[16] Mid-Twentieth-Century Crisis, 1930–1954
For Asia in general, but Southeast Asia in particular, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an astonishing time of crisis and transformation. Some return of economic growth and political influence to Asia would have taken place under almost any circumstances, and more rapidly without the destructive violence of mid-century. The political changes, however, transforming multi-ethnic empires into populist nation-states, were telescoped together by the Pacific War. Not only did the European empires end at Japanese hands in three dramatic months of 1941–2; the war’s sudden end in August 1945 also created an unexpected revolutionary opportunity that ensured the transition to nationhood would be both violent and radical, marking a dramatic rupture and rejection of pre-war patterns.
Out of this crisis came the new world order of theoretically equal sovereignty among actual or potential nation-states. Whereas South Asia (together with Malaysia and the Philippines in Southeast Asia) moved to independence through negotiation, compromise, and the recognition of minority interests (albeit with the accompanying murderous violence of partition), in eastern Asia Japan’s rapid conquest and sudden surrender provided the opportunity for revolution. Armed, mobilized, and traumatized populations would fight their way to victory or defeat, and the victors typically sought no compromise with the defeated. The 1940s became the furnace in which new identities and ideals were forged.
Economic Crisis
The middle decades of the twentieth century were not only revolutionary in politics, but also a terrible nadir in the struggle for survival of the majority of Southeast Asians. The region was transformed from a frontier of tropical agriculture producing for the markets of Europe and America, importing much of its wage labor from China and India, to an impoverished but expectant maelstrom of millenarian and nationalist hopes. Malaya and the Philippines recovered quickly from the disaster of war and occupation in the 1940s, but the remainder of Southeast Asia’s new or reinvented countries embarked on their revolutionary agenda of nation-building in a context of poverty exacerbated by economic nationalism and instability.
The distorted colonial economies had reached their peak in the 1920s, exporting vast amounts of sugar, rubber, oil, tin, rice, and tropical specialties through preferential tariffs to their respective metropoles. The collapse in prices for export products during the world depression of 1929–34 marked the end of this distortion. Indonesian sugar, the staple of the Dutch regime, represented about a fifth of world sugar exports at over two million tons a year in the 1920s, but dropped to only 60% of that in the 1930s and 10% in the 1940s. The attempts of the local sugar industry to make up for export losses in the 1930s by persuading Indonesians to consume its white refined product were so successful that the country became a major sugar importer by the 1960s. The European-run plantation economy in rubber, oil-palm, coffee, and tobacco was devastated by the collapse of international prices for these commodities, but local smallholders made up much of the ground the plantations were forced to abandon. The smallholders typically grew perennial cash crops on hill slopes as a supplement to their subsistence food crops on the irrigated valley floor, and had negligible losses since they only harvested when prices were adequate. In the Nusantara area about a million smallholders were cultivating rubber alone by the late 1930s. Small farmers often profited from the switch to greater economic self-sufficiency the depression enforced. But it was the beginning of the end of the distorted pattern tying Southeast Asia to distant markets and suppliers in Europe. Japan produced textiles far more cheaply than Europe in the 1930s, and despite discriminatory tariffs it began to restore a more natural pattern of intra-Asian trade.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indian laborers entered the region every year between 1860 and 1929, with the flow peaking in the 1920s. Singapore and Malaya represented the extreme cases, with 72% and 44%, respectively, of their population recorded as foreign-born in the census of 1921, but southern Thailand and the Burma delta were not far behind. The Great Depression marked the end of this phase of mass immigration, and a partial reversal as more migrants returned to India and China than arrived. The Thai nationalists after 1932 made the ending of Chinese immigration one of their policies, while the colonial regimes introduced new restrictions on the inflow as problems multiplied. Yet the Chinese share of the population continued to rise slightly more rapidly than the overall population, as the local populations became more stable and gender-balanced, with higher than average birth rates. About 3.8 million people were classified as Chinese in 1931 in Malaysia/Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand combined, but 9.1 million in 1960.
Indian and Chinese nationalism claimed more and more converts among the immigrant communities in the 1930s, rendering them more resented by indigenous nationalists and more problematic for governments. In Rangoon the Indian dock-workers went on strike in May 1931 in protest against Gandhi’s arrest, and when Bama workers were hired to replace them the resulting mob violence left 120 dead, mostly Indians. The Hsaya San rebellion also produced much anti-Indian and anti-Chinese violence, frequently led by extremist monks. As the Japanese began their invasion of British Burma at the end of 1941, Indians clamored to leave in fear of violent popular resentment. For most there was no option but to walk. About half a million made it across the border into India, but thousands died in terrible privations along the way.
Table 16.1 shows that the economic recovery in the late 1930s, aided by cheaper consumer goods from Japan, left most of Southeast Asia fractionally better off before the Second World War than the first. Even though the whole high colonial period looks very sluggish by comparison with post-1970 growth, Southeast Asian economies remained in better shape than those of India and China. The 1940s, however, were economically even more disastrous for the Southeast than for Asia as a whole, as war, Japanese occupation (1942–5) and revolution left most countries poorer than they had ever been at the moment their independence was recognized in the period 1947–54. According to Angus Maddison’s figures (Table 16.1), Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma (like China and India) were poorer in 1950 than they had been in 1913. The anaemic growth of the late colonial era had been wiped out by the disasters of the 1940s.
Table 16.1 GDP per capita by country, 1913–1980, in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars.
| 1913 | 1938 | 1950 | 1970 | 1980 | |
| China | 552 | 562 | 448 | 783 | 1067 |
| India | 673 | 668 | 619 | 868 | 938 |
| Indonesia | 892 | 1175 | 840 | 1194 | 1870 |
| Philippines | 1015 | 1522 | 1070 | 1764 | 2376 |
| Thailand | 841 | 826 | 817 | 1694 | 2554 |
| Burma | 685 | 740 | 396 | 642 | 823 |
| Malaysia | 920 | 1361 | 1559 | 2079 | 3657 |
| Singapore | 1367 | 2070 | 2219 | 4439 | 9058 |
The Japanese occupation was ruinous for the export economies. Starting with Indochina under its nominal Vichy-French government from 1940, the Japanese prohibited trade with free China and confiscated the Chinese companies engaged in it. They declared monopolies of vital supplies for Japan and its military forces. By 1943, however, Japanese shipping had suffered so much from Allied attacks that it could no longer import the oil, coal, tin, rubber, and rice for which it had invaded in 1941. In 1944–5 Japanese military governments imposed a policy of maximum self-sufficiency in each district (shu), and massive requisitions at low prices to support military and urban needs. The food situation became critical in 1944 when drought, and in Viet Nam an exceptionally destructive typhoon, accentuated these maldistribution problems. Though statistics were unreliable and often politicized, there were about 1.5 million extra deaths in Viet Nam and 2.45 million in Java in this grim period. A proportion of the Java figure were forced laborers sent to build railways and airfields under appalling conditions, but glamorized by Sukarno as “volunteers” (romusha) for the anti-Allied cause. Military action itself killed fewer Southeast Asians than famine. Only Burma (where about 250,000 were killed) and the Philippines (over a million) were seriously fought over as the Allies counter-attacked. About 100,000 perished in the February 1945 battle for Manila, virtually destroyed by American bombardment (Figure 16.1).
Figure 16.1 The Destruction of Manila in the US reconquest, February 1945.
Source: Topfoto.
Total rice production recovered to pre-war levels in the Philippines and Thailand by 1949, and in southern Viet Nam and Java by 1960, though Burma would never recover its status as a major rice-exporter. Given the rapid post-war increase in population, feeding Southeast Asia was a critical problem until the green revolution of the 1970s. Wars, rebellions and social conflict, population growth, economic nationalism, and the flight of capital ensured that Indonesia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Burma grew even poorer in the 1960s. Only the Asian countries that were neither “liberated” nor revolutionary did well, notably Japan as the first miracle economy of Asia. Contrary to nationalist hopes, Europe rather than Asia forged ahead after the destruction of the colonial economic system. The gap between a rich West and the independent but poor countries of Asia was wider in 1970 than ever before.
Japanese Occupation
As the first of Asia’s economies to master the formula of state-led industrial growth, Japan spearheaded the end of the colonial order, which was already on the defensive against nationalism and communism. Japan followed the European model of exchanging its cheap manufactures for the raw materials of Southeast Asia, but was inhibited by colonial monopolies and tariffs from lucrative trade with the region. In 1940 the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands placed embargoes on strategic exports to Japan in reaction to its moves in Indochina, including blocking its vital oil supply in 1941. These moves apparently convinced the Japanese military that they had only a narrow window to achieve their goals in the south before the oil ran out, prompting the reckless gamble of attacking Pearl Harbor. It thereby dragged the United States into a war that ended with American military hegemony in Asia. The unexpected ease and popularity of their initial victories in Southeast Asia made the Japanese military lose sight of whatever negotiated exit strategy it had entertained there. The whole region would be administered in the interests of Japan’s total war effort, with some areas, such as eastern Indonesia and Singapore, marked for permanent Japanese control.
Japan’s war of expansion had effectively begun in 1931 with its invasion of Manchuria, followed by all-out war with China from 1937. It was the war in China that brought Japanese troops to Southeast Asia in 1940, intervening at the border crossings of the French railways from Hanoi into China. Once the Netherlands and France fell to German aggression in May and June 1940, European vulnerability in Southeast Asia was clear. The French colonial forces in Indochina, nominally under the pro-German Vichy government, skirmished with Japanese troops at the border but had little choice other than to agree to the stationing of first 6,000, then 40,000, and finally 140,000 Japanese troops in Indochina in stages of 1940–1. The French authorities remained in control until the Japanese suddenly took over on March 9, 1945, worried by the collapse of the Vichy regime in France and military threats from the Allies. The Japanese therefore had only five months to mobilize an anti-western nationalism there.
During the height of Japanese power in Southeast Asia, Indochina resembled Thailand in Japanese eyes, as two dependent client states allowed to govern themselves as long as Japanese strategic and economic aims were served. Between them, however, Japan made its preference clear after the aggressive nationalist premier Phibun Songkhram took advantage of the fall of France to invade French Indochina in December 1940, gaining some advantage on land as against serious losses at sea. Japan intervened to mediate a peace in which the French were obliged to surrender territory on the west bank of the Mekong, an internal propaganda victory which Field Marshall Phibun commemorated in a very prominent “Victory Monument” in Bangkok. After Japan conquered Burma and Malaya, and Thailand declared war on Britain and the United States (January 25, 1942), Phibun was further rewarded by a visit of Japanese premier Tojo to Bangkok in 1943. He there announced the transfer to Thailand of the four northern Malay states formerly under Thai suzerainty, and the easternmost Shan states of Burma (Map 16.1). The nationalist dreams of a greater Thailand seemed to be within reach.
Map 16.1 Thailand’s wartime expansion.
British, Dutch, and US colonial possessions were attacked as soon as Japan joined the war on the side of the Axis with the bombing of Pearl Harbor (December 8, 1941, or December 7 in Asia). Within two days the Japanese had sunk the two battleships representing British naval power in the region, disabled American air power in Manila, obtained the surrender of Thai troops and an alliance with Thailand, and taken Kota Bahru in northeast Malaya. The Japanese entered Manila without a fight on January 2. They took the supposed British stronghold of Singapore on February 15, Java and the Indies on March 12. Burma was occupied from south to north in March, and the American holdout at Bataan in the Philippines finally surrendered on May 8. General MacArthur left Bataan before the surrender and established the headquarters of what became the Southwest Pacific Command in Australia, launching the counter-attack that brought him back to the Philippines in October 1944. The British began fighting their way into Burma from India at about the same time, but the involvement of the United States in the Pacific War was essential to its emergence as the dominant military power in eastern Asia after the war.
The rapid Japanese advance of 1941–2 was welcomed by far more Southeast Asians than opposed it. Millennial expectations were initially high, as one participant remembered: “Burma would at last be free … The Japanese were arriving as friends … they were ready to die for Burma … a Burman prince rode in the Japanese vanguard” (Nu 1975, 102). A few actively sought ways to assist the Japanese militarily, notably Aung San’s Thakins in Burma, the Cao Dai religious movement in the Mekong delta, and the Islamic PUSA movement in Aceh. Even they were soon disillusioned by Japanese military cruelty and arrogance. The active opponents of the Japanese were few but important – communists, socialists, and a tiny liberal elite ideologically opposed to the Japanese military as fascists; Chinese nationalists already mobilized to support the Kuomintang against Japanese aggression; and educated Filipinos who did have a stake in the independent Philippine Commonwealth already promised for 1946. These groups supported a guerrilla resistance in the highlands of the Philippines, Malaya, and northern Viet Nam – the latter two predominately communist. In the two most exposed Japanese fronts in the Philippines and Burma, coincidentally also the most advanced toward democracy, the Japanese were obliged to make greater concessions to residents less convinced of their eventual victory.
The replacement of colonial administrations by Japanese military ones marked a dramatic turning point for Southeast Asia. The status of European government, law, and manners was abruptly punctured by European failure on the battlefield. The lesson was driven home by the dramatic public removal of colonial monuments (such as that to Jan Pieterszoon Coen in the heart of Batavia, renamed Jakarta), street and city names, and symbols. An alternative model of modernity arrived that paid not even lip service to democracy, but stressed rather discipline, a nationalist spirit, and unity between ruler and ruled. The strong position of government-linked European and Chinese firms in the economy was quickly dismantled, to the advantage in the first instance of government-linked Japanese firms. But the controlled nature of the wartime economies gave new opportunities also to hungry newcomer business, both Chinese and indigenous, ready to risk smuggling essential goods by a mixture of bribery and stealth. The “Euro-Chinese” cities were nationalized by the influx of the indigenous majorities to staff government, business, and propaganda roles, in much greater numbers than the departing Europeans. The Japanese government downgraded the prestige of European languages in favor of Japanese and the new, modernizing national languages. For Dutch, in particular, the Japanese had no use at all. They banned its public use, and since Japanese could in no way take its place, Indonesian (romanized and modernized Malay) had rapidly to be promoted in government, education, and popular culture.
The sudden change of overlord risked raising the political stakes dangerously. The assassination of “collaborators” by guerrilla movements, and Japanese execution of those denounced to them as pro-Allied, embittered the normal process of elite competition. Ethnic tensions were sharpened between majority communities generally welcoming the Japanese, and minority communities fearing them. In the sook ching (purification by elimination) massacre in Singapore, the Japanese executed about 10,000 “anti-Japanese” activists identified by hooded informers once the whole male Chinese population was assembled. In west Borneo the Japanese also rounded up hundreds of leading figures, including the ruling sultans, Chinese, and others, for execution in 1943 on allegations of an anti-Japanese plot. In northern Sumatra activists opposed to the local rulers the Dutch had “protected” denounced them to the Japanese, and were in turn denounced by their intended victims, causing the execution and imprisonment of many. In the Philippines political assassinations followed pre-war factional lines more clearly than the collaboration-resistance logic used to justify them.
Yet taken overall, the rough arbitrariness of inexperienced Japanese power-holders had a unifying effect in establishing an indigenous moral community that far outweighed the divisiveness of their initial actions. Traditional monarchs, European-trained bureaucrats, fiery nationalists, and religious leaders had all to find a way to survive as mediators between unpredictable Japanese and suffering masses; all were humiliatingly made to sing the Japanese propaganda tune; all became to some extent complicit in the perilous privileges enjoyed by all elites at a time of suffering for the majority. When it came time, in 1945, to face the return of Europeans, who had brought quite different agendas from their P.O.W. camps or exile, there was more elite solidarity than score-settling on the part of Southeast Asians. Killings were worst in the vacuum after the Japanese surrender where communities had been unusually polarized, as on racial lines in Malaya and Burma and class ones in Sumatra. The fact that the Europeans and some of their closest collaborators had been excluded, by flight or imprisonment, from the dramatic events of 1942–5, and were targets of the nationalist propaganda of those years, contributed further to their exclusion from the national communities as they were imagined after the war.
Initial hopes that Japan supported independence for Southeast Asians were abruptly and often violently crushed in 1942. As the Japanese strategic position worsened, however, concessions had to be made to at least match the cautious steps and promises of the colonial powers. In the Philippines a preparatory commission opted to replace Quezón’s Commonwealth with the symbolism of the revolutionary Republic of 1898, the ageing Aguinaldo on hand to again raise its flag. José P. Laurel (1891–1959), Yale PhD and former Secretary of the Interior and Justice of the Supreme Court, known as a critic of the United States with sympathies for Japan, in October 1943 assumed the position of President of a nominally independent “Second Philippine Republic.” It was a single-party state with a slogan of “one flag, one nation, one language [Tagalog].” As elsewhere, the politicians who had evacuated with the Americans fared worse in subsequent elections than those who had collaborated. Manuel Roxas (1892–1948), another prominent lawyer and legislator who served in the Laurel government, defeated Osmena in the Presidential election of 1946, and Laurel himself only narrowly lost an unusually flawed election in 1949.
In Burma the “30 Comrades” who had joined the Japanese invasion force and formed the Burma Independence Army (BIA) were initially given responsibility to organize civil government. These young activists proved too divisive and were replaced in mid-1942 by the established political elite. Ba Maw (1893–1977), a Bama Catholic with a French PhD on Buddhism, a lawyer gaining prominence by defending the firebrand Buddhist monk Hsaya San, and first premier of British Burma (1937–9), was one of the richly ambivalent figures prominent in this period of transition to independence. Although the most prominent Bama politician of the day, he was in prison at the Japanese invasion for having opposed the participation of Britain and Burma in the Pacific War. The Japanese released him to become Chief Administrator in August 1942, to chair its constituent assembly, and eventually become Prime Minister (with the old royal title Adipadi) in August 1943. Aung San, the 28-year-old Thakin and BIA leader, became his Defense Minister, while the BIA, 50,000 strong by then, became the Burma National Army (BNA or Bama Tatmadaw) and underwent extensive Japanese training. This nominally independent Bama was also a one-party state heavily controlled by Japan. Like the British-sponsored self-government that preceded it, Bama included only the Bama and Buddhist lowlands and coastal areas, granting autonomy to Shan rulers and the Karen state as had the British. Since the BIA was almost entirely ethnic Bama, whereas the British had trained Karen and other minority soldiers, Karen resistance to the BIA deteriorated into mutual village-burning and interethnic killings, leaving a lasting legacy of bitterness.
Ba Maw, President Laurel, and a Thai representative (Phibun pointedly did not attend) all flew to Tokyo in November 1943, along with Japanese clients in China, Manchukuo, and Indian National Army leader Bose, symbolizing the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere of independent states with Japan as “nucleus” (Figure 16.2). Army headquarters refused to add token representatives from Indonesia and Malaya, despite the propaganda setback this represented, having quietly annexed these areas to the Japanese Empire in May. In a muddled compromise between military hardliners and civilian and navy leaders concerned with Japan’s long-term standing in the islands, Sukarno, Hatta, and the Muslim leader Ki Bagus Hadikusumo were invited to tour Japan for two weeks immediately following the conference. Hatta believed the Kenpeitai (the dreaded military intelligence) had plans to eliminate or exile him in Japan, irritated at his insistence on Indonesian unity and independence, but that an award from the Emperor protected him. Nevertheless, the following year was very dark for the cooperating Indonesian nationalists, with nothing to show for their humiliation and the misery of their people. Only in September 1944 did an increasingly desperate Japanese government make a commitment to “independence in the future” for “the East Indies” – intended to include at least Java and Sumatra.
Figure 16.2 The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity sphere leaders’ conference in Tokyo, November 5–6, 1943. Participants left to right: Dr Ba Maw (Burma), Zhang Jinghui (Manchukuo), Wang Jingwei (China), Hideki Tōjō (Japan), Wan Waithayakon (Thailand), José P. Laurel (Philippines), Subhas Chandra Bose (India).
Sukarno’s emotive rhetoric of anti-western unity and his relatively uncritical acceptance of their war aims were particularly valuable to the Japanese. Released from internal exile in Bengkulu, he headed a succession of organizations intended to unify Java in the Japanese cause. His justification for the many compromises he made was positioning himself as unrivalled popular leader and symbol of unity. “I addressed 50,000 at one meeting, 100,000 at another. Sukarno’s face, not just his name, penetrated the Archipelago. I have the Japanese to thank for that” (Sukarno 1965, 179). Only Java was in fact allowed to see Sukarno’s face until April 1945, when the navy (but not the Army in Sumatra) allowed him to visit three eastern cities. Indonesia had been divided between the 25th Army in Sumatra (initially joined to Malaya and administered from Singapore as Japan’s “nuclear region”), the 16th in Java, and the navy in eastern Indonesia. Only Java was envisaged for Indonesian political participation, since the remaining islands and Malaya were the real objects of Japanese colonization. Yet the very lack of political concessions outside Java, and the ban on travel between the islands, had the paradoxical effect of making Java much more central to the transition to independence than it could have been under freer conditions. In Sumatra the 25th Army permitted no political/propaganda bodies beyond the Residency level (roughly today’s provinces) until forced by Tokyo to begin preparations for independence in March 1945. They did, however, from November 1944 permit the powerful symbols of an Indonesian future – the red-white flag and the anthem Indonesia Raya – while still banning contact with Java.
The preparations for Japanese-sponsored “independence,” which would become the basis of the Republic proclaimed at the Japanese surrender, were almost exclusively made in Java. The expected Sumatran delegates were not permitted to attend the Body to Investigate Indonesian Independence that met in Jakarta from May 28 to July 17, 1945. The “1945 Constitution” it prepared was therefore little troubled by minority interests. Only two delegates, born outside Java, were recorded as preferring a federal system to Sukarno’s vision of unity. The constitution was drafted by law professor Soepomo on “integralist” principles akin to fascism, and gave the executive President extensive powers to appoint and dismiss ministers and veto any legislation proposed by an ill-defined representative council. Sukarno answered a critic of this vagueness with the words, “What embodies the sovereignty of the people is the president, not the representative assembly” (Yamin 1954 I, 263). Liberal and socialist ideas were muffled by the Japanese military context of the meeting, and Sukarno’s leadership was reinforced by the delegates’ knowledge that he bore the greatest risks in the high-wire act between the Japanese and a populace increasingly embittered against them.
Only in the desperate last stage after the bomb on Hiroshima did the Japanese fly three delegates from Sumatra and two from Makassar to join an independence preparatory committee. This first met on August 16, the day after the Emperor’s radio broadcast announcing the Japanese surrender. Sukarno, Hatta, and Leiden-trained lawyer Achmad Soebardjo (1896–1978), a crucial link with the Japanese navy representative in Jakarta, Admiral Maeda, had planned to get Japanese approval for an independence proclamation in time to present it to the preparatory committee meeting. But Sukarno and Hatta had been kidnapped by angry revolutionaries determined to have independence proclaimed on their own terms rather than as a gift of Japan. Admiral Maeda, with some of his aides close to the nationalists, helped defuse this crisis by bringing Sukarno, Hatta, and their youthful captors back to his house (the former British consulate) in Jakarta to hammer out a proclamation under his personal protection. Intense debate between “cooperating” and revolutionary nationalists on one side and Japanese army and navy figures on the other produced the needed compromise by dawn on August 17. The proclamation voiced no heroics or ideals. Sukarno and Hatta read out two terse sentences: “We the Indonesian people hereby declare Indonesia’s independence. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be executed in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time.”
Alone of the Southeast Asian nationalists cooperating with the Japanese, Sukarno and Hatta could thereby transition uninterruptedly to post-war leadership as President and Vice-President of the Republic, with Soebardjo as initial Foreign Minister. Their advantage was the absence of “anti-fascist” alternatives, with no effective guerrilla movement resisting the Japanese. Monarchies generally survived the change, including those of Cambodia and Laos, “independent” under the Japanese since March (see Chapter 17). By contrast the “independent” Prime Ministers, José Laurel (in April 1945) and Ba Maw (August), fled to Japan as their power was undermined by local guerrillas and Allied counter-attacks. In Malaya, Ibrahim Yaacob (1911–79) was the Malay radical chosen to head Japanese propaganda and military mobilization, but had no chance of imagining himself a national leader once the Japanese had handed Malaya’s four northern states to Thailand. Chinese were the largest group (47.7%) of what remained as Malai under the Japanese, and Tokyo even considered in 1945 incorporating it into Japan’s Chinese client state. In the desperate days of August, incorporation into Indonesia seemed the only viable choice for Japanese clients, however, especially after Java’s independence investigation committee had voted for a “Greater Indonesia” including British and Portuguese-ruled parts of Nusantara. As the local advocate of this idea, Ibrahim Yaacob fled to Jakarta after the Japanese surrender, where he became a protégé of Sukarno and a member of the Indonesian Parliament.
The most striking difference between Japanese regimes and their predecessors in Southeast Asia was the former’s provisional, emergency character, making mobilization for the final struggle take precedence over the stability and order of other colonial regimes. It had been a preoccupation of European colonial governments in the 1930s to deprive nationalist leaders of access to a mass base, and to keep religious leaders out of politics altogether. The Japanese, by contrast, favored mass rallies, public rituals, and the maximal use of the media for anti-western and pro-Japanese propaganda. Japanese training of local armies began in 1943, and became critical in Indonesia and Burma as the professional core of later national armies. Some 40,000 soldiers in Java and 30,000 in Sumatra underwent its stern discipline and emphasis on seishin (spirit, resonating with Indonesian semangat) as the key element of Asia’s superiority over the West. The Japanese-trained young officers of the generation of later military dictators, Suharto in Indonesia and Ne Win in Burma, were less technically competent than their European-trained counterparts, often from Christian or other minorities, but they had absorbed essential elements of melodramatic public ritual on one hand and brutal control of dissidents on the other. Similar numbers of paramilitary auxiliaries were prepared to oppose the expected Allied counter-attacks, with even heavier doses of seishin and less discipline.
In Java, Muslim leaders were preferred for the most senior positions (daidancho, or battalion commander). Among these it was a Muhammadiyah schoolteacher, Sudirman (1912–50), who would be elected by his peers as Army Commander-in-Chief in November 1945. Muhammadiyah, Nahdatul Ulama and other Muslim organizations were obliged to join a single Muslim propaganda organization under the name Masjumi. It also acquired a paramilitary wing, the Hizbullah (Army of God), some 50,000 strong in Java by the war’s end, which would provide some of the most fanatic opponents of the Allied reoccupation, and problems for post-1950 Jakarta governments. In the Mekong delta the Japanese also encouraged the militarization of the anti-French Cao Dai syncretic religious movement, as a potential anti-Allied force.
The Japanese military model of national mobilization had some resonance everywhere, but its strongest legacies were in Indonesia and Burma, where those most influenced by it remained in government and formed the new national armies. The Japanese wartime neighborhood associations (tonari gumi, later known as rukun tetangga in Indonesia) were extended throughout the region as a key means of social control. A neighborhood of between ten and twenty households became the base unit for rationing resources, mobilizing manpower and crops, and for propaganda, civil defense, and crime control. After independence both Indonesian and Burmese military-dominated governments continued this system of obligatory labor for public projects, though dressing it as a harmonious national tradition of mutual assistance (gotong royong in Indonesian). Women were also mobilized, though without significant empowerment. Occupation authorities suppressed all women’s (and other) organizations and established a single obligatory women’s movement (Fujinkai), headed in each locality by the wives of the ranking government officials. This again had some influence on later authoritarian attempts to control and domesticate women nationally through such organizations as Indonesia’s Dharma Wanita (Women’s Duty) and Malaysia’s Kaum Ibu UMNO (UMNO women’s or mother’s group).
Throughout the region, the last months of the Pacific War were a time of frenzied mobilization amidst increasing desperation of an impoverished and exploited population. Paramilitary and religious groups absorbed the anti-western propaganda, but were increasingly ready to turn their zeal equally against the Japanese or against their own cooperating elites through whom labor and rice exactions were mediated. Revolts against the Japanese gathered pace, not only in upland areas they never fully controlled but also among the favored military trainees given the most intense Japanese training. The youth generation most vigorously mobilized by Japanese trainers was increasingly alienated from the compromises of its seniors, and demanded action from whoever could lead.
1945 – the Revolutionary Moment
The Emperor’s August 15 broadcast of Japan’s unexpected surrender threw a match into the revolutionary tinderbox of 1945. In the cities of Java/Sumatra, Indochina, and Malaya there had been little sign of Allied counter-attack, and the unexpectedness of the surrender left Japan’s clients demoralized and its opponents off-guard. Manila and Rangoon (along with Balikpapan and Tarakan in Borneo) had by then already fallen to the Allies amidst massive destruction, Japanese structures in the Philippines and Burma had already collapsed, and the scramble for leadership in the new order begun (Map 16.2). The two portentous declarations of independence occurred in Jakarta for Indonesia (as we have seen) on August 17, and in Hanoi for Viet Nam (not Indochina) on September 2 (Figure 16.3). Allied troops, caught unprepared, arrived to take control from the defeated Japanese only later. Some Nationalist Chinese troops, to whom northern Indochina had been assigned, reached Hanoi on September 9, while British troops reached Saigon on September 12, Jakarta on September 30, Medan and Padang (Sumatra) not until October 10, and Surabaya and Palembang on October 25. The French also managed to regain control of the Cambodian “independent” monarchy in October, arresting the leading Khmer nationalist allied with Japan, Viet Nam-born and Paris-educated Son Ngoc Thanh (1908–77), Prime Minister under King Norodom Sihanouk since early August. There was a power vacuum of varying length during which the Japanese troops on the ground were more likely to sympathize with assertions of independence than with returning colonials.
Map 16.2 Allied and Japanese control at the August 1945 surrender.
Figure 16.3 The independence proclamations of 1945: (a) Sukarno (reading) and Hatta proclaim Indonesia’s independence in Admiral Maeda’s house, Jakarta, August 17, 1945; (b) Ho Chi Minh declares independence in Hanoi, with armed guards prepared for trouble, September 2, 1945. Both scenes were much used and doctored as the proclamations became mythologized in subsequent years.
Sources: a) Wikipedia, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indonesia_declaration_of_independence_17_August_1945.jpg; b) David Marr.
Communist parties were the obvious candidates to lead revolutions in 1945, though only Ho Chi Minh’s ICP did so. The parties aligned with Moscow had long histories of revolutionary organization, they had been the most consistent and effective fighters against Japanese occupation, and the USSR, China, and other friends among the victorious Allies seemed likely to support them. Their international links, however, were a source of weakness as well as strength. Since Moscow had launched its common front against fascism in 1935, realizing that aggressive Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were more dangerous to the USSR than the colonial powers, communist parties in Asia had become more moderate but lost the support of militant nationalists. Sino-Southeast Asian communists were strengthened in their struggle to support China against Japan, but some of the Indonesians and Vietnamese who had devoured Marxism as a fast route to revolution shifted their support to anti-Moscow Trotskyists or national communists like Tan Malaka. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 had reversed this Moscow line and created lasting distrust of it among nationalists with European experience, like Hatta and Ba Maw. Finally, the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 reversed the line again, and encouraged communists everywhere to engage in anti-fascist united fronts.
In their last months the British, Dutch, and American authorities had released communists, and other convinced anti-fascists like Hatta and Sjahrir, from prison, and discussed with them strategies of resistance. In Surabaya a Dutch intelligence official entrusted lawyer, socialist (later acknowledging himself a covert communist), and Christian convert Amir Sjarifuddin (1907–48) with 25,000 guilders to organize underground resistance. Amir was seized by the Kenpeitai in 1943 and would have been swiftly executed but for Sukarno’s intervention, but after the surrender he was firmly “anti-fascist” and thus accepting of the Allied return. In Malaya the war transformed the Chinese-Malayan Left from the greatest threat to the British into their most promising ally. Both communist and KMT Chinese were legalized and mobilized in the defense of Malaya, while pro-Japanese Malay supporters of Ibrahim Yaacob were arrested. British intelligence gave communist cadres some military training, arms, and radios so as to sustain a guerrilla resistance from Malaya’s abundant jungles throughout the war, under the structure of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA).
This overwhelmingly Chinese force, supplied in 1944–5 by British air drops, succeeded in killing at least 600 Japanese soldiers (by Japanese count) and 2,000 predominately Malay policemen. At the Japanese surrender it moved to take control of all centers outside the main cities, executing a number of Malay officials and policemen as enemy collaborators. The Chinese-Malay racial tension these events produced, obstructing MPAJA contacts with elite Malays, was one of the factors that inhibited the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) from declaring Malayan independence in 1945. Through the crucial months of power vacuum they were still treating the British as their allies and the Malay establishment as part of the fascist enemy, joining victory parades in London and Singapore and receiving British medals. Finally, their leader Lai Teck (1901–47) appears to have been a triple agent, working ingeniously with British and Japanese intelligence. Only in March 1947 was he exposed and executed by the party, and replaced by Chin Peng (born Ong Boon Hua, 1924–2013), who would remain its Secretary-General virtually until death. Relations with the British worsened as the MCP demanded independence, opposed the Federation of Malaya constitutional proposals, and launched a wave of labor strikes. Between March and June 1948 the Party shifted to a strategy of armed struggle, which conformed to the new Soviet “two-camp” doctrine that communist parties must lead progressive forces in confrontation with capitalism and imperialism. The MCP fought a long insurgent war from the Malayan jungles and bases among Chinese rural communities, but it was too late for them to capture the chaotic nationalist moment. The British and their aristocratic Malay partners were already established in government, with enough wealthy Chinese support to continue the plural society. The booming rubber and tin industries were too important for Britain to surrender lightly. Malaya became one of the hottest fronts of the Cold War, but by the time sovereignty was transferred to an independent Federation of Malaya in 1957, the communist threat was contained to a few hundred jungle guerrillas.
Elsewhere, too, the communists emerged from the war taking a firmer anti-fascist than anti-colonial line, and thereby lost the chance to use their anti-Japanese credentials to lead a broader nationalist armed struggle, as in Viet Nam or China. The Hukbalahap communist front in the Philippines had taken a leading part in the anti-Japanese resistance, but entered democratic politics when the Americans returned. Two of the communist leaders, Luis Taruc and Jesus Lava, were elected to the first national congress in 1946. When their election was disallowed on shaky grounds by the establishment, they prepared for armed insurrection in their heartland among the Pampanga peasants of central Luzon. The exceptionally unequal distribution of land, wealth, and power in the Philippines gave them strong support among the landless majority. By 1948, when both were outlawed, the revived Hukbalahap militia was thought to have thousands of members, and the communist front organization, National Peasants’ Union, hundreds of thousands. Their rebellion was only gradually curbed through the determination of Ramon Magsaysay (1907–57), also a successful anti-Japanese guerrilla leader with some understanding of the peasant discontents behind their rebellion, as Secretary of Defense from 1951 and President from December 1953.
The Burmese Communist Party under Thakin Soe (1906–89) also made great gains from its anti-fascist stance throughout the war. As the young Thakins who had initially welcomed the Japanese grew disillusioned and turned to opposition, the communists were in a position to guide a common resistance front. Aung San, while still Defense Minister in the pro-Japanese government, had begun plans to revolt at the end of 1943, sending some of his key men to India to contact the British. In 1944 he briefly joined the communist party (before quarreling with Thakin Soe), and federated his political followers into a communist-led front organization, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL). Although Aung San’s BNA was the strongest fighting force in this front, acknowledged as a partner by the British forces which took Rangoon on May 3, 1945, it was the AFPFL structure which began taking over government in Burma in the wake of the Japanese retreat and eventual surrender.
The communists weakened their central position in the AFPFL by a split in March 1946, when Thakin Soe quarreled with more moderate communists returning from India, and left to form his own insurgent “Red Flag” Communist Party. The mainstream Burmese Party remained loyal to the Soviet common front line, supporting the government even when expelled from the AFPFL in November 1946. The Party moved to armed struggle only in March 1948 as the Soviet line changed, denouncing the AFPFL “bourgeois nationalists” and the “sham independence” they had achieved. The embattled prime minister at the time believed that “the Communists, by placing their faith in Stalin [and the two-camp doctrine] forfeited … the almost certain prospect of winning power from the AFPFL in the next … election” (Nu 1975, 193). The rest of the Marxist-inclined AFPFL managed to retain a sufficiently unified stance toward immediate independence outside the British Commonwealth to give the British no choice but to accept Aung San’s demand for a clear majority in the Executive Council in September 1946. Aung San and several colleagues were assassinated during a cabinet session of July 18, 1947, removing the nearest Burma had to a unifying symbolic figure (Figure 16.4). Nevertheless, sovereignty was swiftly transferred by the British, in January 1948, to a government headed by Aung San’s AFPFL deputy, (Thakin) U Nu.
Figure 16.4 Aung San and family in 1947, shortly before his assassination. The later illness and death of his widow Daw Khin Kyi (left) in 1989 brought daughter Suu Kyi (here center as a two-year-old) back from Oxford to Rangoon and a meteoric but unexpected political career.
Source: © Kyodo News/AP/Press Association.
Having had its revolutionary break with the past in 1932, Thailand alone was in no revolutionary mood at the Japanese surrender. Leftist intellectual Pridi Banomyong (Figure 16.5) had made contacts with the British since early 1944 even from within Phibun’s government, putting himself at the head of an alternative pro-Allied government. In July 1944 Phibun was ousted by the Assembly in favor of one of his ministers, civilian Khuang Aphaiwong, and Pridi became sole regent for the absent king. Khuang resigned at the Japanese surrender, and Pridi invited Seni Pramoj (1905–97), pre-war ambassador to the United States and leader of the Free Thai movement there, to become Prime Minister. It was the British Air Force that represented the Allies in Bangkok from September 9, but Seni’s American contacts were critical in moderating British demands for reparations – notably in the form of rice exports to feed its starving subjects in Malaya, Borneo, and Rangoon. Pridi had already agreed to return the British territories gained from Japan. Seni readily dismantled the worst authoritarian excesses of Phibun, notably in its repression of Muslim, Christian, and Chinese minorities, and legalized the very weak communist party in deference to the USSR. Giving up the coveted gains from France was more difficult. Bangkok reluctantly permitted their reoccupation by France in December 1946, though the official acceptance of this loss by the National Assembly took two more years. Although Pridi was sympathetic to the revolutionary cause in Indochina and elsewhere, communism as such remained in Thailand an almost exclusively Chinese affair, looking for guidance to the Chinese rather than the Soviet party.
Figure 16.5 Pridi Banomyong as Thai Prime Minister in 1946.
Source: AFP/Getty Images.
Only in Indochina did a communist party take the lead in declaring and defending independence, ignoring the then Soviet line that had inhibited others. The revolutionaries in the former French territories had the unique advantage of borders with a sympathetic China and a temporarily (1945–7) sympathetic Thailand, but the disadvantage of a colonial power which had not yet made its adjustment to a post-war world of independent nation-states. Smarting from humiliations in Europe, France had announced its intention to reconstitute an Indochinese Federation within the French Union. But by September 1945, when British and French troops began to arrive, Ho Chi Minh had already proclaimed Viet Nam’s independence on September 2 to an enthusiastic populace, and his Vietminh controlled most of Tongking, with networks throughout Indochina. Ho showed great agility in putting together his fronts, and disguising the role in them of the disciplined Indochinese Communist Party. The party was even dissolved in November 1945 in favor of a Marxist study group, though the army remained under the firm control of communist intellectual Vo Nguyen Giap (1911–2013).
The Vietminh had been formed by Ho in southern China in 1941 as a front for the independence of Viet Nam, but could achieve little inside the country until late 1944. Giap then led about 40 men across the border to begin creating liberated zones and capturing arms and men from the French. They grew much stronger after the Japanese took over from the French in March 1945, and were supplied and trained against the Japanese by the US military. The KMT authorities in Guangxi Province allowed Ho to establish a multi-party Vietnamese provisional government to further weaken the Japanese, even though their sympathies were with the non-communist nationalists. Ho continued the work of coalition-building from Giap’s guerrilla zone. At the Japanese surrender he moved much more quickly than did the Chinese authorities to set up a government. Giap’s troops, only a few hundred strong, reached Hanoi on August 28, enabling Ho to declare the independence of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV) on September 2. This was followed by a welter of decrees and mobilizations designed to give substance to a bold new republic with broad appeal. Bao Dai had already agreed to transfer his authority as “independent” Emperor under Japan to Ho’s provisional government, in return for a role as Supreme Advisor. A cabinet was announced with a number of non-communist ministers, and Ho was able to capture the euphoria of the moment.
Problems arose with the arrival of Chinese troops in the north, but more so when British troops reached Saigon and quickly moved to transfer authority to French representatives. The Chinese occupied major buildings and looted many resources, but allowed the DRV to function and the Vietminh to build up its forces, while favoring the nationalist group whenever possible. In the chaotic south, however, the Vietminh was less well placed than a number of other radical forces, trained by either French or Japanese, less willing to compromise with the Allies than the communists in the north. Refusing to acknowledge the DRV committee in Saigon, British General Gracey instead rearmed French troops imprisoned by the Japanese, who inflamed resentment when they aggressively took control of key buildings in the spirit of the old regime. Undisciplined Vietnamese countered with a reign of terror on September 24, killing over a hundred French civilians. This convinced doubters in Paris, London, and Saigon that the Allies had to regain control of the city by force, using Japanese soldiers to do so.
The French took control of the strategic core of the former colony of Cochin-China within the next few months. The DRV in the north seemed responsible and moderate by comparison with contending nationalists in the south, and reached agreement with France on March 6 that French troops could return to Haiphong and Hanoi in place of the Chinese, while France would recognize the DRV as “a free state … forming part of the Indochinese federation and the French Union.” All Ho’s skill could not overcome the multiplying conflicts on the ground, however. After fierce fighting in Haiphong and Hanoi the Vietminh withdrew from the cities in November 1946 and began its guerrilla strategy. The war with France would last until 1954, when as a result of multilateral talks in Geneva with China playing a moderating role, France agreed to evacuate the north and the Vietminh the south. Common elections were agreed to be the route to eventual reunification, but were never held. Viet Nam reached formal independence as two rival countries, the communist-led DRV ruling north of the 17th parallel and an essentially anti-communist Republic of Viet Nam to its south. The events of 1945–6, however, had been critical in establishing Ho Chi Minh and his DRV as the most plausible embodiments of Vietnamese nationalism.
Communist party structures were weak in Indonesia since the suppression of 1926–7, though Marxist ideas were widespread. The best-known “anti-fascist” politician was Amir Sjarifuddin, still in a Japanese prison when he was named Minister of Information in the first cabinet of the Indonesian Republic on September 4, in an attempt to balance its otherwise Japanese-cooperator elite composition. The leaders most attractive to the impatient mood of mobilized youth in the capital were two contrasting Minangkabaus. Sutan Sjahrir, Hatta’s pre-war socialist colleague, had agreed with Hatta to play a non-cooperator role during the Occupation and maintain contacts with dissidents. He became central in August as mediator between revolutionary youth and the older Japanese protégés. National communist Tan Malaka had the most developed strategy for revolution, having written “Towards the Indonesian Republic” (in Dutch, 1925), and “Mass Action” (in Indonesian, c.1926), and established a Partai Republik Indonesia (PARI) in exile. His experience in Russia, China (especially), and the Philippines was comparable with Ho Chi Minh’s, and he returned to Indonesia in 1942 to plan revolution, but remained in hiding until the Japanese surrender. He would have been the most plausible “revolutionary President,” but lacked Ho’s pragmatic approach to the incoming Allies. Critically, Sukarno demonstrated in August and September that he was indispensable as a recognizable figure for a diverse and desperate population, and the only one capable of controlling the passions aroused.
The Republic managed its own internal transition to a form that might be acceptable to the British who landed in Jakarta on September 30, amid Dutch calls for Sukarno to be tried as a war criminal. Sukarno took a back seat in the following weeks, while Vice-President Hatta issued a number of decrees establishing a parliamentary system, in which transitional authority would be largely in the hands of the parliament’s “working committee” hand-picked by Sjahrir and Amir. Sjahrir became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister on November 14, responsible to parliament rather than the President, and Amir Sjarifuddin occupied the other key ministries of Defense and Interior. A multi-party system replaced Sukarno’s attempt to build a single state party (also favored by Tan Malaka), largely as a pragmatic means to channel the energies of armed groups of young pro- and anti-Japanese nationalists, Muslims, and communists. Amir’s and Sjahrir’s diverse supporters united in a pro-government Socialist Party, which together with the Communist Party led by returning exiles was the most reliable support of the government for the next two years. Amir, the government’s most persuasive and popular asset, sought to build a national army responsible to the government. It struggled to curb the violent demands of armed groups for “popular sovereignty” (kedaulatan rakyat), at the expense of power-holders, traditional rulers, village heads, Chinese, and anybody who could be accused of partiality to the Dutch. Since General Sudirman and the Japanese-trained backbone of the military resented his accusations of fascist collaboration, however, the most reliably pro-government military leaders were Amir’s Dutch-trained fellow-Batak Colonels, T.B. Simatupang, who became Chief of Staff, and A.H. Nasution (1918–2000), commander of the elite Siliwangi Division in West Java.
The Sjahrir/Amir cabinets’ negotiations with the Dutch paralleled those of Ho with the French, both parties agreeing under some British and American pressure to a federal structure for Indonesia in which the Republic would be one unit covering most of Java and Sumatra. When the Dutch attacked the most profitable parts of those two islands in July 1947, Australia’s Labor government referred the matter to the United Nations, leading to the United States having a vital role through the UN in the eventual compromises of 1949. This diplomacy was increasingly unpopular internally, however, with Tan Malaka and other opponents of the Socialists demanding “100 percent freedom.” Sjahrir was forced to resign when even the Leftists withdrew their support, and Amir Sjarifuddin, who replaced him in July 1947, was in turn forced to resign in January 1948. The crisis enabled Sukarno to appoint a “Presidential cabinet” with Hatta as Prime Minister and more conservative Masjumi support, and the Marxists moved into increasingly radical opposition. Peasants and workers were mobilized to turn a political revolution into a socio-economic one, with a growing wave of strikes and unilateral land distributions to poor peasants. This was already polarizing Java dangerously along the cleavage which would dominate the next two decades, pitting poor peasants of syncretic Javanist beliefs against landholders linked with Islamic networks. The return of Musso from Moscow in August 1948 brought Soviet endorsement of a new line whereby “a single party of the working class” must lead the revolution from below, drawing a sharp line against “bourgeois” nationalists. Amir Sjarifuddin and other prominent leaders of the Socialist and Labor Parties, demoralized and radicalized by opposition, fell into line by joining the PKI. This was now led by Musso, who invited other parties to join a communist-led national front openly modeled on the way the Czech communists had come to power the previous February. Hatta, the Muslims, and much of the Japanese-trained army officer corps were not impressed.
Military rivalries provoked a showdown, as government forces led by Nasution’s Siliwangi Division traded arrests, killings, and denunciations with the forces loyal to Amir Sjarifuddin. After the Siliwangi took control of turbulent Surakarta, pro-PKI forces took over Madiun (East Java) on September 18, 1948, declaring that a National Front government had begun there. Sukarno forced the issue in a blistering attack asking Indonesians to choose between himself and Musso. Musso obliged next day by denouncing Sukarno and Hatta as “slaves of Japan and America,” former romusha-dealers and Quislings. The hard Soviet line, borne by the communist least aware of Indonesian realities, thereby sealed the PKI’s fate, as even many of its own soldiers were disinclined to fight explicitly against Sukarno and Hatta. The Siliwangi Division and its allies moved with a purposefulness never shown against the Dutch. Some 35,000 communist supporters were arrested, and the leaders executed or hunted down and shot, including Amir Sjarifuddin and Musso. The bloodletting in Javanese villages embittered the growing cleavage between Muslim and Javanist, rich and poor. The PKI survived in Sumatra and the Dutch-occupied zones, but was set back by several years in its Javanese heartland. Nevertheless, in the 1950s it would again become Indonesia’s largest and most disciplined party, under the youthful leaders first advanced by Musso, D.N. Aidit (1923–65), Njoto, and M.H. Lukman.
The Dutch were planning a final military attack on the Republic in late 1948, expecting to find it mired in internal conflict and confusion sure to aid an eventual communist victory. Instead, when the second Dutch offensive against the Republic came on December 19, 1948, they appeared to be attacking and imprisoning a leadership with the most effective anti-communist credentials in Asia. Sukarno, Hatta, and their cabinet chose to be arrested by the Dutch rather than chance their survival among more heroic but quarrelsome Republican forces, which sustained an effective guerrilla struggle in Java and parts of Sumatra. Washington, impressed at the Sukarno-Hatta success in contrast to communist advances in China, Indochina, and Malaya, pressured the Netherlands to restore the previous status quo, returning the Republican leadership to its capital in Yogyakarta. This diplomatic victory through the United Nations secured anti-communist leadership of the eventual Indonesian government, to which sovereignty was transferred by the Dutch on January 1, 1950. One revolutionary process had lurched first left, and then right.
Independence – Revolutionary or Negotiated?
Indonesia and Viet Nam emerged from the turbulent 1940s with a political leadership that was revolutionary, in the sense of declaring a clean break with the past for which it was prepared to fight. When Sukarno and Hatta became President and Vice-President of the Indonesian Republic, and Ho Chi Minh of the DRV, their legitimacy was based not on links with the past, but on having struggled successfully for a new beginning. The Burmese group of young Thakins transformed into the AFPFL, led by Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win, had not declared their independence until it was transferred by Britain in 1947, but having fought militarily against the British in 1941–2, and then against the Japanese in 1944–5, they had also broken violently with the legitimacy of the past. All three leaderships staked their claim to represent “the people” on the charismatic popularity needed to control an armed and insurgent population, roughly confirmed in ad hoc elections (Republican Java-Sumatra and Viet Nam in 1945–6, Burma in 1947), and on a strong vision of a united future that could justify the sacrifices of struggle. This contrasts markedly with Malaya, British Borneo, and the Philippines, where the pre-war legal order was effectively re-established, military units mobilized under the Japanese were disarmed and discredited, and the structure of independence was negotiated between the varied stakeholders. In Thailand, too, the constitutional structures in place since the 1930s were liberalized but not overturned, so that stability was quickly restored. Investors focused on these three countries during the globally prosperous 1950s, and their economies rapidly surpassed pre-war levels (Table 16.1 above).
Of course the colonial powers had no intention of abandoning the diversity of clients they had built up in Indochina, Indonesia, and Burma to the victors of the revolutionary process. They sought to transfer power to federal structures in which minority interests and investors were safeguarded through elaborate constitutional provisions. In Indochina, we noted, the French sought to contain the revolutionary Viet Nam of the Vietminh within an Indochina Federation inside the French Union. Dutch strategist H.J. van Mook (1894–1965), faced with much greater ethno-linguistic diversity, developed a more complex plan to devolve authority to large federal units (already foreshadowed in 1938) of Sumatra, Borneo, and “the Great East,” to balance and contain Java where the Republic was deemed strongest. In reality Sumatrans were almost equally committed to the idea of unity with Yogyakarta, even if their revolutions had been autonomous affairs. Only the State of East Sumatra (NST), erected in the rich plantation area around Medan conquered by Dutch forces in 1947, had much popular support among the victims of an unusually violent “social revolution” against the sultans in March 1946. In most of Borneo and Sulawesi, pro-Republican sentiment was strong among the majority Muslim population, and had to be suppressed with unusual violence by colonial troops in South Sulawesi. The only effective state was erected in the Great East at a conference of 70 delegates elected by regional (and generally aristocratic) councils or appointed by the Dutch, in December 1946. It adopted the name “State of East Indonesia,” the Indonesian language, and “Indonesia Raya” anthem under pressure from below, and exchanged missions with the Yogyakarta government in 1948. Its government resigned in protest at the Dutch military action of December 1948 against the Republic, as did the federal state erected in Dutch-controlled West Java, named Pasundan in the hope of mobilizing the ethnic pride of the Sundanese-speaking third of Java.
In the negotiations leading to the transfer of sovereignty on December 27, 1949, to a Federal Indonesian Republic (RIS) with a democratic and federal constitution, the six states and assorted federations and “neo-lands” of Dutch-controlled territory (Map 16.3) showed their strong commitment to the idea of Indonesia. They accepted the Republic’s flag, anthem, and language, and before the transfer they also accepted Sukarno as non-executive President of the federal Republic, with the right to appoint its Prime Minister; he named Hatta. They even fought successfully against a constitutional provision to allow any state the right to secede, and unsuccessfully for the inclusion of Dutch New Guinea in the RIS. The political leadership in the federal areas was strongly committed, however, to constitutional guarantees of a loose federation, with an upper chamber representing its constituting states equally. In the first six months these hopes were dashed, as one federal state after another imploded. The taint of being Dutch “puppets” (however unfair) prevented serious resistance to the clamor for total identification with the unitary republic of Sukarno and Hatta. Militarily the federal states had no way to protect themselves against armed bands claiming the mantle of unitarism or Islam except by calling on either the former colonial soldiers or units who held the moral high ground of having fought for independence. Attempts to use colonial soldiers quickly backfired in allegations of treachery. The West Java state (Pasundan) and the West Kalimantan state headed by Pontianak Sultan Hamid II were both compromised by a military coup attempt in Bandung in late January. The East Indonesian NIT, representing the remoter islands with most to lose from unitarism, was the last to fall, as a military attempt by ex-colonial soldiers to stop the arrival of Yogyakarta troops backfired in April 1950. This again gave the unitarists the moral high ground, the NIT unraveled, and its leading Christian figure, conservative Ambonese Dr Soumokil, fled to Ambon with many ex-colonial soldiers to declare independence for the Republic of South Maluku (RMS). All the federal units were dissolved into the unitary Republic in time for the fifth anniversary of the independence proclamation of August 17, 1945, confirming that moment, rather than the negotiations of 1949, as the mythic foundation of the nation-state. The world’s most ambitious experiment in unitary government over hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups had begun.
Map 16.3 Federal and Republican Indonesia in 1948.
In tackling this challenge, however, Indonesia (and the Philippines) had an advantage over the three big Mainland states in having no “core” ethnicity tending to confuse its own identity and interests with those of the plural nation-state. Javanese were less than half of Indonesians, and their name and language had not become the nation’s. Bama were not only two thirds of the Burma population, but also overwhelmingly dominated the nationalist movement represented by the Thakins, the BIA and the AFPFL, which had effectively forced the British to transfer power. Initially it appeared that the Shan, Chin, and Kachin “scheduled areas” of the north and east would be content to defer to nationalist Rangoon as they had to British Rangoon in return for retaining traditional autonomies. The office of President rotated among ethnicities in the 1950s, the first three being Shan, Bama, and Karen. In the first chaotic years of independence when it appeared the government might fall to communist and Karen dissidents, U Nu attributed its survival partly to the consistent support of the Shan, Chin, Kachin, and Kayah states and their military forces. The overwhelming demographic and symbolic primacy of the Bama area meant this could never be true federalism, however, and it never reassured the Karen, whose anxieties could not be allayed within the small Karenni state. Most Karen villages were scattered through Lower Burma, where many had suffered violence from Bama nationalism in 1942. In effect Britain transferred sovereignty in January 1948 with Karen demands unsatisfied, but referred to a commission to define the size and status of a Karen state on the Thai border and a possible Karen-Mon state in Tenasserim. One British historian defines Britain’s departure as a story of “betrayal, incompetence and ignominy,” though conceding that the impatient AFPFL, demanding immediate independence and always fearful of being outflanked by the communists, gave them little alternative (Christie 1996, 79). The strongest Karen card after the withdrawal of the British was their central role in the infant Burmese national army, but in the growing tension of 1948 between the separatist-inclined Karen National Union and the various Bama armed militants, Karen soldiers began defecting. The Karen rebellion proper began in January 1949, and has proved the most intractable of Burma’s many problems.
Burma thus inherited the worst of both worlds. Revolution against British and Japanese had undermined and discredited the legality of the ancien régime and mobilized an insurgent armed population with a diversity of goals; but the assassination of Aung San had removed the figure capable of inheriting the supernatural charisma of a successful break with the past. Its structure was federal, but the very low participation of non-Bama in the anti-British struggle confirmed the fear of Karen and Shan that they would never gain true symbolic or practical equality with Bama in the state. In particular, the army, led from 1949 by Ne Win, one of the “30 Thakins” who had traveled to Japan, was reconstructed as a predominately Bama institution, purged of the Karen officers, and strongly committed to a unitary vision.
The euphoria of the revolutionary moment in Viet Nam, Indonesia, and Burma particularly affected the young. “Everywhere it was young people who took the initiative, speaking directly, ignoring taboos, refusing to worry about personal safety, exuding confidence. Alongside the iconoclasm and bravado there was a longing … to find new order … Youthful heroics and the wish for order came together in the rush to join militia units, where inventiveness and bravado counted for more than social origin, schooling, or wealth” (Marr 2013, 2–3). Arrogant European claims to technical superiority, and Japanese to spiritual superiority, seemed joyfully overturned by the ability of Southeast Asians to do the job themselves, however creatively improvised. The “1945 generation” who experienced these things would never forget the mood, nor imagine sacrificing it for the pedestrian pleasures of young Malaysians or Filipinos, who in turn envied them their “real” revolutions. In the long term, moreover, the very destructiveness of the revolutionary process, and the ability of the winners to impose a single view of heroic national history in schools, would create the most well-defined national moral communities (Chapter 18).
Malaya/Malaysia and Singapore form the non-revolutionary control case where the pre-war legal order was restored, and the shape of independence only gradually negotiated between the colonial power and the varied stakeholders. The process was unheroically peaceful, except on the side of the defeated communist insurgency, leaving many Malaysians feeling that their nationhood was somehow incomplete. In the long term, moreover, the elaborate compromises made between the different states (especially different in Borneo) and the center, and between Malays, Chinese, Indians, and indigenous Borneans, have failed to produce a single idea of the nation. Sukarno’s relentless insistence that “There is no bangsa [race or nation] Kalimantan, there is no bangsa Minangkabau, there is no bangsa Java, Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi or any such. We are all bangsa Indonesia” (Sukarno, 1949, cited Omar 1993, 209) eventually succeeded, though least satisfactorily with those of Chinese, Eurasian, or Papuan descent. Dr Mahathir’s tentative 1991 project to work toward a single “bangsa Malaysia” notably failed. As in France as compared with Britain, the outcome of revolution was not so much liberty, equality, and fraternity as a unitary sense of the nation.
The debit side of the revolutionary ledger is, however, much longer. Economically, Malaysia and Singapore parted company with Indonesia only after 1945, and began their ascent toward First World, or at least middle-income, status. Indonesia remained mired in poverty until the 1980s, and Burma, and Indochina still longer. As infrastructure deteriorated in Indonesia and Burma, Singapore and Penang became more essential entrepôts than they had ever been, and Indonesia even lost control over much of its internal maritime communications. The rule of law, a competent bureaucracy, and stable civilian governments responsible to parliaments survived in Malaysia/Singapore, whereas military rule, corruption, and arbitrary dictatorship became common in the post-revolutionary countries. Above all, the habit of political violence that began in the revolution could not readily be undone. Not only the external fight against colonial or Cold War interventions, but above all the internal contests for power, caused hundreds of thousands of casualties in the post-revolutionary countries over the period 1945–80. The revolutionary assertion of a single nationhood did not end the struggles, but rather increased their intensity by implying a single satisfactory outcome.