Atjeh. Het verhaal van de bloedigste strijd uit de Nederlands... by Anton Stolwijk

While Hidskes pours over the archive and constantly asks himself: ‘How could my father have done this?’, Stolwijk carries the archive with him, as it were, to the very location in Aceh where the events took place.

Stolwijk, by contrast, travels in person to locate the violence described in the colonial archive in the modern landscape and living memory of contemporary Aceh. We share with him the pain of gradually discovering that his father participated in the atrocities committed in South Sulawesi, also known in the Netherlands as the ‘Westerling Affair’. In Hidskes’ case, we accompany the author as he sifts through the archive that relates to his own father.

In both books the narrative is told in the first person and in that sense the authors shoulder the moral responsibility for revealing their nation’s dark past. It is the way Hidskes and Stolwiijk have conducted their archival post-mortems that has earned them wide critical and popular acclaim. While both are based on extensive archival research, it is in their way of telling that they succeed in bringing to life and to the readers’ conscience, this colonial past. These books are not ‘histories’ in the conventional sense arguably such an approach would fail to ‘grab’ the very readership for whom the books are intended. Hidskes’ book and a comparable publication by Anton Stolwijk, both published in 2016, are remarkably effective examples of this. In the Netherlands, the renewed focus on the colonial era is educating a new generation about the nation’s dark imperial past. Public interest in these colonial era killings in both countries has been revived by the successful court cases brought by victims of the West Java Rawagede village and South Sulawesi atrocities committed by Dutch forces, and subsequent Dutch government apologies in relation to them. The major research project and publications emerging from it, involves both Dutch and Indonesian researchers, and was itself triggered by a series of Indonesian initiated court cases. In the past decade there has been a flow of publications reviewing Dutch imperial rule in Indonesia emanating from a major Dutch government funded research project into the 1945 – 1949 Indonesian War of Independence. In this Indonesian context, Hidskes’ very personal account of the ‘South Sulawesi Affair’, as it has come to be known, came to look more like a painful personal confession of national guilt. It was an emotional experience for both author and audience. In late 2018, Maarten Hidskes launched the Indonesian translation of his Dutch language book, Thuis geloofd niemand mij ( At home no one will believe me), at Makassar’s Hasanu’ddin University.

Atjeh. Het verhaal van de bloedigste strijd uit de Nederlands... by Anton Stolwijk