Indonesia at the Crossroads

Abstract

B ECAUSE THE AREA is of strategic as well as of economic significance, the recent trend of events in Indonesia has an important bearing on the future of international relations in the Pacific. The strategic importance of Indonesia became apparent during the recent Pacific war, since Australia owed its freedom from invasion in some measure to the existence of the Indonesian barrier which slowed the Japanese onslaught sufficiently to allow the United States fleet to come to the rescue. Indonesia is of economic importance because of its vast production of raw materials. The basic question posed by the present Indonesian revolution is simply this: Is Indonesia to be a free republic, or will it remain politically and economically dependent? Fifty-four times larger than the Netherlands, and supporting a population of 70 million persons, Indonesia has been a Dutch colony for nearly 350 years. Until i900 Dutch colonial policy was dedicated to the economic exploitation of the Indies for the exclusive benefit of the Netherlands-exploitation which for many decades was taken for granted both in the Netherlands and in the Indies. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did protests arise in Holland against the system of sweating the Indonesians for the advantage of the Dutch.' At the beginning of the present century government policy was altered fundamentally in order to take into consideration the material and spiritual needs of the Indonesian people. In the Queen's speech of i9oi the government acknowledged Holland's moral obligations to Indonesia and charted the course which colonial policy-the so-called ethical policy-was to follow thereafter. And, indeed, subsequent policy decisions in Indonesia did tend to consider the legitimate development of the people within the colonial regime. In the political sphere this process of development was accelerated in I9I7 by the establishment of the Volksraad (People's Council), an advisory body of mixed racial composition whose members were in part elected and in part appointed by