Listen, and I’ll tell you about a man who meant well—or
thought he did, anyway. That’s how these things always start, isn’t it? With
good intentions paving a road that leads somewhere dark and terrible, somewhere
you can never quite come back from, not all the way.
The old history books, they paint those Dutch
Governor-Generals like cartoon villains—stiff-necked martinets with waxed
mustaches and hearts made of Indonesian teak. But Andries Cornelis Dirk de
Graeff? He was different. Or so everyone thought when he first showed up. An
anomaly, they called him. A breath of fresh air in that suffocating colonial
machine.
But here’s the thing about fresh air in a place like the
Dutch East Indies in 1926: sometimes it’s just the wind that comes before the
storm.
De Graeff was the guy who signed the papers that created
Boven Digoel. Think about that. The liberal, the humanist, the man who talked
about respecting nationalist ideals—he’s the one who built what might have been
the most feared exile camp in Indonesian history. If that doesn’t keep you up
at night, wondering about the gap between who we think we are and what we
actually do when the chips are down, then you’re not paying attention.
He was born in The Hague on August 7, 1872. His father had
been a Consul General in Japan, which was like being stationed on Mars back
then—exotic, dangerous, full of things that could kill you if you weren’t
careful. Young Andries grew up hearing stories about faraway places, about
diplomacy and adventure. He went to Leiden University, studied law, got himself
educated in all the right ways.
March 25, 1897, he married Caroline Angélique van der Wijck.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, in that way that fortune and fate always
seem to tangle together like snakes in a basket. Caroline’s father was Carel
Herman Aart van der Wijck—the Governor-General himself. Talk about marrying
into the family business.
De Graeff climbed that bureaucratic ladder like a man
possessed. Started as a secretary in Bogor—nothing glamorous about that, just
paperwork and humidity and mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. But he worked
his way up, step by step, until by 1917 he was Vice President of the Council of
the Indies. One of the highest positions you could get without being the big
man himself.
He learned the system inside and out. Learned how it worked,
learned where the bodies were buried—literally and figuratively. By September
1918, though, something broke inside him. Maybe it was his health, maybe it was
watching his kids grow up in that pressure-cooker environment. He went back to
the Netherlands, told everyone it was for the children.
A year later, the Foreign Minister offered him an
ambassadorship in Tokyo. He took it, thinking maybe he’d find whatever he’d
lost. But Tokyo bored him. Can you imagine that? Being bored in Tokyo? But he
was, and by 1922 they shipped him to Washington instead, where he stayed until
1926.
That’s when they called him back. That’s when everything
changed.
Come home, they said. We need you to be Governor-General.
Dirk Fock, the previous guy, had been a hardass—the kind of administrator who
thought the only good nationalist was a nationalist in chains. The colony was a
powder keg, and Fock had been standing there, striking matches just to watch
the sparks fly.
So they brought in de Graeff, the liberal, the ethical
politician, the man who’d said all the right things about respecting Indigenous
peoples and their dreams of self-determination. He arrived like a conquering
hero, at least to some. The nationalists looked at him and thought: Finally.
Finally, someone who’ll listen.
In his inaugural speech to the Volksraad—that’s the People’s
Council, though calling it “the people’s” anything was a bit like calling a
birdcage a wildlife sanctuary—de Graeff talked about respect. About trust.
About building bridges. He even increased the number of Indigenous members in
the council to thirty. The conservative Europeans hated him for it, called him
soft, mocked his ethical policies behind closed doors and sometimes right to
his face.
But de Graeff’s honeymoon lasted about as long as a match
flame in a hurricane.
November 1926. The Indonesian Communist Party launched a
rebellion in Banten. It was like watching a nightmare unfold in slow motion,
the kind where you know something terrible is coming but you can’t move your
feet to run. January 1927, more unrest in West Sumatra. The whole careful house
of cards de Graeff had been building came crashing down around his ears.
Here’s where the darkness really starts to seep in, like
water through a cracked foundation.
De Graeff faced a choice. He could stick to his principles,
try to navigate this crisis with the same humanist approach he’d promised. Or
he could do what the system demanded—what the frightened Europeans in their
comfortable houses demanded, what the ghost of colonial power itself seemed to
whisper in his ear at night.
He chose the system. Of course he did. They always do.
April 15, 1927. Using something called the exorbitant
rechten—extraordinary powers, which is just a fancy way of saying “I can do
whatever the hell I want”—de Graeff signed the order to build Boven Digoel. An
exile camp deep in the interior of New Guinea, in what’s now Papua. According
to a researcher named Victor de Grood, de Graeff justified it because trials
would take too long, because the courts might give the communists a platform to
spread their ideas. Better to just… disappear them.
Think about that for a second. Really think about it. A man
who talked about trust and respect, signing an order to exile people without
trial to one of the most godforsaken places on earth.
Boven Digoel wasn’t chosen randomly. Oh no. They picked it
because it was deep in the forest, along the upper Digoel River, surrounded by
jungle so thick you could get lost twenty feet from camp. Malaria hung in the
air like a promise. Crocodiles waited in the rivers like ancient, patient gods
of death. It was isolated from everything, from everyone, from hope itself.
A writer named Rudy Kousbroek wrote about it years later,
noted that throughout 1928, thousands of people were arrested without any real
explanation. Around 4,500 were found guilty of conspiracy. Imprisoned. Four of
them hanged, their bodies probably buried in unmarked graves somewhere in that
terrible heat. Another 800 men and women arrested in the following months. Then
1,300 total.
The numbers keep climbing, don’t they? That’s how these
things work. It starts with a handful, just the real troublemakers, we tell
ourselves. But then it’s dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. The machine
gets hungry, and it always wants more.
De Graeff and his government tried to dress it up in pretty
language. “Not a prison,” they said. “An administrative exile colony.” No
trials conducted there. Not an interrogation site. Just an “administrative
measure” to separate dangerous individuals from society.
But the prisoners—sorry, the geinterneerden—they knew
better. Extreme isolation, disease crawling through the camp like something
alive and malevolent, harsh labor under a sun that seemed to hate them
personally, facilities that barely qualified as human shelter. It felt like a
prison. Hell, it felt like a concentration camp, and that’s exactly what it
was, no matter what words the bureaucrats wrapped around it.
De Graeff wasn’t alone in creating this nightmare, but he
was the one who signed the papers. He was the Governor-General. The buck
stopped at his desk, on the blotter next to his pen and his conscience, if he
could still find it in there somewhere.
The camp was divided into zones: Tanah Tinggi, Gudang Arang,
Tanah Merah—the main center. Each zone had its commander, its little hierarchy
of suffering. New arrivals had to build their own prisons, clearing forest,
constructing settlements, raising barracks with their own hands. The more
permanent structures had zinc roofs that turned them into ovens during the day,
nibung-wood walls that kept out nothing, dirt floors that turned to mud when it
rained.
Life there was stratified, because humans will create
hierarchies even in hell. The De Werkwillinger—the ones who cooperated
with the government—they got wages, better facilities. Clerk work. Technical
labor. Anything to stay out of the worst of it.
The De Naturalisten, though? They refused to
cooperate. They were watched constantly, treated as extremists, as
troublemakers. The most defiant ones got sent to Tanah Tinggi, where the
conditions were even worse, if you can imagine that.
A man named Petrus Komayap worked there as a food courier.
He remembered the rations: five sardine-can measures of rice per week, four
spoonfuls of salt, six onions, one spoon of cooking oil, plus sugar and soap
that had to stretch for both bathing and washing clothes. He got to know many
of the prisoners. Even met Bung Hatta, worked as his interpreter when he needed
to communicate with the Indigenous peoples in the area.
There was a weird kind of normal life in Boven Digoel, the
way humans create normalcy even in the worst circumstances. A hospital. A
school. Sports facilities. Even a cinema, can you believe that? But none of it
could hide the essential truth: they were trapped in a forest sanatorium that
was slowly, methodically crushing their spirits.
Mohammad Hatta was there. Sutan Sjahrir showed up on January
28, 1935, along with Hatta, greeted by fellow exiles who understood exactly
what they were in for. Sayuti Melik served his time between 1927 and 1928 for
his involvement in the rebellion, didn’t get back to Java until 1933.
These weren’t criminals. They were freedom fighters. They
were people who’d looked at colonialism and said “no more.” And for that, they
were buried alive in the jungle.
De Graeff’s term ended with the kind of irony that would be
funny if it weren’t so tragic. On one hand, he’d created Boven Digoel,
imprisoned thousands of men and women whose only crime was wanting their own
country back. On the other hand, he kept trying to preserve some trace of his
earlier idealism, like a man clutching a photograph of his younger self and
wondering where that person went.
A historian named Herman Smit wrote about this
contradiction, this impossible tightrope de Graeff tried to walk. He wanted to
maintain Dutch authority and stability while also being seen as moral, as
modern, as different from the hardass governors who’d come before. What he got
was a mixed bag of policies that looked more humane on the surface but were
still rooted in the fundamental inequality and brutality of colonialism itself.
Near the end of his term in 1931, de Graeff granted clemency
to Sukarno—the future Proclaimer of Independence, though nobody knew that yet.
Sukarno had just been sentenced to four years in prison, and de Graeff let him
go, against the wishes of the Council of the Indies. The conservative Europeans
were livid. It damaged his reputation even further, but maybe, just maybe, it
let him sleep a little better at night.
He left office a disappointed man. That’s what the records
say, anyway. He’d tried to bridge the gap between the colonial government and
the nationalists, but the gap was too wide, the current too strong. He’d wanted
to be a fair mediator, but history had other plans. History made him the
administrative executioner for thousands of people sent to rot in Boven Digoel.
After his term ended, he went back to the Netherlands. Later
served as Foreign Minister in the Colijn cabinet in the mid-1930s, pushed for “pure
neutrality” as Europe slid toward World War II. On the international stage,
some saw him as a compromiser, too soft, too willing to weaken the League of
Nations in the name of realism.
Andries Cornelis Dirk de Graeff died in The Hague on April
24, 1957. He was 84 years old. I wonder if he thought about Boven Digoel in
those final years, in those final days. I wonder if he saw the faces of the men
and women he’d exiled, if they visited him in dreams.
Boven Digoel remains his darkest legacy—a harsh place of
exile, filled with suffering and disease and death. But it was also, in a
strange way, a cradle for the stories of the nation’s fighters, the place where
their resolve was tested and, for many, proven unbreakable.
That’s the thing about these stories, about men like de
Graeff. They remind us that the line between good and evil isn’t as clear as we’d
like to think. That good intentions can pave a road to a very specific kind of
hell. That when the pressure comes, when the choice is between your principles
and your survival, most people choose survival.
And the people who pay the price? They’re the ones we exile
to places like Boven Digoel, deep in the forest, where the crocodiles wait and
the malaria hangs in the air and hope goes to die.
Sleep tight, friends. And remember: the real monsters don’t
always have fangs. Sometimes they have law degrees and good intentions and the
power to sign their names on pieces of paper that destroy lives.
Sometimes they look just like us.
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