The atrocities continue today in Iraq,Libya and Afghanistan but the media fail to tell the truth.

Arjay,
It has been like this ever since before WW2. English speaking media does not focus on english background misdeeds but pontificates about all others.

Dear Paul,

Thanks for the article.

I'm not sure if this was originally written for an Australian audience but if it was then it could have benefited from recounting how Australian troops freed and rearmed Japanese prisoners to fight the Independence movement, a fact that I found startling when I learned it.

To balance that though Dutch ships were being boycotted in Australian ports even as early as 1945 plus Australia and India were strong supporters of independence at the UN.

Around seven years ago, in a conversation with a retired senior Australian Army officer, I learned of one of his early experiences as a newly-commissioned graduate from RMC Duntroon. He was involved in the oversight of the repatriation of Dutch colonial civilians (mostly women and children) that had been kept prisoners in Japanese internment camps, I think somewhere on the island of Borneo.

I got the impression that the destination of these several hundred repatriated civilians was Sulawesi. Such locations would have been consistent in a general sense with where Australian forces had been deployed at the time when the war ended. The time would have likely been during the latter part of 1945. In any event, this officer saw with his own eyes the repatriated Dutch civilians put ashore at their intended destination.

He then saw the whole lot machine-gunned to death on the docks by, presumably, what would have been identified as Indonesian independence fighters. I have no reason to doubt his account of this event, although I have so far seen no other reference to it.

The point is that a very confused situation existed throughout the then Netherlands East Indies following the Japanese occupation, with the acknowledged leader of the fight for Indonesian independence having been Soekarno, who had led a puppet government that had been set up by the Japanese following their invasion in 1942.

Numerous atrocities had been perpetrated throughout the East Indies following the Japanese invasion, and, without offering it as an excuse, returning Dutch forces may well have considered there were scores to be settled. Also, it must be remembered that the then Dutch colonial government in the lead-up to the Japanese invasion was effectively largely autonomous from that of the already-occupied Holland. The article author's attempt to guilt-trip the present-day Dutch in Holland may thus be seen to be perhaps a little out of context with the times and situation as then prevailed.

Lots of nuance in the author's last paragraph. Who has been lying to whom?

http://www.cfic.org.uk/main.php?section=4

Thanks, this was very enlightening. Of course for the Indonesia people things did not improve too much. Suharto killing some 500,000 in the Indonesian Communist Party, if my recent reading of Choamsky's "Understanding Power" is correct. Then going on to the atrocities in Timor, complicit with "our" own Gareth Evans.

The World is truly terrible when we let Politicians get involved.

The situation was complex in Indonesia in 1945. Dutch authorities in Australia did not have accurate intelligence on situation. In most of Indonesia neither they nor their allies had forces on the ground when the Japanese surrendered. As agreed at Potsdam this entire theatre was divided into two sections, one under the command of the USA and the other, (South East Asia Command) under the command of the British. Responsabilty for Indonesia and all of the area with SEAC fell to Lord Mountbatten. He called on Japanese forces to provide security for the former colony, as this was the only army on site. With the Indonesian declaration of independence bands of nationalist youth groups, known as Permuda, slaughtered newly liberated Dutch civilians and thousands of Chinese and pro-Dutch Indonesians. Many Dutch returned to their prison camps and their former guards, the Japanese, were now ordered to protect them. Many did protect Dutch civilians and paid with their lives. Others handed their weapons to the rebels. Mountbatten used British troops, including Indians, and Australian troops, to secure key areas. Australia did play an important role. The dockers strike of 1945 in favour of the rebels weakened the Dutch response to the situation. A Labour government in Australia took a more pro-Sukarno role, which soured relations with The Netherlands. The British had come to the conclusion that they needed to work with the Indonesian nationalists through negotiation, which the Dutch also saw as betrayal. The situation was complicated, Australia played a very important role in the conflict and thousands of innocent victims were killed by both sides. What is strange is that most of this is unknown to the Dutch public at large and is seldom reflected in cultural productions (novels, art, film etc). It suffers from a lack of representation. A number of world class Dutch historians have tried to rectify this situation, including Professor Wim van den Doel, Louis Zweers, Gert Oostindie and the country's most recognised historian, Henk Wesseling. To call their work of trying to unravel the truth a "guilt-trip" is inaccurate.