Rawagede: Holland’s very own Srebrenica

Survivors of the Dutch massacre in Rawagede, Indonesia, have gotten some justice from the Dutch courts as the Den Haag civil court ruled the statue of limitations did not apply to them:

A Dutch court has ordered the government to compensate the widows of seven villagers who were summarily executed and a man shot and wounded in a notorious massacre during Indonesia’s bloody battle for independence from colonial rule.

The Hague Civil Court ruled on Wednesday it was “unreasonable” for the government to argue that the widows were not entitled to compensation because the statute of limitations had expired.

According to Indonesian researchers, Dutch troops wiped out almost the entire male population of Rawagede, a village in West Java, two years before the former colony declared independence in 1949.

[…]

The only living witnesses are now in their 80s, and illiterate, after having to fend for themselves following the deaths of their husbands.

“There were dead bodies everywhere, many of which we found in the river after the shooting stopped,” said Cawi, a survivor.

[…]

The court’s judgement paves the way for a case to establish the level of indemnities to be paid to the relatives.

However, Zegveld said its narrow focus on widows of massacre victims means it is unclear whether it will expose the Dutch state to a flood of compensation claims from other relatives of people killed during the Dutch fight to retain control over the Dutch East Indies, which became Indonesia in 1949.

Authorities in the Netherlands say 150 people died while a victims’ association claims 431 lost their lives during an operation to root out a suspected independence fighter hiding in the village, known today as Balongsari.

Every western colonial power has skeletons like this in its closet and would rather they stay there. Yet I can’t help that the Dutch are particularly good at only remembering the history they want to remember. While World War II, in which the Netherlands was a victim of German and Japanese aggression is now an integral part of the Dutch self image, the dirty colonial wars that took place in Indonesia almost from the moment the Japanese had left have been largely erased from our collective memory. In fact, in some respect WWII offers cover for what we did in Indonesia afterwards. It’s only now, when many of the people directly involved (including the victims) are dead that we’re finally getting some recognition of what we did there. We were outraged at what Bosnian Serbs did in Srebrenica and justifiably so, but this means that we should recognise our own atrocities as well.

100 years of Fokker airplanes



Last Wednesday it was exactly 100 years ago that Anthony Fokker flew his first self build aircraft, De Spin or Spider around the St. Bavo church. A modest start, but a few years later Fokker would be the scourge of the Allied fighter pilots in World War I, the first to find out how to synchronise a machinegun with the engine to enable it to shoot through the propellor in the Fokker Eindecker. A slew of other fighter planes followed, including the famous triple decker Fokker Dr. I as used by the Red Baron.

After World War I Fokker would become one of the biggest manufacturers of civil airplanes, leading the way for companies like Boeing or Douglas who’d ultimately take over. The Fokker Trimotor, as used by Richard Byrd to fly over the North Pole, is probably the best known. Fokkers were often used in record attempts, including various races from Europe to Asia. On the military side of things, Fokker had modest successes building aircraft for the Dutch airforce, as well as various other European forces. The DXXI’s equiping the Finnish Airforce in the Winter War against the Soviet Union did the best out of all Fokker fighters, gaining impressive victories over planes both superior in number and capabilities…

Postwar Fokker was specialised in providing intermediate range transport planes and airliners, the turboprop F27 Friendship and jet powered F28 Fellowship, both very succesfull, followed a few decades later by the F50 and F100 respectively. However, too small to survive on its own and unlucky in having been taken over by DASA/Daimler Benz, Fokker declared bankrupcy in 1996. There are still quite a few Fokker planes flying however and plans to start production again and it all started with those three rounds around the church in Haarlem by Anthony Fokker in his Spin one hundred years ago.

That was the mother Fokker.

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West — Guy Halsall

Cover of Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West


Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
591 pages including index
published in 2007

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my parents in Middelburg and took advantage of this visit to check out the town’s library, which used to supply most of my reading back before I moved to Amsterdam. It turned out to be an wise decision as less than an hour browsing found half a dozen excellent history books to read, including this one. Guy Halsall is an author I had just seen slagged off by Peter Heather in his book Empires and Barbarians for being Completely Wrong about the impact of barbarian migrations on the late Roman Empire. This piqued my interest to see how exactly Halsall’s interpretation of the end of the Roman Empire differed from Heather’s views and if Halsall’s explanations make any sense on their own.

To my not inconsiderable surprise, it turned out that the story Halsall puts forward in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 does not differ quite so much as Heather made it seem. They don’t so much disagree on what happened as on why it happened and on where the emphasis should be placed. To keep it simple, Heather believes barbarian invasions are the cause the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, while Halsall argues they are an effect of the collapse. It was the weakness of the western empire that made possible the barbarian takeover of various provinces. Another major point of disagreement is on the composition of the “barbarian hordes”: Heather has argued that the more classical image of entire population groups invading the empire is largely correct, with caveats, while Halsall sees them more as proper armies rather than tribes. Ultimately these differences in intepretation however for me were less important than the sheer quality of Halsall’s history.

Read more

Guy Halsall has a blog

Bully for him, you might think, and just who is Guy Halsall anyway? Well, he’s an historian specialising in the period I’m most interested in myself at the moment, Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages, who I first heard of being slagged off gently corrected by Peter Heather in his latest 1,000 page history, Empires and Barbarians for getting the impact of barbarian invasions on the Roman Empire All Wrong. So I had to read this fellow Halsall’s work for himself and found Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 one of the better one volume explorations of how the Western Roman Empire came to an end, his differences with Heather being one of degree rather than kind, as far as I could make out. In our always on, 24/7 wireless mobile internet connected world it should not come as a surprise a professional historian like Guy Halsall has a blog, but I still can’t take this for granted, especially not when it leads to posts like this, where Halsall examines why we are so wedded to barbarian invasions as explenation for the “Fall of Rome”:

The barbarian is the classic ‘subject presumed to’. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. ‘He’ is not like ‘us’, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians in the vision of Peter Heather, are peoples with ‘coherent aims’, which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well – none other than the barbarians anyway.

And finding Halsall’s blog (through a post from Nicola Griffith I should add) led inevitably to discovering a whole slew of likeminded blogs, now listed under “Science” in my blogroll. There are days when the internet looks small and dreary and all your usual blog friends are silent, not saying anything of interest. And then there are days when you cut around a corner and find whole vistas opening up. This is one of those days. It’s not any day I find four new brilliant blogs: Guy Halsall’s, Blogenspiel, Medieval History Geek and last but certainly not least, A Corner of Tenth Century History, where posts like this one make me very jealous and slightly in awe — why can’t I write like this?

three five things make a linkpost

This was made just for me:

The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. A work in progress with no claim to definitiveness, it has been built in less than three years by a dedicated team of Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, research scholars and one professor, with some valuable contributions from younger and more senior scholars at other institutions. For more details on who we are, please see the People page.

DARMC’s coverage begins under the Roman empire and extends nearly a thousand years toward the present by encompassing the medieval world. Although the initial post-Roman focus has been on medieval Europe, Byzantium and the Crusades have not been neglected, and we have begun to include the essential third leg of the tripod of medieval civilization, the Islamic world.

“If you’re going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared.” Michael Moorcock on how to write a novel in three days. Patrick Nielsen Hayden comments that a lot of aspiring writers could learn from this, to just get going and write rather than fiddle until everything’s perfect.

Way to make me feel old Amanda — Nirvana’s Nevermind twenty years old this year. This wasn’t the life changing record to me that it was for other people, but if there’s any album that marks the spot where the nineties begun and the eighties ended, this was it.

The Justice League goes to Hogwarts and a duller idea I cannot imagine. If this ever happened it would be the perfect spiritual heir to those stupid X-Men/Star Trek crossovers Marvel put out in the nineties.

Speaking of rather pointless Marvel titles, the latest installment of Nobody’s Favorites is another one. I actually have this series, bought out of back issue bins on the “this looks interesting and different and is only fifty cents” theory. Never read it.