The decolonization war in Indonesia, 1945–1949: War crimes in Dutch veterans' egodocuments

In: War in history, Band 25, Heft 2, S. 254-276

Abstract

Between August 1945 and December 1949, the Netherlands deployed some 220,000 military in the Indonesian decolonization war. Both during and long after this war, the Dutch government has denied that its armed forces engaged in war crimes, apart from a limited number of identified transgressions characterized as 'exceptional'. This position has increasingly been criticized by scholars and in public debates, but it remains a daunting task to present conclusive evidence. This paper, based on an exhaustive analysis of all published egodocuments of Dutch soldiers and veterans, is a first attempt at quantification and confirms earlier suggestions that war crimes formed a structural ingredient of Dutch warfare. This extensive and unique corpus also discloses valuable information about the context in which such crimes were perpetrated.