The proclamation of Indonesian independence

At 10 a.m. on 17 August 1945, Tokyo time – the time used on Java during the occupation – Sukarno, standing in front of a small house at 56 Pegangsaan Timur Street in Jakarta with Mohammad Hatta beside him, read out a text of two sentences: “We, the people of Indonesia, hereby proclaim the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be carried out in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time.” The text, dated “17-8-05” according to the Japanese reckoning of years, was signed by both leaders “in the name of the people of Indonesia”. An officer of the volunteer PETA army raised the red-and-white flag on a bamboo pole, and those present sang “Indonesia Raya”, later the national anthem.

War chronologies in English often describe this day with the words “Indonesia declares independence from Japan”. This is a simplification. In August 1945 Japan was the occupier of the former Dutch East Indies, but it had itself been promising the Indonesians independence for a year and in the last days of the war was preparing its proclamation. The act of 17 August was aimed above all at the return of Dutch rule: it was proclaimed two days after Japan’s surrender, before Allied troops had appeared in the archipelago, and it was the Dutch, not the Japanese, who became the new republic’s opponent in a four-year war for recognition of its independence.

The colony and the national movement

The independence movement in the Dutch East Indies emerged in the first decades of the 20th century. In 1927 Sukarno, an engineer from Bandung, founded an association that the following year became the Indonesian National Party; in October 1928 a youth congress in Batavia adopted the watchword of one motherland, one nation and one language – Indonesian. The colonial authorities responded with repression. Sukarno was imprisoned and from 1933 lived in exile on Flores and in Bengkulu; Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir were sent to the Boven Digul camp in New Guinea. Moderate petitions for self-government, such as the Soetardjo petition of 1936, were rejected by the government in The Hague in 1938. When Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, the government-in-exile and Queen Wilhelmina promised only unspecified changes after the war.

Under Japanese occupation

In January 1942 the Japanese attacked the Dutch East Indies, and on 8 March, after the fall of Java, the colonial authorities surrendered. The archipelago was divided into three zones: Sumatra was ruled by the 25th Army, Java and Madura by the 16th Army, and Borneo and the eastern islands by the Japanese navy. Dutch civilians, some 100,000 people, were interned in camps. The Japanese banned the use of Dutch, as well as the Indonesian flag and anthem.

The occupier nevertheless needed the support of the population. In the summer of 1942 it brought Sukarno from Sumatra to Jakarta, as Batavia had been renamed. Sukarno and Hatta chose to cooperate with the Japanese, seeing it as a path to independence, while Sjahrir stayed in the background, keeping in touch with the underground. Sukarno and Hatta headed a succession of mass organisations – Putera (1943) and Jawa Hōkōkai (1944) – and in October 1943 the Japanese created the volunteer Defenders of the Homeland army (PETA), which trained thousands of young Indonesians. Cooperation had its price: Sukarno publicly supported the recruitment of rōmusha, forced labourers sent to work on Java and beyond, whose mortality was very high. Historians estimate their numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and in an autobiography written in the 1960s Sukarno admitted that it was he who had sent these people to work from which many never returned. The occupation also brought famine and disease; the Dutch economic historian Pierre van der Eng estimates the demographic shortfall of the whole of the 1940s – the occupation and the subsequent war – at about 2.4 million people.

A promise “in the future”

As the tide of war turned, Tokyo began to speak of independence. On 7 September 1944 Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso announced it for the “East Indies” “in the future”. The authorities on Java allowed the red-and-white flag to be flown, and Rear Admiral Tadashi Maeda, the navy’s liaison officer in Jakarta, funded propaganda tours by Sukarno and Hatta and opened a school for young activists. In March 1945 the Japanese set up the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Independence (BPUPK). At its session on 1 June Sukarno presented five principles for the future state – the Pancasila: national unity, humanitarianism, democracy, social justice and belief in God – and in June the committee prepared a draft constitution.

After the Potsdam Declaration the Japanese command in South-East Asia decided to speed matters up – according to some historians, partly to make it harder for the Dutch to return to the colony. At a conference in Singapore at the end of July it was agreed that Java would receive independence in September. On 7 August, the day after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the creation of a Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence (PPKI) for the whole archipelago was announced. On 9 August the Japanese flew Sukarno, Hatta and the BPUPK chairman Radjiman Wedyodiningrat to Đà Lạt in Indochina, where the commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group, Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi, promised independence to the whole territory of the former Dutch East Indies and appointed Sukarno chairman and Hatta vice-chairman of the PPKI.

The surrender and the abduction to Rengasdengklok

On 15 August, when Emperor Hirohito announced on the radio the acceptance of the surrender terms, the Japanese command on Java was ordered to maintain the status quo until the Allies arrived. It did not officially confirm the surrender to the Indonesians; that afternoon Sukarno, Hatta and Achmad Soebardjo heard unofficial confirmation from Maeda. A generational dispute broke out. The older leaders wanted to declare independence through the PPKI and not to provoke the garrison of some 70,000 troops. The young activists, the pemuda – among them Wikana and Chairul Saleh – together with Sjahrir demanded an immediate proclamation without the participation of the Japanese-created committee, so that the Allies could not dismiss independence as a Japanese product. On the evening of 15 August a pemuda delegation put this demand to Sukarno at his house; Sukarno refused.

In the early hours of 16 August the pemuda took Sukarno – together with his wife Fatmawati and their son – and Hatta to the PETA garrison at Rengasdengklok near Karawang, officially to protect them from a supposed uprising but in reality to force a proclamation. The two leaders did not give way. When the Japanese discovered their disappearance, Soebardjo – having obtained from Maeda a guarantee of safety and permission to use his residence – went to Rengasdengklok and in the evening brought them back to Jakarta. The Japanese military gave assurances that they would not interfere provided the proclamation was not associated with Japan; helping it would have breached the terms of the surrender.

A night at Maeda’s house

During the night of 16–17 August members of the PPKI and representatives of the pemuda gathered at Maeda’s residence, which now houses a museum. Sukarno and Hatta rejected a pemuda text prepared under Sjahrir’s direction as too violent: it might provoke bloodshed and put the Japanese in a position where they would have to intervene. The final version was written by hand by Sukarno with the help of Hatta and Soebardjo. The Japanese could understand its key phrase about the “transfer of power” as a handover of administration, while the Indonesians understood it as a transfer of sovereignty; to them, “in the shortest possible time” meant before the Allies arrived. The text was typed on a machine with a Latin typeface borrowed – according to Indonesian accounts – from the German navy’s office in Jakarta, since there were only Japanese typewriters in Maeda’s house. To separate the document from the committee created by the occupier, it was agreed that only Sukarno and Hatta would sign it. The meeting ended at about five in the morning.

The ceremony at Pegangsaan Timur

The proclamation was to have been read before a crowd in the city’s main square, today’s Merdeka Square, but the Japanese, fearing unrest, had occupied it with troops. The ceremony was therefore moved to the front of Sukarno’s house. It was brief: the preamble to the draft constitution was read, then Sukarno, with Hatta at his side, read the text of the proclamation, preceding it with a short speech about the nation’s long struggle. The flag, sewn by Fatmawati, was raised by the PETA officer Latief Hendraningrat. The pemuda spread the news using Japanese teleprinters and the news agency; in Bandung it was broadcast by radio. Many Indonesians did not believe it or took it for another Japanese ruse, and on Sumatra until mid-September it was known mainly to the elites in the large towns.

On 18 August the PPKI elected Sukarno president and Hatta vice-president of the republic and adopted a constitution based on the Pancasila; over the following days the Central Indonesian National Committee, the nucleus of a parliament, was formed, together with the People’s Security Agency, from which the army grew. The Japanese, bound by the order to maintain the status quo, for the most part did not interfere, but neither did they hand power or weapons over to the republic; where the pemuda tried to seize them by force, clashes followed.

The Dutch and the republic

To the government in The Hague the republic was a Japanese creation and Sukarno a collaborator. The Netherlands, itself only just liberated, had no army in Asia, however. After Japan’s surrender the archipelago passed into the area of responsibility of Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, which was to disarm and repatriate some 300,000 Japanese and free the prisoners of war and internees. Australian forces, fighting since May on Borneo and at Balikpapan, occupied the eastern part of the archipelago, but the first British units, mostly soldiers of the Indian Army, did not reach Java and Sumatra until the end of September – Java on 29 September 1945. For six weeks after the proclamation the republic built up its administration without outside interference.

What followed

The arrival of the British and the first Dutch officials opened the period known as the bersiap (“be ready”). From September to the end of 1945 and on into 1946, armed pemuda groups and local gangs attacked Europeans and Indo-Europeans – including internees leaving the camps – as well as Chinese, Ambonese and Indonesians regarded as supporters of the Dutch. Estimates of the number killed vary widely: from a few thousand victims documented by name to several tens of thousands in some Dutch studies. At the same time Japanese units, which the Allies had charged with keeping order, fought the republicans, for instance in October in Semarang, where an estimated 500 Japanese and 2,000 Indonesians were killed. In Surabaya the death of the British Brigadier Aubertin Mallaby on 30 October led in November to the Battle of Surabaya, in which, according to various estimates, between 6,000 and 15,000 Indonesians were killed; 10 November is commemorated in Indonesia as Heroes’ Day. The last British troops left Java in November 1946, by which time there were some 55,000 Dutch soldiers in the islands.

So began the Indonesian National Revolution – a war with the Netherlands interspersed with negotiations. The Linggadjati Agreement (November 1946) granted the republic de facto authority over Java, Madura and Sumatra, but in July 1947 and December 1948 the Dutch launched two major offensives, which they called “police actions”; in the second they took the republic’s capital, Yogyakarta, and interned Sukarno and Hatta. In September 1948 the republic also had to put down a communist uprising at Madiun. Pressure from the United States and the UN Security Council forced The Hague to make concessions: after the Round Table Conference in The Hague, on 27 December 1949 the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia, which in August 1950 became a unitary state. Indonesian losses in 1945–1949 are estimated at about 100,000 soldiers and civilians killed, and Dutch losses – according to the Dutch NIOD institute – at about 5,500.

The dispute over the date of the state’s birth lasted a long time. Since 1946 Indonesia has celebrated 17 August as Independence Day, while for decades the Netherlands recognised only the date of the transfer of sovereignty. Only on 14 June 2023 did the Dutch government recognise 17 August 1945 as the day Indonesia proclaimed its independence, while stipulating that the formal transfer of power took place in 1949.

The proclamation of 17 August was the first of the acts by which the peoples of South-East Asia exploited the power vacuum left by Japan’s surrender – two weeks later Vietnam took a similar path. The war that ended for the Allies on 15 August passed for the Indonesians without a break into a four-year struggle over who would replace the Japanese occupier: the former coloniser or the republic proclaimed in front of the house on Pegangsaan Timur. By destroying the Dutch apparatus of power and training the cadres of a future army in PETA, the Japanese occupation had largely made a return to the pre-war order impossible.