Six decades have passed, but Kadun bin Siot’s voice still trembles as he recalls the morning Dutch troops surrounded his tiny Indonesian village and nearly wiped out its entire male population.
He was 12, peering through the slats of a wooden barn as soldiers flushed his father out of his hiding place in a trash heap, stabbing it with bayonets until he emerged, blood pouring from his face.
“They dragged him away,” the 76-year-old farmer said. “I never saw him again.”
Dutch troops clinging to their retreating colonial empire arrived in Rawagede by the hundreds just before dawn on Dec. 9, 1947, and opened fire, sending sleepy residents scattering from their homes in panic.
The troops were looking for resistance leader Lukas Kustario, known for ambushing Dutch bases.
When villagers said they didn’t know where he was, the soldiers rounded up the boys and young men and took them to an open field.
Squatting in rows, with both hands placed on the backs of their heads, they were shot one by one.
The Dutch said 150 were killed in the massacre — for which they have yet to apologize — but villagers put the toll at nearly three times that. Only a few survived.
Relatives of the victims have spent a lifetime waiting for justice.
Though a landmark ruling by a Dutch court last week offered compensation to surviving widows, now in their 80s and 90s, it could take years for the money to wind its way through the political and bureaucratic maze.
However, time is running short as three of the 10 claimants in the suit have already died, the most recent in May.
Another US$1.2 million in “development aid” promised to Rawagede 30 months ago for the construction of a school, a hospital and a market is stuck in The Hague. It is supposed to go to the Indonesian Interior Ministry, but a dispute between two foundations representing the villagers’ interests is holding things up.
Standing on his toes, Wahidin carefully lifts a cardboard box off the top shelf from his office and sifts through a bundle of papers until he finds the blueprints.
“Ah, here they are,” the regional financial officer says, dusting off the drawings and letting out a deep sigh.
It’s as if he almost forgot as well.
“A lot of talk, plans, a rice field was even cleared at one point,” said Wahidin, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. “But we haven’t seen any of the money that was supposed to go toward helping building these. Not a cent.”
Though described as one of the worst massacres by Dutch troops during Indonesia’s bloody fight for independence, few in this nation of 240 million have ever heard of Rawagede.
Those who have know it only through a poem by Chairil Anwar that is still recited by schoolchildren.
It was up to survivors, he wrote, to decide if those who died, their bones scattered between the -neighboring West Java towns of Karawang and Bekasi, were part of the price for freedom, victory and hope.
However, 92-year-old Wanti needs no such reminders.
With great clarity she describes hiding under her bed with her two children for a day, the rat-a-tat sound of gunfire assaulting her ears. The next morning, when women in the village thought it was safe, they went outside to look for their husbands, brothers and sons.
“We carried their bodies ... to our homes, dug holes with our bare hands and buried them in our backyards,” Wanti said, recalling how her children helped cloak their father in sheets ripped off the bed.
Indonesia declared independence from Dutch colonial rule when World War II ended in 1945. The Netherlands fought unsuccessfully to try to maintain control of its lucrative Asian outpost and Indonesia was finally recognized as independent in 1949.
The massacre — like the failure of peacekeepers to protect Muslims in Srebrenica a half-century later — remains a black page in Dutch history.
When then-Dutch Ambassador to Indonesia Nikolaos van Dam, attended a memorial service in Rawagede in 2008, the first representative of his government do so, he said he was “sorry” about the killings.
The remarks, not cleared in The Hague, caused a diplomatic uproar.
Survivors can only hope this month’s court ruling will make it easier for the Netherlands to face its past.
They pray they will get not only financial compensation — though no one has said how much — but also a heartfelt apology and, -eventually, the school, hospital and market their village was promised.
The Dutch insist the money is “development aid,” not reparations, and that it will come eventually.
“Together with the Indonesian authorities we want to put together a sustainable project,” Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Aad Meijer said.
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