In conventional writing on the Indonesian National Revolution, perjuangan (struggle) is often counterpoised against diplomacy. But seen from another angle, both activities served each other. For Tan Malaka and his supporters, guerrilla warfare was a subset of the broader political and ideological campaign. It connoted a particular form of struggle exercised through political coalition building and through the exercise of mass campaigns, rallies or other mass actions joined by left-wing and religious groups supporting laskar, or militias, who took their struggle to the streets, the countryside or even the mountain slopes. From 1945 to 1949, practically no one on the Left in Indonesia knew anything about guerrilla warfare contained within communist theories of revolutionary takeover, much less had any deep experience of them (and that included the group around Musso). The exception was Tan Malaka, who set out his own blueprint for a revolutionary takeover of Java in his 1925 publication, and which he further refined in some of his prison writings.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first sets out the details of Tan Malaka's Persatuan Perjuangan, or Struggle Front, following his first open political plays in the young Republic. The second goes on to detail the emergence of the Gerakan Revolusi Rakyat (GRR), a grand Tan Malaka coalition linking political parties with sections of the TNI, and even with radical Islamists, that came together in the wake of the crackdown on the PKI. In the Dutch estimation, the GRR emerged to become the most potent threat to peace on their terms.

The starting point in the chain of events leading to the uprisings on Java and Sumatra in 1926–27 and their rapid suppression was the occasion in December 1925 when a group of ultra-leftist members of the PKI met in Prambanan, a tenth-century temple complex in Central Java, in response to the increasingly tightened political control of the colonial government. Despite the absence of the party's core leaders, who were then outside Indonesia, the group decided—against objective conditions as it turned out—to rebel against the Dutch authorities in mid-1926. As we have seen, the rebellion broke out in West Java in November 1926 and West Sumatra in January 1927, and its bloody suppression led to thousands of individuals, including PKI and SI members, arrested and deported to Digul. This resulted in the pro-Communists being virtually eliminated until after the Pacific War. The rebellions have also been the object of close study. First by the Dutch, who were keen to find an outside hand in them, such as the Comintern. And these studies in turn became source material for a succession of scholars examining the rebellions. It is not my intention here to analyse the failed rebellions per se, or even to fit them into a taxonomy of rebellions such as millennial, proto-nationalist, nationalist, anti-tax, desire for change, and so on. But rather to examine them through the prism of intra-party and Comintern debates while assaying the fallout for the anti-colonial movement in Indonesia at large.

With the near destruction of the PKI at Madiun in August 1948, Tan Malaka remained the foremost proponent of the perjuangan line and, from the Dutch perspective, the foremost enemy. Released from prison the following December by Prime Minister Hatta ostensibly to add a powerful counterweight to the surviving PKI-Moscow faction, the Republican leadership also sought to win kudos from the United States and so strengthen its hand in upcoming diplomatic negotiations. Hastening with his entourage to the Solo River Valley battlefront in the face of the long-expected Dutch attack on the beleaguered Republican government in Yogyakarta—the so-called Second Dutch Police Action of December 1948—Tan Malaka broadcast a statement over radio rejecting negotiation, such as pursued by Sjahrir and Hatta, or any compromise such as the Linggadjati or Renville agreements.

In this chapter, I seek to link the Second Dutch Police Action with a shift on the part of Washington (and Canberra) to favour the centrist Republican leadership out of fear of a communist ascendancy only abetted by Dutch counter-violence and excesses. While such an argument may be implicit in international reporting on Indonesia, I seek here a novel interpretation with particular attention to the less-studied guerrilla context as opposed to the last-minute diplomatic manoeuvrings that better belong to standard Cold War histories. First, the chapter evaluates the rapid ascendancy of militia forces connected to Tan Malaka in the wake of the Second Dutch Police Action.

Less than two years after the end of the Japanese occupation of the former Netherlands East Indies (NEI), the founding president and co-founder with Mohammad Hatta of the Republic of Indonesia, Soekarno, offered a short address that was pregnant with meaning. The venue was a congress of student radicals, and the date was 24 April 1947—just two months before a full-scale Dutch military assault upon the beleaguered Republic. As Soekarno stated,

This was a reference to a series of uprisings in West Java and West Sumatra in late 1926 to early 1927 that were crushed within days by the Dutch colonial forces, following which captives were dispatched to Boven Digul, a prison camp in remote West New Guinea.

In mentioning the Partai National Indonesia (PNI)—the political party he founded after the failure of the 1926–27 rebellions—Soekarno is referring here to his own arrest, imprisonment and trial that led to the dissolution of the party.

Moving with the times, the Dutch Ethical Policy signalled the prospect of a new consensus between the colonial power and the colonized—namely, that there could be no awakening without enlightenment. Certainly, progress and advance were common themes that entered both conservative as well as radical discourse, although the means and purpose of educating the population as to their awakening could not have been more different. The gap in perceptions on the part of the colonial power and their subjects only sowed the seeds of revolutionary thought and action. Notably, the crackdown on the communists dating from 1926 to 1927 created a political vacuum inside the Dutch colony concerning the anti-colonial movement. Into this space stepped the “nationalists”, or that part of the population—both educated and uneducated—that came to espouse a new sense of belonging around a yet nameless nation, just as the term “Indonesia” began to enter the vocabulary. Modern in their orientation, they are sometimes termed “secular”, and that distinguishes them from BU, with its syncretic Javanese orientation, and SI and Muhammadiyah, with their explicit Islamic identity.1 Symbolic in this sense was the emergence in 1927 of the Partai National Indonesia (PNI, or Indonesian Nationalist Party), pledging acts of non-cooperation with the Dutch to force the pace for political independence, in which it was joined by several other Islamic and nationalist parties.

As this work has brought to the fore, Indonesia's War of Independence (1945–49) was long in the making and was not only “made in Japan”. As rationalised by Indonesian Marxists especially, its roots or “lineages” went back to the zaman penjajahan Belanda, or era of high Dutch colonialism, not excepting distant social memories of the earlier VOC invasion of the archipelago and the struggles of disparate peoples to preserve their autonomy. Nevertheless, it was the more recent past that weighed most heavily, such as the thwarted dreams of the nationalists, communists and organized Muslims, culminating in the repressions that both preceded and followed the failed 1926–27 rebellions, including the zaman pergolakan jang maha hebat, or the age of great upheaval of the Japanese occupation, to evoke Dr Amir's slogan. As demonstrated in an opening chapter, Dutch surveillance and incarceration such as took place in Boven Digul not only affected the cream of the native elite but also imposed a high degree of trauma on the collective body politic. We should not be surprised then that at the moment of Merdeka in August 1945—however conflicted it was—there would be no turning back from this shared experience under colonialism as an extraordinary closure of ranks from among the political class, and even the masses, would spearhead Indonesia's postwar struggle for independence.

Incarceration under modern colonialism took various forms, but, as this chapter demonstrates, it also helps to define the nature of the state as an oppressive institution. That holds for totalitarian as much as liberal states, and wartime Australia is not exempted from this stricture. Certainly, the Dutch were not alone among colonial regimes in Asia in establishing repressive carceral systems. Reaching back to the first arriving Portuguese and Spanish in the archipelago, such practices were shared by all the foreign interlopers—Dutch, British, French and Japanese. Backed by legal institutions and courts with the power to dispense life and death, such systems would evolve. From the crude enslavement practices of the first arriving Dutch down through the sequestration of war captives, such as defined by the crushing of the Diponegoro rebellions and carried on through the multi-generational Aceh wars, to systems of forced labour and conscription of the Dutch “Culture System”, to the internment of malefactors against the Dutch rust en orde (peace and order) before the Japanese occupation, and carried on during Indonesia’s war of independence, incarceration was a constant. Nevertheless, in the last decades of Dutch rule, reaching back across the centuries, and the major subject of this book, a new category of miscreant entered the legal lexicon—namely, anti-colonial nationalists, and communists.

The Soekarno-Hatta declaration of independence of the Republic of Indonesia on 17 August 1945 was not uncontested by either the Dutch or the arriving SEAC forces charged with taking the Japanese surrender and rescuing POWs (although the Japanese were vested with responsibility for law and order until Allied occupation forces took over or until a “lawful government was able to function again”). In part owing to this ambiguity, there would be five years of diplomacy and armed struggle before the Republic gained international recognition, by which time the United States had brought pressure to bear on the Netherlands, not to mention the pressure of international opinion. It is also true that, in the early weeks of the proclamation of independence, Soekarno and Hatta held legitimate fears that they would be arrested and tried as quislings, having collaborated with Japan, since war crimes investigations were ongoing, leading to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. While the major local political actors confronting Allied forces on Java were not of a kind—the comparison with the politico-religious checkerboard of southern Vietnam in late 1945 offers a counterpoint—we see extraordinary unanimity in rejection of Dutch overtures where they did not prevail by force. Moreover, whether de jure or de facto, the Indonesian Republic had been created and, thanks to Japan, it hosted an armed force, the TNI, and an embryonic state structure was in place.

Having discussed the activities of the reformist nationalist group of expatriate Indonesians in Holland, this chapter turns to another pole of attraction—namely, the Soviet Union in the decades following the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of the Third International. Relative to say Vietnamese or Chinese, the number of Indonesians in Moscow was always finite at a core of around four or five along with several recruits from among young seamen groomed to establish links with Java. Although the shipping link between Indonesia and Europe was well established, the Moscow-based cadre also sought to work a direct link via China with revolutionary Guangzhou as a base. Nevertheless, there was much toing and froing between Holland and Moscow and between Java and China via various Southeast Asian destinations, including Singapore and Manila. In many ways, differences in approaches compounded by distance from homeland led to infighting, and we should not be surprised to learn that the founding generation of PKI leaders fell out one by one over personality issues, recriminations about working with the nationalists, stress with Moscow, and the shadow cast by the Dutch party over the PKI at a time when it sought to assert its own autonomy. At a time when the group around Sardjono were languishing in Boven Digul, a splintering that culminated in the 1927–30 period would set apart the PKI-Moscow around Musso and Alimin from the rest, and that would include Tan Malaka.