From Black Dutchmen to White Moluccans: Ethnic Metamorphosis of an East-Indonesian Minority in the

Moluccan soldiers in their attempt to foil the movement for Indonesian Independence. With the transfer of sovereignty in 1949, 12,000 of these troops were demobilized, 6.000 were discharged, and 1,000 entered the Indonesian army (TNI). Circa 2,000 soldiers stationed in the South Moluccas became the core forces of a movement to establish an independent South Moluccan Republic, the RMS. About 4,000 others, mostly stationed on western islands, mainly on Java, refused to be mobilized or discharged anywhere but in the Moluccas or (then still) Dutch New Guinea (Decker 1957:31). The problem was solved by “temporarily ” moving the troops, and about 8,500 family members, to the Netherlands in 1951. Over 75 percent of them were Protestant Christian ethnic Ambonese from the Central Moluccan islands who were dominating the political actions of this minority. Fanatically anti-Indonesian, they were never allowed back and over the next two decades their population increased to approximately 40,000. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Moluccan youth became restless and shocked the world with a number of spectacular acts of terrorism in futile attempts to force the Dutch to help them to return to their homeland to be freed of Indonesian rule. Ironically, when the Moluccans arrived they were the most loyal servants of the Dutch and most would have been flattered by being called “Black Dutchmen”. In this paper, I want to describe how the Moluccans became “Black Dutchmen ” and then show how the exiles in the Netherlands evolved into “White Moluccans ”- in what my have become the closing chapter of Dutch-Moluccan colonial history. The Ambonese and the KNIL The Moluccas, or Spice Islands, in the eastern Indonesian archipelago had drawn the Dutch to the region in the early 17th Century when great fortunes could be made in the clove and nutmeg trade. In the 19th Century, the region experienced a drastic economic decline and Dutch interests shifted to Java and other islands. The task of conquering, pacifying and controlling the far-flung island empire of the Dutch East Indies was in the hands of a specially formed colonial army of native and European soldiers le