Revolutionary Violence in Indonesia

The Indonesian National Revolution had begun in the wake of Japan’s surrender to the allies in August 1945. Beginning with a declaration of Indonesian independence by the prewar nationalist leader Sukarno and his associates, read from the doorstep of his house in Jakarta (Batavia) on the seventeenth of that month, attempts to reassert colonial authority were widely opposed by Indonesians of varying political and religious persuasions, and by methods that ranged from subtle negotiation to extreme violence.Footnote ⁷ The theme of revolutionary violence in particular, has never been absent from studies of the struggle for power that went on in Indonesia in the second half of the 1940s. In the anglophone literature, at least, a focus on violent revolutionary activism permeated studies of the pemuda or “politically activist youth” that transformed the “terrorists” of contemporary Dutch colonial reportage into the (frustrated) harbingers of a grass-roots social revolution that somehow lost its way in the anticolonial struggle.Footnote ⁸ Subsequently, Robert Cribb’s coinage of “gangsters and revolutionaries” and kindred revisions served to give a less idealistic slant to the evolving situation in the Netherlands Indies immediately after the war.Footnote ⁹

Moving on several decades, the turmoil surrounding the collapse of the Suharto regime at the end of the 1990s became the occasion for a fresh look at what Adrian Vickers termed “the archaeology of violence” in modern Indonesia, even though the “re-opening of old wounds” was in fact mostly confined to discussion of the anticommunist pogroms of the mid-1960s rather than to the republic’s foundational phase some twenty years earlier.Footnote ¹⁰ That discussion proved highly pertinent, nonetheless, to the developing historiography of the events of the early Bersiap phase of the Indonesian Revolution, in so far as attempts to locate the 1965–67 massacres of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members within a global framework of “genocide’Footnote ¹¹ mutated into a similar delineation of what had taken place in parts of Indonesia during the closing months of 1945. In the specific case of Java, “genocide” (though with some significant reservations) became the lens through which attacks on both Dutch-Eurasians and Sino-Indonesians were viewed,Footnote ¹² albeit with some residual definitional uncertainty surrounding the former group in particular.Footnote ¹³ Within this same context, the concept of “ethnic cleansing” also became incorporated, however marginally, into ongoing debate, again reflecting both global trends and the particularities of the situation in Indonesia itself, where Bersiap could plausibly be interpreted, though far from exclusively, in terms of the boiling over of tensions between culturally and ethnically distinct communities. In particular, some of the violence of the early months of the revolution (and subsequently) appears to have been directed at Dutch-Eurasians per se. Indeed, in some parts of Java, at least, they were the victims of what might properly be described as a pogrom.Footnote ¹⁴ One estimate is that in Java (together with Sumatra) as many as 25,000 Dutch and Dutch-Eurasian people perished during the Bersiap months and subsequently, that is, perhaps one-tenth of the entire prewar Indies-Dutch population.Footnote ¹⁵ Even so, the dreadful situation in which the Indies-Dutch found themselves was not unique: as is becoming increasingly clear, the revolutionary period also witnessed violence on a massive scale perpetrated by Dutch on Indonesians and by Indonesians on other Indonesians. In effect, the revolution was a multifaceted civil war with all the viciousness that such conflicts are apt to bring in their wake—but it was also something rather more than that, insofar as due recognition of the important role of violence leaves open the question of its place in the historical narrative (and likewise leaves open to question, dare one say, the pornography of violence to which that dominance sometimes unwittingly gives rise).

There is, that is to say, a danger that a single-minded focus on violence obfuscates a wider narrative—one in which violence was deeply implicated but in which it was not the constant, overriding theme. The argument, in short, is about the circumstances in which various forms of violence take place: circumstances, in short, which serve to link the problem of violence to the other issues at stake. As Mary Margaret Steedly has remarked, “the alternative to essentialising or culturalising violence is not to disregard it but rather to localise it. By this I mean exploring the full particularity of its multifarious occasions; how it is produced in certain circumstances; how it is deployed, represented, limited, imagined, ignored or instigated; how it is identified, disciplined, interrogated and, of course, punished.”Footnote ¹⁶ The present paper examines that “full particularity” with reference not simply to the immediate and ghastly event of the murder of the Van der Sluys couple in or near to the district of Slawi in the early days of October 1945, but also to the event’s location in the much broader context of the history of the sugar factory in which Edward Van der Sluys (in common with his wife’s father) worked for his entire active life, and in front of which—most likely—he was cruelly murdered. As such, it is a history that needs be understood in terms of different but intersecting dimensions. The first concerns conflicted and divided loyalties with respect to the abstractions of “Holland,” “the republic,” and “the revolution.” The second, longer-term in the way it worked out, relates to loyalty toward, and identification with, the sugar factory itself, viewed as a social community as well as an economic institution. Both these dimensions point to a story that, for all that it ended in violent death, had something in addition to blood and gore as its central feature. In so doing, they draw attention to a largely uncharted though far from insignificant aspect of the fraught mid-century transition to a postcolonial order that was taking place in Java and in the context of the sugar factories that had been, less than a decade earlier, a prime focus of rural economic life.

Sugar Factories, Suspect Allegiances, Lives and Loyalties

Until the Second World War, Java’s industrialised sugar factories had been largely Dutch-owned (Sino-Indonesian investment, though amounting to some ten percent or more of the total, was nonetheless quite overshadowed by foreign overseas capital) and managed by a mixture of Dutch expatriates and locally born Indies-Dutch, under whom a sizeable number of Indonesian (and Sino-Indonesian) “native” subordinates worked—in field, factory, and the laboratories that were a key facet of Java’s “high-tech” industry.Footnote ¹⁷ Although badly hit by the interwar depression of the 1930s, scores of them were still functioning concerns when the Japanese overran the colony in the early months of 1942. With the Japanese surrender, despite the fact that many factories had been closed down or partly dismantled over the previous two and a half years, the sugar factory compounds and their tall, boiler-house chimneys remained the prime signifier of Dutch economic presence in rural Java.

It was against this background that the industry’s physical infrastructure and managerial-technical personnel—by 1945, a mixture of Dutch-Eurasians and Indonesians (expatriate Dutch staff had been interned by the Japanese two years earlier, while the fate of Sino-Indonesian staff remains unclear)—became a target for local activists once the events connected with Bersiap began to unfold. In particular, it has been suggested that the closing months of 1945 were a period when many in Java’s colonial communities—especially, it would appear, the Indies Dutch-Eurasian and Sino-Indonesian elements among them—fell victim to something akin to “la Grande Peur” (the Great Fear) of late-eighteenth-century revolutionary France. Dutch-Eurasians—in common with others with an ostensibly “Dutch” persona or perceived loyalties (threads of cloth in the Dutch national colours might be sign enough)—came to be perceived as a “fifth column” for the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA), and as such seen as key agents in Holland’s bid to reassert control over its “rebellious” colony.Footnote ¹⁸

The situation had important and possibly critical antecedents in the period of the Japanese occupation, when Dutch-Eurasians like the Van der Sluys couple had already been under great pressure from the authorities to “clarify” their allegiance to Japan’s new order by renouncing Holland and affirming that they were “Asian.” As would recur subsequently (though in the context of the breakdown of state power after the Japanese handover to the Allies in August-September 1945), Dutch-Eurasians were specifically targeted on account of their “suspect” loyalty. Indeed, in parts of Java the last year of the war witnessed large-scale roundups and imprisonment or internment of hundreds and probably thousands of Dutch-Eurasians by the Japanese authorities. Ominously, in light of what was to follow, rumours were said to have circulated among Indonesians themselves that Dutch-Eurasians were preparing some kind of operation against them, and that they needed to be on their guard.Footnote ¹⁹

Interwoven with this was the longer-term issue of loyalty toward, and identification with, the sugar factory itself as the economic and social community to which particular segments of the Dutch-Eurasian community belonged and from which their status derived, something that did not exclude, however, the existence of parallel loyalties—as we shall see—among sectors of the factory’s prewar Indonesian personnel. In this dual context, lives may have more to tell us than deaths. Doekoewringin, where van der Sluys spent his entire working life, was one of more than 180 colonial sugar factories, many of them with similar mid-nineteenth century origins, scattered through the lowlands of central and eastern Java until the reduction in their numbers caused by the depression of the 1930s. The factory compound itself, though in a semirural situation—most of the fields on which its cane was grown were close by—was far from isolated physically. Indonesian kampongs were in close proximity; a paved road ran southwards to the township of Slawi itself, while to the north the same road, used by motorbuses from the 1920s onward, connected the township with Tegal, the residency capital city some twelve kilometres away. Close by was a branch line of the Semarang-Cheribon Steam Tram Company, which since the 1890s had taken Doekoewringin’s sugar down to the coast. During the early days of the revolution, its trains carried Republican slogans on their sides. Sugar factories like Doekoewringin, however, were embedded within their surroundings by time as well as by space. The entire industry had been established much earlier than virtually any other major “Western enterprise” in the colony, and was deeply rooted in what Bosma and Raben have referred to as the Oude Indische Wereld (the Old Indies World), one that was syncretic to a degree—and socially and culturally accommodating of its Indonesian environment in ways that were apt to scandalise latter-day colonials who saw matters in simpler, binary terms.Footnote ²⁰

The community of factory personeel to which van der Sluys belonged—management distinguished between its Europeesch (European) and inlandsch (native) sectors—formed, that is to say, a distinctive social microcosm that reflected important dimensions of late-colonial society in Java. Moreover, despite sharp internal differentiation, and possibly even because of a rigidly hierarchic organisation in which everyone knew their place, the factories generated a strong sense of belonging in their managerial, technical, and supervisory staff, regardless of ethnicity, which nonetheless remained an important and, indeed, discriminatory articulating principle. There is nothing particularly new, of course, about the notion of company loyalty. What gives it a particular spin in the context of the events of October 1945 in Central Java is the particularity of the sugar factory communities, to some (at least) of whose aspirations it gave expression, and its collision and accommodation with the “higher” loyalties demanded by the unfolding conflicts of the early revolution.

In the late 1920s, at the height of the industry’s operations, the dominant element among the managerial, technical, and supervisory staff at Doekoewringin was the Europeesch personeel, who averaged around twenty individuals at each factory—and perhaps as many as three times that number when wives and children were taken into account.Footnote ²¹ Generally speaking, they were housed in company bungalows in the vicinity of the fabriek. At the more up-to-date factories, they lived in an exclusive compound in which they were ostensibly insulated from their Indonesian surroundings not only by a high fence but also by such “Western” amenities as electric light and running, purified water. These compounds had the appearance, at least, of being a little bit of Holland set down among the sawah. Some factories had their own swimming pools, many of them their own tennis courts and football field, and virtually all of them had a clubhouse in which, purportedly, “the staff spend many a companionable hour in each other’s company.”Footnote ²²

The compound was enveloped, in turn, in an evolving discourse of expatriality, nowhere more neatly exemplified than in the subsequently published address given by its metropolitan-based managing director at the opening a major new factory early in the 1920s, at which he made quite explicit reference to the staff’s expectation of “one day enjoying a well-deserved rest in Holland after a hard-working life.”Footnote ²³ By thus identifying the Europeesch personeel unambiguously as “outsiders” whose social, cultural and political loyalties lay decisively with the metropolitan Netherlands, discourse of this kind obviously had the potential to set such communities on a collision course with the Indonesian national project, particularly in the revolutionary form that it took in the mid-1940s. This sense of the alienation of the sojourner was strongly reinforced by the concept of “home leave”: by the interwar decades, regular, paid leave in the Netherlands had become part of the normal conditions of employment for expatriate employees. Indeed, home leave evidently came to be conceived in terms not just of social convenience but as critical to a recharging of an individual’s cultural batteries. Late in the 1930s, for example, Dutch-domiciled owners went on record with their concerns that, as a result of the exigencies of the depression years, one totok (that is, expatriate) member of their Java factory staff had been denied such leave for more than fifteen years. Their concern was expressed most immediately in terms of the benefit to be gained from a period of months in a cool climate—but their underlying unease related, fairly obviously, to the danger that the man concerned would lose some vital element of his European persona by an uninterrupted exposure to “the East.”Footnote ²⁴

Yet a gathering expatriate mentality—and there is at least some reason to suppose that such a mentality did become more pronounced during the interwar decades generally—sat awkwardly with a social and ethnic configuration of the factory communities of Java’s late-colonial sugar industry that was altogether more ambiguous. It was a configuration that among other things confounded any reference, like that just cited, to fond expectations of a return to patria. In point of fact, the majority of the factory’s Europeesch personeel had never seen Holland and probably never would: they were Indies-born Dutch-Eurasians for whom “the Indies” was incontrovertibly home. Their standing vis-à-vis Java’s Indonesian population was complex. On the one hand, ties built up over generations could well run deep. The Eurasian Henry Gill, a factory engineer who was murdered in Slawi in 1945, was a close friend of a leading figure in the local Indonesian community and their sons were educated together.Footnote ²⁵ On the other hand, as Lucas discovered in his fieldwork in the 1980s, the impression was widespread that Dutch-Eurasians generally despised “the natives” and that their arrogant behaviour toward them was resented, in particular, by the better-educated younger generation of Javanese, who correctly regarded themselves (as we shall see shortly) as the intellectual superiors of—and as at least as well qualified as—the Eurasians who patronised them—and kept them out of jobs.Footnote ²⁶ In short, by the interwar decades, despite individual histories of close association between Dutch-Eurasians and their Indonesian contemporaries in the sugar factory communities, there was considerable fuel for resentment, which constituted a critical context for the events of the Bersiap period.

At Doekoewringin itself at the end of the 1930s (the factory had been reopened in 1936 after a temporary closure at the height of the depression), eight of the factory’s twelve salaried Europeesch personeel were Indies-born and—as far as it is possible to ascertain—of ethnically mixed ancestry. As was the case throughout the industry, they formed the vital articulating link in the colonial enterprise in Java sugar that combined, under common management, the heavily industrialised processing of cane with an equally industrial but immensely labour-intensive plantation. Crucial to this latter development was the availability of a large number of Dutch-Eurasians who, many believed, deficient in education though they might be, were far more effective as supervisors of “native” labour—particularly in the field—than young men “fresh” from Holland. Moreover, because sugar company employment offered pay and, perhaps more important, status not otherwise easily available to Dutch-Eurasians in the non-government, private sector of Western enterprise in the Netherlands Indies, they were also thought to be loyal.

On the face of it at least, Edward van der Sluys himself fitted this stereotype almost exactly, not least in respect to his perceived unswerving attachment to the Doekoewringin Company and to their factory in Slawi.Footnote ²⁷ A bald statement of his antecedents would be that he was born in Batavia of Dutch-Eurasian parents in the year 1900. Altogether more meaningful, however, is the fact that his family had deep roots in the Indo-European world of early nineteenth-century Banda, one of the so-called Spice Islands of northeastern Indonesia, where over several generations his male forebears had married with “native” women. On his father’s side, he had a non-Christian (and hence “native”) great-grandmother, and an ex-slave grandmother who had converted from Islam to Christianity at the time of her marriage. The family patriarch, Johannes Wilhemus van der Sluys (1833–1885), had been a perkenier or proprietor of a clove “garden” and a man of some considerable substance, whose offspring (and many like them) left Banda to get an education and make careers in Java.Footnote ²⁸ Edward van der Sluys’s father, Wilhelmus van der Sluys, found employment there as a minor official in the postal service, and having made a rather good marriage to the Eurasian daughter of a Dutch engineer, he spent his last years in retirement in The Hague, where he died in 1924.

Edward van der Sluys himself, however, never saw his putative fatherland. Sometime in the early years of the new century, he (and possibly his family) had left Banda and relocated to Tegal, where an uncle had worked in the sugar industry as a bookkeeper since the mid-1880s. By 1917, at the age of seventeen, young Edward was himself employed in at the factory where he was to spend the rest of his working life supervising Doekoewringin’s Indonesian foremen (mandur) and labourers, initially as a goedangsopzichter (warehouse overseer). In the stock phrase of the printed forms on which the quality of his annual performance was reported to the company’s board of directors, Edward van der Sluys was consistently rated “very good” in terms of “his ability to get on with [omgang met] the Native Staff and the people in general.” He was also reckoned to have an excellent knowledge of “native” languages, and spoke fluent Javanese and Malay. His theoretical knowledge, on the other hand, was rated as only “average” (matig), reflecting presumably his modest educational attainments.

Like many similarly placed Dutch-Eurasians, his education had extended no further than the Dutch lagere school (lower school) and his only formal qualification was the klein ambtenaars exam (the junior officials’ exam), which amounted to little more than a certification that he could read and write and do simple arithmetic. This did not prevent him, however, from being rated a highly effective tuinopzichter or plantation supervisor—the position that he had attained at Doekoewringin by the late 1920s. But it did mean that he could not aspire to any higher position in the industry: indeed, the judgment regularly pronounced by his boss, the factory’s administrateur, was that of “not suitable for further promotion.” The ceiling on promotion for Dutch-Eurasians like him did not mean, however, that he was poorly paid. Indeed, by the late 1930s Edward van der Sluys drew the same salary as the expatriate fabriekschef or head of manufacturing and one higher than that of the chief engineer. Indeed, among the other staff at the factory, only the other tuinopzichter J. A. C. van Polanen Petel (also a Dutch-Eurasian but who could, and probably did, count among his distant ancestors Holland’s first ambassador to the newly independent United States of America) was paid more.Footnote ²⁹

Van der Sluys himself came from a very different background than that of his fellow tuinopzichters, but one that still conferred on him a solidly middle-class status in the Dutch communities of the interwar Netherlands Indies—and one in which sugar was, quite literally, “in the family.” In addition to an uncle already in the industry, his marriage made him part of a network of “sugar-men” that included his father-in-law and the latter’s brother. Frederika Gill, whom Edward van der Sluys married in the 1920s, was the daughter of Frederik Johann Gill, one of Van der Sluys’s senior colleagues at Doekoewringin. Indeed, when the older man retired in 1928, Van der Sluys assumed his position as tuinopzichter. Nor did the family ties to the sugar industry end there, since Frederika’s uncle, Henry Gill, was a machinist at the nearby Pangka sugar factory. The brothers were the Eurasian descendants of the Londoner Charles Gill (b. 1833) who had “gone out” to Java as a very young man, in the company of his father and two brothers sometime in the 1840s: all three subsequently became involved either directly in the sugar industry itself or in the world of engineering workshops (mostly in East Java) that serviced it.Footnote ³⁰

Marriage, in short, confirmed Edward van der Sluys’s identity as an individual whose extended family had long been part of the colonial sugar industry and, specifically, the group of factories that the industry had established over the previous three-quarters of a century throughout the lowlands of the north coast of Central Java. Given his own family’s particular trajectory—his mother and father, after all, had chosen to end their days in Holland—it can be assumed (in the absence of direct evidence) that Edward van der Sluys’s “higher loyalty” was unquestioningly to The Netherlands. His most immediate loyalties, however, were surely to the sugar industry and, more explicitly, to the factory at which he had spent his life. Not for nothing did his service report (dienststaat) of 1939 make reference to his “strongly developed sense of duty (plichtsbesef).” To this extent, he and other members of the Europeesch personeel had more in common with the inlandsch staff of the Doekoewringin than Nationalist (or for that matter, Dutch) narratives of the industry might lead us to suppose.

In addition to the relatively small group of the factory’s Europeesch personeel, large numbers of “native” staff or, as they were designated, inlandsch personeel lived and worked in close and very necessary proximity to Java’s sugar factories. Literally across the fence from the Doekoewringin factory itself was the native village for company employees, its very name of Kampung Preman (that is, “Freeman Kampong”) redolent of an era, less than a century earlier, when most of the work in the sugar industry was done by servile peasant labour from the surrounding villages. This particular kampong, by way of contrast, must have housed the small minority of skilled and supervisory Indonesians who in the mid-nineteenth century were counted as “voluntary” workers. Their twentieth-century counterparts, foremen, skilled operatives, bookkeepers, and laboratory personnel—at some factories the latter were designated as intellectueele inlanders (natives)—had a singular existence along the fault lines of the Indies colonial communities and the colonial discourse that grew up around them.

Even at a relatively small sugar factory like Doekoewringin, by the interwar decades there were approximately 130 full time Indonesian staff categorised as vast inlandsche personeel (permanent native staff) and a further hundred listed as campagne (manufacturing season) personeel. Judging by the salaries paid, there was considerable internal differentiation within the group. There was an elite of some eight or nine individuals (headed by the native cashier), the head clerk, a plantation clerk, two machine operators (machinedrijver), a chemist (laborant), and, first and foremost, the hoofdtoekang or head foreman.Footnote ³¹ By far the best paid of all the inlandsche personeel (at sixty-seven guilders a month his salary still amounted to less than one sixth of Van der Sluys’s earnings), he and people like him were evidently much prized by employers who were careful to bestow what they conceived as the appropriate signs of favour. Dedicated accommodation adjacent to the factory compound became perhaps the prime signifier of status, along with the provision of education for the intellectueele inlanders’ children. Indeed, by the 1930s a younger generation of educated young men and sometimes women—their attainments in this respect far higher than that of Van der Sluys and his kind—were now available to the industry.Footnote ³² All told, the “archive” of the sugar industry is far less forthcoming about such people than about their European-Eurasian counterparts. Nevertheless, their positioning was a critical one. As we shall see, it exposed them to the accusation of disloyalty, and of having “Dutch attitudes” in the highly charged atmosphere of the early revolution. At the same time, however, it made them a vital element in the industry’s continuity of operation, something which elements on the Republican (as well as Dutch) side were keen to promote.

The Japanese Occupation, the Early Revolution and Bersiap

The Japanese occupation of Indonesia and its aftermath struck the sugar factory communities of colonial Java hard. At Doekoewringin itself, though not apparently at many of the adjoining factories, the “anarchy” that accompanied the collapse of Dutch power and the impending arrival of Japanese troops in March 1942 saw attacks on the factory buildings, the looting of its stocks of sugar, and the plundering of some of the “European” staff houses. The Dutch used the term rampok (violent thievery). Nobody was injured, however, though the administrateur, F. H. Feltkamp, appears to have attracted some opprobrium by retreating to the relative safety of the nearby Kemanglen factory, leaving his subordinates to fend for themselves. The events of October 1945 (scarcely two months after the Japanese surrender to the Allies) were much more far-reaching. As Frederick has suggested was the case elsewhere in Java, they were at some remove from the “usual” form of rampok.Footnote ³³ In Slawi, as we have seen, events took a fatal turn for many of the district’s Dutch-Eurasian population, when the district and surrounding areas became the crucible of a “social revolution” that swept away the old order of prewar Javanese officialdom—the pangreh praja—and many of the village heads or lurah who were their clients.Footnote ³⁴

At Doekoewringin—as at several of the sugar factories in and around Slawi and in the Brebes kabupaten (administrative district) immediately to its west—the Japanese had called a halt to sugar production at the close of the 1943 campaign, and at the same time completed the piecemeal internment of the totok members of the Europeesch Personeel.Footnote ³⁵ By and large, Dutch-Eurasians were not interned, and remained at the factories, eking out an existence as best they could alongside their inlandsche counterparts. Some attempt was obviously made to retain the old social order. At Doekoewringin, for example, a subscription was set up for the now destitute (Dutch-Eurasian) wives of interned totoks,Footnote ³⁶ of whom the most eminent, administrateur Feltkamp, died of a heart attack in the Tjimahi internment camp in West Java late in 1944.

Some of Doekoewringin’s Dutch-Eurasian personnel were fatally caught up in the Japanese war machine, likely because they had been recruited into the Netherlands Indies Army and were hence technically prisoners-of-war. Van der Sluys himself escaped this fate, probably because he had managed to relocate to West Java, together with his wife and two daughters. He may have intended to assist Doekoewringin’s interned administrateur in whatever way he could. At any event, the end of the war apparently found the Van der Sluys family in or near Bandung (there is no apparent evidence that they had been interned in one of the area’s camps, nor would this have been likely given their non-European status in the eyes of the Japanese occupiers).

It was from the Bandung district that husband and wife travelled back to Slawi in the following month. On present evidence, we can only speculate as to why they did so. It appears that two of Frederika Van der Sluys’s cousins Harry and Bernard made the journey from West Java at around the same time, apparently with the aim of persuading their father, Henry Gill, to leave Slawi for the “safety” of Bandung.Footnote ³⁷ Did the Van der Sluys couple make a similar journey in an attempt to “rescue” Frederika’s parents? Among other possible reasons, however, may well have been the fact that, as the longest serving—and most senior—member of the Europeesch personeel of Doekoewringin to have survived the war (assuming that he had some idea of the fate of his erstwhile colleagues), his loyalty to the company and its factory was a paramount consideration. Of course, returning to Slawi may simply have represented an untimely resolve to return home now that the war was “over.” Whatever the explanation, however, their journey proved a fatal one.

Edward and Frederika van der Sluys were among the most socially prominent victims of the October killings in around Slawi. As members of the elite of Dutch-Eurasians who worked as part of the managerial and technical staff of the sugar factories of the area, they enjoyed an income and standing considerably higher than most of the Dutch-Eurasian “petit bourgeois” who died with them during those October days. Among the people murdered in the factory yard at Doekoewringin were a family who ran the local dairy; another victim was a nurse in the local clinic. Further west, in the town of Brebes the people dragged out from what might have been intended as the safety of the local prison and butchered in a nearby village included a colonial official whose Italian nationality had apparently precluded his internment by the Japanese.

Accounting for Violence

Nonetheless, violence in this part of Java undoubtedly centred on sugar industry personnel to an extent that indeed makes it appropriate to write in terms of “the sugar factory killings.” The events that took place at Doekoewringin found equally bloody parallels, within the same few days in mid-October 1945, at sugar factories which lay to the west of Slawi, notably those at Djatibarang and Bandjaratma in Brebes. At Djatibarang, eighteen men and youths, most if not all of them sugar company employees, were killed in the immediate vicinity of the factory, while at Bandjaratma as many as ten of the male Dutch-Eurasian staff perished, apparently in the factory compound itself.Footnote ³⁸

It was a sequence of events that has to be seen against a very place-specific background, beginning with the forced departure early in October (after a deadly battle with local pemuda) of Pekalongan Residency’s small Japanese garrison; the violent eradication or driving away of the entire corps of Javanese officials who had served under the Japanese (and prior to that, under the Dutch); and the establishment of a popular revolutionary authority that was only brought under the control of central Republican forces sometime in December.Footnote ³⁹ As in contemporary developments elsewhere,Footnote ⁴⁰ any “central” co-ordination or direction appears, on the basis of surviving records, to have been absent. Lucas’s fieldwork in the 1980s—by far the most thorough and authoritative account of the “October Days” in Tegal—established that the members of both local pemuda “organisations” (the Angkatan Pemuda Indonesia (API; Younger Generation of Indonesians), and Angkatan Muda Republik Indonesia (AMRI; Younger Generation of the Republic of Indonesia)) were present at the killings at the Doekoewringin sugar factory on 11 October. Likewise, he was able to identify one Sidik as the API leader implicated in the murder of sugar factory engineer Henry Gill some weeks earlier. However, to say that the API and AMRI members were “involved” says little or nothing about any central direction of what took place, not least because neither of these groups appear to have had any meaningful organisational contact with each other, even in the same kebupaten (colonial administrative district below Residency level), let alone on a national or quasinational level. This is not to say, of course, that the events of mid-October had no common inspiration; as we have seen, NICA-phobia and a more general suspicion that the Dutch-Eurasians were agents for a restoration of colonial rule were important triggers. But there is no evidence of a local, coordinated plan. Not least, this was because nobody was in sufficient authority to execute one. Lucas does indeed attempt a reconstruction of the history of one powerful local leader, identified as Kutil—a man both feared for his cruelty and admired, among other things, for his attempts (so it seems) to seize and redistribute goods, especially the cotton cloth that was in desperately short supply in Java by the end of the war—but his bailiwick lay to the north of Slawi and its sugar factories, and there seems to be no evidence that he intervened there. Nor, for that matter, did the locally based units of the embryonic Indonesian National Army or the police, neither of whom ventured to leave the (relative) safety of the towns for the dangerously “unsettled” countryside.Footnote ⁴¹

Events in Tegal and Brebes in October 1945 not only draw attention, however, to the importance of locality in the early history of the revolution in Java: They also suggest the danger of generalising too widely. This is immediately apparent from a comparison of what happened in Slawi and surrounding districts with events in Brebes. In the former, the killers seem to have turned indiscriminately on men, women, and children. Indeed, south of Slawi, at the erstwhile “sugar town” of Balapoelang (the mill had closed down a decade earlier) one of the most hideous incidents of the October Days involved the slaughter of young children.Footnote ⁴² Further west, however, at the Bandjaratma and Djatibarang factories and in the town of Brebes, men and youths were killed, but most of the women and children survived and were interned in Republican camps.Footnote ⁴³

Moreover, the October killings did not affect the entire region, though there is plenty of evidence that they were widespread across Java.Footnote ⁴⁴ On this part of the north coast of Central Java, however, they appear to have been confined largely to specific locations.Footnote ⁴⁵ In short, when near-contemporary Dutch sources allude to the massa moord in Tegal (“the massacre in Tegal”), they do so with a precise and well-justified regional emphasis: further east along the coast in the kebupaten of Pemalang and Pekalongan, there appear to have been no parallel to the attacks on the staff of the sugar factories or, indeed, on Dutch-Eurasians in general.Footnote ⁴⁶ Likewise, further to the west, in Cirebon Residency, the staff at the Nieuw Tersana sugar factory—by this date the largest such enterprise on the whole north coast—appear to have been interned but not otherwise harmed.Footnote ⁴⁷

Most important for an assessment of the “ethnic cleansing” implications of the violence of the early revolution, it needs to be remembered that its potential victims were by no means confined to members of the local Dutch-Eurasian communities. In an incident in East Java documented by Frederick, for example, “in one mass grave of about seventy-seven victims, forty-seven were later deemed to have been Indonesian.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The inlandsche personeel of the factories were also very much at risk of having their loyalty to the factory equated with loyalty to the Dutch. The explosion of violence in the closing months of 1945 focused not only on attempts to compel Dutch-Eurasians to take sides and to define their allegiances: there is also ample evidence that elite Indonesian employees risked being defined as outsiders to the revolution, too—and hence as its possible victims. During the October Days, the leading members of the inlandsche personeel at the Djatibarang factory, to the northwest of Slawi, were threatened with execution on account of their purportedly pro-Dutch sympathies. Accused of siding with the Dutch, they were only saved from death by the intervention of an elderly haji, “who said that it would be sufficient if the former officials and employees of the factory “asked forgiveness.”Footnote ⁴⁹ At the neighbouring Bandjaratma factory, the murder of most of the Dutch-Eurasian personnel in October 1945 was paralleled sometime during the subsequent eighteen months by the flight of the Indonesian staff, none of whom—though they were said to be present in the locality—could be prevailed upon to return when its Dutch owners (after some delay) resumed operations following the so-called Police Action of July 1947.Footnote ⁵⁰ This, the first of two such “actions,” signalled the determination of Dutch hardliners to regain control of the resource-rich parts of Java by all-out military assault if necessary, and it had a far-reaching impact on the sugar industry. Subsequent “terrorism” around Bandjaratma took a toll on both Dutch-Eurasian and Indonesian staff more or less indiscriminately, and it also showed indications of being an Indonesian civil war in which the factory was caught essentially in the crossfire.

The whole issue of “ethnic cleansing” and of ethnicity per se is, of course, inextricably intertwined with the issue of “loyalty”: so much so, indeed, that the two became virtually inseparable. What took place in Slawi during October Days 1945—the killing of Van der Sluys and his wife, other Dutch-Eurasians, and assimilated Ambonese—had the very obvious appearance of an event in which individuals were singled out on the basis of their ethnicity—complex and ambiguous as that may have been.Footnote ⁵¹ Nonetheless, an equally probable dimension to the tragedy, suggested by the NICA-phobia already alluded to, and lent weight by particular incidents in and around Slawi and in Brebes, has to do with allegiance to the “revolution” and of “belonging to our side.” Later in the revolution, the vortex of loyalties became a great deal more complex. At the Bandjaratma factory, for example, employees were caught in a literal and figurative crossfire between the Royal Netherlands Indies Army, the Republican army, several groups of Islamic dissidents, and, for good measure, groups of communist guerrillas.Footnote ⁵² In 1945, however, loyalties were viewed in simpler, binary terms. Lucas records a contemporary’s recollection that the Doekoewringin killings were preceded by speeches and a demand that the victims be tried “as the enemies of the people were tried in the October Revolution in Russia.”Footnote ⁵³

A similar suspicion of alien loyalties—albeit one that, again, cannot be divorced from issues of ethnicity—underlay the killings not only of the Van der Sluys couple but also of their uncle, Henry Gill, at the Pangka sugar factory (a few kilometres east of Doekoewringin), where he had been machinist (engineer) for more than a quarter of a century. Gill had close connections with some elements among the Islamic-Nationalist leadership in prewar Slawi: he was a close friend of the local Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union) leader in Slawi, kyai Badrun, one of whose sons had grown up with his children. However, it looks as if in the early days of October he was found wanting—at least by some of the younger local hotheads—in respect of his commitment to the revolution. In their eyes, at least, he had failed, fatally as it turned out, to make an unambiguous declaration for the new Republican order.Footnote ⁵⁴ Very much in line with this insistence on declared allegiance (though there is no apparent mention of it in the October Days of 1945) was the warga negara, a pledge of loyalty to which Republican activists encouraged interned Dutch-Eurasians to subscribe during the course of the following months. Subscribers were separated into their own, ostensibly better camp: nonsubscribers were offered the (ostensible) prospect of being “repatriated” to Dutch-held territory.Footnote ⁵⁵ The logical conclusion of this search for loyalty was reached in the 1950s, when the colony’s Dutch-Eurasians were faced with the choice of taking Indonesian citizenship or (eventual) expulsion from a state that defined them as “outsiders.”

The upshot, however, was far from preordained. In the 1970s, when she was interviewed by Lucas about the circumstances of her father’s death, Henry Gill’s daughter—and Frederika van der Sluys’s cousin—was still living in Tegal, where she had evidently opted for the kampong rather than the boat to Holland. On the other hand, Frederika’s father, Frederik Johann Gill, the retired tuinopzichter (gardener) from prewar Doekoewringin, having survived the events of October 1945 opted for “repatriation” at the beginning of the 1950s to a country that he had never seen. (He died in Hilversum in the northeast of the Netherlands, in 1965 at the age of ninety).Footnote ⁵⁶ Edward and Frederika van der Sluys’s two daughters likewise survived their parents.Footnote ⁵⁷ Their subsequent history is unknown, but the probability is that they did not “repatriate” to Holland.

The fraught loyalties of the early revolution—to Holland, to the Republic and to the factory enterprise itself—were underscored, moreover, by a pronounced duality in the Republic’s thinking about the industry itself. As Lucas remarks, from the viewpoint of many Nationalists, “the sugar mills … were symbols of the worst and most hated aspects of colonial oppression.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As such, the industry was a target for verbal Nationalist onslaught for more than two decades before the Japanese Invasion of 1942, on the grounds that, among other things, the sugar industry engrossed land on terms that were unfair to farmers; that it was able to do so because the sugar capital (putatively) enjoyed the unconditional backing of the Netherlands Indies state; and that the industry’s profits were expropriated almost exclusively by Dutch expatriate and metropolitan owners and shareholders. Unsurprisingly in these circumstances, the very origins of the Nationalist movement in the Javanese countryside—in the form of Sarekat Islam activism immediately before and after the First World War—had focused very closely on the misdeeds of the sugar industry. In the Volksraad, the People’s Assembly reluctantly established in 1918 by a colonial government hopeful to head off “native” radicalism, the Indonesian minority among its members extensively and continuously aired the industry’s iniquities.Footnote ⁵⁹

In this context (and allowing for the fact that local circumstances differed significantly) it seems probable that a symbolic meaning attached to the extent to which rural violence—where it indeed occurred—centred largely on the sugar factories. It may be true, of course, that a (deserted) factory compound, with its yard and sheds and housing, was a physically convenient place to herd potential victims. Nonetheless, the sugar factories became the focus of the unfolding tragedy for reasons other than the purely contingent. The people who organised the killings—and there can be little doubt that organisation was involved and organisers present: the synchronicity of events at locations so relatively wide apart bears testimony to that—were not unaware, though the point remains speculative, of the larger implications of what they were doing. Likewise, a deep animosity to the industry might be thought to underpin the extent to which the sugar factories themselves became, subsequent to the specific events of late 1945, the targets of a “scorched earth” policy as Republican forces retreated in the face of an armed Dutch onslaught some eighteenth months later during the First Police Action of July 1947, and again after the Second Police Action of December 1948.

Conclusion: Narratives, Identities, and Loyalties

The present paper has advanced two primary explanations for the murder of Edward and Fredericka van der Sluys, both of them pervaded with themes of ethnic ambiguity and conflicted loyalties. On the one hand, it has focused on a reconstruction of the immediate events in Slawi in which Edward and Fredericka van der Sluys were caught up, and their broader relationship to developments taking place across Java during the early months of the revolution. On the other hand, it has also attempted to elucidate what happened in terms of the wider history of the sugar industry’s factory communities, an arena of long-standing social difference and conflicted loyalties that has a considerable bearing on the immediate events of October 1945.

As was indicated at the beginning of this paper, attempts to give context to the “sugar factory killings” of October 1945 in north-Central Java—and, in particular, the murder of Edward and Frederika van der Sluys—involve both complementary and competing narratives about the significance of the events. The grandest of such narratives centres on the rise of revolutionary nationalism, with its purportedly unique claims to define the loyalties of the members of the factory communities. A more recent one is that which seeks to bring what happened within the framework of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” a framework which at least has the advantage of making clear how multi-dimensional was the violence that took place. The present argument, based on a close look at the sugar factory communities, suggests a third, but by no means exclusive alternative, one in which loyalty to the enterprise seems, on occasion at least, to have overridden both revolutionary consciousness and ethnic difference as a key dynamic in the evolving situation. In many ways, that is to say, the present paper has concerned people of ambiguous identity caught in a conflict of loyalties that had not originated during the months of September-October 1945 but which was greatly exacerbated by the onset of the Indonesian Revolution in ways that were to prove fatal to them. The fact they did prove fatal had, however, had very much to do with the contingent and the local, even though the individual tragedies clearly also belong to a history common to the whole of Java and the erstwhile Netherlands Indies in general during the second half of the 1940s.