The Evening Star (February 15, 1946)
Editorial: Dutch plan for Indonesia
It is probable that American and other opposition on the Security Council of UNO to the Soviet demand for an investigatory commission in Indonesia was partly motivated by the proposal simultaneously made by the Netherlands government for the establishment of a commonwealth of Indonesia with the promise that, “in our time,” the more than 60,000,000 Indonesians would be vouchsafed the right of self-determination – a choice between partnership in an overall Netherlands commonwealth embracing both the homeland and its colonial areas in both hemispheres or complete independence.
Judged by every criterion, this appears to be a statesmanlike proposal, in line alike with our policy toward the Philippines and British policy toward India. The parallel between the Indonesian and Indian situations seems to be especially close. Both areas have been administratively consolidated, not through internal evolution but by the empire-building activity of a foreign power. Both contain profound differences in race, religion, language and culture which render the immediate attainment of true national unity by common consent of the inhabitants dubious if not impossible.
Consider the human makeup of “Indonesia.” The word is, itself, intellectually confusing. A more accurate term is the historic designation of “Netherlands Indies.” More than three centuries of Dutch colonial expansion and development has spread Dutch rule over a vast belt of islands stretching east and west along the Equator for more than 3,000 miles. That island chain contains such diverse elements as the densely settled and industrious Javanese, with their Moslem religion and culture, the Christianized and traditionally pro-Dutch people of Amboina, the wild Dyak tribes of Borneo and the negroid savages of New Guinea. Sundered from each other by wide stretches of sea, these diverse peoples have nothing in common but the nexus of alien Dutch colonial rule. The present independence movement centers in Java with offshoots in neighboring Sumatra. The returning Dutch authorities have either been welcomed or peaceably accepted in the “Outer Possessions,” from Borneo through Celebes and the Moluccas to New Guinea, Flores and the Dutch portion of Timor.
Why, then, should an insurgent regime in Java be recognized as the spokesmen for the whole Netherlands Indies? Indeed, what likelihood is there that the agents of such a regime would be accepted by these other peoples as willingly as a restoration of the Dutch authorities? The logic of the situation would therefore appear to favor a program of evolution such as the Netherlands government proposes in its commonwealth plan.