Death in Slawi: The “Sugar Factory Murders,” Ethnicity, Conflicted Loyalties and the Context of Violence in the Early Revolution in Indonesia, October 1945

Abstract

In mid-October 1945, Edward and Frederika van der Sluys were murdered in gruesome circumstances, along with a number of other Dutch Eurasians, most probably in the yard of a Dutch-owned sugar factory in the Slawi district of the north coast of Central Java at which the husband had been employed since his youth. Their fate forms part of a larger narrative of the Bersiap! (“Get Ready!”) period of the Indonesian national revolution, which has attracted considerable attention from historians. Indeed, there are already two well-trod narratives of the violence accompanying the revolution and of ethnic cleansing during the Bersiap. The present paper argues, however, that there is room for a third: that of the sugar industry—and factory communities that lay at its heart—as a much older arena of social difference and conflicted loyalties. The account proceeds on the assumption that, without being embedded in a broader and deeper narrative, the story of what happened to the Van der Sluys couple remains incomplete.