary; a person with too much red, white, and blue (the Dutch national colors) in his sarong could be picked up as an agent for the Dutch administration.

Chinese, Indos, or Ambonese knew trouble was coming when they heard the sound of bamboo spears being banged like drums of war against the hollow metal lampposts of Jakarta. The armed Japanese soldiers who were ordered to protect civilians in the absence of Allied troops often slunk away when the banging started. Shops were raided and houses set on fire. The families inside were hacked to death by frenzied youths, drunk with violence, literally in love with their daggers, and sometimes given to drinking the blood of their victims. In one area near Jakarta, there was no more fresh water, because the wells had been stuffed solid with putrefying Chinese corpses.

The Indo-Dutch phrase for the most common kind of killing was
getjintjangd
.
Tjintjang
meant slashing a person with a
kris
or machete. Dutch civilians, foolish enough to leave the camps still guarded by Japanese, were frequently
tjintjanged
, as were Japanese soldiers who resisted demands to help the rebels or hand over their weapons. Even though the old concentration camps, huge squalid villages full of sick and hungry people, were also targeted for attack, they were still the safest places to be, as long as the Japanese guards stayed at their posts.

One young man, named Peter van Berkum, born in Indonesia like
many Dutch civilians, was picked up at random one night in Surabaya by a group of wild teenagers with sharpened bamboo spears. He was taken by truck to a local prison: “As the truck slowed it was surrounded by this mass of screaming people. I saw only a blur of brown, sweaty faces with contorted, wide-open mouths. They were shaking clenched fists and brandishing all sorts of weapons.” Amidst screams of “Death to the whites!” the prisoners were pushed out of the truck. “Immediately the crowd started in on them, beating, hacking, stabbing with sticks and bayonets, using axes, rifle-butts, and spears.”
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Bersiap
, never wished for by the Indonesian leaders, was now utterly beyond their control. Battles broke out all over Java and Sumatra, not just acts of vengeance against colonials and their alleged helpers, but between rebels and Japanese as well, in a bloody cycle of revenge and retaliation. In Semarang, a Japanese unit led by Major Kido Shinichiro clashed with
pemuda
, who believed the Japanese were sabotaging the water supply. The Japanese, in a brutal form of intimidation, killed a number of Indonesian militants. Indonesians then murdered more than two hundred Japanese civilians locked up in the city jail. A British army report noted: “Some corpses were hanging from the roof and from the windows, others had been pierced through and through with bamboo spears . . . Some had tried to write last messages in blood on the walls.”
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More than two thousand Indonesians were butchered in retaliation by the enraged Japanese.

The worst violence engulfed the industrial city of Surabaya, which was entirely in the hands of the Indonesians by the end of October. The jails had been emptied. Crowds of
pemuda
freedom fighters, petty mobsters, and romantic youths fired up by tales of traditional Javanese derring-do broadcast on “Radio Rebellion” by a charismatic long-haired figure known as Brother Tomo, ruled the streets. Chinese, Ambonese, and Indos, accused of being NICA spies, were assaulted with daggers and spears. And the Japanese, worried about their own lives, happily supplied the mobs with more lethal arms.

Peter van Berkum's sister, Carla, arrived with other Dutch refugees from a nearby concentration camp: “We were stormed by a mob of
natives. They stuck their bamboo spears at us aggressively. And they kept screaming:
merdeka! merdeka! merdeka!
[freedom]. They were dressed in rags. Their dark eyes had a terrifying look. I was scared.”
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The Allies decided to act. P. J. G. Huijer, a Dutch navy captain, was sent into the city to prepare the way for an Allied landing. Quite naturally, his arrival was seen as a further provocation. Arms kept flowing from Japanese arsenals to the
pemuda
fighters. On October 25, about four thousand British troops, mostly Indians and Nepalese Gurkhas, came ashore. Rumor had it that these soldiers were Dutchmen in blackface. They were attacked by a ragtag army of Indonesians. Afraid that their troops would be massacred, the British asked Sukarno and Hatta to come down and control the mobs. They complied, and had some success. The cease-fire held, more or less, until October 31 when the British commander, Brigadier General A. W .S. Mallaby, trying to intervene in a fight, was shot by Indonesians.

This time it was the British who sought retribution. For the next three weeks, beginning on November 10, Surabaya was bombed, shelled, and strafed. An eyewitness described the scene in the center of the city:

Bodies of men, horses, cats and dogs, lay in the gutters, broken glass, furniture, tangled telephone lines cluttered the roads, and the noise of battle echoed among the office buildings . . . The Indonesian resistance went through two phases, first fanatical self-sacrifice, with men armed only with daggers charging Sherman tanks, and later in a more organized and effective manner, following closely Japanese military manuals.
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By the end of November, Surabaya had been pacified at the cost of being reduced to a bombed-out battleground reeking of the corpses of Indonesians, Indians, British, Dutch, Indos, and Chinese. It would not be until 1949, after further acts of vengeance, not least from the Dutch, who in 1946 sent death squads led by Raymond “Turk” Westerling into South Sulawesi, where thousands of civilians were murdered, that Indonesia
achieved full independence. (Westerling, incidentally, who had fought the Germans in North Africa during World War II, later became a devout Muslim.)