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Jakarta Tram - "Better
to the hell than to be colonized again"
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| The continuing existence of Republican
resistance paired with active diplomacy, soon led to the end of colonial
rule. Journalistic opinion in much of the rest of the world, notably in
the United States of America and Australia began to disfavour the Dutch. |
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| The Netherlands government was forced
back into negotiations, in The Hague. The Dutch finally assented to Indonesian
independence on Dec. 27, 1949. |
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Disputed Date
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| In the following decades,
a diplomatic row between the governments of Indonesia and the Netherlands
persisted, over the officially recognized date of Indonesian independence.
Indonesians commemorate as the anniversary of the August 17, 1945 day of
Sukarno's proclamation as their official independence day holiday. The
Netherlands, viewed Sukarno's government as |
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| illegitimate and would only recognize
the date of the total Dutch withdrawal from Indonesia on December 27, 1949. |
| This changed in 2005 when the Dutch
Foreign Minister, Bernard Bot, (left) officially accepted Indonesian
independence as |
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| beginning on August 17, 1945, he
visited Indonesia, expressing a regret for all the suffering caused
by the fighting during the war. |
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SUKARNO
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| Indonesia's first President. The
son of a Javanese school teacher and his Balinese wife from Buleleng regency,
Sukarno was born in |
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| Surabaya, East Java. He was admitted
into a Dutch-run school as a child. When his father sent him to Bandung
in 1916 to attend a secondary school, he met Tjokroaminoto, a future nationalist.
In 1921 he began to study civil engineering architecture at the |
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| Technical Institute in
Bandung. |
| A rare breed even among the colony's
small educated elite, Sukarno was fluent in several languages, Dutch, German,
English and French. He often told the story about when he was studying
in Surabaya, he sat behind the screen in movie theatres reading the Dutch
subtitles in reverse because he could not afford a ticket. |
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HATTA
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| Mohammad Hatta, Indonesia's first
vice-President, was born on Sumatra into an aristocratic family.
He went to the Netherlands to |
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| study economics. There
he joined the Indonesian independence movement. He was arrested in 1927
by the Dutch, tried, but released. Hatta returned to Sumatra in 1932. He
became chairman of the Pendidikan Nasional Indonesia, a nationalist organization.
For his activities, Hatta was again arrested by the Dutch and exiled in
1935. He was freed by the Japanese early in 1942 when they occupied Indonesia. |
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