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The conquering Japs fed the nationalist fires. They jailed cool-headed Governor General A.W.L. Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, a stiff, old-school civil servant. Every Hollander they could find was put behind bars. All through the yellow man's life-of-a-hen rule, his racist propaganda thus went unanswered. Indonesians never heard Queen Wilhelmina's promise, broad cast a year after Pearl Harbor, to give them full postwar partnership with Holland.
Welcome Home. The Europeans were still in jail when the Allies came back Sept. 30. But Soekarno was not. In a tricky lateral pass, the Japs had installed him as "President of the Indonesian Republic." Mohammed Hatta was comfortably en sconced with him in Batavia as his vice president.
By last week the British, charged with Southeast Asia's short-notice liberation, could regret a pair of blundering policies, which already had been reversed: 1) to occupy only the biggest cities of Java, sharing the policing job with Jap troops; 2) to treat Soekarno's as the de facto government.
The Japs slyly armed nationalist rioters, who rampaged from Depok to Bandung, Semarang to Surabaya. The red-&-white flag of the "republic" fluttered at many a scene of thuggery. The nationalists had evidently learned a lot about terrorism from the Japs; they fought bitter skirmishes with British, Dutch and Jap troops, tossed Allied prisoner-rescue teams into jail, occupied hospitals, internment camps, airfields. Soekarno repudiated the "holy war" declaration which his radios broad cast. Hatta cried: "It's war or revolution for years!" Whatever it was, it was clearly out of control.
The liberation came on the heels of Holland's own, caught the Dutch unready. Last week, as they strove to bolster their forces in the Indies, rifts showed in their own policy. At The Hague, Governor General van Starkenborgh. strong as always for prestige, quit rather than deal with the natives. But Lieutenant Governor General Hubertus J. van Mook, an old Indies hand, was all set to deal with them, if not with Jap-serving Soekarno himself, at Batavia.
At week's end, amid new riots, Soekarno made a new grab for headlines, appealing to President Truman to stop the use of U.S. uniforms and equipment by the trigger-happy Dutch. What worried Hollanders most was a bigger question: how much had nationalism increased among Indonesia's easygoing millions as a result of the yellow man's rule? And how would King Djayabhaya's prophecy come out?