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Back to Business. Next day, Batavia got back to business and the new government began to take over the scores of administrative departments which serve the 3,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago. For the time being, only the top jobs would shift to Indonesian hands. The head of the government's biggest bureau, the 1,500-man Ministry of Economics, introduced the Dutch staff to its new Indonesian boss and told the Dutchmen: "Now, you must try to be officials without being officials."
Indonesia urgently needs economic help; first to improve its war-ruined transportation system and second to regain its prewar productive capacity. Indonesia's biggest dollar earners—rubber, oil and copra —were coming back strongly, but the output of coffee, tea and kapok had still a long climb ahead. Before the war, Indonesia produced enough rice to supply her own needs. Now, rice imports are costing her $15 million annually. EGA has already agreed to provide $40 million in textiles, medicine and agricultural tools, and the Indonesians are hoping for another $100 million from the Export-Import Bank. All of this, however, fell short of the $200 million which was the minimum Indonesian estimate of the help they would need the first year. To attract the investment of private capital, Indonesia is counting on its vast untapped lumber resources in the forests of Sumatra and Borneo.
Change the Pictures. At week's end, the fledgling government seemed to be hitting its stride. In the executive mansion, President Soekarno began receiving the new envoys to Indonesia. The first to present his credentials was Economic Expert Dr. Hans M. Hirschfeld, the Dutch Government's choice as the first Netherlands High Commissioner to the United States of Indonesia. The second was the U.S.'s bulky, soft-spoken H. Merle Cochran. For 18 months, Cochran had been the moving force on the United Nations Commission for Indonesia, had skillfully steered the Dutch and Indonesian negotiators through a tangled jungle of mutual distrust and suspicion. Said Cochran: "I have the utmost confidence . . ."
Meanwhile, in the main.hall of the palace, Indonesian workmen removed the heavy, gilt-framed portraits of the imperial Dutchmen whose hardheaded commercial dealings had founded the empire. (Their pictures would soon be replaced by Soekarno's favorite paintings of Indonesian national heroes.) The old pictures sat unceremoniously on the floor: bewigged Johannes Camphuys (1684-91), great governor and great gardener, whose followers introduced coffee-growing to Java; Herman Willem Daendels (1808-11), governor general and dictatorial reformer; Johannes van den Bosch (1830-33), governor general, paternalist exponent of a forced-labor system. The workmen loaded the pictures of the past into a truck to begin their long voyage home.