On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Indonesia declared its independence. The declaration was not recognized by the Netherlands, which resorted to force in its attempt to take control of the inevitable process of decolonization. This led to four years of difficult negotiations and bitter warfare.

In 2005, the Dutch government declared that the Netherlands should never have waged the war. The government’s 1969 position on the violence used by the Dutch armed forces during the war remained unchanged, however: although there had been ‘excesses’, on the whole the armed forces had behaved ‘correctly’.

As the indications of Dutch extreme violence mounted, this official position proved increasingly difficult to maintain. In 2016, the Dutch government therefore decided to fund a broad study on the dynamics of the violence. The most important conclusions are summarized in this book. The authors show that the Dutch armed forces used extreme violence on a structural basis, and that this was concealed both at the time and for many years after. All of this – like the entire colonial history – is at odds with the rose-tinted self-image of the Netherlands.

All of the authors – Gert Oostindie, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, Eveline Buchheim, Esther Captain, Martijn Eickhoff, Roel Frakking, Azarja Harmanny, Meindert van der Kaaij, Jeroen Kemperman, Rémy Limpach, Bart Luttikhuis, Remco Raben, Peter Romijn, Onno Sinke, Fridus Steijlen, Stephanie Welvaart and Esther Zwinkels – are or were affiliated with the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH), or the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The editorial team consisted of Gert Oostindie, Ben Schoenmaker and Frank van Vree. The Indonesian historian Hilmar Farid wrote the epilogue.

1. Introduction
1 Background, guiding principles and methodology
Gert Oostindie

2 The Netherlands and Indonesia 1945-1949. The political-historical context
Gert Oostindie

3 The war in Indonesia 1945-1949. The military-historical context
Gert Oostindie and Rémy Limpach

Interim conclusions

2. Intermezzo
The human dimension. The search for stories about the Indonesian War of Independence
Eveline Buchheim, Fridus Steijlen, Stephanie Welvaart

i i i. Research results
1 ‘Hatred of foreign elements and their “accomplices”’ Extreme violence in the first phase of the Indonesian Revolution (17 August 1945 to 31 March 1946)
Esther Captain and Onno Sinke

2 Revolutionary worlds. Legitimacy, violence and loyalty during the Indonesian War of Independence
Roel Frakking and Martijn Eickhoff

3 ‘Information costs lives.’ The intelligence war for Indonesia, 1945-1949
Rémy Limpach

4 The myth of the ‘Dutch Method’. Heavy weapons in the Indonesian War of Independence
Azarja Harmanny

5 The law as a weapon. The actions of the Dutch judiciary during the Indonesian War of Independence
Esther Zwinkels

6 Silence, information and deception in the Indonesian War of Independence
Remco Raben and Peter Romijn

7 Silence as a strategy. International visions of the Indonesian War of Independence
Jeroen Kemperman

8 Beyond colonial guilt ranking. Dutch, British and French extreme violence in comparative perspective, 1945-1962
Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis

9 A guilty conscience. The painful processing of the Indonesian War of Independence in the Netherlands
Gert Oostindie and Meindert van der Kaaij

4. Closing remarks
Conclusions

5. Epilogue
Dealing with the legacies of a violent past
Hilmar Farid

Notes
Abbreviations
Further reading
Acknowledgements
About the authors
Index