The Red Shadow Over Returning Yogya


 

The day the Dutch finally pulled out of Yogyakarta wasn’t the celebration folks had hoped for. No, sir. If you looked closer—and in my business, looking closer usually means seeing things you wish you hadn’t—you’d notice there was something wrong with the light that day, something that made the shadows stretch a little too long across the cracked pavement of the old colonial streets.

June 29, 1949. Remember that date. Not because history books tell you to, but because that’s when the mask slipped, just for a moment, and showed what was crawling underneath.

(You know how it is in small towns—whether it’s Mayfield, Kentucky, or Yogyakarta, Indonesia—there’s always something festering beneath the surface, something the chamber of commerce doesn’t put on the postcards.)

The United Nations Commission for Indonesia—UNCI to the folks who like their doom in acronyms—had been babysitting this withdrawal for damn near a month. Started June 2nd, and by God, you’d think moving an army was like pulling teeth from a reluctant crocodile. Every day the Dutch lingered was another day for the darkness to seep in through the cracks.

On June 28th, the day before the “official” withdrawal, Dutch soldiers were still hanging around the airfields at Kaliurang, Kalasan, and Maguwoharjo like teenagers outside a closed convenience store. The sun beat down mercilessly, making their helmets into little Dutch ovens, cooking their thoughts until everything went soft and pliable, ready for bad ideas to take root.

That’s when it happened—the shooting. Three locals opened fire on those lingering Dutch boys. Not much of an incident in the grand scheme of war, but enough to make everyone jumpy, enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up if you knew what was coming.

See, the UNCI boys were determined not to get hornswoggled again. They’d seen enough broken promises to last a lifetime. So they patrolled in those ghostly white jeeps, flying the UN’s blue flags like some kind of protective charm. As if pieces of cloth could keep the darkness at bay.

Even Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX himself was there, riding along, playing nice. He gave a cigarette case to a couple of Dutch officials—a parting gift, they called it. The kind of gift you give when you’re thinking don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.

Colonel D. R. A. Van Langen, the Brigade-T Commander, couldn’t resist one final sermon before he packed up: “Remember, you are not fighting against the Indonesian people, but only against certain groups…”

(That’s how it always starts, isn’t it? There’s US, and then there’s THEM. And THEM is always something worse than you imagined.)

The sultan claimed everything went smooth as silk. Peaceful-like. But that’s the thing about peace—it’s just the costume that horror wears when it’s walking among us in broad daylight.

While all eyes were on the Dutch pulling out, something else was pulling in. Something red. Communist agitators had been sneaking around for a week, quiet as church mice with sharp teeth. The kind that wait until you’re asleep before they start nibbling.

And that brings us to Ki Hajar Dewantara, the Father of National Education they called him. Descended from royalty, lived in a house on Jalan Tamansiswa that’s a museum now. Probably has a gift shop and everything.

Imagine waking up on a Thursday morning—June 23rd, to be exact—and finding a poster slapped on your property, dripping with threats like blood from a fresh wound. The poster had the mark of the “Gorilla Section of the PKI” stamped on it, red as sin.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. No, the cherry on this particular nightmare sundae was the homemade bomb. Five live hand grenades packed into a copper flower pot, wrapped in plastic like some kind of demonic gift basket, sitting against his wall.

The bomb’s fuse was half-burned, like a prayer interrupted halfway through. Sometimes God has mercy, even in Indonesia. Sometimes the monster hesitates before it bites.

(I’ve seen it a thousand times—the worst kind of evil doesn’t come with fangs and claws. It comes with ideology and explosives.)

Lieutenant Dekker from UNCI checked it out, confirmed what everyone already knew in their gut—this was the real deal, a Japanese-made detonator ready to send Ki Hajar to kingdom come.

But here’s where the story takes a turn down a long, dark corridor that no one wants to explore. When the report hit the Dutch military police desk the next day, things didn’t add up. The bomb was at Dewantara’s house, but the message wasn’t meant for him at all.

De Noord-Ooster spilled the beans on June 25th—the “Gorilla Section” had been sending leaflets to the Dutch military police demanding the release of communist prisoners from Wirogunan Prison. The prison that just happened to be blocks away from Ki Hajar’s place.

It was like they wanted to make noise, wanted to make sure the Dutch knew they were there, watching, waiting. Using Dewantara as bait to make sure everyone was paying attention.

And the propaganda—Lord have mercy, the propaganda was everywhere. Posters on trees, buildings, street corners. Some in Indonesian, some in Latin, some in Javanese script, like the darkness was multilingual, making sure everyone got the message.

By June 28th, they’d hit Siti Hinggil, a sacred space used for royal ceremonies. Vandalized it with the hammer and sickle, painted blood-red. But they didn’t stop there—they added pornographic images and filth directed at Sukarno, Hatta, and the sultan himself. Called them Western liberal puppets.

(The thing about evil is, it always has to desecrate what others hold sacred. It’s not enough to destroy—it has to defile first.)

The public was scared, and rightly so. This was supposed to be a time of triumph, of “Yogya Kembali”—Yogya Returns—but instead, there was this creeping dread, this sense that something worse than colonizers was waiting in the wings.

The I.V.C. patrol tried to catch these phantom vandals, but all they managed to do was scrape off some graffiti. Like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

Meanwhile, the nightmares were spreading. In Bojonegoro, fifteen men—PKI suspects—stormed a hospital, held a nurse at gunpoint, and looted medicines. Near Salatiga, fifteen Dutch patrol officers faced down 300 men in blood-red uniforms, carrying the hammer and sickle banners like ancient battle standards. The reds had eight machine guns, and when the smoke cleared, fourteen police officers lay dead, thirty more bleeding into the earth.

The Merbabu Troops clashed nearby too—one officer dead, another wounded, three communists sent to meet their maker.

(The dead don’t care about politics. In the ground, we’re all just food for worms, whether we died for freedom, colonialism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat.)

All this happening while Yogyakarta was supposedly being “returned” to its people. Returned to what, though? Something was coming, something that made the Dutch occupation look like a Sunday picnic.

The shadow fell across Indonesia that June in 1949, and it was red. Blood red. And the worst part? This was just the beginning.

Sometimes the real monsters aren’t the ones leaving. They’re the ones waiting to take their place.

And they always, always have a plan.

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