Over the Fence

In Amsterdam's Royal Palace one morning last week, 335 frock-coated Dutch and Indonesian officials gathered around a green baize table to hear Juliana, Queen of The Netherlands, end 340 years of Dutch rule in Indonesia. Juliana entered the palace hall followed by her husband, Prince Bernhard. From her crimson-upholstered armchair, she spoke clearly and melodiously: "Immeasurable," said she, "is the satisfaction of a nation that finds its liberty realized . . ." As Juliana finished, the palace carillon pealed out first the Indonesian and then the Dutch anthem, and one of her four uniformed lackeys fell flat on his face in a dead faint.

On the other side of the world, from Jakarta (the new Indonesian name for Batavia) TIME Correspondent Robert Doyle cabled:

Just before noon of the day after Queen Juliana's announcement, two C-475 bearing Indonesian President Soekarno and his official party swept over the city from the mountains of central Java. Soekarno, whom most Indonesians regard as the personification of independence, had been driven from Jakarta by the Dutch almost exactly four years ago. A roar of welcome ascended as the planes reached the runway. President Soekarno, wearing a white uniform and black Moslem hat, climbed into an open Packard convertible and headed into the city. Behind him, over a distance of four miles, tumultuously happy crowds boiled and swirled like the wake of an ocean liner.

"We Are One." Almost as soon as Soekarno arrived at the palace, a torrent of Indonesians surged through the gates onto the lawn. Others enthusiastically kicked the slats from, a wooden picket fence and poured in unchecked. In a matter of minutes, the sprawling, mile-wide Koningsplein in front of the palace was an unbroken expanse of brown faces.

"Sudara, sudara, brothers," said Soekarno. "Be quiet. Thanks to God Almighty, today after four years I have again set foot on the earth of Jakarta. Four years was not a moment, it was four times three hundred and sixty-five days."

"Merdeka," the crowd thundered, "Tetap merdeka [Freedom, Freedom forever]!"

"We are one nation," cried Soekarno, "and we pray that we may live as a single free nation . . . We want to build a strong nation, prosperous and orderly ... I appeal to you all to show our hospitality to our foreign guests, including the Dutch." As Soekarno turned, walking between the graceful Ionic columns into the executive mansion, one foreign diplomat waved in the direction of the crowds and said to a colleague: "Could the Dutch ever have held this, in the face of that?"

The crowd dispersed quickly, leaving behind only a few score natives stretched out from heat prostration and a few hundred others happily and symbolically splashing their feet in a lily pool of the palace grounds. Until independence, the lily pool had always been emphatically on the other side of the fence for Indonesians.

Back to Business. Next day, Batavia got back to business and the new government began to take over the scores of administrative departments which serve the 3,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago. For the time being, only the top jobs would shift to Indonesian hands. The head of the government's biggest bureau, the 1,500-man Ministry of Economics, introduced the Dutch staff to its new Indonesian boss and told the Dutchmen: "Now, you must try to be officials without being officials."

Indonesia urgently needs economic help; first to improve its war-ruined transportation system and second to regain its prewar productive capacity. Indonesia's biggest dollar earners--rubber, oil and copra --were coming back strongly, but the output of coffee, tea and kapok had still a long climb ahead. Before the war, Indonesia produced enough rice to supply her own needs. Now, rice imports are costing her $15 million annually. EGA has already agreed to provide $40 million in textiles, medicine and agricultural tools, and the Indonesians are hoping for another $100 million from the Export-Import Bank. All of this, however, fell short of the $200 million which was the minimum Indonesian estimate of the help they would need the first year. To attract the investment of private capital, Indonesia is counting on its vast untapped lumber resources in the forests of Sumatra and Borneo.

Change the Pictures. At week's end, the fledgling government seemed to be hitting its stride. In the executive mansion, President Soekarno began receiving the new envoys to Indonesia. The first to present his credentials was Economic Expert Dr. Hans M. Hirschfeld, the Dutch Government's choice as the first Netherlands High Commissioner to the United States of Indonesia. The second was the U.S.'s bulky, soft-spoken H. Merle Cochran. For 18 months, Cochran had been the moving force on the United Nations Commission for Indonesia, had skillfully steered the Dutch and Indonesian negotiators through a tangled jungle of mutual distrust and suspicion. Said Cochran: "I have the utmost confidence . . ."

Meanwhile, in the main.hall of the palace, Indonesian workmen removed the heavy, gilt-framed portraits of the imperial Dutchmen whose hardheaded commercial dealings had founded the empire. (Their pictures would soon be replaced by Soekarno's favorite paintings of Indonesian national heroes.) The old pictures sat unceremoniously on the floor: bewigged Johannes Camphuys (1684-91), great governor and great gardener, whose followers introduced coffee-growing to Java; Herman Willem Daendels (1808-11), governor general and dictatorial reformer; Johannes van den Bosch (1830-33), governor general, paternalist exponent of a forced-labor system. The workmen loaded the pictures of the past into a truck to begin their long voyage home.

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