Reopening inquiries into what actually happened during the Police Actions of 1945-49.

‘The Retreat’ by J. Eijkelboom, Part III. Continued from parts 1 and 2.

‘The Retreat’ by J. Eijkelboom, Part II, continued from Part 1.

Jan Eijkelboom was trained in England to ‘fight against the Japs’ but, as it happened, he was drafted to fight in the Indies when the Japanese had long gone. He arrived in Java in the middle of 1947 and served there as a sergeant for 2 1/2 years. In later life he functioned, inter alia, […]

On the date of today, in 1962, then President Sukarno gave his yearly Independence Day speech of which the English version received that year the title ‘A Year of Triumph’. The then very recent New York or Bunker Agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands in which Papua was, under certain conditions, handed over to Indonesia […]

“One of the rajas of Badung who once discussed Van der Tuuk with me said very peculiarly of him; “There is in the whole of Bali only one man who knows and understands Balinese and that man is Gusti Dertik” from Dr. Julius Jacobs , “Eenigen tijd onder de Baliers”, 1883

Van der Tuuk used the time in Holland (1857-1868) to work on the rich material he had brought from the Batak lands. But he had a combatative disposition and got involved in a lot of polemics. His main target was the orientalist Taco Roorda who enjoyed great, and according to Van der Tuuk undeserved, authority […]

Gusti Dertik (Dr.Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk) was, so we are told, the greatest nineteenth century Western student of Indonesian languages, possibly rivaled only by Brandes, a quite different type of scholar (and different type of human being). He laid the foundation for the comparative study of Indonesian languages by the formulation of two phonetic […]

An excerpt from ‘Report from East Java’ detailing examples of ‘crushing actions’ in 1965.

The second part of a translation of a story entitled “The Clan” in which pre-war Dutch journalist Willem Walraven tells about his Sundanese wife Itih, and her family. Read the first part – A Pre-War “Mixed” Marriage.