In his new book, Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck puts the creation of the republic at the centre of the story. Indonesia was the first country to declare independence in the wake of the Second World War, shortly after the surrender of Japan, which had occupied what was then known as the Dutch East Indies since 1942. After the war, the Dutch tried to reconquer the islands, leading to ferocious fighting. Sovereignty wasn’t formally handed to the government in Jakarta until 27 December 1949, more than four years after Sukarno, the leader of the nationalist movement, had read out the ‘Proklamasi Kemerdekaan Indonesia’ – a declaration of independence.

Van Reybrouck is best known as the author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, which established a template for his lively works of history based on extensive interviews. Van Reybrouck often drops himself into the narrative to tell you how exciting the interviews were – that he sat ‘with bated breath’ or talked ‘as darkness gathered over the sea’ – which is unnecessary, since the vignettes are effective enough on their own. Revolusi was published in Dutch in 2020, and this translation (by David Colmer and David McKay) is the most important book in English to place the Indonesian revolution in a global context since the work of Benedict Anderson, though very different: Van Reybrouck’s skill lies in telling the story for a wide readership.

The existence of a country called Indonesia within its current borders is unimaginable without Dutch imperialism. There is no natural dividing line between Indonesia and the islands that now comprise the Philippines, and there was no firm cultural or linguistic division either before the Europeans arrived. At the other end of the country, where Indonesia wraps around former British possessions, the boundaries make even less sense: most of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, for instance, lies to the west of Malaysia.

In his book The Jakarta Method, Bevins documents the CIA role in organising (and covering up) the massive murder of more than a million people affiliated with the left in Indonesia.

Van Reybrouck describes the local reaction to the arrival of the Dutch in the early 1600s. They were portrayed as ‘giants with bulging eyes’; one captain was described as ‘a raging demon with brusque gestures and a raspy voice’ who emitted ‘an unbearable odour’. The early mariners were employees of the newly founded Dutch East India Company (VOC). They weren’t looking for territory, but for pepper, cloves and nutmeg. The turn to violence, conquest and forced labour came in response to global market conditions and growing competition. In Banda, for instance, local people defied the VOC by selling nutmeg to other companies, so in 1621 the Dutch massacred them, forcing out those inhabitants who remained and replacing them with settlers. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who ran the VOC’s operations in Asia in the early 17th century, held that ‘trade cannot be maintained without war.’ His patrons in the metropole said they disapproved, but they let him carry on – an approach that continued over the next three centuries.

As coffee and sugar became more important than spices, the Dutch needed more land for plantations and more people to work on them. By the end of the 18th century, however, the VOC’s military commitments and debts had grown too great for a private company to honour. It declared bankruptcy and was dissolved, its possessions passing to the government of the Dutch Batavian Republic. When Belgium left what was by then known as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, causing a budgetary crisis, the Dutch tried to make up for the shortfall by extracting more crops and labour from Asia. They continued to acquire new territory into the 20th century: by 1914, the government in The Hague controlled an area fifty times larger than the Netherlands itself. Hendrikus Colijn, who later became Dutch prime minister, remembered the capture of Lombok, the island just east of Bali, in 1894: ‘I had to have nine women and three children, who pleaded for mercy, heaped together and shot dead.’ It was ‘a nasty business, but there was no other way’.

Indonesia's Gen. Suharto and George H W Bush 1989. Local henchman and grifter for the empire meets with the imperial consul. In all latitudes, thugs like Suharto have always been the natural allies of the global oligarchy headed by Washington.

As Van Reybrouck’s narrative enters the 1940s, he employs another approach that appeals to Western readers: he writes about the war. About a third of the book is devoted to the Second World War. When Japan invaded, making quick work of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army after successful campaigns in Malaya and the Philippines, its soldiers were greeted as liberators. The Japanese talked up the idea of ‘East Asian co-prosperity’, and set up more schools in three years than the Europeans had in three centuries. But they also forced thousands of women into service as ‘comfort women’, and diverted rice and labour to support their increasingly desperate war effort, leading to the starvation of millions; the death toll in Java alone has been estimated at 2.4 million. British forces landed in September 1945 with the stated goal of demilitarising the Japanese and freeing the thousands of Europeans who had survived the Japanese internment camps. But they also brought back the Dutch, who assumed that they would rule the islands once more. Indonesians realised that the arrival of the Allies signalled European recolonisation. In the ensuing violence, civilians were killed by young Indonesian revolutionaries, to the horror of the Dutch and mixed-race Indo-Europeans; one of Van Reybrouck’s interviewees told him that a pregnant Chinese woman was murdered and her killers ‘cut out the baby’. Republican militias stormed Japanese installations and seized weapons. A number of white settlers had been adherents of National Socialism in the 1930s, but the Dutch now claimed the independence movement was fascist, because some of its leaders had collaborated with the Japanese military government.

In his 1926 essay ‘Nasionalisme, Islamisme dan Marxisme’, Sukarno had argued that these three ideologies were natural allies in the fight against colonialism. Although not born into the elite, he had risen through the colonial education system and in 1927 founded the Indonesian National Party (PNI). He had roots in both Java and Bali, and succeeded in uniting the archipelago through a shared idea of nationhood built through anti-colonial struggle. The alliance between nationalism, Islamism and Marxism worked well for most of the first half of the 20th century. But the chaotic, intoxicating years of the revolusi, from 1945 to 1949, posed difficult questions about the form of the independence movement. The three groups identified by Sukarno – communists, Islamists and relatively moderate, modernising nationalists – fought over the direction of the revolution. There was a small but significant generation gap: older republicans presented themselves as realists, insisting on diplomacy in the face of overwhelming European military power, while a younger generation, shaped by war and Japanese colonialism and referred to simply as pemuda (‘the youth’), insisted on action. Men like Sukarno, Mohammad Hatta, Soetan Sjahrir and Amir Sjarifuddin, all in their late thirties or early forties, wore Western suits and ties, even if they paired them with the local peci cap. The pemuda, by contrast, adopted a very different look, described by the historian Rudolf Mrázek as ‘boots worn barefoot; samurai swords worn like a stick; bamboo roentjing, sharpened bamboo stick, worn like a rifle; headbands worn bloody red; the ammunition belts worn crisscross around a naked chest’. The youth movement was not only an Indonesian phenomenon: in the wake of Japanese retreat, equivalents sprang up across South-East Asia, in the Philippines, Malaya and French Indochina.

Class and regional divisions also came into play. Tan Malaka, the Marxist founder of the Persatuan Perjuangan (Struggle Front), believed that there had to be a social revolution as well as a national revolution, while his better organised opponents thought the latter could be achieved without the former (the Persatuan Perjuangan was distinct from the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, which fought alongside republicans for most of the revolusi). In some parts of the archipelago, the native aristocracy were willing to join a federation that would remain in the Dutch sphere of influence, while republicans who favoured establishing a unitary state did their best to assume such a state’s functions from their base in Yogyakarta on Java, hosting foreign dignitaries and showing what a national government might look like, despite their limited authority outside the city.

Van Reybrouck dedicates less space to the divisions within the country than to Indonesians’ interactions with foreigners; the republic itself is often offstage. This is a pity, though paying close attention to the different ways the revolution was fought and experienced across thousands of islands would have required another six hundred pages. In Revolutionary Worlds, a recent collection that looks at the revolution in various local contexts, Roel Frakking and Abdul Wahid declare without much exaggeration that ‘much of what is assumed to constitute the Indonesian revolution’ is still barely understood.*

The Dutch threatened republican leaders with military force in an attempt to strong-arm them into accepting increasingly humiliating two-state solutions. The Linggajati Agreement of November 1946, which was brokered by the British, led to the creation of a small republic that operated as a federal state within sovereign Dutch territory. The young gerilya who resisted the deal were labelled ‘terrorists’ and the Dutch launched a brutal counterinsurgency. They claimed they were trying to save the Indonesian people from violent extremists, even as they drafted tens of thousands of young Dutch men and carried out two ‘police actions’ (a euphemism for military invasion). The republic was reduced to a fraction of its previous size and, in keeping with the codename for the first police action, Operation Product, the Dutch made sure that enough palm oil, rubber, coffee and tea came under their control to pay for the war. Dutch soldiers plundered Indonesian homes: one interviewee tells Van Reybrouck that his platoon stole silver coins, jewellery, ceremonial daggers, a girl’s diary and an imam’s Quran. The republic’s government responded to a power struggle in the city of Madiun by cracking down on the left; the PKI leader, Munawar Musso, was killed by government forces.

In August 1947, the United Nations, a young organisation still working out the extent of its powers, called for a ceasefire. This was heeded, at least until the launch of the second police action in December 1948, but the Dutch government ignored the UN resolution of January 1949 demanding that it withdraw from Indonesia altogether. Once again, Van Reybrouck writes, ‘a phase of extreme violence was followed by arduous political negotiations, in which the Netherlands constantly imposed new conditions on the republic, while itself violating the fresh agreements.’ One prominent Dutch critic, the Labour Party politician Jacques De Kadt, stated that ‘the fools who believe that we are right and the whole world is misled, and the even greater fools who believe that we are a shining example to the world, need to be seen for what they are, people who have proved utterly inadequate and wreaked incalculable damage.’ By the end of 1949 the Dutch had killed almost a hundred thousand Indonesians – twenty for every soldier they had lost – and war crimes had claimed more lives than regular combat.

In the face of continued republican resistance, and under increasing international pressure, the Dutch transferred sovereignty to the young republic, which, crucially, now had the recognition of the international community. Sukarno became the country’s first president, at the head of a fractious parliamentary republic dedicated to ‘unity in diversity’ – this became the national motto. At the same time, Islamists in the west of the country (where they are still strongest) launched a rebellion that lasted well into the 1950s. The Dutch managed to make money out of their surrender, forcing Jakarta to repay the debts it had supposedly accrued in the 1940s; in effect, Indonesia had to pay for its own invasion. Dutch companies also held on to their concessions to extract natural resources. After independence, around a quarter of a million Europeans remained. Over the following decade, nearly all of them left.

The history of Indonesia shows that in all instances of colonialism and imperialism, the metropolis, (in this case the Netherlands), often resorts to savage violence when real liberation is demanded. Gaza is but the latest reminder. 

Sukarno is best remembered today for his speech at the opening ceremony of the Bandung Conference in 1955 – ‘the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind’, as he put it. The conference marked the beginning of Third Worldism, and helped give rise to the Non-Aligned Movement. At the end of Revolusi, Van Reybrouck gives a whistle-stop tour of the achievements of the Bandung moment. Countries across Asia and Africa threw off the colonial yoke, pushed for a transformation of the global economy and inspired civil rights movements in the US and South Africa. ‘But it all came to nothing of course,’ Francisca Pattipilohy tells Van Reybrouck. ‘By 1965, the pioneers of the Afro-Asian movement had all been cleared out of the way. Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Lumumba in Congo, all deposed or even murdered.’ In 1965, the military had used a botched operation targeting its right wing as an excuse to seize power and begin an anti-communist purge. Backed by the US, which provided money, equipment and intelligence, the Indonesian army killed approximately one million people. Pattipilohy’s husband died in prison. Suharto took hold of power amid the carnage, ruling as dictator until 1998.

What explains the Indonesian victory in 1949, and its devastating reversal in 1965? Van Reybrouck follows recent scholarship in emphasising the shifts in the position of the United States. By 1949, Washington had come to the conclusion that its broader geopolitical project was being harmed by the Dutch disregard for Indonesian life and sovereignty, and that independence wouldn’t get in the way of the extraction of tin, rubber and oil. It wasn’t only the efforts of the rebels, as significant as they were, that brought about the Dutch retreat. The Netherlands faced political isolation as well as the loss of Marshall Aid and Nato funding. Two decades on, the US saw the aspirations of the non-aligned Third World as inimical to its interests, and feared that in the event of free and fair elections, the PKI, the third-largest communist party in the world, would take power. There were several attempts to divert Sukarno’s regime from this track, but like the Dutch before them, the Americans proved willing to back mass murder: one intelligence officer later recalled that ‘no one cared, as long as they were communists, that they were being butchered.’

The book’s subtitle claims that Revolusi is about ‘the birth of the modern world’, but Van Reybrouck admits early on that it’s really about European doubt over its own colonial history, ‘about pride and shame’. We spend as much time marching with the Dutch through tropical islands while they commit atrocities, or with elderly Japanese men reflecting on their own war crimes, as we do in the rooms where rebels read and talk and develop a new ideology, or in the jungles and side streets where they form mass revolutionary organisations. All these scenes are relevant to the wider story, but the book leaves the door open for a popular history centred on Indonesian nationalism and the task of state-building, rather than on foreigners committing crimes.

Prabowo​ had a comfortable victory in the Indonesian general election last February, taking almost 60 per cent of the vote. His victory was more or less guaranteed after he formed a de facto alliance with Jokowi, whose son Gibran Rakabuming Raka was his running mate. A former lieutenant general who oversaw a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against independence movements in East Timor in the 1980s, Prabowo was expelled from the military after his troops kidnapped Indonesian pro-democracy activists in 1998. He used family ties to establish himself in politics (he was once married to Suharto’s daughter). All this is reminiscent of recent events in the Philippines, where Bongbong Marcos, the son of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, has been president since 2022, and Sara Duterte, the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, ran as his vice-president. (The alliance fell apart very publicly late last year when Sara said in a Facebook livestream that she had hired someone to kill Bongbong in the event that she herself was murdered.)

Global investors today look to Indonesia not for spices or tin, but for nickel and palm oil. Jokowi’s decision to abandon the nominally left-leaning nationalist PDI-P (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) for Prabowo’s right-nationalist project has led to questions about who will control lucrative mining and infrastructure projects. Indonesia continues to extract things from the ground, and to cut down trees, and sends what it finds to the US and Europe. Dutch GDP per capita is still more than ten times larger than Indonesia’s. Sukarno’s ambition was to put the colonised nations on an equal footing with their former colonisers, but he found himself trying to survive in a world dominated by the conflict between Washington and Moscow. Today Prabowo, like other leaders in the region, must navigate the confrontation between the US and China. Meanwhile a law against the defence of ‘Communism/Marxism-Leninism’, passed in 1966 and cited as an inspiration by the Bolsonaro family in Brazil, effectively makes it illegal for Indonesian scholars to tell the truth about the mass murders of 1965. Under Jokowi these restrictions were used to target activists, and there is no reason to think that Prabowo will be unwilling to use them in the same way.

But the commitment to anti-colonial struggle runs so deep in Indonesian society that political elites celebrate the ideals of the revolution, whatever their own policies. Both the PDI-P and Prabowo’s Gerindra Party describe themselves as nationalist; even Suharto paid lip service to Sukarno’s ideals while sidelining him and massacring many of his most ardent supporters. In 1980, his government opened a museum in Bandung celebrating the spirit of the 1955 conference. It has become a popular destination for Indonesians too young to remember Suharto’s dictatorship. Judging by their posts on social media, Indonesians’ pride in the project to remake the world in truly postcolonial fashion is genuine. By all accounts, Prabowo’s commitment to this legacy is not.