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.

It is always good to receive some feedback from an author to comments on OLO, nalood100.

It was the statement made in the fifth paragraph of the article that attracted my use of the term 'guilt-trip', not the work of the Dutch historians you mention in your post, but that were unmentioned by name in the article. That statement was:

"But last September [2011] history ended up in
the court room and a court verdict in The Hague
found the Dutch state responsible for carrying
out a massacre of over 300 unarmed Indonesians
in 1947 in the village of Rawagede, Indonesia,
and called on the state to award compensation to
the plaintiffs – seven elderly widows of those massacred."

An account written by one Elizabeth van Kampen, dated 31 March 2007, contains the following statement that may help shed some light on the issues you raise:

"The Netherlands had two enemies during World War Two,
Germany and Japan. But the Dutch people only speak about
the Germans. I can’t even remember how many books I have
read about the enemy Germany. It was only in 1995 that I
really began to read about the other enemy, Japan. Mostly
written in English of course, because the Netherlands
doesn’t really see Japan as their former enemy.

That is also the very reason why I wrote this website in
English, with many mistakes and all. I tried to tell the
story of the Japanese occupation in the former Dutch East
Indies, because it is a quite unknown story. I tried to tell
about the consequences of that very cruel Japanese military
occupation of the former Dutch East Indies. There are many
trauma’s people had and still have from that occupation.
What made it worse, is that Japan doesn’t acknowledge their
atrocities from during World War Two and that the Netherlands
is absolutely not interested in what the Japanese did to the
Dutch in the former Dutch East Indies."

http://www.dutch-east-indies.com/story/index.htm (on the last of the 73-page account)

Any chance of a link to the 'de Volkskrant' photos you mention?

Still not sure what you mean by guilt-trip Forest Gump. I hope you are not saying that because many Dutch suffered a great deal from the Japanese we should not bother investigating how Indonesians might have suffered from the Dutch. Anyway, here is what you requested.
De Volkskrant: http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2686/Binnenland/article/detail/3284391/2012/07/10/EerstefotosooitvanexecutiesNederlandslegerinIndie.dhtml

The Television: http://nieuwsuur.nl/onderwerp/393495-opgedoken-fotos-van-executies-indie.html

The radio (this one provides a slide show showing the album containing the photos) :http://www.rnw.nl/nederlands/article/opgedoken-fotos-veranderen-kijk-op-nederlands-indi%C3%AB

Thank you for the links, nalood100. One of the comments shown within the webpage to which the third link delivers one illustrates perfectly why I asked for them. It is a comment, in English, by one Theodorus van Diest from Australia, made on 13 July 2012, which says:

"My father served in the Knil army in Indonesia.
One of the photos of airmen in the above album
looks very familiar. Does anyone know how I can
access more photos from this album? Can anyone
give me other websites where I can view photos
from this era?"

Many former residents of the then Dutch East Indies settled in Australia during, or shortly after, the period during which Indonesia gained its independence. It is from among their descendents that it is possible you might obtain more insight, and/or corroborating evidence, as to the events of which you speak. I am assuming it is for reasons of this nature that you have published the article on OLO.

My only familiarity with this transition period arises from study of the (relatively unknown in Australia) military history, from an Australian perspective, of the Malayan campaign of WW2 which culminated in the fall of Singapore. (I have no Dutch antecedents nor relatives by marriage.) From works like Lynette Silver's 'The Bridge at Parit Sulong' I have become aware of the extreme difficulty of pinning down responsibility for wartime atrocities, no matter by whom committed.

Just a little searching on the internet with respect to both the Rawagede and Sulawesi massacres of Indonesians by Dutch colonial forces reveals that the identities of the (KNIL) commanders responsible for ordering them have been known from the outset. Likewise that searching revealed that it was part of the negotiated end to the colonial regime on the part of both Dutch and Indonesian governments that there would be no pursuit as to blame for atrocities, war crimes, call them what you will, that may have been committed by either side in the conflict.

Perhaps therin lies the explanation for the apparent Dutch 'amnesia' up until the present.

The opening paragraph of the article includes the statement:

"... the Dutch state mobilized the largest army
in its history and fought a war against the
Indonesian independence movement."

Again, some relatively cursory searching on the internet revealed the curious, in that context, claim that it was unconstitutional for the Dutch government in Holland to conscript troops for service in the then Netherlands East Indies. How then was this 'largest army in Dutch history' mobilized?

The explanation that most readily springs to my mind is that, in the immediate aftermath of the WW2 occupation of Holland and the accompanying destruction thereof, many men of military age (and perhaps conscripted in Holland) must have effectively volunteered for service in the KNIL as the only paid employment on offer at the time. Universal military service was, I understand, an obligation imposed upon all male Dutch colonial residents in the then NEI, but was it an obligation in Holland? Was it a combination of these circumstances that created 'the largest army in Dutch history', one that was perhaps not seen as being nearly so big from the perspective, or in the memory, of the Dutch in Holland?

nalood100 asks: "I hope you are not saying that because many Dutch suffered a great deal from the Japanese we should not bother investigating how Indonesians might have suffered from the Dutch." The answer is no, not at all, but I am concerned as to which Dutch are to be deemed as needing to confront this little known history: the descendants of a diaspora of a colonial regime long gone with the wind, or the descendants of those in Holland who at the time neither knew, nor were able effectively to direct, policy in a part of the world that had suffered such then recent upheaval.

Is this all about funding academe? Historians having:

"... called for the government to fund a large scale
research project that would systematically look at the
behavior of the Dutch military in Indonesia during the
years 1945-1950 and examine the role of the Dutch
political elite in the conflict."