By Erica Boey, Kaitlyn Dang, Tarleton Hunt, and Newton Wainscott
Violence is an integral part of the technologies of rule in colonialism. Enforcing violence was a means for the colonizer to exert control over culture to achieve hegemony in colonies. However, in the context of Southeast Asia, violence manifested itself as a prominent tool for the colonized to break free from oppressive colonial rule and the erasure of its successes as a nation-state. Southeast Asia is no stranger to revolts and violence. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have endured years of immense oppression and violence under colonial rule. However, the colonized were not bystanders to their own struggles, instead, violent revolts and insurgencies have been a huge proponent in overcoming colonialism.
Indonesia
The Dutch have left a haunting colonial legacy in Indonesia socially, economically, and culturally. Europeans like the Portuguese arrived in Indonesia in the 16th century seeking to monopolize spices like nutmeg, cloves, and Cubeb in Maluku. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and became the dominant European power in this region by 1610. In doing so, they successfully monopolized the Maluku spice trade and spurred brutal genocide of indigenous people to accomplish this. Motivated by the economic interests in monopolizing the spice trade, the Dutch used countless violent measures in order to reach and maintain their goals (Fathimah, F. A., 2018). The Dutch justified their atrocious actions by calling them a “civilizing mission” – believing the people of Indonesia were primitive and backwards and thought it was their “responsibility” to modernize them. After the Dutch arrived, many massacres occurred. In 1621, the Massacre of Burdanese took place. Jan Pieterszoon Coen led an expedition to the Banda Islands in which many natives were slaughtered, and the rest were enslaved and shipped off as slaves for labor elsewhere. Unfortunately, this was the first of many massacres in Indonesia. One of the more recent massacres occurred between October 1965 to March 1966. It is estimated that between 500,000 to 1,000,000 people were killed during the main period of violence (Kine, P., 2020). These atrocities, sometimes described as a genocide or politicide, were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Indonesia declared its independence shortly before Japan’s surrender, but it required four years of sometimes brutal fighting, intermittent negotiations, and UN mediation before the Netherlands agreed to transfer sovereignty in 1949. Indonesia has endured centuries of extreme violence from its colonizers. With this, Indonesia retaliated with the only force they have been exposed to – violence. With Fanon’s words, “decolonization is always a violent event” (Fanon, 1963). Indonesia met their colonizer’s oppressive and brutal rule with equal violence for independence.
Malaysia
The prevalence of amok violence has shaped social life in the Malay peninsula for almost 150 years. During British colonial rule, instances of amok violence have been a hindrance to their colonial rule. The British defined amok violence as a behavioral pattern of indiscriminate, homicidal ‘tendencies’ purportedly observed among Malay Muslim men. The British believed that the presence of amok violence was the primitive character of a Malay man, capitalizing on these violent tendencies as uncivilized (Wu, 2017). Antagonizing amok violence became strategic propaganda of the “British Forward Movement”, this was further amplified when the British deemed the killing of British resident J.W.W Birch in the 1875 Pasir Salak rebellion as a form of amok violence (Williamson, 2007). Amok violence events were used in the colonial press that would circulate in English-speaking parts of Asia, making these cases a national, and to an extent, international phenomenon that would be ridiculed by the rest of society. The instances of “running amok” by the Malayan people were manipulated by the British in an attempt not only to further obtain their goal of colonial domination but to dehumanize the colonized. Indeed, amok is a mental condition in both historical and contemporary terms, but this violent behavior is a product of culture and environment.
Misconstrued during the British colonial period, the origins of amok violence as a result of colonial oppression have been silenced. The British occupation of Malaya propagated the poverty, hunger, and suffering of the Malayan people by increasing the prices and obscuring the accessibility of basic goods. The colonialists were the initiator of violence that ultimately sparked resistance to oppressive colonial rule (Fikri, 2022). The phrase “running amok” stems from the Malay word mengamok, which means furious and desperate change. Initially, British fascination with amok was deeply rooted in viewing the colonized as savages, and Malay men were innately pathologically disarrayed. However, when insurgencies threatened the sanctity of British colonial rule, it was deemed as an unnatural disturbance of manic and mania. Despite the brutality of amok violence, they were heroic and honorable acts that boosted the morale of the Malayan people during a time of severe oppression. The occurrence of amok violence is a form of defiance, both to colonial rule and the master-slave dialectic, where the colonized, channeled the years of trauma from oppression to overcome the projections of recognition set by their colonialists. Despite violence’s significant role in Malaya’s liberation from the British, it eventually sparked racial fractures in the multiethnic nation, which led to internal conflicts and divides with implications beyond reparations.
Vietnam
Ever since the arrival of imperial French powers in the mid-17th century, Vietnam has always resisted against her colonizers—win or lose. From the failed resistance movement led by Phan Din Phung in 1885 to the establishment of the Viet Minh in Hanoi after the surrender of Japan in 1945, the colonized people of Vietnam are well familiar with fighting for their liberation, by all means necessary. Through decades of exploitation, land displacement, and illegal ownership of plantations and industrial enterprises by the hands of the French, Vietnamese peasants turned to national resistance movements toward liberation. The educated minority saw the social consequence of French colonial policy within their own communities, that, apart from landlords, no previous property-owning indigenous middle class developed in colonial Vietnam. Like most colonial rulers, driven by economic welfare rather than social, French colonizers ignored the real cause of the anti-colonial struggle—the desire of the Vietnamese people to achieve independence for their country (Zinoman, 2001). There had been multiple anti-colonial attempts to drive out the French but the only one that was truly successful was Ho Chi Minh’s leadership of the Viet Minh, seizing power in one of the largest territories of Northern Vietnam away from the French and their Japanese allies at the end of World War II. However, the French still aimed to reestablish colonial rule, while the Vietnamese in Hanoi wanted total independence. In 1949, the French sought to reunite Cochinchina with the rest in Vietnam, proclaiming it the Associated State of Vietnam. Vietnamese nationalists denounced these claims, resulting in an increasingly successful guerrilla war waged by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, a previous French-held garrison. In 1954, the French agreed to an end of the war and their colonial hold over Vietnam.
Afraid of the rise of communism in the North, the United States, at this point in their cause against the Soviet Union, placed their global standing with South Vietnam, aiding alongside anti-communist leaders. The U.S. was just as naive as the French in believing that the Vietnamese—communist or not—would surrender to this new, foreign global power. The rise of Vietnamese nationalists and communists in the South aided in the U.S’s struggling battle, guerilla soldiers unbothered by the military strength. Civilians burned themselves alive out of protest. Even after the U.S poured rainbow herbicide on their country for years, the Vietnamese continued to use large-scale violence against soldiers and civilians to drive the U.S out, which they eventually did after the Tet Offensive in 1969. The Vietnamese attitude toward the conflict may be induced from this evidence. The willingness shared by millions of Vietnamese to continue their struggle in the midst of constant destruction indicates their priorities of the revolution to risk annihilation to secure its success (Swanson, 1973).
What these countries have in common against their colonizers is that they recognize the destruction their decision of violence has placed on their country. But they accept it as an inevitable consequence of their journey toward justice, for “violence is a cleansing force.” Through violence, as Franz Fanon argues, it frees the native from his despair and inaction, making him fearless and restoring his self-respect.
Sources:
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Fanon, Frantz (1963) “On Violence” The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press 1-62
Fathimah, F. A. (2018, September). The Extractive Institutions as Legacy of Dutch Colonialism in Indonesia: A historical Case Study. Retrieved from www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1285721/FULLTEXT01.pdf
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