When, in 2005, I received the exciting news about my transfer from Berlin as Dutch ambassador to Jakarta, the first thing I did was to go to the well-known Berlin bookshop of Dussmann in the Friedrichstrasse to look for travel guides about Indonesia.
Contrary to what I had
expected, I could not find any book on Indonesia in the section dealing
with Asia and Southeast Asia. I kept searching and to my surprise
finally found what I had been looking for in the section on Oceania and
the Pacific.
Only then did I fully realize that Indonesia
actually covers two continents, of which the borderline runs through the
deep waterway between Bali and Lombok, where the so-called “Wallace
Line” is located. To the east of this line we can find kangaroos and
other marsupials, just like in Australia, but not to the western side of
it.
The reason is clear: When sea levels were much lower in the
past, these very special animals could not cross the sea because it
remained too deep for them. As a result, quite divergent developments
took place on both sides, also in the field of flora. These deep straits
did not, however, prevent human beings and their cultures from
migrating all over the area that is today called the Indonesian
Archipelago.
Generally it can be said that the geographic
boundaries of Indonesia with its huge territory and extraordinarily rich
diversity, have not been determined by ethnicity, culture, religion,
language, nor its belonging to one or more continents, but rather by its
Dutch colonial history. The Dutch colonial boundaries in the end became
the political boundaries of the Republic of Indonesia.
Not one
inch more and not one inch less. I do not want to say that there is any
merit in the Dutch contribution to the unity of Indonesia. It is just a
result of colonial history, which did not follow any logical ethnic or
other boundaries. The Dutch just tried to get control of a large area to
serve their own interests, both strategic and economic.
Many
people argue that present day Indonesia experienced 350 years of Dutch
colonialism. This is true, although it is not valid for the whole
territory of Indonesia. Some areas had only been fully colonized since
the early 20th century, which in some cases means that full colonial
occupation lasted some 35 instead of 350 years.
In the early 17th
century the Dutch occupied small parts of what today is Indonesia, with
the main purpose of lucrative trade in, for instance, spices like
nutmeg, which were found in the remote Banda Islands. This spice trade,
conducted by the United East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oostindische
Compagnie — VOC), was the beginning of a development that finally led to
that huge colonial empire, called the Dutch East Indies or Nederlands
Indië, which stretched over an area of over 5,300 kilometers (which is
similar to the distance from Bremen, in Germany, to the western borders
of China).
The northern region of Aceh was one of the areas
occupied by the Dutch in the beginning of the 20th century, after a
bloody war of some 30 years. Had Aceh not been occupied and incorporated
into the Dutch East Indies, it might now have been a separate
Sultanate, like for instance Brunei, not part of the Republic of
Indonesia. The same applies to the Batak region in Northern Sumatra, as
well as to Bali, which were equally only incorporated in the early 20th
century.
In the absence of Dutch domination in Northern Sumatra
in the late 19th century, the German Lutheran Church had the chance to
convert many Batak people there and to establish the Batak Christian
Protestant Church.
Similarly, German protestant missionaries
introduced Christianity to Papua in 1855. Later on, with the expansion
of Dutch colonialism in Papua, it was agreed between Christian
missionaries that Papua was to be divided into a Catholic and Protestant
zone of influence.
Just imagine how pragmatic the missionaries
were at the time, by deciding that the northern part of West Papua was
to be Protestant and the southern part Catholic! I am sure that in
Europe such things did not go that smoothly.
The writer was
Ambassador of the Netherlands to Indonesia, Germany, Turkey, Egypt and
Iraq. The article is excerpted from a lecture he delivered in German on
the occasion of the 112nd celebration of the East Asia Society in
Bremen, Germany, recently.